Town Council - Regular Meeting

I spoke with him earlier today. Thank you. First item on the agenda is approval of the May 20, 26 council meeting. Any questions or comments?

Motion.

Motion by Mr. Irby.

Second. Second by Mr. Chatham.

All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Motion carries 4-0. Thank you. in front of you kind of three options so kind of rewind here real quick so one choice was purchased by heather maybe a month ago

Endeavor took them over, they're going to work for Endeavor, and so they talked about our contract, and this is some of the options about transitioning over into Endeavor, if that's a possibility. Keeping the same services for the most part, the only thing that would change is the phone would be operated by somebody else, but pretty much the same exact So there's a one year version of the phone and the MSP or the major services. And that is quote 17373 version one. Yeah, I'm just gonna talk. So our phones are the actual handsets are end of life pretty much. So you can't update them or anything like that. So we're looking to buy phones as well there.

The goal kind of background on this. So last contract renewals, you know, we signed up for a three-year contract with them.

This would, the one year through the end of this year, then the one year would match what we already kind of committed to for one person in house and really that's kind of the goal in this That's really kind of our mindset. I know you guys are like, hey, you need to go And also with the elections coming up and stuff too, I don't know if we wanna roll into a three-year agreement on anything. I don't know the legalities in that one. So we do have some changes in there and stuff too. There's election cycle next year as well. So that's why I was kind of leaning on the one year,

so we wouldn't have anything through this year right and then next year is similar to that 10 to 11

What is that gap that they can take care of in the meantime? But it's not just that, though. It's somebody who knows MDTs, knows how we operate, knows where we want to go. Right now, like forecasting, you're getting 5% to 10% of Will's time, right? Or now you get a lot of this person's time because it's their goal. They could also take on the fiber. That's another thing where all of us are wearing all these hats, and we've got to finally put them into one. in the long term. Maybe you could generate hours, you know, with the fiber and stuff too, so.

Well, some of that will, I know we've talked, you know, about hiring an IT person and stuff like that.

When you look at it, so if you go to next year, roughly, a month and a half gets basically the start of hiring. Yeah. So you really only get that person about four and a half, five months to get up to speed.

Is there any...

advantage to maybe moving that hiring up so that they have a little more, this being a special, we're going to start throwing some of our stuff into the library and stuff that we've never had in our reign. You know, do you feel that'd be beneficial to maybe look at, possibly look at

and someone to protect us. I mean, really, you know, the cyber insurance is like just growing and growing. And anytime we could have somebody in the house to protect us, I think that's a great way to go.

So I think if it were to be approved, you know, make it into the budget, we could start the process earlier, right, to where we could have somebody in there Jan 1 and then look at, you know, maybe it goes there and then we would have some numbers around budget time because that would help too.

Anything that we would do right now is 500,000 a year.

Make sure it's in the budget next year. I think it's the best we can afford right now. It's on our five-year plan.

Motion. Motion.

I'll move to approve.

various projects um utilities infrastructure

I think we were well over 25 submittals for responses. We got a lot of feedback, a lot of good responses, a lot of qualified people. We met twice and we came up with chain management as our selection. Financing the innovative design and efficient daily operation, an eventual handover to the public entity. Their team is well known and has demonstrated a clear ability to mitigate risk and care strictly to budgetary constraints and deliver projects on schedule without compromising quality. Of note, it is their commitment to transparency, regulatory compliance, solving. Given their track record, expertise in project delivery, and financial capacity, GM management is exceptionally well-suited to meet and exceed the requirements outlined in RFQP. They would be an outstanding partner for our community in this transformative endeavor. So that's your recommendations. I just want to read that out loud because then you have a lot of experience. and the ones that I spoke to were very pleased with the professionalism in the eye.

Question? I will say, I guess I'm currently with the committee as chosen. I'm a little concerned, and I'm probably just I didn't know if there was an opportunity to be on the committee. I'm not sure. So my position is that we obviously all can't be on the committee. But I'm disappointed that I wasn't even given the option.

I took it forward so I could be on the committee. They probably did a great job.

But I feel like moving forward, we're going to have committees. The entire council needs to at least have the option to say, yes, I'm in. But yeah.

I certainly understand that and hopefully you didn't take offense personally. I think when we originally started this, this was geared towards utilities. When we were looking at the 35 to 50 million dollar plan expansion and the people that we felt and I had met with Mark and we kind of discussed this about who would be on the committee. At that point, we felt it was important to have the liaison for the utility. Fire Department was invited because we knew they had some wishes that they wanted to be heard with some of the projects they had. That's how we came up with it. We really didn't kind of cherry pick, so to speak. We put the people in that had a direct impact on the requests that were gonna be made. Just to be clear, that's how we came up with that. And what happens next, Greg, a project and if we want to use GM management, if we want to use the VOT, we've got it. If we have a project that comes, you know, a project that comes up to be done, we can actually do another VOT for that specific project. It does not have to be GM management. This one is unique in the way that if you responded to this RFQP, you are on the bench. Meaning, if we do a project we start to collaborate through a scoping period for a project the people that submitted this can still be on that team that's the idea behind it is we didn't want to exclude anybody we want to make sure that everybody has an opportunity because we need to find the best part possible for the lowest cost and that's how we do it with this this scoping period it really gives us as close to my When we do that, I think you'll see the benefit. I'm not saying that you don't think there's a benefit. I'm on board. I love it. I like the way we're heading and stuff. You'll have an opportunity to be on that scope experience team, because what we will do, each project will have many team members that go through that scoping process. It's in round by round. I'm all about it.

I'm proud of the structure. I was just surprised to find out that a couple of people are on it.

Good evening. What you have before you is Resolution 8, which is the fiscal plan for the ordinance number 5, which is the supervoluntary annexation of the EE Farms property. It's been through the public hearing. We, you know, met all the proper things we're supposed to do. The fiscal plan did show that there would be no adverse impact on overlapping taxing units. And it also did show that the town does not anticipate any incremental operating costs more than what it is currently. So this is up for approval tonight.

Questions or comments? Yes, this is the ordinance that actually adopts the annexation and puts an end to the 10-1-8 bill. next up ordinance 620 26 election cycle mr morgan coming for you tonight with a topic that i thought had been discussed for quite some time which is the election cycle for the town of vanville in doing research we found

we paid in 2023 just for a primary which was just over eighteen thousand dollars and then if you we did not have a general election that year because we had no retested seats obviously what this does is puts us on even your elections as a result The ordinance has been revised by our legal counsel and reviewed. What we are requesting obviously would be through council positions next year, be elected for a one year term and then go back up for reelection the following year. And then the court treasurer

promotes greater solar turnout and gets our

about primarily the disposal of property located 302 West Main Street. It's a house that was purchased with the possible intent of raising it to put in a fire station. Since then, the fire chief has advised me that he no longer intends to need that building.

I'll make a motion to sell the Kentucky and Maine 302 West Main Street property. Second. Motion for Mr. Irby, seconded by Mr. Chatham.

I will point out that I had a discussion with Mr. Dodd today, and he is in favor of it. I can't cast a vote for him, but certainly he favors it. So that said, all in favor? Aye.

All opposed? Motion carried. agenda item is deals with the miles farm property so if you recall your Horton contributed a great deal of land to the town for the building of a fire station and a park system after conversing with the fire chief we don't think we need all that property for one fire station and will doesn't know if he and possibly using the proceeds from sale to help either fund the roadway that we're wanting to build out there or to fund asked for amendment to the pud because it was all dedicated for that but at the end of the day we are still keeping property in use for what it was donated for which is a fire station and a park we do believe that a small park like a pocket park or something like bill's not really disgusted with want to make sure that we're using it for what it was donated to us for so that's uh i don't have an exact uh parcel listing for you i just have this i just need consensus to move forward to start getting some uh surveys and then go ahead and make a an appointment with the planning commission and go forward from there if you're interested further discussion for you so given that do we actually need a roller just just looking for consensus on this yes thank you very much i'll just stay here it's okay next up is the five-year capital improvement so i've asked all the department heads to be in attendance tonight um but uh before you um we had a request last year to do this we produced one um we've produced a second one now as you can see a lot of our department heads have a lot of lofty goals and the interesting part about this is that some of these we've really we've got money set back for we just don't have the project completed that's why you're seeing the more 27. uh like the uh downtown restrooms you know we had set money aside for that still working with that but so the money's there we're good I know some of take care of all of the buildings that we have. So those are some of the things we're looking at.

come out of normal operations. But there's a lot of money here in capital improvements that we're going to have to look at other sources for some funding options.

So I would kind of like to go through page by page and talk with a focus on those, not meaning we can't ask questions about any of the others, but I'd like to go through and kind of address the capital improvements on do we need them, when might they fall into are faced with some severe significant funding questions to come down the road so with that in mind The Kroger connections, that's one that I think the RBC

and it goes south.

You need to talk with whoever did the form on your telly page, because they're the one that's running. They're going to cost $300,000, I think. I see that. On a previous version, there was a generator for Town Hall that doesn't appear on this version. So do we need a generator here? It's supposed to be done this year. It's supposed to be done this year.

That's why I dropped it.

have the uh county highway garage relocate street for 1.6 uh mary help me out there so i'll help you help me because that one we are going to negotiate with the county that is what currently they have listed as a value they have that property appraised without going into a lot of detail there's i've been stacking some pennies a lot of them

to try to reduce that cost.

We had to put that number in there because that's what it was at the time they did the appraisal. So that's a number that I expect will change and be lowered. But like I said, I don't know that until we have a meeting with the county.

And why do you say relocate streets?

So long-term, the wastewater department's gonna have to move to the east. And when they move to the east, they're gonna take a part of the street department, the current street department. Just because of normal extension. Now, if we look in the next five years, it's not gonna happen.

I'll be out here for a second, go ahead. It doesn't literally mean to relocate a street.

of the town being served through that location. It's as much cheaper, at least the engineers are telling me that it's cheaper for us to work out of that plant. And we do have some options that we're working on to get us a 15 to 20 years out. But still, we are going to need that space eventually for the wastewater part. So I wanted to put that on there and go after it now because there's some talk that the county wanted to give up East Campus Boulevard. We were in conversation about that. There have been three different people in that position since these talks started. So it's kind of moved around a little bit. We don't have any continuity there, but I do have that person's information. We have had conversations. Like I said, I've stacked them.

and not in favor of putting our street department there. If we can get that property, I think it should be 3% commercial type thing property and not another partial occupant of the town. Having said that too though, based on recent discussions with a variety of folks, I thought for the foreseeable future anyway, we're going to be able to do upgrades to our existing wastewater plant and not have to encroach upon the street department property for the foreseeable future. And have I misunderstood those conversations?

No, that's true. We are working on that plan, but we do not have it nailed down. That has to go through my agenda. There has to be a lot of things happen before we actually say we're going to be able to do that. And I hate to give you numbers up here, but it's going to be significant. And all this goes back to the smoke testing that we're going to be doing, attacking I&I, coming back to you. But this is a... is we have a little bit of time, but not a lot of time with the highway garage. They had offers for that. They were definitely really low offers. So I just want to stay on top of that. Whether we get it from the street department or whether we get it for 3%, we're going to be paying the same amount of dollars for the same amount of commercial property, whether it's there or somewhere else. So if we don't get it there, we can lower that cost based on what we've done for the county.

favor of pursuing it, just we need to think about what its use is if we succeed. The future tower at that bus station for $240,000, that $275,000, is that a typical RDC TIF money project? Yes. That was not part of the bond. The RDC actually put in $300,000

We are, I believe, 100% designed. We have one parcel that we got purchased, and this is kind of a dual piece because it'll actually have the lift station and the future water tower on the same location. We've already talked with the landowner.

The fire stations, I think we've all kind of tentatively said, yeah, we want to move forward with that, but it all depends on money and putting in a list of all the other priorities. The only question I really had was a training ground for if you have 2028 perhaps made, whose funds would you anticipate

there's a lot on that which

I just have a general question on the Blanton House and what we're doing there. It bothers me a bit for the town to enter into activities that with building facilities to compete with private business and maybe I'm maybe I'm wrong so every one of our spaces competes with private business that doesn't train station I mean we have at times 10 to 12 weddings a weekend facilities that we already have I wouldn't suggest that we didn't

The biggest problem on that is we have a semi-permanent tent out there right now, which is a liability.

And that's why we're looking at the space. Yeah. Nothing more on that.

I suspect we'll come down to the discussion. If you'd like to invest me, I would lose all the discussion anyway. I have nothing on police. Anyone else?

Streets?

only question there of making improvements down there if in fact we're going to relocate them so that needs to be uh balanced out before we move on that anything else there wastewater uh the item there the county-owned lift station

was in that bond money and it has bandings yeah it's a it's a ticking time bomb it's uh it definitely needs to have some major attention uh the west station itself everything else that goes with it i mean it's a timing issue to do it all at once it's cheaper to do it now than it is later but yes it does

So part of the fee for Reedy Financial to do our budgets is including capital assets and capital plans. And so once we give this to them, they should be able to put it in our budget and then tell us when we need to do those projects, where is the money going to come from, or give us ideas. I think that's part of that price.

I think we all know that we have to be careful about how we bond.

for all the projects that we deem needed. How quickly can we get them going and do we have millions of dollars sitting there that we're paying interest on that we can't

Anyone who's watching at Destination Day, I hope it was this weekend, please come and enjoy our downtime. Before I take my mouth. Yes, sir.

Thanks, everybody, for putting together this fine new plan. I know it's been a lot of work and a lot of headaches and a lot of wishing and a lot of other things. I just wanted to share a He is extremely impressed with every staff member that he's worked with.

So kudos to everybody. We tried to give you guys a hard time, I'm told, and people rose above it.

And he said he wishes every town was as good as ours from the experience he had on the weekend. So kudos to everyone. the other thing i would add is uh congrats to our administrative staff for continuing to pursue the undock and the high Planned Docket came out $1,361,886.23.