Council - Regular Meeting

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

We have a couple of changes before we do the agenda approval.

We will not be doing the item number 12, the socket fiber agreement discussion approval. Tonight after we move to the 15. And here at the beginning of the project, there are some questions concerning the grant. They're writing in the grant, so that also will be moved to September 15th, and it will still remain under .

I need a motion that we approve the agenda tonight after the meeting of corrections. Second. Second. All those in favor?

Aye. Opposed? Okay, so this is just mentioned.

I would like to bring this to your attention, probably most of you have never seen it, don't know what it is. It is the Cuba Policing Project Policy Manual. And if you haven't seen it, it's not because it's so new. It was actually approved by the then Board of Aldermen on June 15, 1998. One of the things that this manual provides for is that officers shall make themselves familiar with the handbook or the manual. and state statutes and the Cuba City Code. Regarding social media, all personnel are prohibited from posting any comments, pictures, video, or audio while on duty unless it is related to an investigation in which a supervisor has acknowledged and has approved. And it also provides that all personnel will adhere to the procedures and directives outlined in the policy. You don't have to reach very far back into your memories to recall an event in which a citizen was harassed, framed, tormented, humiliated, taunted, and otherwise cruelly verbally abused by an officer on the Cuba police force on duty at the time. A very proud day for Cuba. And that officer is still on the police force. From that, I think we can fairly infer, and even conclude, that the chief of police is either not making officers familiar with the handbook, or just isn't bothering to enforce it. Is either not making officers familiar with the prohibitions on use of social media, or isn't bothering to enforce them. Is not making officers adhere to the procedure and correction of the department's policies. And if he's failing at all of this, at what else is he failing? When you repeal the ordinance tonight, you give up your ability to closely monitor the activities of members of the police force. You will advocate your duty to represent we, the voters who elected you. Why would you do that in the face of such stark evidence regarding the performance of at least one police officer, and more importantly, the non-performance of the chief? Several of you spoke to your reasons for repealing the ordinance at the last meeting. With one exception, I found those reasons to be pretty much Little Boy Network still alive and well. That one exception came from Alderwoman Hartzell. It was simply, Doug doesn't want it. I'm sure he doesn't. I have only to observe the performance of the one police officer to understand why Doug does not want his performance subject to oversight. What I don't understand is why you, the alderman, would not insist upon maintaining such oversight at a time when it is so clearly needed. Thank you.

Anyone else?

For the record, Dan Ikson, 505 Tidwell Drive. Ready? Okay. First thing I'd like to know is, when was the last time that the Parks and Rec Board had a meeting? Any idea? I haven't been following with it. I generally was trying to keep up with those and attend the meetings, but I haven't heard any meetings lately. One of the reasons that I bring that up is we've got a wonderful people ball court over there, and a beautiful $2,400 piece of rock sitting in front of it, and new shades, and every time I invite a body there, I don't see anybody on the people ball court. Now, that's not up to the Parks and Rec Board to put people out there, but I've been watching their pages, and they're not even promoting it. In fact, I don't think I've seen anything on Cuba's page promoting that. so i'm just kind of wondering what's what's the parking record doing you can solve them maybe you might want to look into that Second thing that I'd like to cover is that when it comes to police department and social media, if anybody had done their homework, she would have realized that the officer she was talking about was pretty heavy into TikTok and social media and whatnot. And he got bring back quite a bit by his boss for doing that. I'm not going to cover for what he did for one of the other citizens around here, but I'm going to reiterate. If you don't like what Doug Shelton's doing, you either run for the position or you groom somebody to put in his position. But we're not going to, and I really hope that you guys feel the same way, we're not going to give the mayor a backdoor access to try to control what's going on in there with social media and whatnot. It wouldn't even be the mayor's position to do that. So, that being said, I do have one other question. The individual that's helping clean up the books on the, uh, the comptroller's books and whatnot, is she still at it? Hello? I want to do that.

Do you know who that person is? Do you know this is Susan participation? And, and she related to you by any chance? Do you know this is Susan participation?

Thank you. That's all I needed to hear.

Hey, Dan, if you go by the pickleball course late at night, there hasn't been a lot of kids down there. I have not.

Full disclosure, but generally I go by there in the evening when it's cooler. It is getting used.

Yesterday morning when I picked up the thing, it was full of people in the pickleball course.

It was getting used. Good.

My name is Pat Bass, and I know for a fact that the Pickle Pull Club has been loose a lot. Because I'm not the only kid. I work down there. There's four Pickle Pull Clubs, and all four Pickle Pull Clubs is packed.

And I tell my mom, and I'm making you careful because what did I say?

But I'm going to tell you what I'm going to tell you. I tell my mom that the pickup coach, I was going to make them $450. You got nothing to take over there. Four million dollars don't give you food. Four million dollars give food to other. Five million dollars don't give me one or two kids for the big world. You could give a kid a one and a half. Oh, I don't know what to say. My name is Donald. We're wondering if we can have the $500 deposit waived since we've been doing all the cleaning and everything on the track. And we've been doing a good job, so we're just kind of curious if we can have the $500 waived for the deposit.

I make a motion to leave it because they've done a lot of work down there and put in concrete and the blocks and they always leave it better than it was when they lived. I make a motion to leave it. There's a lot of people in the town who give them a chance anyway.

They did last time. Let's do a little comment. I hope you guys are all there because it's going to be one after the show again. What is that?

What is that? What is that? I can't hear. That's it.

Yes. Yes. Anybody else?

Hi. Council members, I'm here to request permission to use the Hood Park grounds in the barn next month, October 24th, for our annual Halloween at the Hood event. My name is Andy and I'm here tonight on behalf of the Cuba Area Chamber of Commerce. You may or may not know, but Halloween at the Hood is a yearly event hosted by the Chamber Board. It is a completely free event for the community. A haunted house, a costume contest, games, candy, activities, all of this is provided at no cost to any of the family members attending the event. Last year, it wasn't the best weather. We probably had 300 to 400 people come through. The year before, we had over 500 people come through. The event is made possible through donations from local businesses, organizations, community members, as well as many hours from volunteers. We do allow vendors to set up and sell items during the event. Vendors pay a nominal fee to participate, which helps offset some of the costs of putting on the event. But to be specific, Colony of the Hood is not a fundraiser for the Chamber. All funds received through vendor fees and the donations go directly toward that year's event expenses. I think last year we raised about $1,800 and I think we spent A little more. Some of that stuff came out of pocket, but it was all spent towards the event. So we would just like to ask permission to use both the park grounds and the first barn, which I think is called the cow barn, for the haunted house, haunted barn, and then with access before and after the event. This will be the fourth year for the event. And Leslie just suggested that I come to talk to the council to get official permission.

Just a couple of questions. First, electricity.

So obviously inside the building we need electricity and then outside we would need electricity at the pavilion and maybe two or three spots.

Have you approached the park board?

No, I have not. I did last year, and it was approved last year, but I have not talked to them recently.

You have to go through Park World first before you come to us, because they have approved that since it is a park facility. And then once it comes to us, you're under the Chamber of Commerce, so you cover their insurance.

Yes, that is why the Chamber hosts it.

So you provide a copy of the insurance for them? Yes. Electric? Are we making the Derby people go to the park board? The Derby people are paying them to use the park. They are not using the inside of the building. They are using the inside of the fair building, which is controlled by the park board. That's the only reason that they have to go to the park board.

And we did go to the park board last December. The park board is just the board. We can give permission for them to use it.

Are we going to circumvent the process? Again, are we going to circumvent the process? We have always been, if you want to use the park, just like if you're going to use the park buildings, that I've never heard of this.

When, let us say, that's park working, do you put...

It's the second Tuesday of the month. Okay. If one of them was here, we would just, actually, it won't be a problem. It's not going to be a problem. We just want to go through the process.

So I'll go to the park board next week, and then do I need to come back to you guys, or will the park board come back to me? The park board can come back to us.

And we've got committee members. We have two committee members. You better be on deck.

They should make a recommendation for their minutes. As long as there's a recommendation on their minutes.

Okay, perfect. Lainey, do you want any of this written out for your notes? Sure, yeah. Thank you guys all so much. Anybody else have some information?

Okay, Cuba War Memorial, Memorandum of Understanding, Mold Family Memorial Committee, and CCF Advisory Committee. I'm sorry? No, I'm sorry. Let's do, I got out of course, sorry. Special meeting now is July 29th, 2016. All those in favor?

Aye. All opposed?

Okay. Regular meeting minutes of August 18th, 2026. Motion. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? And executive session meeting minutes of August 18th, 2026. Motion. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? All right, bills will be paid. Motion. Second. Any questions? All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? No. No. Q. War Memorial Memorandum of Understanding, Mullen Family Memorial Committee, and CCF Advisory Arrangement Discussion Group.

I'm Rachel. I'm Jason. Tara. I'm Hannah.

Moms.

And so, yeah, so we were getting together just because, obviously, Terri's father and uncle put this amazing memorial in place. And at the time, I'm representing the Crawford County Foundation board that has been in existence since 2002. So when they came to us in 2007 and said, can you be a vehicle for the not-for-profit just to help them raise money? Obviously it's there and then they came to the city like in 2017, 2018. Hopefully you got the minutes that we found for us and there was supposed to be a committee put together and then that just never happened. And so then we kind of regrouped because obviously Tara and her family want to carry on this legacy and do it right for the community. And also, you know, the Provider County Foundation can continue to help and put the information on our website and allow people to donate directly to the war memorial. And so what we have come forward with, Zach Renick is a local attorney, and he kind of put this memorandum of understanding together, which hopefully you have. And it's very in favor of the city. I mean, obviously the Memorial is on the city property. So basically the city has total control. So the ask is that the family, as you know, the committee can put on new names or make sure that the maintenance is taken care of and they can get reimbursement from the fund that's already in existence through proper county foundations specifically for the Memorial. And that's the way the process could work. until it doesn't work anymore, which would be totally up to the city's discretion, because you basically own it. So I guess our ask is, do you have any questions about the MOU? If you don't, maybe we're hoping the city attorney can review it. And also just ensure that this memorial is on your balance sheet and it's an actual asset. And if so, then we would all three, the Brewer family, the Proper County Foundation and sign it in conjunction with the city and move forward so we can make sure that it serves the community the way it was intended.

Thank you for bringing it to us. Everybody okay with that? So there will be a motion.

Well, I have a question. So I can just kind of read through it here. So the committee, it says on the back page, we got signature, page, memory, and understanding. represented by City of Cuba, Crawford County Foundation, and then it says the Mullen Family Memorial Committee. When they're talking about committees, they're all blank. Is there a committee? Sorry.

I mean, right now it would be myself and all of my girls have agreed to help. I mean, so I've had, you know, I mean, I'm almost 60, but I've got one since, you know, 25. So everybody wants to see it going. Everybody knows how hard my dad and I have to work to put it together. But we also want to see, and I know that over the years people have approached the city or they've tried to get names added and nobody really kind of knew where the money was or how to do it or what the requirements were. So I think it's just kind of sat since then. And so we want people to be able to add names. We want people to be able to put their logo on top of it. We were talking about maybe at CubaFest having a QR code and a little sign there. If people want to get information, they've already got a direct link that they can go directly to Rockville County Foundation. They can fill out an application. They can make a donation. And we can see this thing perpetually go on. It doesn't have to be a financial drain necessarily for the city. to be able to do that. But right now, it needs some attention. It needs to be cleaned. The north side needs to be re-frosted. There's some things that need to be done.

I think it's a good idea, what you're doing, because I was on the committee, the World Memorial Committee, a few years back. Nobody can figure out how to get him to put on it. But now we've got somebody that we can send people.

Do we still have applications from people that were given anywhere along the way? Do you know? We get them.

We bring them all.

Okay. I think we don't have anything to give her. I mean, we never received applications. We received some phone calls. They didn't know where to draft us, and then we tried, and they hadn't been done. So as far as applications, I have nothing to give you.

We have a new name. Okay.

Perfect. Thanks.

I have just one quick question. Can I take it from Delbert? Delbert is my dad.

Do we need a motion?

Yeah.

Under my administration, this was dropped, the ball had dropped. Really and truly, y'all never lost control, because the city never took it over. And that's the reason it came to a standstill. My fault, I will take part of the blame, because we just never did. We had this yesterday. A lot of people who would like to be on it, nobody figured out how to do it.

We appreciate you just taking it back over, because we want to know if it was done properly.

Yeah. Well, we said all things happen for a reason, and it's cool that Shara and her daughters want to take it on and continue, yeah, this legacy.

I mean, this thing all kind of happened accidentally. We know each other, or even kind of like something related. So she called one day, and she said, do you know why the Northeastern Foundation has this money on our books, which is just sitting here? And I was like, well, kind of. I mean, without my dad, I can't go ask that question. It's like, and we kind of backtracked into it. Well, that led us to, what do we do with it and how do we move forward to seeing it? Yeah, they do. It's still sitting there. It's still sitting there and we hope to raise some more. I think this is the 20th anniversary this year. So it might be a good time for us to put an article in the paper and remind people that it's there and give them a link to do it and...

We appreciate your concern and we'll help you any way we can. Well, that's an all-in-one.

Thank you, that's very nice.

Part of the scale question we have, do we have Karen's contact information, email, phone number? It's on email.

We'll get it from her. No, I only suppose that we need to do some review.

We can do a review and come back next meeting for your approval, but...

We haven't had the opportunity to preview this in just three and a half pages of legal jargon, so we just take the time to look it over, give our recommendations.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you guys. Shelly Steiner will be with you on your installation discussion and approval.

Okay.

For Hope, we are here to request a mural of approval. The design is not like 100% colored in. This is supposed to go on, oops, there's the original one. Might have to change the size up a little bit. This is a mural that would go on the building across the street from Missouri Barbecue. And Ryan was supposed to come today but he had some other obligations so he wasn't able to make it. And this is kind of his brainstorm. He's pretty excited about it. He's trying to get that end of town kind of brought into the rest of the town with the murals and all the tourism that's going on. So he asked us to come up with a design. It will be funded with the help of Ryan and Viva Cuba and some other donations. So we're not asking the city for any money. We're just asking for you guys to approve it. This one would be a different theme than we've had in the past. It'll be like 70s, 80s, 90s, a little bit more recent and kind of geared towards the music and road tripping like we all did when we were kids. You guys all have several of you around my age, you know? So it's kind of based a little bit more on some of the memories of the local people that are our age. So we have Mohit. That would be more 90s, I think, when Dennis built Mohit out there. So kind of a nod to Dennis because it's on that building. So there'll be a picture of him doing the construction of the building. He has a favorite sports car that would also be on there. Then just a nice sports car would be the Torino. We're going to do a Torino in one of them. Midway Building, of course, Dairy Queen, because that was the local hangout, and then Hopper Oil. We just thought it'd be fun to have a little gas station one in there as well. I don't know if you guys remember all of those things, but the details on this, please excuse me, are not the greatest, but once I get it on the wall, it certainly will be. So I want this to be very realistic. So this will be a pioneer, you know, car stereo because that was the primo back then. The wording, it'll be road trippin' on the mother road, on the mother road. The road trippin' is the mother road. And these will be neon painted to look like, they're not going to be neon, but they will be painted to look like neon. So they'll be really bright. The background color is still, I wanted to go dark so that the neon would show up, but I also wanted to really catch your eye as you're coming into town. So that's why the blue's on there now. That may not stay that bright of a blue, but something kind of like that. And obviously this will all be painted too. Just so you're not confused to why only half of it is. This would be from the building facing up here? No, it won't. It will be facing east. So as people are coming into town, you'll see his installation there, and then you would see the mural as well. Any questions?

I know it'll be nice. You doing it. Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

I appreciate that. A little better than this. I was going to go there.

I mean, I'll second that. We have a motion to second the discussion. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed?

Well, thank you guys. I appreciate it. We'll get started on our regular. Thank you. Thank you, Joe.

Excellent. Number seven, electric department, tree trimming bids, discussion and approval. Thank you.

Good evening. On behalf of the Indian Lake Department, tree trimming bid, if you want to be touching a few things, the Electric Department. The Lake Department does do a lot of tree trimming, but to keep up with the projects and maintenance, we contract out a lot of them out. Every budget for tree trimming is to maintain the vegetation that we do not have time for. It cuts down on averages and blinks. The budget used to be $100,000 a year, and we cut the tree trimming budget by $40,000. because we picked up some of the tree trimming ourselves, so that saves us quite a bit of money there. There's only one bid for tree trimming, and that is because one tree, the other tree trimming company would not give any bids because they were too busy. The bid they have is for an hourly bid. We would like to do it this way because we need them to go somewhere, if we need them to go somewhere else in town, we can do it while they're in town on an hourly rate. We currently have $60,000 budgeted, but do not plan to go over $15,000 a quarter to keep out of cash flow. So that is the presentation I got from the English department, and we do have a sealed bid. We have a sealed bid.

This is from Brown's Treaty and Bucket Service. January 2026 through December of 2026. Foreman and lead man at $65 per hour. Laborer at $55 per hour. Bucket truck at $35 per hour. Track machine loader at $35 per hour. Dump truck or dump trailer at $30 per hour. Forestry saw, mulcher, and mower at $25 per hour. Side-by-side or four-wheeler at $20 per hour. And then a jet boat should that be needed at $20 per hour. over a 40-hour or from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m. time plus a half on Sundays and holidays, double time. Most live printers, for example, with three main crew, bucket truck, skid steer, and dump truck would be $20,000. $285 an hour for everything. So that's $285 per hour for everything. We would honor this list through your business year. Example, normally if you're using mulcher, you're not using the dump truck or not always through men. So it could be us. Correct. Thank you. And this was Inter-County Electric, City of Cuba, St. James, Crawford Electric, City of Steelville, City of Cuba. And so it must be the same rates. Itemized price sheet for 2026.

And this, doing it this way is much cheaper than actually a full bid. So how are they ready to do a full bid? We hope at least. I mean, yeah.

It didn't work before. It didn't work before?

No. We weren't the old LeBron people readers, though.

They do a good job.

They do a good job and see how it works. They do a good job. They do a good job. I'll make a motion. Second. Okay.

Discussion. Discussion. Discussion. Will you deal about the bid since you are more or less in charge?

If it gets a fair market value? Yes, I think we've done some research on that and it is very fair. It's the same program. I just wanted to read your opinion on it, since you'll be working with them, too.

Yeah, for sure. Thank you.

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you.

Okay, this will be your $20.25. Discussion will improve.

Your audit report? Yes. I'm going to go over pages 21 through 27 first. And in these pages are some definitions and explanations of many items in the audit. I'd like you to briefly familiarize yourself with these. We're not going to go over them in terrible detail. But it gives you an idea over your reporting entity, your government-wise financial statements, your measurement basis of accounting and financial presentation. But the most important one is on page 26 that I would like to go over tonight before we get started, and that is net position. Net position definition is, I'm going to show you that terminology a lot tonight, so that's why I want to clear that before we get started. Let's see what net position definition is. Net position is made up of assets plus deferred outflows of resources minus liabilities and deferred implosive resources and is shown in an entity-wide and propriety-funded financial statement. Net position is required to be classified into three components, net investment and capital assets, restricted and unrestricted, and those are defined on page 26 and 27 there for you that you can familiarize yourself with. On page 8 begins the management discussion and analysis. Under financial highlights, I'm going to talk about some pretty important numbers that came out of the audit. $286,922 of unrestricted were unrestricted and available for governmental activities. And $2,625,102 were unrestricted and available for the city's business type activities. This leaves a lot of room to work with that were unrestricted. The city's total net position decreased by $648,035. Of this amount, $84,999 was a decrease. from the city's governmental activities and $563,036 a decrease from business-type activities. The unsigned fund balance for the general fund was $220,379, or 6.3% of the general fund expenditures. Per our policy on page 26, That should have been $877,541 this year, not the $220,000 that we ended with. So that was a difference of $657,162, even though we ended on the plus side. So I just wanted to point that out to you all, even though we made sure that it's not always where the policy states that we should have ended with. On page seven, I wanted to point out on the table that you'll see there, the one thing that's showing, the big thing that you should be the eye-opener are the transfers. Last year, in 2024, we had $2,048,200. $48,208. This year we had to transfer $2,190,661 in transfers. So those went up this year. And that is a substantial increase. So we need to look at ways to limit those transfers. If you'll turn to page 17, Your statement of net position in the proprietary funds, this is a financial report used in government accounting that shows an entity's assets, deferred outfalls, liabilities, deferred inflows, and net position at a specific point in time, similar to a balance sheet. So on this page, the particular alarming number is the first line, cash investments. In your electric fund, you had $1.3 million. In your water works fund, you had $226,000. In your natural gas, $542,000. For a total, together in your proprietary funds, of spendable cash, $2.081 million. So spendable cash, that's what you can spend. That's not a lot for those proprietary funds to have in single cash. So it's a thing that we need to think about when we're working throughout the year is what is spendable and what is not spendable. 2.081 is not a priority number.

That was for all four funds.

All three, yeah. The other thing that is on page 18 is your statement of revenues, expense, and change in the fund net position. The very bottom, the change in fund balance. If you look, and this is the thing that was alarming to me, in your electric fund, you decreased by $397,702 in the electric. Your water did go up $325,828. and your national grants decreased by $491,162. For an overall of all three funds, a decrease of $563,036. What this tells me is looking at the cash numbers and the changes in fund balance, it shows that the funds were in need of a rate increase. All three funds. You can't survive with $2 million, a spindle of cash, and continuing decrease in your fund balance and not know that you did need a rate increase. You gotta have revenue. Where do you get revenue for proprietary funds? Customer charges. And the other point in this is your $12 million in any net position for the year is not all spendable. It is including your assets and deferred inflows, outflows, various other things that make up the $12 million. So it doesn't get any of your $12 million that you need to make an account. That is the net position that we talked about before on page 26. So it's not spendable cash. On page 19, the net cash provided operating activities. He only had the 2.6 million for all proprietary funds. This is not a lot to survive on if you have an emergency. Your net increase and decrease in cash to cash equivalents. Again, you decreased by $790,615 for a total of cash to cash equivalents for the year of $3.2 million. You're just spending your cash fast. You need to find a way to stop the bleeding. Your proprietor is onto your lifeline, your business life activities. You should not be bleeding these off and spending your money. So you have to find a way to stop that tunnel of cash going out the door. On page 23, Your allowances for uncollectible accounts are basically your bad debts. So you will notice that this amount raised substantially from 2024. Again, your bad debt on utility bills is the amount that we feel we cannot collect, and we are developing a policy and looking on for how other cities can handle their bad debt in order to limit our bad debts. We realized that we were going to have a bad debt, but we were working towards limiting that liability. Page 30. Compensated absences are something that the city is always going to have. It's something that we have to report. I just wanted to show you on this page that we did have additions to that. They did increase from last year. That is something that I have to report to you. from the previous year. It's nothing that we shouldn't be alarmed about, but it is a liability to us as a city that we have compensated absence liability. It just means that we have longer term employees that are staying and that we don't have anybody that in the future that we have more people that are staying. So we are gonna, this is the liability that we have. The other big thing is on page 32, It's in our notes. It's our pension. I'm going to start reading some things. It's going to take some time, so I just ask you to bear with me. It's about your lawyers. Benefits vest after five years of pregnant in service. Employees who retire on or after age 60. For general employees, 55 police with five or more years of service are entitled to an allowance for life based upon the benefit program for information below. And that table is listed below. Employees covered by the benefit terms. At June 30th, 2025, the city had 40 active employees covered by the benefit terms, 47 inactive employees and beneficiaries currently receiving benefits, and 28 inactive employees entitled to the not yet receiving benefits. Under contribution, the actuary determined the rate is estimated amount necessary to finance the cost of benefits earned by employees during the year with an additional amount to finance the unfunded approved liability. The city's contribution rates are 24.9% for dental employees and 20% for police of annual covered payroll. The city's net pension liability was measured as of June 30th. The total pension liability used to calculate the net pension liability was determined by an actual valuation as of February 28th, 2025. On page 34, Your total pension liability as of June 30th, 2024 was $16,022,053. As of June 30th, 2025, that number rose to $16,966,870. An increase of $944,000 is not sustainable year after year. On page 35, you will see your inter-fund transfers. As was pointed out on an earlier page, those transfers rose substantially. This page breaks it down for you on where those transfers went to. The substantial amount was from the proprietary funds to the general fund, and that was a substantial increase this fiscal year. And so you can see that that one. The other funds were just normal transfers that we see year after year for the rest of them, but we had to transfer a lot into your general fund. You are transferring a lot of money into your general fund or your proprietary funds. Those funds cannot keep can't keep funding the electric fund year after year. We have to figure out a way to stop the leading in the general fund. On page 43. This comes from Waters. but it's a requirement to be in your audit. Report is your net pension liability. This is a 10 year comparison from 2016 to 2025. The two things that I would like to point out on this report is something that we should all be familiar with, is that in 2016, our net pension liability was $461,408. In 2025, that number rose to $1.4 million. The other number that we should be familiar with and be concerned about is the net pension liability as percentage of covered employee payroll. In 2016, it was 30.2%. In 2025, it more than doubled to 65.3%. We need to address this issue in a Salary Committee meeting in mid-September in order to combat this issue. And this will come from the mayor. On page 51, you will notice there are several reports that look the same before page 51, but the one I want to point out is on page 51. This is your City Transportation Trust Fund. It had a lost income balance of $58,575. You started at $730,316. You ended the year at $671,741. If you maintain this loss at this rate, this fund will be broken in 11 years. This is a loss that is not sustainable. And council needs to address this issue. On page 54, Again, looking at the net change in fund balance, this is one that we should not be taking away from the fund balance, but we should be looking at adding to it each year. We had a loss of $158,827. This loss is not sustainable to this fund. Keeping this loss up, this fund will be broken in seven and a half years. We won't have any money left in those funds. Are there any questions?

So this is the completed audit for 2025. 2025. 2025. Here we are a year later, 2026. These numbers we're looking at 2025. These are pretty scary numbers. Has this group been given our stuff to start 2026? Okay. Because this is fresh memories right now, 2026 being completed as soon as possible. It would give us a better idea of the difference between last year and this year.

And one of the holdbacks is loggers will not give us their info until November.

So did we end 2025 in the negative or positive? Negative.

Negative. Show that on page 8.

What's the percentage of decline? Jim, what percentage did it go down?

I don't think that was reported in this report.

That was the page that required page four. 648, that division decreased by $648,000.

I said, we're bleeding, and he said, you're hemorrhaging. And you have to address your expenditures. You need to look at your highest expenditures and address them. And then if you look at this audit, it kind of tells you, based on what you're reading, what's your highest expenditure.

yeah i don't think i quite touched on on page eight i forgot i skipped over but over the course of the year the city approved mary's budget amendment significant increases between the budget and the final budget can be summarized as follows 237 250 Dollar increase to general government budget increases due to greater than anticipated expenses for contract labor, salary, and benefits, and miscellaneous other expenses. $110,999 increase to public safety budget expenditures due to greater than anticipated salaries and benefits and capital expenditures. $315,414 increase to budgeted transfers and other financing sources. And that was in struggle alone. That was pointed out on page eight.

Those are the expenditures that down here . A lot of work. Yeah.

So the comments in the audit speaks for itself. And agenda item number eight on this agenda says fiscal year 2025 audit discussion and approval. I don't like what the audit has to say, and it is what it is. Therefore, I approve what it says.

We'll need a motion for approval. I'm sorry?

We'll need a motion for approval.

Yeah. OK. I made a motion for approval of the audit. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes.

i'm going to have verbal blankly i hope i said it right bhmg engineers electric brake structure discussion thank you

So she's just passing out a spreadsheet that we were working on to kind of illustrate some of the calculations that we're looking at.

Can you speak to your company you work with in person?

Sure. I'm Verbal Blakey with BH&B Engineers. We've worked with the city of Cuba for probably about 15, 20 years. We've worked with you on your electric system consulting and also on your electric brakes and help you secure your wholesale power conference. So we worked with you on your rates before. We did a rate study, I think, about three or four years ago. And then the recommendation was adopted. And you haven't changed your rates in, I think, over 15 years. It's been, like, early development. The good news is the rate structure has an adjustment for the cost of wholesale power. So as that changes, your electric rates fluctuate and change with it. Had that not been in place, we would have had this conversation probably many, many years ago. But the other part of your rates that recover, if you think about the expenses in an electric fund, you have your energy costs and then you have your non-energy costs. So everything except your wholesale power bill. there has been no adjustment in almost 20 years on what your rates bring in revenue versus the cost. So as inflation happens, in the last four or five years, we've seen drastic changes, increases in material costs for electric systems, but also just, you know, benefits are more expensive, salaries are more expensive, those things go up. Either your spending has to go down, so you have to provide capital to staff, provide less maintenance upgrades, or your margin and your margin decreases at the same time. But we're at a position now where your fund doesn't have enough to cover the next month's electric bill. And so to talk about reserves.

Can you say that again?

Yeah, your fund doesn't have enough money to cover next month's electric bill without collecting more It's kind of like when you think about your savings account at home. If you don't have enough to make your next month's rent payment or house payment, then that's concerning without getting another paycheck, like living paycheck to paycheck. When we talk about electric reserves, the rule of thumb is that you want 50% to 100% of your annual expenses in reserves. And that number is kind of broad. It depends on the size of your system. The smaller the system, the more closer to the 100% that you want. Just because certain things are expensive. If you have a storm, you're going to need help. Your residents are going to want their power back on immediately. So you're not going to rely on your city staff to do it on straight time. You're going to want them working overtime. You're going to ask for mutual aid. You're going to have contractors come in. You're going to need materials very quickly. All that means money. And you could spend $400,000 to $500,000 in a week very easily. A lot of the towns will come back and say, well, that's OK, because we'll get FEMA money. Only if it's declared a disaster area, and you'll get 75% of the approved expenses about two years later. And it'll take a full-time person to do all the accounting to get that money. So you can't really rely on that. You also just need an operating tax. If you have a collections issue with your bills, but you still have bills to pay, So you've gotten to a point where you don't have a healthy reserve in your electric fund. Your electric fund, you have a water fund, you have a gas fund. The electric system, the expenses are more than like a water or a gas. And typically you see a bigger multiple on those that's on electric than you do the others. That's just kind of background information of where we are. So I've been working with the city for a few months trying to figure out, like, they want to get a, let's do, like, can we go ahead and implement the rate suggestion or recommendations from three or four years ago? And the response to that is that data is stale. So you can, but how do you, you know, you want as a board to set fair and equitable rates. The only way you can set fair and equitable rates is to do a cost analysis. If your load has changed or your customer profile has changed significantly from three or four years ago, your wholesale power structure has, then you can't use a recommendation from three or four years ago because it's not going to be in alignment. It may be closed, but you don't know unless you look at it and do calculations. The other struggle you guys have is catching up on your audits. So we can do a rate study, and somebody mentioned in the slide, like, this is a 25 audit. We're going to start with 25 audited data at a zero. So our recommendation was you really need to be like, you're getting caught up. You're probably going to have your 2026 rate audit done in December or January. We'll leave out some preliminary numbers for the legislative department maybe a month or two before that, and we can work with that. But to set an accurate rate structure for all of your customers that is fair and equitable, you need more current data. And so our recommendation was you should probably wait. But you can't wait. Your electric fund can't wait. So then the question was, what can we do in the interim? So we talked about rate structure. For various reasons, your rate structure is a little old. As we talked about, it hasn't been changed in almost 20 years. Your rate structure needs to be more mimicked than the way you're charged wholesale power. You want your rates to be fair and equitable to the customers in the different customer classes you put them in. And you want to try to eliminate subsidies across customer classes. So to do fair and equitable rates, you also have to want to eliminate subsidies within a rate class, specifically residential. So you can think about logically, there's certain expenses you pay every month just to have an electric department. Regardless, it doesn't matter how much people use, you have to re-maintain your cinema bill, collect the bill, you have to have a minimum number of linemen to maintain your system. Those are fixed expenses. They vary a little bit, but they need to be recovered as fixed expenses. They're going to be expenses no matter how much people use. If they scale back, if they conserve, or it's the middle of the summer and we're using a lot of electricity, you still have to spend that base amount of money. That needs to be recovered by a fixed charge. And the reason why that's more important now than it had been 10 years ago is that people who have like solar on a house, like they're net metering. So they're not buying as much volume from you, but you still have to read meters to know what will, you still have to have line, you still have to have the physical facilities attached to them. So if you don't collect funds to cover those expenses on a fixed basis, then you have people who don't have renewables subsidizing people who do have renewables. Because you don't have a customer charge, a flat charge every month that covers the cost of everybody being a customer. So if you don't have one of those, then you have a renewable customer who's bill is 10% of someone else's, but they're not contributing enough to their fixed cost that they're costing the system. Because of that, the structure needs to be focused on an adequate customer charge, and then an energy charge, and then you have some customers in the industry that need the demand charge. So the demand and energy structure go a little bit differently. So you don't have a customer charge today. Well, you kind of do. Your rates is overly complicated. You have blocked energy charges, meaning like the first block is this amount, then your first 30 is this, the next 170 is this, and the next up to 1,000 is this. That was an appropriate rate structure about 30 years ago, whenever that was where your wholesale power was being charged. That's not the case. Your wholesale power, the first kilowatt hour, was the same as the last kilowatt hour. So, but ripping that mandate off and fixing that will cause people to be affected completely differently. And that is very difficult to do. So you would have people, constituents that, you know, these two neighbors, one of them gets a 10% increase, the other one gets a 2% increase, just because of where they fall in the blocks. So we recommend not doing that by ripping the mandate off. However, if you think about it, the first 30 kilowatt hours, for example, for most of us, we'll be charged $8.18. If you look at the thousand block, which is like 8.75 cents, that's really more of a basic kilowatt hour rate number. The differential in that, so if I take 30 kilowatt hours, that's 8.75, then I have $3.44 of power in that $8 block. The difference is the customer charge that you're charging. But you don't charge if people have 10 kilowatt hours, you still get that charge. You can call that a pseudo customer charge, it's just max. To me, it's confusing. It's confusing to explain, it's confusing to understand. But when you're doing calculations to increase revenue, you have to recognize the fact that that is a pseudo customer charge. Our recommendation is you eliminate it, and you charge per kilowatt hour for the first block. And I would even go ahead and get the second block that's at 170, because it had a little bit of an elevated fee. But initially, just at least the first block. So you get the first 200 kilowatt hours at the same, at a kilowatt hour rate, not a flat amount of money. But you also need to implement a customer charge. So, but then the question is, well, we're going to do this and we don't want to race it yet. You have to plug the hole in the name. And I will tell you that 100% that you will have, I will be recommending a customer charge in six months from here. And I can pretty much get pretty close to what I think it is. And it will be cost-based. We've done so many of these. We know systems that are just like yours. We see financials like yours. You need to recover the cost on your system. And we can tell you that the customer charge needs to be cost-based. What does every residential customer on average cost the city every month? It's going to be close to $20. So I can tell you, if you need to do a step, you can't afford not to, you do this in phases, and then in the next phase you actually have all the data to kind of tweak it where it needs to be, one of those steps is going to be a customer card, and it will be at least $20. So that's a recommendation we make to do today because you're not going to have to walk it back or correct it or change it. You're going to build on it.

So if you were going to do a rate study right now, if you were presenting a rate study right now, it would be in your recommendation to have it?

100%.

And it may be more than 20.

I don't know what the costs are, but I can tell you that I'll see you later. Now, if you're talking about $20 per year or per month?

Per month, per customer. And that's just presidential. Now, again, I'm also talking about changing that first 30, so it's not a $20 per month increase. It's a $15.25 a month per increase, because you already have some of that fake 10 that I'm going to eliminate to make things simple. So the customer, and you can absolutely say, every residential customer in the city of Cuba will be paying $15.25 a month more for their electric. That's what I'm recommending. Same thing for commercial, but there's a little bit, it's like $40 million more. And then large commercial and industrial, they have no customer charge. They have no imputed customer charge. They have nothing that's putting in reasonable customer charges for them. And so that's what the recommendations that you see on that spreadsheet. Now, those are numbers that I feel comfortable telling you that when we get the study back, the cost will justify those numbers. And we've seen them enough. I've done this for more than 30 years, longer than I was going to say. But I've seen this. It's right. It's not going to be like, oh, man, that was only $12, and we should have not raised it that high. That is not going to be the case.

One quick question before I forget. So going back to something you said. So right now, the city of Cuba does not have a minimum charge on its electricity.

Minimum and customer are not the same thing. So let's clarify that first. A minimum charge means you're going to get at least this much, but as long as your bill is at least $30, you don't pay a minimum charge, or at least $5. That's a minimum. A customer charge is a flat charge no matter how much you use, no matter how much your total bill is.

So we don't have a flat charge.

You have... A pseudo flat charge. You don't have a, you have, your first 30 kilowatt hours is $8.18. It's not a 30 kilowatt hour, it's a dollar an hour. So if I calculate what the power rate should have been in that block, the difference is your customer charge. So you have a customer charge of $3.44 or $3.45. Because you're charging $8.19 for the first 30. I'm recommending that you eliminate that because it's confusing. And make it a four hour charge. So you would make it the same four hours. I would eliminate the first two blocks and make them all the same four hour charge. But that's getting into I don't want to do that. It's making too many changes until we see some data. Because then we would change it again. So what kind of revenue would you get from that? The revenue you would get from Taking that dollar, the Colorado charge out, taking the flat amount charge out and replacing it with Colorado charge, and putting a $20 per month per residential customer Colorado, hill, residential customer charge every month, that will increase your revenue $300,000 a year. So now let's talk about, like, where are we trying to go with this? Your average wholesale power bill is $500,000 to $600,000 a month. You need to have at least that much money. You need to raise at least that much money. Raise your revenue. That's just the starting point. Now, that's about 7% of your annual revenue. It sucks. It stinks. You know, no one wants to sit here and say, I'm going to get a 7% raise. And no, you're going to have to do something else in January. But we can't tell you what to do January next year or whatever, because I can't give you fair and equitable numbers without a study. This is fair and equitable because I've seen it enough and I understand your system and I understand the cost. So it's a good stepping point that is fair, equitable, and something you don't have to walk back or revise. You're a builder. So with the proposal that you have in front of you, it's $300,000 for residential, $135,000 you would get from commercial, $70,000, $48,000. That's based on the customer charges of $20,000, $50,000, $150,000, and $250,000. Based on the number of customers you have today. And you won't collect that in the next two months. It will take you 12 months to collect that $500. So it's not going to fix the gap tomorrow, but if you wait, it's just going to get worse.

So now, if we accepted this as a city council, this recommendation, Does this have to be put into an ordinance and approved by us?

You'll have to have a revised ordinance.

And do you do any other government entities as well with your company? Any local around here by chance?

Sealeville, Cuba, Houston, Salem. The whole group, so you're in a power group of like 12 people that, 12 towns total that wholesale buy your car, they only work for one of them? Okay. Because we know that you do your wholesale power contracts, but we also work for other ones who are not part of that as well.

Okay, thank you. Is it fair to say most of them are looking, or some of them that you know of are looking at rates?

Everyone's looking at rates. The whole energy market from renewables to data centers to everything that's changing. I've been in this industry for 33 years. There's so much change in the last four or five years and this is a pretty stable industry. It's unpredictable. There's so much change happening so fast. that it's hard to keep up with. You used to be able to, if you said I need a new substation, we could get it from the beginning to the end and get it online in 15 months. Today, it'll take three years. It'll take a year and a half to get it transformed.

So you're saying you're keeping up with these rates and all that with the governments, but are you also following, like, what's Ameren doing, for example?

You can follow what Ameren's doing, but their cost basis and their rate basis is totally different than you. Right, right.

But they're raising rates.

They're raising rates, too. Yeah. I mean, I live in St. Louis. My electric bill a couple years ago was $0.14 a kilowatt hour. Today it's $0.18. I just got my power bill last week. It's $0.18 a kilowatt hour. So everybody's raising rates. Now, you can look at your neighbor and say, well, hey, they only charged $15, and their electric rate is $0.09. Well, they probably have an adjustment on it, and they might be poor. But if you don't want their financial system in, the situation is. So it's not apples to apples when they're saying, well, their rate structure looks like this. Well, their cost structure may be different. They also may not be making any money. They also may be getting a ton of money. So you need to look at what does it take for CUBA to pay the bills, and what is it fair and equitable for CUBA's customers? You guys are doing a great job of trying to manage the costs, but the costs are what the costs are. And so the only way you can increase margin is you raise revenue or you lower expenses. And I don't know how you could lower expenses any more than you have. You control cost really well. Your management team controls cost really well. And if you think about it, 70% of your cost is a wholesale power bill. So that's where we are. And what we're recommending is something that we believe is fair, equitable, safe, and it stinks. But you haven't done anything with it in the last 18 years or 20 years. So you can make the case that, okay, well, everyone is going to realize it's not fun. No one likes this. But for the last 18 years, you haven't paid more than you probably should have. Doesn't make anybody feel any better. Everything's going up, groceries, gas, everything. Well, electricity will go up for the rest of our lives. Because the one thing that's going up is demand. Everyone wants to plug in their phone, and it works all of the time. The electric hands are going up. People are getting electric cars. Not that that's wrong, but the electric load is going up. And we're shutting down pipelines. And I'll stop talking about that now. But there's supply and demand issue. And there's manufacturing gaps. And in manufacturing, the materials are more expensive. The labor is more expensive. Everything is more expensive, and so it's naive to expect their electric rates not to go up.

The honeymoon is over. What? The honeymoon is over.

If there was even a honeymoon. You're suggesting that we do this $20 customer fee and then wait until January to get more information about it.

And then we're going to be recommending, I would love to say let's put the bandaid off and get rid of all your blots, but if we do that, you can't say everybody's getting a $15 a month increase because that's not the case.

We have a poverty, we do have a 17% poverty rate here and we're not going to hit everybody that hard.

Well, and so you're doing this as gently as you can, but I would also say that you should have done this 15 years ago, 10 years ago. Like, if you increase something like 1% or 2% a year to follow cost patterns, that's so much more stomachable than 7% now and 10% later.

And I don't know that 2% children are ever out there anymore.

But you have step increases that you have to do because you haven't done them for so long. Now, I say you. I mean, it could have been like the last council or the 15 councils before you, you know, not necessarily you. But you guys have to make a decision. You know, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the city. You just heard the audit report, and that's a year and a half ago. So what are you going to find out in December? I mean, you can't speed up your audit, unfortunately. I mean, like, what do you get on a regular schedule? You know, you can't get the data age quicker than it comes. So there wasn't any arrears trying to look at this data. But these are – this is a safe – adjustment that starts to plug a hole in the gap until we can give you some fair, equitable, calculated, based on actual numbers, where I can tell you this will absolutely be justifiable. I have no concerns whatsoever.

This is a boost for now, knowing we're going to revisit very soon.

And it's just a phase. It's like you already know what you're facing in the race, and this is the first game that you face it. Because this is a building block. I will come back and say, oh, it should have been 12. Can we change it? That's not going to happen.

I would say based on your experience, the company's experience, and I guess the word I'm going to call it, reputability, you know, reliable sourcing, we go ahead and accept their recommendation. Okay, so I make a motion that we accept the rate structure based on the information we were given here at $20 proposed customer for residential, $50 for commercial, $150 LG commercial, and then $250 for industrial. I'll second that.

Roll call.

Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, we have to. We don't have to, but we have to.

Okay. So we will send that to Emily for words. Thank you for coming out today. Thank you very much. There was a question asked last week which membership we had and that was the Phoenix Prime approved. So we're going in for the prime membership 12 membership service hours through basic membership dues based on 2025 estimated population of 3288. We did contest that. They came back and said that they used an estimated data from some census at E2 or something, so we'll accept that. At $1.45 per capita, it includes 27 membership service hours. If you pay the minimum dues, prime membership is calculated at $3,123.60 plus a population of 3,288 at 50 cents per capita. So your prime membership total amount due is $4,767.60. And keep in mind that we are going out to grants now that our 2025 is done, and they do most of our grant writing. And so we do use their hours.

Do we have money for that?

We budgeted the money based on last year's money spent, so it would be for the budget.

Second. Second. All those in favor? Aye.

Opposed?

Okay, item number 11, we've already talked about that. It will be addressed September 13th. Item number 12, socket fiber agreement discussion approval, moved September the 15th and the socket fiber has been moved by. And number 13, ordinance number 300, assisted city model repeal, discussion approval. I'll make a motion to repeal it.

I second.

All right. Roll call. Discussion first. Roll call.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Thank you. Okay.

The only thing I want to follow up on is our nuisances. I had those back home that were brought to me. Started working on those. Working with Laney on 606 Bond Street, trying to find the actual owners, including the bank. And we're working with Emily here on an undeveloped property because there's no house on it. It's one of the houses that the city keeper had removed. So there's no structure there. It's just going to be locked. So I'm trying to decide whether or not that's a forceful ordinance to... I don't need another question. We're working on that one. I'm sure it's the courtesy of the neighbors and stuff to make sure. I have questions. I'm going to try to get that one. Go ahead.

I don't care where I was at. Longstreet.

Oh, 905, yeah, that's where, I'm not done with that. 905 Merv Street has new owners for that property. They do live here. We're still trying to find a number to contact them. They live somewhere off the, so of course we're trying to figure out where that is so we can contact them and find the property. 606 Band Street went by several times. That grass has been, the, Are you hanging anything on the houses or doors? Whenever we can't get a hold, if we can't get a hold of somebody, we're not able to make contact so that, yeah, we'll, you know, find us something on the work or something like that. 406 Phillips Street. It is also purchased a new owner that's been off the courtyard. So we're trying to get hold of that new owner. The previous owner left it and he's no longer in town. 801 Washington has the dumpster, the Amazon return. I think he's been notified by one of the officers I'm not sure what the cleanup is. I know it's been like that for... 25 years. As far as the small section fenced in around it, the half of the trees that's been growing up around it, it's looked like that for 25 years. And I'm not 100% that he owns that building. I know he's operating out of the building, whether he's renting it. So we have to do a little bit more digging. We just haven't had time to do all that digging this week. to find out who the actual owner is for that. Mabel Shade, who got the complaint for mattresses and other stuff in the backyard, they've been notified. So they're 14 days and also started to get it picked up, cleaned up, because we can't see their backyard quite easily from the intersection.

The other thing on my thing was the... Can Lou ask this question?

Oh, yeah, yeah. So the 606 Pine Street was a house that we tore down, the city did? Is that what you were saying? Yes. Okay, so and now it's got grass growing and it's not being cut. Does that kind of fall back under us since we tore it down that we can add to that? No.

We still have that to honor.

Well, there's a process that we have to go through before we actually clean up and . And the other thing I have is for the ACA position, I don't have any recommendation or higher at that point or at this point right now.

We were closed twice. Do we need to run an ad then? I don't know that we necessarily need to run the ad in paper. It's been in paper for weeks. What we'll do, I think, we'll reach out on Facebook. We get better responses that way and make sure that it's shared.

Is it on the Cuba Police or the City of Cuba Facebook page?

I will be with Sarah, the city supervisor over there to run it on and make sure she, whatever you do with Facebook. That's all.

Okay. Number 15, bill number 2236, an agreement with Oros and Bush Application Technologies Incorporated. Motion to have the first reading of bill number 2236. All in favor? Aye.

I don't have it.

Important, authorizing the mayor of the city of Cuba, Missouri, on behalf of said city, to enter into an agreement with J. Oros Environmental Incorporated for the hauling and disposal of biosolid material.

Motion to have the second. Motion to have the second reading of bill number 2236. Motion. Second. Roll call.

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Concordance, authorizing the Mayor of the City of Cuba, Missouri, on behalf of said city, to enter into an agreement with J. Oros Environmental Incorporated for the hauling and disposal of biosolid material.

Motion to approve the second reading of bill number 2236. Motion.

Second.

Roll call.

Bucks. Yes. Rosemont. Yes. O'Neary. Yes. Vordermeyer. Yes. Crocker. Yes. Herzog. Yes.

Bill number 2236 becomes special ordinance 976. Okay, old, unfinished, and new business.

Joyce?

Yes?

Last meeting, Jeff brought up about a software that's causing us a lot of problems. Does that have an effect? That audit that we just got, is that? It's a little bit out of town.

Jennifer can speak to that more than I can.

Is that right?

And I had another question.

You said we bought that in 1998. Why is it just now causing us problems? They had upgrades.

I'm sorry? They had upgrades. All software programs have upgrades.

Upgrades caused the problem? Yeah.

There are some, if you go online and read, they're in lawsuits right now and they're having some problems. Russ? Is that it, James?

I know it would be a lot of expense if we were looking to changing the software.

We have already talked to, we went out, found out two good organizations that other people are using. We have already had two meetings with both of them to discuss. You sat down with both Jessica, Jennifer, myself, went through the software to determine what ones would meet all of our needs the best. And then they both gave us bids. We had those bids. We talked to them about those bids. We will be doing a presentation on that in the near future. We're waiting for the audits to come through because if it's approved and we do decide to switch to one of them, there will be a time frame. It'll take them 10 months to a year to swap us over, and we're in the middle of the reconciliation of the 2026, so we have to be careful with our timing and everything to start. Now, one of those, and we'll discuss that just a little bit, one of those companies does not want to do in-house training. They want to do remote training and from what I'm reading on the internet, that is not doing good. So the other one will do, will not do remote training. They prefer not to because they feel like the training is a little better if they do it in-house. One-on-one, you're there, it's meeting your needs, you find out if it's meeting your needs. If not, they can address it. We'll get to that point. We just had to wait till the socket done, find out where we are financially, and it's not gonna be cheap. So that's a big thing that's holding that up. Was the money budgeted? No, the money was not budgeted. If you don't have the money, you don't have the money. So we had to find out where we, we still have 20, 26 to find out where we're at. It's not a whole lot. I mean, it's more. It's the initial cost. When you're paying somebody to come in and they're taking all your stuff and they're switching over, that's where you're... that's where your initial cost is after it's set up and it's done it's not as bad as you think but it's that initial cost when you get somebody sitting at your desk we have an estimated proposal um to the council in october so we'll have all those that stuff ironed out for you we'll have it all done by that time

I just want to thank the council for voting to repeal that ordinance for the chief of police. The last meeting I was mentioned in Jackie's deal that I took a note to the poll ordinances. It also made a promise to the people who vote for me that I would fight backdoor criminal politics.

So following an ordinance is backdoor crooked politics?

That one was. Really? That ordinance was all about getting control of our elected chief of police. If you don't like your chief of police, vote him out.

Who's chief of police with that ordinance?

That's a little bit of a discussion right now. That's fine. Okay.

Next time.

Okay.

We're going to take a recess. Right. Five minutes.