City Commission - Special Meeting

Uh today is March the 24th. It's uh about 10 after 9. We have Commissioner Siri who is on her way and then Commissioner Peak I guess had too much of us last night cuz she's running a little sick this morning. So we'll go ahead and start with three and uh call a meeting to order. Uh the first thing on our agenda this morning is we're going to have a presentation from New Hope Food Pantry. Going to do an agency presentation, man. That's Good morning. Good morning, ma'am.

Morning, man. Cracks me up. Well, thank you guys for allowing me to do this early and not disrupt my vacation next week. You guys are the best. I appreciate it. I'm Victoria Timberlake of New Hope Food Pantry and I have nothing new to report. We've done the same thing for the last what 15 years. Um we are a nonprofit. Everybody's a volunteer including me. So I got to get out here and get to my paying job shortly. And um every penny that we have goes to purchasing food. We have except for four bills and we have um two churches that donate money that cover those four bills. So everybody else's money including girls goes to purchasing food. So we are specifically for Boille County would love to help surrounding counties but we just don't have the funding. So specifically, Boil County residents, they have to show proof that they live in the county. Um proof of how many people live in their house because what they can get each time they come visit, which is one time a month, is based on number of people that live in the house. And it's truly a shopping scenario, not a we just give you a box. So uh we do the same thing we did last year and the year before, the year before, and the year before. So, be short and sweet unless you guys have some questions.

How's the new facility? Is that still progressing or It is not. We keep hitting brick walls. So, we just tabled it. The the land we bought free and clear. So, you know, as long as we keep it mowed for a couple of people and paid we don't even have to pay taxes because we're nonprofit, it's not hurting anything, right? But uh yeah, we we just kind of tabled it for the moment and yeah, do what our father would have us do from here. So still in the same place that we've been forever. Okay. Yeah. What what was the anticipated cost of the new facility?

Um 175,000 and that was all inclusive. That was everything down to the light bulbs and cute little purple keys. Okay. Yeah. Other questions, comments? Again, I want to say thanks for what you're doing. It's vital service in our community and we do what we can to continue supporting it in some way. All right. Are you getting busier as the economyy's kind of taking a downturn?

We have about 30 new families every month. really every single month we have that many new people and I don't think that the need is different. I think it's county hoppers. They lived in Lincoln County for six months. Now they live in Bull County. They'll be in Mercer County. It's more that scenario. But yeah, it it just so our numbers kind of the people leaving the county versus the ones that are moving into the county. It's good morning. It's kind of a it's kind of a wash. So numbers aren't really changing, just the dynamics are changing. We have more multifamilies

living in one house, which is hard to police because we want them to shop one household, right? Yeah. So that that's more what's happening these days. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, ma'am. Are we good? Thank you very much. Yes, ma'am. Appreciate it. Okay. Oh, wait, wait. What What's your request for? How much is your request? It's on the paper. You guys have either five 5,000 or eight. Okay. Or more. Whatever you guys We didn't have any in front of us this morning, so that's okay. I don't I don't remember if it was five or eight. That's all right. Yeah. Ashley knows everything. That's it. It's $5,000.

There you go. Thank you, ma'am. All right. Okay. All right. Thank you guys.

Okay. The next item on our agenda is to have the part presentations. And the first one up is the city clerk.

Thank you. Um mayor, I want to start by talking about um some of the updates we've gotten on the economy. we the the overall view of the economy and and I we were we were able to sit in on another presentation last week and we we stole some of the slides or some of the charts out of that presentation. We want to make sure we share those with you. When we communicated our overall um perspective of of what we thought the national trends were and and those types of things um some of this data is why we feel like that. So, I want to start with with doing that as as we get into the department heads. Uh, this is a reminder of the budget calendar. Today's March 24th. We're right in the middle of the department presentations. So, that's where we're at in the the uh order. The next next week, we should have um some baseline operating and baseline revenue to to look at as a group and uh uh in order to progress and maintain our schedule. So the the national economy is is in a in an interesting place. There's a lot going on and when we talk about um trends, we we try to monitor those trends and try to you know allow them to form our opinion of of what the city's revenue and what the city's expenses are are moving towards. This slide represents um the probability of a recession um which is an interesting thing to consider u for everyone we in terms of you know that affects everybody on every level right and so the uh some some big ticket items job seekers now outnumber uh available job openings the consumer

price index shows 2.5% annual gain the Fed targets 2% % which that is indicative of inflation. Um inflation remains but has slowed. Uh remember last night we mentioned 26%. So we've got another slide here in a second that's it's interesting to look at uh since 2019. Um feds have stabilized the the the rates and and the uh odds of a recession then are currently slowing. And so what you'll see on the slide over on the extreme right side is uh with COVID the odds of recession spiked and they've been in a in a steady pace decline since then. Uh um and it's now down below 20%. So overall then the economy although there's a lot of uncertainty the economy seems stable and the general position is is that the the US economy will expand this year. the uh this is an interesting slide. So when you're talking about the jobs on in the market, jobs is uh really a thing that I focus on personally. I I like to see what that data looks like. Um this the red line is the number of people seeking a job and the blue line is the the number of available jobs in the market beginning the so co disrupts the the trend and when we go back and we think about uh presentations we had given to the city in in 2010 2012 era um we there was an acknowledgement of the baby boomers, the 80 million people retiring, leaving the job market, uh 20 million people being in the middle, which is which is I I forget the age

range now, but it'd be in in theoretically my classification. And then there was 80 million people younger that are coming into the workforce. So, so they would represent those under 29 now probably. Um so this slide really is indicative of that turning point in 2017 when you had we you really saw the the breakthrough with with the 80 million people leaving the job market. Um COVID impacted that then um so then the the trend line started coming back together and so why why why did that course correct? And one of the things I would suggest is this slide which is retirees re-entering the workforce. Um that began in Ernst about 2020 just as COVID hit which which the green line represents the the retirees entering the workforce. Um it hovered around 5 to 10% for years and years and years. And then as that transition uh started in that 2017 era that line started trending up and over the last 5 years it spiked which is now up around 18%. Which when you go back to this slide it correlates to the jobs available um down downturn. And so what that means is is that around 2021, you started to really see the impact of retirees entering the workforce again. Now, some folks would say they're entering the workforce as a result of inflation, but we have to acknowledge that that three facts. Number one, there's more jobs more people looking for jobs for the first time in 5 years than jobs

available. and we have a greater reliance on the experience of a senior uh retiree employee versus a newer employee. Now, some folks will say the reason for that is because you get uh uh less risk in the employee, you got more experience, less training, you know, all those aspects of you're coming in work ready theoretically. Um, so there's a lot of aspects of that, but we found that very interesting. Um, and that does impact us here at the city. I mean, we can see that that same trend here inside of the city of Danville. This is the local impacts on inflation chart. The greatest uh impact in inflation over the last since 2019 has been in energy and transportation with groceries. Um the preliminary reports show Bull County 2025 unemployment dropping from 5.5 down to 3.6. Kentucky average is 4.7. Housing opportunities are on the rise. The plus the Fed rate cuts which means that's that's good news for buyers inside of the housing market. The chart on the right indicates the change in each one of those categories. So, the largest is at the very bottom, and I know it's a little dark down there, but that is car insurance. Car insurance since 2019 has gone up 56.1%. Now the I think to to show how cost impacts roll up. If you look at the price of a new car is gone up 25% plus

or minus the cost of used cars are up 30%. So then those the then obviously the supply chain the parts on those um so you would see why insurance is going up then significantly as well, right? It's not necessarily the result of natural disasters or more wrecks. It's in in that's the inflationary impact inside of other other aspects of the economy. So the overall inflation since 2019 is up 26%. So that that is reflected in the city's budgets. It's still going up, but it has slowed. The rate of inflation has slowed. Um it was sitting at 2.7% last week when the chart was presented. Um, but the but the change it was still trending down. The the rate of inflation I don't have that chart was still trending down.

Yeah, it' be in your packet but we we can print copies. It should be in that. Is it in here? Yeah, should be in your So you say so you say. So

there he is. So we say all that to say um in a community our size that one lost employer or that one gained employer is is a significant event for us. Um we are not an unstable economy. We're economy is is very stable but we are in transition like we talked about last time. We are the nationally you're seeing that that technology healthcare and and defense and advanced manufacturing type you know each one of those segments of the economy is struggling to see which one's going to be the leader over the next 10 years or 5 years of of the national economy and and so I think we're just sitting here waiting for to see what opportunities are are a byproduct of that especially in the ind industrial side. I think that's what our economy is doing locally. Our biggest strength is is balance. We have a diverse economy. I think we we are positioned to to with new modern um industrial sites, with our hospital renovating downtown, with u the availability of education in our area. We're we're in a good position to take advantage or businesses um should be able to take advantage of whatever becomes the strength locally. And ultimately our strategy is just to be ready and positioned to to uh continue to react. But I did want to take a minute and share these slides um with you. We we wanted to get these at the last meeting and we were a little bit delayed in these particular just bits of information. Um do you have any questions on any of those things or want to talk about

otherwise we'll let this see this is very insightful um what did you say um is inflation since 2019 uh the average the total inflation is 26%. Okay. Thanks. Yeah. Other questions or comments for the city manager? Yeah, that that's really impacts budget. So,

it does. Well, and and that's what we were we were pointing out last night. The um cities the existing year expenditures are trending three or 4% higher um than than where they were budgeted, you know, two to two to four. Uh but revenues are as well. So, we're not upside down necessarily because of it, but the um it's it's you can still see that inflation in the background. Um and it is impacting I think um we mentioned last night too the cost when we're doing something like a valve replacement on the utility side. You know, eight years ago that that typical work order was somewhere between 4 and $6,000. Now it's trending towards that 8 to $10,000 and and that that that is real real numbers. Those are real dollars for sure. Um the um let me read some of those percentages if you want to take 10 seconds. The the interesting thing is uh new cars and trucks are up 23%, milk 24%. But personal care products are up 25%. Um the things bread is up 29% as a as an individual item. Um meats, poultry and fish is up 38%. I think we can all see that when we go to Kroger. Um car maintenance and repairs up 50%. That that is indicative 48.8 eight that you know that's along the lines with car insurance. It goes your your impact on labor is in that number across the board because that's that's a labor intensive

industry um which is impacting your car insurance. So so so the impact on on vehicles is probably because you're catching every all the other smaller increases inside of that single industry. And I see rents up 31%. So that affects staff. This affects everything you do. Yeah.

Electricity is 40%. Other comments Thank you, sir. So, that means we uh now go to the real city clerk. Yeah. Right. That was the city manager just just reported and showed all that information. Welcome back. Thank you. Back to feeling better. We have 99 questions for you this morning. So, I'm ready for them. All right.

So, just quickly a few updates that have from the last couple of years of presentations we've done. Um, we've had cemetery software conversion on our list for a while now to convert all of our data to an online um, presence uh, so that things are easier for the community to search. We have started that conversion. I'll talk a little bit more about that when we get into the recordeping. Um, continuing education has always been on our presentation and I will say that I just received my second certification for city clerk. Um, and I'm still pursuing the other two certifications. So, like I said, continuing education is always on our list. Uh, recordkeeping. We have converted a Hillale completely. It will be live. I'm I'm assuming soon. We've got the mapping um just about complete for that one. There were some miscommunications there. We had asked for grave level mapping and they initially did lot level mapping but they've now converted that to grave level for that. Hill uh Belleview is ongoing. That one is a very large cemetery. So that one has taken a little while longer or a little longer than what Hillale took us. Um, we received over 260 open records requests since July 1st of last year. Um, that takes a lot of time for my staff and myself. Um, in upcoming projects, I would like to start digitizing some records like um, resolutions. We get requests a lot from other department heads for copies of resolutions from years past. Um, so it would be nice to start digitizing those into folders for each of those departments so that they can access those whenever they're

looking for something specific. And then, uh, we do have an upcoming retirement this next budget year. Um, and so we are working on succession planning for that and staff development as well. I would like this uh the person that we select to step into this role to attend some of this um the clerk trainings and kind of get a feel for exactly what my office does. So that is part of what I have planned for this next year. Congratulations by the way. Thank you. He's getting all these trying to

is that um just curious if the 260 open records request was that higher than usual because of certain things that No, I think that's about average for us. That's a lot. Yeah. I mean it ranges from accident I mean a lot of them are accident reports that we get from law offices that are representing clients. Um they ask for the photos from the accident, things like that that aren't initially provided with just the initial police that goes through you all rather than Yes. All records requests come through me. Is there there's a turnaround timeline on that?

We have five business days to respond to those requests. And that's new. We used to only have three, but they changed that a couple years ago. I think it was 2022 that they changed that or something somewhere in there. Okay, other questions or comments? Well, Ashley, I just wanted to commend you for always being willing to implement new technology um because that just makes the whole department more efficient. So, thank you for not being afraid to do that.

I appreciate that. We do have to keep things permanently paper like paper-wise. There are things that we do have to keep, but I just think digitizing certain records make it easier for staff. And it also takes a little bit of the load off of my staff when we have to go to the basement to search for something. If they could find it in an a share folder, that would be a lot easier for everybody. Just curious again, are there companies that do that or will that just be entry from? It'll probably be just my staff and myself scanning these documents in and having them available. Yeah.

Another intern opportunity. Yeah, perhaps. Any other questions for the city clerk? Thank you, ma'am. Thank you. Mr. Morgan index.

You all hear me talk enough, so we'll try to keep this as brief as we can. If you all have questions, interrupt me anytime. Um, as we run through this, this is going to be very similar to what I presented to you all last year. Um, kind of settled into a a routine with these uh presentations at this point. So, um, I sort of provide this every year. This is kind of the the the org chart somewhat of our departments. Um, has all the different positions that we have listed here. um kind of gives you a full picture of everyone involved. And then um I think the only change on this from last year would be the engineering clerk position becoming the engineering executive assistant position. That's the only change uh that we made on this slide. Otherwise, I you know, we added the Jenny Rogers community center coordinator last year. I think was part of that that slide then. Um but yeah, those are the kind of otherwise looks very very similar. Uh public services uh got a good picture of of of the guys there. Um projects that we're you know very similar list to last year as far as I'm trying to make this more general and not not particular projects but just more general the work we're going to do. Um couple things to point out. sidewalks. We'll just continue to work on sidewalks, wayfinding and banners. We're, you know, we've been doing a lot with banners lately, thanks to Melanie, and we're going to continue to work on that. We're going to do more uh we're going to do some banners for parking this year to kind of direct people to the right locations to get to the parking garage. That's kind of we're kind of brainstorming some ideas. Uh some downtown wayfinding stuff. One of the issues we've dealt with downtown wayfinding, it's really hard to find a location to put the signs up. Mhm.

That's something that's not really you think, oh, we'll just put a sign up, but then you actually go stand where it needs to go and you're like, there's there's nowhere to put a sign here. So, we're trying to figure out how we can utilize our banner arms and put banners up and create and use that as part of our way finding. Um, so that's one thing we're working on. Parking garage maintenance. Uh, the parking garage is 20 years old now, Earl. Is that right? 20 years. 2007.

Yeah. So, we're coming up on 20 years in this fiscal year that uh for the parking garage. So, we have some maintenance. We need to do the stairwell on the walnut street side needs some work. Uh we have some, you know, concrete and railing issues over there. We need to do some pressure washing. It's kind of starting to show a little, you know, little grime on the outside of it. Um we may do some painting. So that's that's something that's prior priority for us. Try to do that work in house just for for the for, you know, cost standpoint is it's, you know, cheaper for us to do it. Um we still do our leaf collection. uh continue with speed humps and race crosswalks and other traffic calming measures. Um and then our usual storm drain ADA ramps uh service system request service request system. So Cclick Fix is the system that we have that we ask uh citizens to you know to post to us service requests. Public works does a really good job with that system now. We've had that system five years five years now. Is that about right? I think so. We would I think this is the year where we need to go back into it and kind of clean it up. It's kind of just accumulated things in it over time. If you look back into our data, um it's kind of messy now. So, because it's been 5 years of just of it functioning. So, we we need to go clean that system up and and continue to use it. Well, I'm worried that if it gets too cluttered, uh we'll stop utilizing it. So, we're going to put it

trended up. I mean since we started um I don't know if citizen or you think have you seen a citizen you know uptick

I think that's another go ahead

well I think a part of this too is kind of pushing it back out to the public again I'm a little afraid to like really push it hard with the public again because I don't want them to get overwhelmed with everything there so I think if we can get it cleaned up get retrained on it we've had we've had a lot of new people come in over five years. So, we haven't had new training done with Cclick Fix. I think if we almost like a fresh start and then we can then we can really market it out to the public again and hopefully ramp up their use. Um because it is it is by far the most effective way to get something done especially with public works. Um if you want to get a pothole filled, if you put it on there, they'll get they'll take care of it. So, um definitely something we want to we want to um nurture it a little bit so that it continues to be useful. um budget budget impact. So the when when these numbers I put on here on these slides are always just our operational budget that doesn't include these don't include personnel or capital um because you know honestly when we make the when I make this slide I don't have access to the personnel budgets yet but also we don't have a lot of control over that necessarily like we have our people and that you know that's kind of set by the comp plan. So this is just our operational budget. So these numbers got a little uh This is the budget for FY26. This is our year in estimated for FY26. That is 1.4 million. It's we're going we're trending over um FY27 budget that we're going to request is 1.1. And the reason for that $100,000 drop is we're taking the parts of the mowing contract that go to parks and utilities and actually shifting those to parks and utilities. Those have been previous years have been stayed under the public works budget. We thought it would be more appropriate for those to move out to parks and utilities where they belong. Um that's going to be a bigger impact on parks, but I think that's we want to make we want to put the things in parks that go in parks so we know what the

true cost of it is. So that this was one of the items um we we moved over into the parks budget. And then so that's what and with that we we've kind of initially requested one additional maintenance worker in public works. Uh it's been uh since I've been here 5 years now we haven't added any staff down there. Um so I you know we keep pushing them. We keep adding things to their list and they we've not added people. So I think we're kind of getting to point we're putting a little bit of strain on the the list is getting longer than they can keep up with. So, we would like to start adding staff. Um, so that's kind of the the one place we're requesting additional staff and we're trying to use that. You know, I know the money is going somewhere else. There's not like that money is just disappearing. It's going to other budgets, but it is freeing up space within their budget. Um, so that's public services. Any questions about that side of things?

I'm always amazed how much you get done with just that number of people. Well, and I you know what the thing about in the one thing that's really become more apparent to me as I'm here again um is how seasonal their work is and that we really have a three or four month window where we can actually get work done. You know it's you know November you know when you go through the year and you start in November November December we're picking up leaves. We're not getting projects done in November December. Uh January February the weather's just too bad. we're not getting work done in January and February. Um, and then you get March, April, May between the rain events that we're dealing with, the wind events that we're dealing with, preparing for this the year, getting cleaning up all the things that were left over from the winter. Uh, we're not really there's not enough bandwidth to tackle projects and then you're into the summer. So, it really is July, August, September, October are when we get work done or when we get projects done. So it really limits what we can schedule like we you know it's and we have to be on top of it during that time period like we have to say okay these are the things we're we that's we I started in like August September I'm like what do we got to get done before November 1st because if we don't get it done by November 1st it's going to be next July before we're back on it again. So, um, the seasonality of this of their work is really really becoming something that we focus on. Uh, because that's so we could be we can schedule better the work that we're going to do. Um, so that's that's something that's been on my mind a lot lately with their work and we try to pass that along to the public when they ask us about drainage projects and things. It's like, hey, we it might be August before we get to it. you know, just because you, you know, you can't do a lot of work in in in ditches and in things right now why it's so wet. So, um, they don't like that,

but it's really kind of the reality of the situation a lot of times. All right. Um, storm water, um, got a list of kind of projects and priorities here. The big priorities we are storm water, the mapping, the storm sewer system mapping. We're trying to do that in-house. NJ and myself um just to save cost of hiring a consultant to do that, you know, I just don't think a consultant would do as good a job as we do. Um and then one thing I'm finding a lot of when we're out doing this mapping, the old retention basins, you know, we've had retention basins built in this community for now 30, 40 years, and a lot of those older ones have not been maintained well. not necessarily from a vegetation standpoint, but they've they've got dirt has accumulated in on them. The inlets have gotten blocked. They're they're just not functioning the way they initially were designed to. So, I think we're going to really I told MJ that's the one we're going to focus on next year is how do we all these old basins that we're kind of discovering as we do the mapping, how are we restoring them to their original design? Uh that way they're functioning correctly. So, that's going to be a big push this next year. Otherwise, we're kind of, you know, standard kind of thing. Storm water feed billing audit. We're we're we were tackling that yesterday. Um trying to make sure that our billing is is done correctly. I think we're we're we're going to we're going to increase our revenue with if we do that well. Um so, we're going to continue to work on that. So, that leads to revenue projections. So, I wanted to talk about that a little bit. Um we budgeted a little over 700,000 this year. We're we're getting it. We're getting going trending close to that. We're trending towards 698,000. Um if we keep the same rate, we're looking at that 710 number. Um we put that in our budget. We send it off to Lee and then Lee reached out and

said, "Hey, your expenses are exceeding your revenue right now. You need to do something. You need to lower your expenses." Well, then when you come down here to expenses, the expenses in storm water that I have any control over are pretty small. uh it's that's the non-personnel non- capital um non-debt service you know there's debt service and then within even within those numbers there's insurance and kind of some of those things that I we don't have a lot of control over so um we then looked back at revenue and said okay if we we can't lower our expenses 20,000 which really wasn't a good place to do that without drastically impacting the services we provide how can we raise our revenue so that would be if we if we take a cola this year 2.7% that would raise our revenue up to 730 which would cover that shortfall. So that we are we are requesting to get a cola this year that would go that would raise this storm water fee from $3.75 to $3.85 a month. Um if that if if that doesn't get approved we'll figure out a way to lower expenses and I think some of the billing audit will raise revenue some but I don't think we'll be able to make up that full gap. So that's another change that we're asking for. Um, so any questions on storm water?

So we haven't been taking a cola ever since we had the

So we started in 2008 at $3.36 and we never changed it. Never took a cola for for almost 20 years. So last year was the first rate increase we'd ever done up to $3.75. Um, yeah, I think it would make sense to continue to do a COLA espec especially as our personnel costs that that's all personnel cost. you see how much the budget 600,000 to the $700,000 budget or personnel. Um so it's those as those costs escalate you would the only way to keep up with that is to do a cola every year otherwise you're going to constantly fall behind and then you can't do the projects you want to do that actually you know that folks want to see

I think people kind of expect a cola I mean it's not a usually a big combative situation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we do cola on pretty much everything else we deal like on the water bill, right? Yeah. On on the water bills, it's built into your ordinance um to raise annually. Um and it also it's built into things like our um leases for parking garage is built into a lot of

the solid waste contract we talked about last night. It it has a cola built into it. So, they all everything else does. This is the only thing that doesn't. That's so I think we even discussed at one point just building that into the ordinance, changing the ordinance that it is a that this has a built-in cola. Um that's something that we can we can discuss later on. Okay.

Um cemeteries not a not a not a ton to report here. Uh we can you know actually talked about our the the you know database website database that we're working on. that's going to be still believe that's going to be a really big deal when we get it completed. Um it's, you know, she talked about the records and doing that in house. I think we're realizing even with that project, there's a lot of this stuff that we're we're at a scale where like we know we know this data so well, we almost even if we farm it out to get somebody else to do it, we end up doing most of the work anyway because they're reaching out to us with so many questions that we're doing the work. Ashley is probably I mean she's back. Yeah. I mean it's so it really doesn't it's even from a you know financial standpoint it's like well why do we even why are we even paying consultants when we can do this stuff in house. I think that's the same same feeling I have about the cemetery master plan update. I I want to try to do that in house. So that's one of our priorities over the next year. We're continue to work on the rules and regulations implementation. I do want to look at this fee schedule update sometime. I don't think it'll have a huge impact on these revenue numbers over here if we change our fee scales, but I do think we need to get it a little bit better. Um, we we're we're we're under undercharging on a few items in particular that we could look at with our fee schedule. Okay. So then the numbers um I think revenue stays close to the same. We're estimated to be year at 120,000. I think we'll budget 125,000 next year. I don't see a reason for us to see a big spike or drop in our lot sales and uh services um in operational expenses. Um we're we're trending up a little bit but I think we'll come back down with this is this number is almost entirely our mowing contract or maintenance contract. Um so there's a lot of like same same

thing with this is with storm water. There's not a whole lot we can tweak here. You know, we have our contract. It kind of sets the budget for the year. Um, and then otherwise, there's really not a lot of knobs we can turn to change this. Um, yeah, I think, you know, cemeteries kind of staying steady. We don't we're not really planning to change much in there. We got some capital projects we'll ask for during the capital part um to to to you know, improve the cemeteries, but otherwise everything's staying pretty well the same. mutual aid. Um, similar similar story here. These are the three things we really use a for right now. Our paving list in the summer. We do we pay for some of our street design work that we do throughout the year. As far as, you know, as as we work on these grant projects, as we prepare for these grant projects, we do some work that's not covered by grants. We with design, we we we fund it out there. It's usually a pretty small number. And then we've got it. We've people are starting to doubt me now, but the Bman sidewalk project is going to happen. We're close. We're really close. Um so I I'm thinking that's going to happen this summer. So that's going to be that's going to be a project kind of staggers the two the two fiscal years, which is why these numbers look a little strange over here from budget and revenue kind of standpoints cuz we have this, you know, $500,000 project that's going to stagger the two years. We tried to split that up. I don't know how exactly that's going to land, but we've tried to split that up between the two. Bottom line is we get about we get about $360,000 a year from municipal road aid fund from the state. That's the that's our gas tax uh revenue. That's that's primarily what we use to do paving. um like we've talked about before that that revenue has not increased very much

in 20 years and our costs have increased a lot. I think you know we've seen about a a 20% increase in revenue and about a 200% increase in in expenses. So um we're not able to pave as many streets as we used to be able to pave. So we we continue to try to be you know strategic about it and targeted and make sure we're paving the streets that are in desperate need of it. Um but the revenue is we show a revenue of 760 because we should see 400,000 from the grant match come in uh to to so that's why the revenue show 760 for next year. Um dismissible municipal road aid garbage we talked about this enough last night.

I got a quick question. Is that um the amount we get municipal road aid is that set by Frankfurt? I mean is that Yeah, that's that's set by We need to attack Franklin cuz that's ridiculous to pay. It's a It's a calculation. Yeah, it's a calculation done. 200% increase in expenses and 20% increase. And I might I might speak a little out of turn here. A lot of times this gets this gets pitted cities against counties. What portion cities are getting, what portion counties are getting. We both need more. Yeah.

I mean, when I look at the counties, they're struggling too because there they've probably seen the same problem that we have. you know, they they haven't seen a 200% increase in revenue either. So, I I think it's more I think the cities and counties should join together and say we are we we maintain a lot of road miles and we're struggling. Yeah. Rather than address the overall need, a lot of times it's cast as a well if we give more to the cities, we got to take it from the counties and then all a sudden it blows up and nothing's ever done. Right. Right. So, the formula has been in there hundred years. I mean, it's really an old formula. Um and and there's opportunities to modernize it and it just keeps getting punted.

Yeah, it's it's a tough one because you know gas prices haven't kept up with and gas usage haven't hasn't kept up with what our cost to pay the streets is. So it really fails as a mechanism to fund that in on its face, right? Like when you look at the basic math. So, I don't think they're going to raise the gas tax. I don't think they're going to double the gas tax. Like, you know, so it's a it's a tough one. It's a there's not an easy solution to this, but I think it's something that, you know, city counties come together like, hey, we don't we just can't keep up with this anymore. Like, I I think I've done this math for you all before. Um, if you right now it would take me 40 years at $360,000 a year to pave every street in Dable. With a life cycle of of pavement, it's about 20 years. So, I'm I'm behind right already. Like there's no like I just can't do enough to keep up. I don't think that impact has hit us yet. I think it's going to be another 20 years we actually see the impact of that. I think we're still I think we're still like the streets we were able to pay back in the 90s and early 2000s. Those are those are okay for a little bit longer, right? I think we got a little bit more out of those. But so I think in the next 10 to 20 years is when we'll start to start to see the streets fall apart and we just won't be able to keep up. Um so that's it's it's worrisome definitely. So something we need to continue to to to push is that you know as far as cities and counties like hey we need more funding somehow. Um,

we Yeah, our general fund is not couldn't keep up. So, well, you know, it's, you know, when you're talking you need an extra 200 300,000, that's a big big of money to start carving out of the general fund. Yeah.

Garbage fund. Um, this these all this is subject to change based on what we decided after our conversation last night. Uh, one thing we we based I base these numbers on if what if we took that last option of we just turn everything over to republic. Um, and you can see how my numbers change at the bottom, you know, I go from a, you know, 1.6 1.7 million numbers down to $180,000 numbers. That's it. We we assumed one month would carry over into July of of FY27 and then also we would have our $45,000 aotment that we we send to the county every year and we did a general fund transfer to fund that. So that's that's how I came up with this $180 $185,000 numbers. um you know it'd be a and instead of a $5,000 shortfall that this the general fund has to compensate for it it would be 5,000 instead of $115,000 shortfall which is what we're we're projecting this year. Um so yeah that's garbage fun we we talked enough about it unless y'all have any more questions. I was I they were laughing at me downstairs. I was I was in the middle of the night thinking about garbage collection and came up with some crazy ideas that I proposed to them downstairs and they said no you were tired. You were you were you know too late at night to be thinking about garbage. So they were not good ideas apparently. Uh

you need to take some knife or something. I need to do something something right like Yeah. So that's all that's all I have. So any any more questions questions for Josh? It was a good discussion last night. It was just like, wow.

I guess I want to say thank you, sir. Yeah. Thank you all. Appreciate it. Let you off the hook. Questions for

Oh, yeah. Morning, Mr. Barton. Good morning. Good to see you, sir.

See if I can do this right this time. Parks and Recreation. We're going to I sat down with each of our department heads and kind of went over uh the 2526 fiscal year. And I'm not really going to go through our day-to-day kind of Monday and stuff. I'm going to kind of just give you highlights of things we've done, things we've added, uh uh things we've improved. Um so first I want to start with the big stuff. These were the capital projects that were approved in 25. Uh we had the rehab of baseball fields number three and four and softball field three. So uh in the last two years we've completed rehabs of half the fields. Uh and this this involves a new infield skin putting in a gravel warning track uh and adding foul territory sod. And I'll have a picture for you here in a little bit. Um, and it's also leveling them and getting rid of the puddles, uh, and making it so, uh, we don't have ring outs. The new infield skin is a product called Washington ball mix. Uh, it's the wave of the future in baseball. U, it's actually, it's actually sand and clay that is baked before it is brought in to before it is delivered. So, what it does is it holds this granular form. when it gets wet, it doesn't turn to mush. So, as you know, we had a big that big rainstorm on Wednesday. I went out to the fields first thing uh no, what was that? Monday, Sunday night, we had a big rain. I went out to the fields Monday morning. You could have played on them at 8:00 a.m. So, uh that's great improvement. Um, Millennium Sight Park uh, Millennium Park site furnishings. Uh, that project is complete which we replaced every door in the three buildings. Um, we installed AEDs at all all buildings and uh, it put in some new

cameras and uh, new systems. uh we kind of went we didn't exceed our cost on there but we had to remove one project from that it which was replacing all the old drinking fountains. So that might be a project that we come to for 26 uh those those uh those are 25 25 to 30 year old fountains out there and they uh about time to replace them. So uh that project is complete. Uh skateboard park we're really excited about that. that it's a joint county uh city program. Um we are in final design phases. Uh we should have that by in the next couple weeks. We should have that final design. Uh we'll be coming to you for approval of that and then they'll be moving into construction. Uh we believe that project will be done uh I'm hoping I'm hoping uh late August, September. Uh so we get some get some time to ride on it. We have involved the local uh skate community. Uh they are a big part of the design. Uh they're really happy about it. Um I can't tell you how excited they are about it. And and I believe uh by inviting them into the design phase. It's going to give them ownership and it's going to it's going to they're going to look out look out after it make sure that that park is is taken care of. uh Pine Knob Trails. That is the name of the uh mountain bike park out at Alam Springs. Um this is a county-led project that we're involved in. Uh I'm going to say it's about 25% complete. Um they began cutting trails. Uh but we can't really see it yet cuz they started at the very top of the hills of the knobs. So they started at the top and they're working down. um that that project has a lots of bells and whistles uh and there's a lot of

things that uh it it it's involvement every day. So, we meet um with the trails alliance, the county uh and the city are all working together on that and we hope to have that open by October. Uh and then the other projects that we are working on uh getting finished is uh Gannie Rogers roof repair and we are actually going to start building a additional parking lot at Genie Rogers. Uh I believe we're going to start that inhouse and get it graveled this spring as soon as the weather uh gets a little better. Um so this it's hard to tell here. So this is a before and after of field number four at baseball. Uh you'll see see if I got my clicker right here. So So we've added all this sod cut this nice little circle here. And you can see this added we've added a grab a warning track. And what this does is on this old one when we had a big rainstorm all this infield skin would wash out into this cement and we'd actually every rainstorm maintenance would have to shovel it back in. I mean actual shovel it back in. So, what we did is we put this grass in field and we got a warning track here. So, that's going to keep all this fabulous Washington ball mix right where it belongs. And what you can't see on this is this particular field when it rained would puddle all the way from first to second base. And that's cuz it's obvious after years of use, that's where the kids are running. When they slide back into home, when they slide back into first or third, you're creating a big hole. So, what this field is is it's coned from the pitching mound out, so water sheds right off it. And again, this Washington ball mix is easy to move, so we're able to keep it nice and level. So, we're really excited about that. Uh, and it seems to be working real well. Uh, so the next uh so that's our capital

project. So, I sat down again with each department head and we're going to go through each department and this is Genie Rogers Community Center which uh is coordinated by Morgan Burgerer. Uh again, we opened this uh over a year over a year ago. Uh we were able to add a whole new community center without adding any any new full-time staff. Morgan was our office manager. She came over from Bunny Davis and took over uh the community center and she's done an awesome job. Uh I think Jeannie Rogers uh is is is a a hidden gem uh that we have and really need to tout its uh success. When we me, Melanie, and Josh uh visited Lexington, we visited their community centers and they warned us and told us how don't don't project what you need to the public. the public will tell you what they need and it'll be obvious and you got to be able to pivot and move

and they were exactly right. Um over the year we've added so much uh things that we didn't even know existed. So first of all we have classroom partners. These are people that we've uh uh partnered with and gave them in a classroom. Uh we have the arts commission uh Mimi Becker. She has uh she has classes four times a week with plans to add more in her classrooms. We have opening act which is uh youth theater. Uh they have classes three times a week and they do two to three shows a year. Uh so they use their classroom as rehearsal and they'll have like group rehearsals or they'll have solo rehearsals with their leads. Um we have Cradle School which is through Danville uh Danville School District. They meet every Wednesday with early childhood development. It's more about educating the parents of early childhood um and working them through their issues. Um and then we have what's one we added this year is the Danville Food Pantry uh which uh I didn't know would be such a successful program. Um I'm going to show you a couple pictures of that later. Um, and we have, again, we had no idea this existed out there. We have Elite Wrestling, a group from uh, Berea that comes once a month and they put on Saturday night wrestling, kind of like WWE, I guess you call it. Uh, and we get crowds of 100 to 200 people coming to it. And then the biggest partner we had added this year is Ren's Nest Daycare. Uh, they are taking over the Boa County uh, school district wing. Um we're meeting with them regular. We started uh vetting daycarees uh early last year and we committed to them I think in October of

last year. They've moved in. They're ready to open uh this April and they have guaranteed us by midMay they will be at full capacity which is over 125 kids. Uh, and that will be a legitimate daycare that is open 7 am to 5:00 pm uh all year long uh not just during school hours. So, we are really excited about them and and I think we've made a great decision uh to add them as a partner. Some of the additional partnerships we have is Center College provides us the Bonner program. uh they provide two to three kids uh a semester and what they do is they kind of come in after school and just hang out with the kids. They hang out, play basketball with them, mentor them and kind of just additional eyes and ears out in the program. Uh so uh that is a great program. Southland Church brings pizza every Monday to feed the kids. So every Monday there's free pizza uh for staff and kids. Uh and it's become a Monday's become a big day there and a lot of the the the church uh parishioners stay and hang out with the kids, play basketball with them or volleyball. Uh so that is another awesome program. Healing hands together, that's the group that does archery. They provide archery equipment two days a week and come in and teach the kids to archery. uh they will be uh expanding to volleyball I believe uh in this year. I believe they come twice a week. And then we have the friends of Jeanie Rogers which is just local businesses and restaurants. Uh they provide Morgan with either funding or free food because she'll have during school breaks which is fall fall break, Christmas break, and spring break. She feeds the kids every she feeds them lunch every day. Uh and

then they and you'll see in our program uh every day they have a different vendor or sponsor for the meal. The kids actually help them cook and it's a pretty cool thing that Morgan does. Other things at Genie Rogers, some of the updates and improvements we've made is uh we've gotten the kitchen fully functional um and added a commercial dishwasher. This is because Ren's Nest Daycare will be feeding lunch uh and snacks to all their kids. So, they will be using that kitchen every day. Um uh and we've worked it out to where we're going to use the cap the what I call the catering kitchen, which is our concession stand up front. uh we'll be using that and so the rentals will be using that kitchen and then we'll and then uh Ren's Nest will use the back uh uh commercial kitchen and and then we're we're we're jointly using it like if we need to use that kitchen we will um but uh that's pretty exciting. Um maintenance has kind of cleaned up all the landscaping out front of Genie Rogers this year. Uh we had Jean Rogers become our day camp headquarters. So, our day camp moved there and uh we'll talk a little bit more of that when we get into recreation. Uh community rentals have expanded to where we're renting two to three rentals every weekend. Uh this is for bridal showers, birthday parties, uh engagement parties. We've had all kinds of stuff uh rental and they'll they'll rent the cafeteria, they'll rent the gym or we have two classrooms of our own that if we're using the cafeteria, we move them into the classrooms. One of the the un uh one of the uses that we didn't really foresee is uh a lot of the local group homes are are coming to Gene Rogers on a daily basis.

They usually come around 10:00 a.m. hang out around 1:00. They play in the gym, they hang out in the game room, and sometimes they do uh exercise programs in the cafeteria. We also have a group of homeschoolers who meet up at Genie Rogers on a weekly basis, kind of like their PE time. So, they come in, homeschoolers, uh I want to say it's a group of 15 to 20 parents who all meet at the cafeteria. the moms hang out in the cafeteria and the kids just go crazy in the gym on a weekly basis. Um, we've updated our game room. It's because it's gotten so much use. We had to redo all the the furniture. Um, coming soon, of course, we're going to get the roof and the parking lot fixed this fall. Uh, and Morgan and what you see here on the what you see here is is I can't use this flavor very good, doing it. This here is uh Morgan's monthly newsletter that she does. We put this on the website. She has paper copy she puts out. Uh Melanie posts this on our site. Uh it just basically tells you what's going on at Genie Rogers on a daily basis. Um and all this is going on as we have daily pickle ball, basketball, volleyball free to the public. So uh you can pat yourself on the back. Uh Jeannie Rogers has become a great success I believe. So here right here, this is the food pantry. This is just one one of the walls. It's a you know four walls. This this room is packed. What they do is they get donations uh at the beginning of the month. They pack this room full and then at the end of the month uh Danville counselors will come in and it's pretty anonymous. People come in uh they give them a wagon and they basically go comb through this like a like a grocery store, pick whatever they want. Um this over here of course is the new kitchen. We had the stove fixed. We've had this fixed. We

got the range all fixed. Of course, we have uh the walk-in fridge and freezer is all working. Uh so, we're pretty stoked on that. And we It was It wasn't too expensive. This is the wrestling. So, you're seeing uh it's kind of dark, but you see there's there's at least 100 to 150 people watching wrestling there. And then, of course, this is fall break last year, the kids having lunch. Um so, that is Jeannie Rogers. Um so, our athletic department that is uh obviously Stephanie Boyd, our supervisor and our volunteer cheer coach uh Donna Donna Peak.

Um youth sports that we do, these are the numbers just so you want to know. Uh youth sports, we had baseball, softball, we had 520 participating in that in the spring. Fall ball, which usually kind of because football and soccer are going, it splits in half and those are your diehard baseball players getting another season in. We had 236. Basketball this year we had 550 and we had cheerleading ofund 109. And if I go through this now to explain why we have a an athletic supervisor that focuses just on this is um because spring baseball that runs March through June. Fall ball starts uh she gets July is is the only month that she has no program running. Fall ball goes August to October. And of course basketball goes October to March. So on a yearly basis to to put it into p perspective, she hosted our uh end of the year basketball tournament last Saturday and then this Monday she was doing skills clinic for for softball baseball. So those programs are just rolling right into each other and 520 participant means you know she's got 1,040 parents who are feel like they can call her at any hour of the day. Uh, and believe me, they do. I've I I I ran that in my past uh experience. Additions, she's added uh she added a Tri County Girls fast pitch uh 12-year-old and 15. And that so that's Mercer, Bole, and Garrett County. Uh and the reason is this is we only had enough for two teams. I want to see Mercer had one team and Garrett had two teams. So, we just made it a tri county league. We

made a joint rules and we play at each of their facilities. Um, opening day ceremonies, we're we're making we're trying to make the opening day ceremonies bigger and better. Uh, this year we added a dunk tank which we had all the volunteer coaches uh go in the dunk tank and their kids were able to dunk them. Uh we do uh a ceremonial first pitch and we get uh local celebs out there to uh to uh sing the national honor. And it being a being an election year, you know, mayor, maybe you want to come out there and this year and maybe do the national anthem or throw out the first pitch. That's a plug for you maybe this year.

I'm not that one. Uh you're saying I'm in public.

Oh, that's the uh cheer exhibit. Uh we added last year, but it keeps growing. And this is a we do the cheer exhibit at Talibur. And this is an all day where it's kind of during the season the cheerleaders are are focused on cheering for the basketball team where this is just where the volunteer coaches go through their routine and that each cheer team gets a designated spot kind of like you see on on ESPN when they do those cheer competitions. Uh I'm happy to announce that uh Hogsit and KSD are letting us use their gyms again. The last couple years we haven't been able to use them. So, that's been good.

Uh Stephanie added a she tried to do a flag football program. Um but we didn't quite get the participation we needed uh cuz we realized that the schools kind of had their own flag football programs going. So, unfortunately, that program didn't work, but not for the lack of trying. Um the adult sports she does is co-ed softball. She has 180. Co-ed volleyball. She has about 60 participants. And uh last year we added men's basketball which at Genie Rogers which we're getting about 120 participants a year in that. So here's our some pictures of us. We got this is here we got here. Where's my thing at? So we got our dunk tank there in the middle.

Uh and then of course we got our cure exhibit there on the left and then our down in the corner there. That's our men's league. uh recreation programs uh departments headed by Amber Schartzer. She's kind of catchall and does all uh any anything we need. Uh Amber kind of takes care of it. Um new programs she's added. We added some pickle ball leagues. Uh we added aerobics. We added yoga. Uh DCA is using Millennium Park for their high school baseball softball teams and added tennis this spring. So DCA's out there using our facilities. Uh we did add a flag football league uh that we're not running um that just started uh the last couple weeks and that is an all girls flag football league and it is played at Cowan Park. Um we added paint the park which uh is a July 3rd program uh we do with the arts center of the blueg grass. Uh it's no cost to us. Basically, we provide the labor and the park and the art center provides the funding and the sponsors and kind of organizes the paint. I'm going to show you some pictures of that. That was very successful. And we added another travel tournament league, which is Kentucky Classic Baseball. So, we have added six six to seven more travel tournaments a year. Uh we their first tournament with us was this uh past weekend. So they had uh about a 30 team tournament uh come and so this basically just an additional travel tournament we have. And then again we have a we've created a uniform agreement and fee for all leagues and partners. So that means BISA and Cal Ripken and this uh flag

football league. there. We have a uniformed agreement form, a a uniform fee program. So, all the everybody's being treated the same. Um, as I said, we expanded our day camp from about 70 participants to 95 participants and we moved them into Genie because it's at Genie Rogers, we're able to to host more kids. Uh, this is our most successful program Amber runs. it sell uh it it uh fills up within 2 hours of once we start signups. Um under wreck we uh got the pool pool leaks fixed from last year uh which greatly improved the pool experience. Uh one thing we use less chemicals. Another thing is the pool actually was we were told was warmer than it's ever been. And the reason for those two things is because we had three hoses filling that pool 24 hours a day uh the year before. So it was always fresh water. So again, we're not using as much water. Um we're not uh we're not having to actually uh use fill at all. Like maybe on a weekly basis I have to turn it on for a few hours. So the leaks fixed. We're very happy about that. Um, we upgraded the camera system at the pool uh for added safety and monitoring. Uh, we added the new treadmills and ellipticals and we reapholstered a lot of the weight equipment locally. Uh, we added new menu boards to the concession stands and we added a bunch of new menu items which have become our best sellers. We added pulled pork uh sandwiches, pulled pork nachos and soft pretzels, and those have been our biggest sellers. So, uh Amber also reached out to Chick-fil-A and they are sponsoring all of our uh concession uh fountain drink cups, so we

don't have to purchase them anymore. So, those are all donated. Uh and she's expanded our banner program, which those are the banners that we put on the fields. Uh the way that works is uh businesses sign a three-year contract. The first year pays for the banner to be made and then the second and third year uh the fee goes into taking care of the field. So that program brings in $40 to $50,000 a year.

So here are some pictures of the paint the park. We had over 160 kids paint and it wasn't just kids. They paint a 4x4 square on the parking lot floor. These if we didn't we didn't pick a winner, but if we were to have a first second place, these were my runners up. Uh these were uh and if I had it, this was my favorite. This was done by the library. And you can't tell, but this is a little girl sitting on a swing set reading a book. And of course, she's all kinds of visions coming out.

I thought this one was very interested. This was done by a pre-teen. Uh, and uh, this one here is my my uh, my one I did there. So, I put myself in a rank for Oh, look. I'm kind of a, you know, kissing kissing up to my job here, right? Which one did you do? I did the DKY one. Yeah. Oh, that's my favorite, too. Park maintenance. So, I'm going to finish off with park maintenance. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. uh all these different folks who are using these facilities, they're all have u memberships, are they all paying fees for the use of these facilities?

Uh well, of course, Genie Rogers, most of Genie Rogers is is free. Uh for daily daily usage of that is all free. All the classes that we offer at Genie Rogers, those are all free. Now, when it comes to day camp and your athletic programs, those are Th those are fee based. So I want to say we charge $75 for baseball and basketball. Um and then of course our yoga and aerobics classes are you you have to have a membership to Bunny Davis which I believe is like 20 bucks a month.

What what I'm getting at is that you went through all these different things and you have excellent numbers for all of them. What are the numbers for pickle ballers? Uh I know it's a controversial conversation, but I think I think the Picklers have have a have I don't know their numbers, but their Facebook page is up in the hundreds. Uh, and we notice a ton of center kids out playing pickle ball, too. Uh, all over. Who's paying for anything for pickle ball, though? On a weekday morning, I would say there's at least 45 to 50 out there. I'm not concerned about the numbers. Yes, I am. But these these facilities facil facilities are really getting used

correct by Dville Bianians and everybody else but there's no numbers there's no membership fees paid to anything for the use of this stuff right yeah and do they have their own tournaments or we do we sponsor that ball tournament uh that no they run their they run their own leagues and uh yeah there's no fees involved no they're they're they're awfully expensive for us to operate and they if this expansion takes place in Millennium Park, uh we need to start talking to them about memberships and fees and whatever else for use of the Atkins facilities. Yeah, there you go.

Have a better name. No, I I could I could put your other name out there that's claims ownership to all this stuff, but I won't do that. Yeah. Public and that's not a criticism of you all, right?

It's just as a conversation we got to have as a city and county government. Uh, I'm going to close out with our maintenance department because they have done a lot of stuff this year. Um, these projects here are contracted out repairs we've had done uh over the year. Tennis court we had to repair. Two courts were cracking severely. Uh, we got that taken care of. Michael Smith splash pad repair and replace was warrantied because actually when it was built uh uh one of the contractors uh ran a piece of rebar through uh one of the plumbing pipes. So we got them out here. We ran a camera down through it and we figured out oh it was their fault. So they took care of that uh for no charge. Millennium Park stump removal. Uh you bet went out and got uh most of the stumps removed that have occurred over the years. I want to say we got over 30 stumps removed. Um Jackson Park disc golf signs. We've replaced all those. Those were worn out. Uh this spring we are going to have those four huge trees that have been dead in Jackson Park. We're going to have those removed this year. Uh and uh we've also going to have some trees along the property line at Millennium Park removed. We've had some uh people on AR, is it called? Argyle.

Yeah.

Uh that have had some trees that are kind of dying uh that are actually in the park. They're falling into their yard. So, we're getting that taken care of for them. Uh some of the in-house stuff we done and Ingenuity, I'm going to show you some pictures of this stuff. Uh we now have a water truck uh that is mobile that we can pressure wash anything in the park with and we can water any tree in the park. Uh that's thank to thanks to Joe Condor. He's a pretty artistic uh welder. He's come out and made some things for us. Uh he also made us this fence roller. I show you a picture of Ronnie Yates. Uh the myth, the legend, uh built all soccer benches for the soccer program. We we discovered the soccer program came to us said, "We've never had benches for our for our soccer league. So, could you guys get us benches?" Well, we looked them up and they cost like $600 a bench. We have over 10, I believe, 11 soccer fields. So, you're talking 22. You need two on each. That it came to thousands of dollars for these benches. So, Ronnie went and just built them out of uh treated wood. Uh sanded them down and painted them. And I believe it was for 150 bucks. We got it done for him. Uh Ronnie also redid the shop this summer. Uh this winter during the during the ice storm. He built all new cabinets and benches uh for the shop and organized it. Uh he rebuilt all of our reservation signs and our little library out there. Uh I put this slide repair on there because this was a two-week process. Uh nobody had uh we actually fixed a playground with no experience ever fixing a playground and the staff got it the slide repaired. Uh we took a lot of the boulders from over at the fairgrounds that have been sitting there

and we used them for parking determent because when we have those big tournaments, everybody just parks wherever they feel like. So we took all these big boulders and kind of strategically put them to where so people couldn't park and ruin our grass. And I actually think they look pretty good. Um

yeah, I think it looks cool. Uh uh we repaired every bridge out at Millennium Park. So there's four bridges. Uh and then we uh if you remember they used to the tournaments at the baseball softball field used to tape their tournament uh papers to the concession stands and it just made it just ruined the concession stands. And so we made a tournament display board. So that's where they put them now. And so it saves our concession stands which we also repainted everything. It got every building in excess stands. If you notice, all the all that's been repainted. Um, some of the certifications we have now is certified in pesticide, which means we're able to use Roundup. Uh, ornamental aquatics, she's certified in. That means we don't have to call fish and wildlife when we get the algae on the lake. Uh, she's able to take care of that. We can get that done a lot quicker. Of course, I got my certification in uh as a pool operator. Uh you bet has her certified playground inspector license and we hired a licensed arborist as a part-time maintenance worker. He's retired man who moved here from Cheyenne, Wyoming, and he's on staff now. Uh we're pretty proud of the memorial tree program. We've paired all posts, which this is over 30 trees that didn't have posts or had their plaque removed. Uh youette's I challenged her with this program when she came here a year and a half ago. Uh so uh she's got every post figured out and renamed. Uh she added 20 trees to where there was a post and no tree. So, she's fixed over 50 of those and we just have a few remain unmarked trees. And unfortunately,

uh me being here three years and her only being here two, we have no records of who they are or who they need to be. And uh so we have no info on those donors. So, if anyone comes to you and says, "Hey, my tree is unmarked." just send them our way because we could we really need, you know, we really need somebody to reach out to us with that. Some of the volunteer programs we have going on at maintenance, uh, Center College, again, we have the Bonner program twice a week. Uh, two kids come out at 3:00 uh to 6:00 and you bet usually has them painting. So, it's we're kind of like Golden Gate Park, you know, we start we start painting at one end and we get the other end, we got to start back again. So, there's always something we can be painting out there. Uh, Eagle Scouts, uh, they built that little duck house that's out there in the lake now, and that is supposedly for their winter home. Uh, and we have a day of action, which is the park cleanup um once once a year. Uh, so I got a few pictures here. I wanted to just show you these. This is the water tank that, uh, we built. We got a big old tank on it. It's got a pressure washer. It's got a generator. So, we're able to pressure wash anywhere in the park now, which we weren't able to do. And if when you go out through the entrance, you'll notice the Millennium Park sign looks like it's all brand new, and that's because we're able to go out, pressure wash it. Uh, and we can convert this over to just a watering, so we're able to water any tree in the park. This is the fence roller I'm so proud of. This was my idea. I took an old piece of equipment that was sitting there being unused and had Joe Condor build it into a fence rollup. So, we're able to, you won't believe it. Take it takes three to four staff to pull this out and roll it up uh without this machine. So, we're pretty happy with that. These are the benches

that Ronnie built. So, they look pretty professional for, you know, for a $20 bench. Uh, and then again, this is the shop that they he's rebuilt. This is a this is a great thing he built that holds all of our drills and power tools. And just to show you how cleaned up the shop is, well, they also took u uh there was two I don't know what you call them. They I guess you call them uh portable tool sheds that were over at uh the fairgrounds. And we were noticed that homeless people were actually living in them. So we actually cleaned them up, moved them over into the by the maintenance shop. So what I bet's done is put she keeps houses all the tools in one and one is just for all the baseball equipment. And she was doing this during the Olympics. So we changed the uh the name of the instead of calling it the maintenance shop, we call it the maintenance village now because we have several shacks out there. So that's about all I got for you. Uh if you guys have any questions or anything else you'd like to cover that I missed maybe

the the duck feeders. The the duck feeders. Yes. Yes. They that we removed. Yes. We removed those is because we don't know whose those were and we don't know where they came from. Like they were put by a private business put them in. And they weren't put in by the city. And the ducks in We actually have a local that feeds the ducks. uh uh during from March to October and then of course Eubet takes care of them in the in the in the winter. And the fishing is open to anybody.

Fishing is open to anybody. You do have to have a license. I believe that the the pond is stocked four times a year by wildlife fish and wildlife at no charge. Yeah. Other questions for parks and wreck? No questions. Looks like you have a great team. Yes, I'm very happy. Yeah. Well done. Thank you very much. All right. Uh been requested by the commissioners up here to have a five minute break. Huh? What's that?

All right, let's consider ourselves back uh in order. Miss Compton, finance um department.

Yeah. So, um the first couple of slides that I have for you all today are really kind of just a refresher on what my department does. Um sometimes um I don't brag enough about how hard um the finance department staff works because you know we are busy every day just getting work done but we we don't have any pictures right Tommy just went through dozens of beautiful pictures of all the good things he does and so I have zero pictures because uh pictures of invoices and uh paperwork is just not as as fun to look at.

Um we are there are four four folks in um the finance department under under me. Um we do currently have the open accountant position that re we recently reclassed. Um hopefully we should be bringing a recommendation um to you all for hiring. Um we also have our collections clerk who has been with us 19 years. Um or accounts payable clerk um or I'm sorry her title is collection specialist I think at this point. Um accounts payable she has been here one and a half years and our finance clerk has been here three years. Uh just some highlights of things that we actually do on a day-to-day basis. There are a lot of words on this slide, but some of the highlights. Um business registration. We registered 319 businesses in calendar year 2025. Um we recorded over $22 million in cash and checks other than water um funds through one single individual. Um, we record and process all leans that the city issues. We process over 800 insurance premium returns um on an annual basis. And we process the ABC returns for 61 um alcohol entities uh quarterly. The accountant position um when they were even when they were the finance officer, but going forward, they reconcile 36 bank accounts every single month. Um, one account we review and reconcile daily. Um, they process our sales and school tax returns each month. A lot of folks don't realize even governments have to collect and pay sales tax. Um, there's a lot of things you don't even realize. We have sales tax parking. Um, folks that pay parking leases now have sales tax that they're

charged. Um, a lot of stuff at parks has sales tax. Um, we created and processed a sheetment for the city. Um, if you don't know what that is, a lot of people have heard of unclaimed property. Um, sometimes you send checks out in the mail and they get lost. Sometimes you send a check out in the mail and it's a small dollar threshold, so they just don't get it cashed. Um, they lose it. Um eventually those checks are required to be sent to the Kentucky State Treasury for collection at some point by the owner of those funds uh prior to 2024. We did not do that at the city. So we had outstanding checks that had never been cashed and cleared from the mid210s. Um, so we created a process um with a large dollar thresholds um because most of those checks tend to be water refunds, right? You get a water refund on your account after you final it and it's $3 and that doesn't always get cashed or it doesn't go to a forwarding address. Um so we've implemented that. um our accounts payable staff, she processes all payments made out of um from the city, which was in FY25, $46 million, over $3,100 individual payments. Um she processed over 6,200 individual invoices. Every single invoice for every single thing that the city buys, we touch in some form or fashion. Um she

one person

that is one person. Uh she's a very we're all very busy back there. Um she also has started helping to translate um Spanish for various um city hall functions because she's fluent um and that has been a a very very big help um in a lot of ways. And then our finance clerk processed um over 2100 individual purchase orders. So before a purchase is completed, um most of them require a purchase order. If you do notice, there's a 2100 purchase orders and 6,200 invoices. Sometimes one purchase order covers multiple invoices. So there there's always a disconnect there. Um she has we implemented a couple years ago um remote deposit capture where we scan our checks inhouse for deposits. So every check that we receive gets scanned inhouse um which is approximately 2,200 a month um in our daily deposits that she scans to ensure uh we get a lot of checks where the check wasn't signed. So we have to send that back to the department to get it signed. Sometimes the check is post-dated um and we can't accept that check. So for instance, somebody mails their water bill and dates it for next month instead of this month. Well, we have to contact them and say, "Hey, your your check is not going to get posted to your account because we can't accept this." Um, she processed over 370 individual general billing items. So, other than your water department, we bill local agencies, certain entities, parking, um, for various various things, and as well as just providing general backup for the finance department, and to help answer the phones. So, that's kind of in a nutshell. We do a lot of work back there, but we just don't take a lot of photos.

The numbers are intimidating. The numbers are intimidating by themselves.

So, what is our goal next year? We've we've done a lot over the last couple years. We implemented a new finance software. We implemented business license software. Kind of what's our next step going forward? And my my big picture goal is transparency. So, I think we've done a lot since I came on board on changing presenting financials to commission, presenting them to the public. Um, we don't do them as often or as regularly um to the public as as we could, but that's frankly it's just a sheer time time. There's not enough time in the day um to do that. Um the also the the financials that we give um are a very manual process. Our software doesn't just shoot those reports out, right? It's they shoot out num spreadsheets and numbers and then that has to get translated into a format that's understandable by the public and by the commission. And so we want to explore options for financial transparency um and budgeting to make that more transparent to the public. So that that's our big picture goal. Um we're going to explore some softwares that help with that. um and just bas ways we could better um structure that internally to provide that information on a more frequent basis. But that's that's the big picture long and short. It's very short presentation. Um, but you know, we want to transparency to me is, you know, I can I can post on our website or a monthly report that's generated similar to a budget spreadsheet you get, but that doesn't mean a lot to the public, right? Them going through a 40page document of of line by line accounts and numbers is

not helpful or meaningful. Um, and so we want to do a little bit more to whether whether people use it or not, make it available. Um, and currently it's not as available as it could be um without them without the public having to request it. Any questions for Wisconsin? A few years ago, I guess the KC or something, they were talking about citizens um budgeting where I guess you put it in a format that the average like me can read and send it out once a quarter or something.

Yeah. Um so y'all don't have time to do that but well they they have they have they have in the last few years there have been softwares that make that more um uh more accessible um and they've um there are lots of ways to make it more citizen centric and to um I don't know how you know if that's worth us me and Melanie coordinating to send it out regularly. Uh I'm sure it's worth it. But um just getting that getting us a place where we can do that. Yeah.

Um just cuz right now it would be it would be a probably

we could do it say on a quarterly basis, but it wouldn't be an A+ effort. It would be a C++ effort just getting it into the format we would like it to be in and the data available. And I don't think we want to send out C++ uh work. Um, so the goal is to work um whether that be through some software, through some um hopefully our our new position can help alleviate some things and um we can find ways to better uh communicate that. Well, I I say kudos to your department because the way you communicate the bill list and the financial reporting to the commission

has become more and more user friendly. Yeah. More and more understandable in the sense and so either it's creates more questions or it takes care of a lot of unnecessary questions but it's really helped us in our understanding about where we are. So I would say kudos for that simp simplification of the reporting. I have to watch her see her how she signed signed the word hillbilly. Did you do it? I didn't see how you sign for hillbilly.

I'm sorry to say that too. Emily, I also just want to thank you for putting in all the time and hard work to implement the new modern software over your last four years. Um, it's just it's like night and day from when I started. Um, I felt like I had no financial information when I first started and um, where we're at now, you're it's very transparent. So, just thank you.

Well, and and that's our goal, right? And you all can't do your jobs if you aren't right, if you don't understand the financial picture of the city. And frankly, you all are charged with responsibility. So, while you know, Earl and I are charged with the day-to-day financial um governance, you all are in fact legally charged with financial governance. So, if you don't have that information, then you're not you're not doing your job effectively. Um, but also we want the we want it in a format that does allow for non-financial experts to understand it and to understand where our funds go and um

whether whether they agree with how we use it or not, they can see it clearly, right? Um, yeah. and the department heads finally have all the pertinent information they need to really run their department more efficiently and budget better and save money. Um, I've seen a transformation over the last four years. So, other questions or comments? Well, you know, you and I didn't even like her for a long time. She's doing pretty well. Well, you know, I I grow I've I've been told I grow on you. Yeah. like cut to first first impressions aren't aren't the best, but give me enough time.

Just kidding. And we appreciate what you do. He threw me under the bus. That's all I know. Okay, next up next up is uh Nick Warren with it. Uh Nick has already been given fair warning. I got a time limit, right? No, all the time. Rest of the afternoon.

All right. Uh we'll start with staff. Um, we haven't had any changes last year. Um, as you can see, we have a a fairly experienced staff in our department. Uh, we have myself as the director, uh, Brandon Million, our new network administrator. We've hired in the last, uh, 12 18 months, and then Jason Simpson and Anthony, who have both been here, uh, I think five and going under five years. Uh we don't anticipate requesting any additional staff or any changes this year. So we'll keep everything as is. All right.

Uh update on a couple um security solutions we have implemented in the last budget cycle. Um the first of that being what we call MDBR, which is malicious domain blocking and reporting. Um this is a service that sits in between our security devices and the internet. that it's a third party service that we route our traffic through and it scans the outgoing requests for potential malicious sites or uh inappropriate content sites, things like that. Um we started implementing this in July of last year. Um we did not implemented at all sites at once. It was kind of scattered out throughout the year. So the numbers you see there are not a full year for all sites but so far we've processed uh 280 million uh requests and of those 52,000 have been blocked for some various reason or another. Um not all of those necessarily are malicious. They could be for example on our office networks we block gaming sites and stuff like that. So, uh, people's cell phones tend to end up with games on them and when they're in the background, they still try to hit out to the web and it we, uh, we filter those out on the office network. U,, the other thing we've put in is our checkpoint email scanning. Um, hopefully you all have noticed some benefits from this yourselves. Um, so we scan every incoming and outgoing email now for malicious content and what we consider spam and gray mail. Uh the difference there being gray mail is um it's not quite classified as spam, but it's it's vendors or entities that you've communicated with, but they're sending you like newsletters or advertisements. Those are considered gray mail. Um we blocked 1.2K fishing, actual legit fishing attempts, um which is pretty substantial. Seven known malware instances uh that could have caused some potential damage.

And then like I say, a bulk of it is is spam and gray mail that um while we filter that out, we filter to your junk uh box instead of just straight up quarantining it. So you can I'm sure you've seen the emails you get daily you can request a release on those if it's something you feel you need. Uh one of our big challenges we're going to face in the coming year and I'm not sure if you probably you don't keep up as much as computers as we do but uh DRAM which is your memory and your computers pricing has gone up 400 over 400% in the last quart six months to last quarter. Um, additionally, uh, solid state drives and hard drives have increased over 200% in that same time period. Uh, most of this is due to your AI companies buying everything they can get um for data center buildouts.

So, we expect PC prices to increase considerably over the next 12 months. Our vendors are already uh rolling our quotes back from being valid for 30 to 60 days to now 7 days. Um so that's how quickly the prices are changing.

Um the biggest I guess impact we see is that um the individual prices for PCs and components are going to go up which is going to affect the operating budgets of each department as we buy replacements. Um to try to help mitigate this a little bit, we're going to extend our replacement uh schedule an additional year. And additionally, we're going to uh discontinue surplusing PCs themselves that are still capable of running Windows 11, which is the most current operating system. Uh just to try to build up some surplus of parts if we need to extend lives of of existing systems.

That's scary. Excuse me. Uh, one of our projects we'll look at doing next year is um replacing our main firewall and aggregation switches in our core network. Um, if you see on that chart, it's a little dark there, but that top layer um is the is the layer that we're looking at replacing. Um, currently we have a single firewall, single aggregation switch, but we're looking at building in some redundancy this year. Um, more and more of our our services that we use. For example, like the cemetery map they talked about earlier, it's all online now. So, we want to ensure that we don't lose access to that if we have like for example a firewall go out. In the past, everything was inhouse. You can still you can still operate even though you didn't have internet access. nowadays, you know, lease software, all the stuff that we've been talking about, it all requires internet access. So, we want to build as much redundancy in as we can to ensure that we, you know, keep constant access to those systems. Um, the budget impact on that is going to be around $25,000 and it will be included in our capital uh request, which I think is going to be later on. Uh the next thing we're looking at doing is um a system called SDWAN. Um so currently we rely on a single ISP at all of our locations to provide our access to the internet. Um we want to put in um a secondary ISP being a cellular service and then utilizing our existing equipment to create uh automated failovers. Um we piloted this out at Millennium Park. Uh we do a lot of credit card transactions out there. Uh we had an issue where um Spectrum had a few outages. We were unable to process

concession sales. So we wanted to solve that solution or solve that problem by creating a solution of putting in redundancy at the ISP level. So we we piloted a project out there with using Verizon cellar as a backup. So far it's working flawlessly. Everything automatically switches and switches back when the primary service is restored. so they can still process their concession transactions in the event of a ISP being out. Uh we're missing a slide here, I believe. So, okay. Had one other thing. It's for some reason not in the presentation here. Um so, currently we utilize for our remote um remote users, those being, you know, department supervisors when they're on the road. uh Marshall's department uses quite a bit for all of their infield uh employees to access uh their telemetry systems. Currently, we use a traditional VPN. Uh with a traditional VPN, it's an implicit trust system. So, when you connect in, it's as if you're sitting on the network, you get full access to everything. um with a zero trust uh network access solution that we're going to um first of all to verify you and it's no longer just an authentication but you have to be on a correct device in a correct location as an approved user. So there's like a multiple layer um checkpoint to make sure that you're you know you're able to access the solution and then once you're connected you don't get cart blanch to everything. It's uh it's now explicit. Uh so you one user may only get access to one specific service say for example Lee's accounting software where another user is going to get that plus Marshall SCADA system and then we can um basically individual resources you have to be assigned to. You don't just get everything once you're connected in. Um, and the reason

we do this is just to try to to limit the vectors that if we have somehow someone get in that they're not just they don't have access to everything. It's just specifically what that user was allowed to to utilize to perform their duties. Um, the budget impact of that is it's uh this solution where we've been piloting that we like it's around $5 a month per user. Uh right now we have between 30 and 40 users. So we would that cost would be spread across the departments that are utilizing that service. Um so you're looking at about $60 a year per per user. And that's what I've got.

All right. Hopefully I didn't get too deep in the weeds. Comments. Nick. Um How long does a PC last that we have? So, it varies. Uh, a dispatch PC, we're lucky to get three years. Okay. Um, a PC, for example, for a a police clerk or something like that, we can go five to six years. Um, that's about the end. I mean, yeah, that's you're you're it's not so much that it's it's just that software changes so rapidly. Mhm. The computer is still okay. It just doesn't have the power to run

the new stuff. Um, you know, everything's going browser based. Browsers are very resource intensive. And as you add more stuff into that, it's getting beyond the scope of what the the the original resources are able to handle. So, you know, like I say, an a system like dispatch where it's running 24/7, 365. Yeah. We get three years out of them. We're doing good. Yeah. it loses the ability ability to to update the new changes.

So, you can and you to an extent. So, um a lot of what we use nowadays are what are considered small form factor PCs. They're not the big towers like you used to have. They're small. They're you probably seeing them mounted on the back of the screens. Uh those a lot of those utilize what they call a system on a chip to where the entire system is built into one chip that's soldered to the board. Uh so there's very little you can change. You can upgrade a hard drive. You can maybe add a little RAM, but it's not interchangeable parts like it used to be. Um, the reason we utilize those is they're substantially cheaper and they're easier to maintain because they have less moving parts.

What' you say? No, I said that that makes sense. Yeah, it does. Yeah. I I had an iPhone 6 and uh it already got to iPhone 14 or 15. And it's like what's wrong with this thing? Yeah. Stop. It stopped on the scene. Your phone runs on the scene. I was running Nick said it run out of whatever was out wouldn't run anymore. But it happens though. Wow. Yeah. Thing fascinates me about Nick too is he self-taught. I mean you just learned this on your own for the most part. Yeah. Smarter man than I for sure. Went from cutting grass to this. That's amazing.

Well, you've done a great job for the city. Hope you continue doing a great job for the city. Yeah. No need to retire. I told the chief last Yeah. I told the chief last night five more years. What are you talking about? We appreciate you though. That's right. From all the rest of you. He went from Dexter Dexter Court to city hall. stayed at city hall the rest of his life. That's amazing. Yeah, it's been the longest summer job ever. Yeah, that's right. Well, we do. That's right. Well, great story. Okay, any other questions or comments?

Well, we'll entertain a motion to uh take a break go to break for lunch. Uh it's 10 after 11, so come back 11:15. You can. So, how much time for lunch? 30 minutes. No big deal. It may be later on. Come back. Come back about a quarter till 12. What's that? Back about quart 12 or so. Okay. Mr. Coller says quarter to 12. Don't leave the building though, right? Oh, you can. I'm just messing with him now. I don't have my ankle braces on today. I can go where I want to.

minutes here. So, uh, up next is, uh, Crossfield. She got out here community development. Okay. What was that? Said my feet are dangling. I don't Was it Nick in this chair before I was? I feel like a little kid.

All right. Um, so I put a little bit of everything I do into these three little boxes to try to keep myself organized. So that's how we're going to frame this discussion today. Um, public outreach and communication, community events and programs, and business support and marketing. So, for public reach, outreach, and communication, we've tried a few different things. You know, we always hear um well, I don't use social media. Okay, well, let's try something else. Well, I'm not getting the newspaper. Okay, well, let's try something else. So, really, we're going to try a little bit of everything, which I think is a good communication strategy. Anyway, um I feel like the newsletter, the weekly newsletter, it's an e newswsletter. we have grown to um about,00 subscribers uh over the last two years. So I think that has been pretty successful and it's fairly affordable, inexpensive annually. It's $318 annually. Um the good thing about that is we can also share it on social media. So if you're not subscribed, you could still have access to it. And then I also um publish it on our website so you can go back and look at older issues if you wanted to. um based on our web traffic. Nobody wants to, but they might. Um Facebook, we've grown to um 12,800 followers. We got a big bump last year um because we had some YouTube fame. Um but that's free. So, we don't do any Facebook ads or anything. And um we try to share as much on Facebook as we possibly can. Um, we also started the City of First podcast last year and we have 704 downloads. That's about $144 a year. And so we are hoping to grow that

a little more. It is one of those things that um we haven't prioritized, but about once a month we'll get an episode out and then um we'll get some traffic from that. Um highlevel CRM. So, this is a program that we used back when we had our old website design and it was really for um customer relationship tracking. And so, what that means is if somebody were to submit a form or a survey to us, we could see how that relationship has progressed. So, we could see how often we interact with that one person. Um, but those have typically just been used for like my purposes. So, if I'm doing a survey or if I'm trying to get registrations for things like our um civic engagement series, then I'll be able to tell who's most involved. And um it's just not something that we're using as much anymore because we do have a free option. Um Google does find forms. They're not quite as pretty, but they'll do the trick. Um and we have capabilities through Civic Plus as well. So, I put that in red because as our uh subscription ends, I will likely um cancel that subscription and continue to just use the things that we have available. It's nice, but we weren't using it full capabilities and we can save a little there. Um we also have recently started a LinkedIn page. We only have 71 followers, so hopefully that grows over the next few years. LinkedIn is really where your business and economic development and community live. And so the content on there is geared more towards that and less of public information. So, um, as I look ahead to the to this year, I'd really like to focus more on that storytelling piece and being able to really market Damble through LinkedIn and other other

things. So, our monthly bill inserts, um, I've I've received a lot of positive feedback from putting the newsletter in the bill monthly and sometimes it's a recap of commission actions or things that have happened in the commission meetings. Um, or sometimes it's just general information like how to pay your water bills or the 250th events for one of the most recent um, bill inserts. but they are um you know comparatively a little costly. It's about $1,7,000 or I mean I'm sorry $1,700 a month. Um but it does reach all of our build water customers. Um and even if they get a an electronic bill, they do get a copy of that in PDF form. Uh so it's a good way to reach everyone if they look at it, but it is there available to them. And those are also uploaded on our website. So again, if someone wanted to go back and look, they could. Um, some of the other things, and I I I won't go through all these, but um, with communication, we really um, look at a unified design. So really utilizing our logos with event signage and banners. Um, we're trying to get a little more creative with our downtown banners. And we've got our veterans banner program that's coming up. those have gone to print. We've filled all the polls in Daveville and so we should see those up before Memorial Day. Um and then we also added the downtown directory which is remarkably hard to keep updated but um it's there and I think it's pretty. Um and then we're supporting events like the Brass Band Festival, MLK, the Christmas third Thursdays in downtown Downbeat. Um, and then I I come bearing gifts. So, you all received your notebooks. Um, and these are things that we take with us

sometimes if we're uh marketing the city or even for educational purposes here locally because people will lose our business cards, but they will not lose that little notebook because those sticky notes are adorable. Um, so those are the types of things that um I I would like to have on hand and I'd like to have more on hand. I've created an economic profile for the city, something we can take with us when we are talking to prospective businesses. Um, we have our downtown master plan, which um, you know, it's we have a digital form, but we like to be able to hand that to people as well. So, those items, um, there are printing costs and design costs associated with those that just have to be considered when we're looking at the budget. Um, and again the promotional items, the local government literacy program is happening now. We already had our first session. It was the most boring session because I just went over all the basics, but it gets more exciting as we go on. The next time is utilities. We're going to meet at the water plant. Um, and I'm I think a and Marshall are going to do a great job with that. So hopefully you all can join us for a few of those sessions. Um, this year we started coffee with commissioners which I think has been pretty successful. I'd like to see new faces come to those. So, um I'm going to hit the ground running with just trying to share that a little farther and wider. Um and then we also have redesigned our website with uh some department pages that are updated. Um our community calendar is getting a little more use, but I'd like to encourage people to submit more events to it. Um, and then we have welcome to Danville emails by request where you can go on our website and say, "Hey, I'm new to Danville. What do I need to know?" And I'll send them an email that has where to get your water,

where to get all the things. That hasn't gotten a lot of use, but I've actually spoken with a few employers lately who are like, "Well, I'm getting new employees. They would love to know this." So, they are sharing it themselves with their employees. Um, okay. That's a lot on one slide. All right. So, these are just some of the events um that we have ongoing. You're aware of all of those, but the city may not be a primary sponsor for those, but we do either support with inind sponsorships or um we do the work. So, um and the Danville KY gift card is gaining some steam as well. We have 42 different businesses that are part of that and it's seen a little bump after Christmas. People got them for prizes or Christmas gifts from corporate Christmas gifts and now they're using them. Um and then some upcoming events. We have the 4th of July military appreciation parade on the 4th of July obviously and hoping that's going to be a really great event. And we are taking a fresh look at third Thursday. So you had downtown downbeat before which was first Thursday and then you had third Thursday which was sometimes the thing and sometimes it wasn't. Um and then you have um the farmers market on Saturday and sometimes on Thursday. So anyway, we're marrying all those things together for one big monthly event in downtown Danville. Um you'll still have your farmers market on Saturdays. Don't worry about that. That's still there. Um but your Thursdays are going to be way cooler on the third Thursday. Um because everything is going to happen at the same time. Music, vendors, uh shopping. Awesome. Um new business events, we are hoping to kind of bring those back up. Um we had done a few last year in partnership with the development corporation and with the chamber. And um

those two organizations have gone through some transitions. And so we're hoping to uh revamp that and bring that back. And in the same vein, like the welcome to Danville emails, I'm considering ways we can educate people as they move in, work with realtors, and maybe host a session once a month or even a live stream once a month that just explains those things like where to get your water bill and where to do all the things in Danville um to people as they move ahead. Um when we get the banners up, we're going to have a walk. We're going to walk around and we're going to talk about each of the veterans and hopefully their families can join us. Um, Memorial Plaza dedication. Um, we're looking working with Josh on that and our first responders to look at September 11th as a date to um, it's the 25th anniversary which is nuts. Um, so we will dedicate Memorial Plaza on that day. And then we're also planning some other things in conjunction with the Chamber of Commerce, um like a business resource fair and some small business week events. Okay. So, um for business support and marketing, what I'm hoping for this year is to really focus on building our business retention and expansion program hasn't truly existed. We have a lot of resources that we that are in a lot of different places and so working closely with the Chamber of Commerce um their new director Sarah is amazing and we work well together and so we're working through these steps. We're finding the right team. We're learning more about the resources we have locally um resources we have at the state level and then meeting with employers. So we've met with a few of our top employers so far. We're working down the list. Um, and like like I say there, we'll just

rinse and repeat. Um, and we're learning a lot, but the point being we're here to help tell stories for businesses here in our community, but we're also here to let them know that Danville is a businessfriendly community and we're here to help. Um, and then you could take a look at the new or expanded initiatives. These are things we're working on together. Again, the jump start program already existed. Um, but it was kind of owned by the development corporation, kind of owned by the chamber. The city played a part. So now we're working on just bringing it into one place where if a business is interested in starting here in Danville, they could go to one one place and get all of their information um and and we can help them and guide them along that process. Uh we do have a few business mentors already that are willing to help whenever businesses come into town. Um but we haven't really expanded on that program at all. So really that's just telling people about it and matching prospective business owners with those mentors. Um we have a couple networking events um and then really focusing on gathering the data that we need to attract businesses but also support businesses. So, what kind of state programs would come here if they knew what types of businesses we have? So, looking at the types of businesses, what they do, what they make, all of those good things. We're also working on um making things a little easier for our food trucks downtown. So, on that Josh thing, but um I like I like bragging on him, too, because this is a cool thing. He's got great ideas. Um, and then again, create a one-stop shop for business owners and entrepreneurs. We're working with the Chamber of Commerce generating these ideas of what it would

look like if a entrepreneur has a product idea or an app idea. Where do they go um to expand on those skills and to learn what resources are available? And so we're hoping that the city chamber development corporation, we can all join this together to be a one-stop shop for that. Um, and then again, storytelling and marketing in all forms. And I added that picture there. um for millennial women. If you have ever watched Gilmore Girls, um you'll understand, but one of our visits recently was at Hobart. And I've watched Gilmore Girls maybe a thousand time, I don't know, a million times. And I have never noticed that Hobart commercial dishwasher in the background. Um but I do now. And so I sent it over to them after we met and I said, "Is this can you confirm this would be a Danville product?" And he said, "Oh yeah, that's the model C235X that it's only made in Damble." And I was like, "Well, that's cool." Cuz um it's in every episode of Gilmore Girls after they opened the Dragonfly Light in, by the way. Um so anyway, those are the kind of stories we want to tell, right? Like these products are being sent globally and they're being used in all sorts of ways. And so, um, I'm really excited to focus on this this year. Um, I don't think there's anything in there that is, um, has too much of a budget impact. It's just going to be about getting our ducks in a row, making sure we have the right partners. Um, so questions,

any questions or comments? You cover a lot of territory. I thank you for traveling to wellchosen conventions um because that really promotes Stanville and it it always says a lot when you go to them. It really garers attention. So, thank you. Um I know you're mom of young children and uh I thank you for doing that. Thank you. Great. Thanks. I I do have a question. You talked about doing a welcome to Damble thing. Which entity in most communities does that? like the chamber or the CBB or

so well you know really the conversation started we did a p Josh love me um we did a podcast a while back and we had a bilingual student from Danville High School um on the podcast because she was just hanging out helping out and we asked her like what would you like to see in Danville and she said well when I came here um she's one of the only people in her family who speaks English and she said I would have liked an opportunity to help my family understand where they go to do things and how things work around here. And so we talked in that conversation about maybe a monthly event, maybe it's a quarterly event or maybe it's just a tour um an invitation. So, we've tried to build relationships with realtors because they usually know when you're here um and and provide them with the resources, but I think we could go a little more in depth with that and not just cover city services, but also library, post office, hospitals, where do you go to live here? I mean, it's it's pretty easy to get around here, but um and then again, including that accessibility piece, you know, she like I said, she was bilingual, so having those translators available or ASL translators available to reach all of our incoming citizens.

Okay. So, you're not partnering, you're actually doing it yourself. Well, we are in the we are in the idea stages of that. That is a hope and dream for this year. We will definitely work with the chamber on that or Okay. Anybody you suggest? Yeah. Well, like um I always donate stuff to the Herodsburg chamber because every single new resident Joe Cutler goes to and says, "Here, here's all of our partners. Here's all the," you know, kind of like the welcome wagon used to do. And I didn't know if our chamber did that or Well, they don't right now, but they're just getting started. And so, I think it would be a good partnership for us to work with them. That would be great. Most most businesses will Yeah. want to be part of it. So Okay. Okay.

Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Next up is the fire department chief. All right. All right. How about now? Sure.

There we go. All right. So, we just wanted to quickly uh, you know, overview some of the things that we've done in 2025. Um, so in 2025 at the fire department, we uh, you know, we responded on 3,118 calls for service. That's including fire rescue and EMS. Um, of those calls, 1337 of them were just EMS related. Um, we've actually, you know, installed 95 car seats um for the citizens. They come by, make appointments and, um, our firefighters are all trained to, um, properly, you know, inspect them and actually install them for them or teach the citizens how to install them. Uh we have performed standby for 99 confined space entries at um different uh manufacturing facilities here in town and we've actually averaged 342 hours of training per person at the fire department. To give you some perspective on that, that's well above any standard that would that's expected. Um, the Kentucky Fire Commission expects a firefighter to uh receive or exceed 100 hours of training per year to maintain their professional qualifications. Um but through with guidance from other organizations such as National Fire Protection Association, if you really want to try to uh attain their guidelines, it would really take about 250 hours of training a year to really stay current in all the guidelines and all the trainings that we need. Um so we're significantly overachieving on those on those items. Um so in 2025 in addition to that you know we had four retirements. Three of those

were administrative staff and and one firefighter. Um in 2025 we were able to um you know promote three more people, three administrative staff. We also hired three laterals. um you know those three laterals uh they have various levels of of experience at other fire departments um you know any ranging from two years to well over 25 years um at different fire departments. So it it adds diversity to our department um and some experience where it's needed. you know, sometimes, you know, it's hard to fill those gaps, especially when, you know, a lot of our, you know, attrition comes from, you know, more senior members of the of the department. Um, we also hired one recruit and we kind of put a slasht transfer. So, and Ben Thompson, he was a transfer from public works. Um, and he, you know, had ambitions to be a firefighter and had had that for a long time and he had the opportunity to transfer to our department and then we sent him through recruit academy. Um, that'll end up coming up a little bit later in the presentation as well. Um, in addition to that, we actually put Engine 19 into service in 2025. Engine 19 going into service in in 2025 really has kind of positioned our ourselves well. um to really not to have to invest heavily into you know fire apparatus which are you know very expensive pieces of equipment um for for the near future. We probably don't have to really look into making a substantial investment in in apparatus for the next three years or so before we need to start planning for the attrition of some of our backup engines.

We'll move on to uh you know some of the things I wanted to recognize that we also got done in the 2025 year is um you know with the car seat program that we have we received the governor safety award for for our car seat program. Um we also trained 172 individuals in the American Heart Association CPR and first aid. We've hosted at um multiple classes at the department. That was one of our goals last year was to try to become more of a regional hub for you know some trainings. So that's a IFSAC aerial class that was actually put on by state fire commission and and we hosted it here. So we had multiple agencies from outside the department come in and partake into that in that training. Um, we mentioned Ben Thompson a little earlier as as our recruit that we hired in 2025 and he received an award at the fire academy as co- validictorian of the fire academy. There's a picture of him here. That fire academy is 13 weeks long. Um, and it takes a significant commitment from them because they live there Monday through Friday. Um for those 13 weeks we hosted Norfolk Southern Training Exercise that was also another regional exercise. Um it it's a largecale hazmat incident with rail yard um equipment involved. Um so it's a simulated exercise. We also were performing joint trainings with B County EMS um on a monthly basis. So, we've really over the last year really started to um cultivate a really good relationship in working well and more efficiently, you know, with the other

services in our in our community. We also um took part in the mock disaster drill that was put on um by emergency management and Bo County EMS and Bo County High School. Um we did that. that it was a incident um involving a school bus turn roll over and how we would handle that in because that overt taxes anybody's resources when you have that many you know patients that you're having to deal with that exercise went well. Um and then we also instituted some stress management and leadership courses. we kind of decided to um invest heavily into that um in the last um in the last year towards the end of the last year. We'll revisit that as we move forward too. So 2026 personnel changes. We also So since 20 we rolled into 2026, we've hired three new recruits. Um, those recruits are currently in the fire academy and those three recruits actually will allow us to fully complement um our current staffing model. This once these recruits are able to go online, which probably won't be until August or so, they'll be in the fire academy until miday. Then they'll get out of the fire academy and they'll um they'll have a little bit of time before they have to go into EMT class. And once they have their EMT certification, then we can put them online as career firefighters. So that we're looking at a window of probably around August before that

actually would happen. That'll be our first opportunity to really execute having our full staffing model. um that will that will actually give us um 10 people per shift um across the board with all three shifts that our current staffing model is 35 um personnel. Um I've got five administrative staff and 30 operational staff. So each shift has 10 people. Um, we also hired one lateral recently um to fill in the role of uh of one of the other retire retirements. Um, but that left a whole lot of with all the retirements that we had, it left a whole lot of um people working out of position. So, we've really worked really hard on the in the last 3 to four months to really start to reestablish all the positions and get everybody aligned to where they needed to be. So, we've promoted um three battalion chiefs, we've promoted three lieutenants, and we've promoted a training officer. This year was our first opportunity to get back to having a training officer um in our in our current staffing structure, and that was something that we were sorely missing for years. Um when we lost that position, all the training um had to fall onto the operational staff to be able to perform that on their own. And while they all are um you know very capable and and and very knowledgeable about what we do and are and are all very good instructors. the consistency of the training across the board and making sure that we're all speaking the same language all the time and we can all intermingle together and and not miss a beat, you know, really

gets lost when you don't have somebody coordinating those efforts, you know. So um you know the consistency of training the um coordinated and intentional effort to make sure that that training is really aligning with the guidelines that are set forth for from you know those multiple tools that we have. We've got the National Fire Protection Agency. We've got ISO which I'll talk about a little bit more here in a minute. um you know that training officer really becomes a key role for us. We uh hired Josh White as as our new training officer and while he's somewhat new to us, Josh brings a a really diverse perspective to to that role. Um and he's already really started to help us gain a lot of traction in that in that regard. So Josh, he's uh you know really had a lot of diverse experience. He's had 25 years experience as a firefighter, 13 of which he was a um fire chief for a volunteer fire department

and um he then he spent six years as a law enforcement officer and then most importantly he had 13 years of experience as a area coordinator for Kentucky Fire Commission state fire rescue training and that's what really correlates to this particular job. He's done it before. He's done it for actually a larger agency or a large larger um group of of fire of fire departments and coordinated those efforts and I really think that really is going to translate well for him to really help us move forward where we need to in our training programs. And then before joining us um at he actually spent another two years um at the Lexington Bluegrass airport as a firefighter. So those experiences will also you know help us out moving forward. So that being said um with all that change all that change we we really started to zero in our prim primary focus really needs to be on staff development this year. Um while all these people were highly talented and very capable of moving into the positions that they've moved into, they just now got moved into those positions. So now we need to work on building their capacity to be successful in that new role that they've taken on. Um those new roles that they taken on, you know, can be really challenging. So, we really want to look at, you know, stabilizing um everybody into into those new roles, help them build the the capacities that they need in order to be successful in those roles. Ensure that you know all those positions are really grounded in what the best practices are. And that's where the training officer will come into place. And that's where us as an administrative staff really building the structure for them to

succeed so that they know where the expectations are um and how how to navigate and make sure that that is not solely dependent on one person. We can build the framework to make sure that the organization is supporting that and that and that goes into moving into what you know, our primary um primary objectives are, you know, our primary object objectives as a fire department, of course, is, you know, to save lives, protect property, and preserve the environment. You know, that's what all of our um that's that's the very basics of what a fire department does. Um, and we want to make sure that our mission is always in line with with that. Making sure that we're not getting we as fire department, we are the jacks of the all trades, right? And sometimes we'll get um we want to be the fixer for everybody's every issue. And sometimes we can say, "Oh, well, this issue is coming up a lot. we're going to spend a lot of time learning in that and we may lose our focus on what our primary goal or primary mission may be. So, we just want to make sure that we're really aligned with that. So, moving into, you know, organizational growth, well, how do we how do we determine where we need to grow and how we how do we need to determine these things? So we need to identify and communicate the needs based on our primary focus. And the tools that we can use to find out what we really need to be primarily focused on is um is the ISO PPC. Um ISO PPC is ISO is the insurance service organiza or in

insurance service office and they develop um public protection classification for every community in the nation. That is the classification that um allows insurance companies to know what the capacities of the um what the capacities of the fire department, uh the water supply, dispatch, the whole system, uh what the capacities are so that they can determine what their loss rate is going to be um if if there was a fire in in that area. So that heavily dictates what the insurance rates are in the area. Then we also have the National Fire Protection Agency which sets forth guidelines for us to uh to try to achieve. And then in 2021, we there was the CPSM study that really did a large assessment of all of our demographics, all of our run volume, all of our run data, and really kind kind of gave us some guidelines on what we could do to improve the res the resources and improve our um response objectives and things like that. So, we're going to utilize those things as tools to really help us align with what those primary objectives would be. Looking at those, we I've spent the last six months, a little longer, really diving deep into a lot of those assessments. and looking at those assessments, it's really showing us that um we need to invest in um realigning some of our objectives um to more efficiently serve the community that we have. Um but also there there are some um

areas there in which we really need to expand our capacities and some of those capacities we may need to consider additional staff in order to achieve those objectives. So, one of our primary goals is being able to um provide enough firefighters and enough fire resources to every fire that we go to. And it was identified in some of those assessments that we are having to divide all the objectives that have to happen on a fire scene too broadly with with not enough personnel. And we need to break those things down to make and divide that labor amongst more people so that we can have some people that are specifically engaged in fire suppression at the same time with PE people that are um engaged in um victim search and rescue without having to multitask on those things. So that that's something that we need to consider moving forward is how how do we align our operations with that? Some of the initiatives that we've taken so far is leadership development. I know that um human resources is really leaned into this. A whole city has really leaned into um leadership development. So, we're utilizing some of those resources in addition to um some soul source um resources that we invested in as a fire department that we thought translated really well to what our um what our organization does and what and the kind of paramilitary aspect to it to what what a fire department is. And that was the echelon front training that I brought before you all a few months back. We've really rolled that program out and people are really gravitating to it and it's really helping us all learn to

speak the same language so that uh we um we can really have high level discussions about how we want to adopt this into how we do business. um stress management and resiliency training. You know, that was something I really asked the question, you know, h how do we get how do we go from we had an operational tempo in which a lot of people were close to burnout or close to like they just weren't really thriving on the job. And so, you know, I was really looking at how do we go from surviving this job as a first responder to really thriving on it. And so I really want well what we need to do is we need to um enhance our ability to handle the stresses that we know that we're going to be subjected to you know so how do we do that how do we develop a wellness model that helps people understand how the stress is respon is is is affecting them and build their capacity to handle it in better in more better ways. So, we've leaned into stress management and resiliency training and we've been implementing those things at the department and we want to continue to do so. We've also been assessing the organizational needs. I so I I've told you we've done an had an in-depth look into the ISO and NFPA and CPSM. Doing so, we've also recognized that we wanted to adopt um we wanted to make sure that we readress and adopt um some organizational values, mission and vision. Um we want to make sure we stay grounded in what our purpose is and um in in doing so um what values do when you have to make a decision that you don't have enough information to

make the decision. What do you lean on? You have to lean on a value. You have to lean on something I know even if it's not the right thing I know I did what was right in this situation. like regardless of whether it was good or bad, what the end result is, we we had to live by a particular value. So, we wanted to define these things so that we knew that we were all speaking the same language again and be able to uh make sure we were dynamic enough that when things don't go the way we expect them to go, we can make a decision that we're that we're happy with. And I really think that's what values, mission, and vision will do for you. um assessing operate options of operational objectives. We going back to um making sure our objectives are aligned with our primary mission. We we've kind of assessed this and um we were running a lot of EMS calls that um you know that weren't really aligned with they weren't they weren't true emergencies. We were ended up getting dispatched to a lot of calls that um you exactly that they weren't true emergencies. So we what we try to do is work on a policy and look at what that run volume was doing and how it was taken away from us being able to really perform our primary mission. So I've we've started to try to realign that by writing a policy that makes sure that we are performing the first response for EMS for the true emergencies, for the cardiac arrest, for the trouble breathing, for um you know um significant bleeding

and start to pivot that away from the squad of truck that we have. and and put that responsibility back on the um on on the actual engine companies so that we can start focusing on getting more resources to fires and rescues. See, make sure I've gotten where I'm at. So that that was an example of us assessing our operational objectives and making sure they're aligned with that. Um so we've developed that action plan. We we actually put that into into motion. What we're wanting to do is we're really wanting to pivot those resources and get a ladder company in service. A ladder company is going to help us achieve our primary objectives at a much better rate than what um we're capable of with with running a sole resource of a medical unit. And then I I had on here assess needs for fire marshall objectives. So our fire marshall is responsible for your fire prevention, public education and fire code inspections. Um, you know, in the past we've, um, you know, we've conducted on average about 200 inspections a year, um, that we have documented of going into commercial places and and checking them for any um, fire code hazards or anything like that to make sure that they're a safe place to do business. um through our recent assessments and things like that, we believe we need to be we need to be performing 600 of those inspections a year. Um and so we really need more capacity in our

fire marshals office. Um and because we don't want to not be able to do the fire education, we want to be in the schools. We want to be able to do those things. So, one of the things that moving forward we may want to consider is whether we could supplement the fire marshall's office with a part-time for the time being um fire inspector that could help him do the do the inspections and get caught up to the point where maybe we could properly execute the 600 inspections a year that we really need to be performing. initiative is moving forward. So align training program with best practices based on ISO, PBC, NFPA, Kentucky Fire Commission, update SOPs and SOGS to reflect best practices and primary mission. So we do have a a lot of SOPs written, but most of our SOPs are really aligned with, you know, administrative duties. Um and we would like to intently focus on trying to get a lot of operating guidelines out so that um we we put the parameters on decision- making on every one of our operational calls. So, we really want to intentionally focus on right, you know, working on some of the SOPs and SOGS and update and enter into mutual aid and automatic aid agreements. So, what this is is um mutual aid agreements. We've had them in place for years. They haven't been updated since I I've got some of them that go back to 2009. I have some of them that are even earlier than that. Um, so mutual aid agreement, what it is is that when we arrive on a scene, if we believe this scene is going

to exceed the resources that we have available for it, we would call another agency within the region and have them supplement those resources. Um, and we need to make sure that we have a good working relationship with all the other resources in our community and make sure that we have those mutual aid agreements in so that when I when that call is made, they understand the parameters in which we're asking and they don't we don't have to make it up at the time. Um what an automatic aid agreement is is um and in sometimes automatic aid agreements would serve us in a a lot better because what that is is actually we can pre-plan our jurisdiction and if we know that there's a particular intersection in this in town that is always going to that it frequently exceeds the expect the resources that we have available because of a reoccurring event that happens here. we could pre-plan and and have an arrangement with another agency and have them automatically send in resources every time we get that particular call, whether it's, you know, a fire or whether what whatever it is. And that would be a reciprocal agreement between us performing um some type of aid for them on some of their calls and then them performing that type of aid, whatever type of aid that we need for our calls. And I we really want to look into updating that and working out some of these agreements with other agencies. So some of our current objectives that we've got is address the ISO PPC deficiencies. I don't like the word deficiencies. Um what what it is, it's a true assessment to give you a reality of where you are.

um and what the some of the um public protection classification has indicated and I I've gone back through and seen the the ratings for the last 30 years and what they've shown us is that um we as as the city has grown, we haven't grown as a as a fire department hand in hand with it. So that that rating even though we've enhanced our services, we haven't enhanced them at the same rate that the city has grown. Um, and so our rating has actually steadily declined over the last 30 years. Um, and we want to really put an intentional focus on making sure that the things that we're doing are aligning with that to maximize what that grading is because it could significantly impact every insurance rate in the community. Um, and I think we really have an opportunity in the next three to five years to really um maximize that efficiency and actually improve our grading to the point where we could provide a discount to everybody's insurance rate in this in this in our jurisdiction. I think it could easily be done with just some intentional focus on our prim our our uh training objectives. Um our efforts in the fire prevention program and then um getting a ladder company in service. A true ladder company in service in our community would significantly impact that. Um but it's resource dependent. We do we would need some personnel to put on that vehicle. align response priorities with the best practices training and development. See if I'm aligned with here. You training and development. Make sure

that all of our training and development is aligned with um enhancing that public protection classification and then address operational tempo. I spoke about that a little bit earlier. Um our operational tempo of 3200 calls a year was really overt taxing the resources that we had. So we needed to look at adopting I kind of tried to take that from two different directions. I want to expand our capacities to handle that call volume, but I also want to make sure that the call volume is where we're needed to be. Like if it if there were some calls that were going out that that we really couldn't we we weren't really the asset that needed to be on that call, then let's learn and figure out how to um you know to trim that list back so that it's really meeting the higher need. Uh we also want to really look at updating the airport response plan. the airport, the emergency action plan that I've seen for the airport is really outdated and really needs to be readressed and we're going to be working on um create a new EAP there. In order to do that, really what we need to do is a tabletop exercise with the other agencies in our jurisdiction that would be helping us support that in a mutual aid agreement or automatic aid agreement and then then draw up a new line. So that'll take us a little little bit of time, but it's definitely something that we're going to focus on this year and then update those aid agreements. So the 26 27 goals, uh, one, place a ladder company in service. Um, we can we could once we get those three personnel back from the academy, we'll we'll have the staffing to be able to put a minimum staff level together of two engine companies and a ladder company. Um, one of the challenges that we would have in

that is that in any callouts or vacations we we would be going low below what effective staffing for those three apparatus would be. Um, so If our goal is to have those three apparatus always in service, we're going to have to have a few more people. Um, and that that's something we can work to work towards for the next 3 to 5 years. But that should be the model that we need. We need two engine companies and a ladder company running 24/7 all the time in our community in my opinion. Um so ensure all policies and procedures and practices align with organizational objectives and practices. Um yeah um continue continue station two improvements. So this past year we had capital improvements at station two. We spent $30,000 putting new um overhead doors in the front. They were 20 years old um and they were starting to break down. We have two more that need to be replaced out there in addition to uh the roof over top of the bay. Um I believe we're moving forward with at least the planning phases of possible station three. Um that that's a budget concern for this year. Um we're also looking to collaborate with DPD for drone program. I know that they have um they have a need for a drone program and I think we could piggyback off of that and actually utilize that resource and and contribute to that as well. And then the fire marshall's office. We're wanting to add capacity to it also because the city has a need for, you know, um a safety officer um or at least somebody to help facilitate that over the near future until we're able to

expand or the city's able to expand in that in that growth because we're really well aligned with we already do lockout tackout safety. We already do confined space safety and those are some of the programs that the city really wanted to focus on in in the near future and we think that through the fire marshall's office we would be able to help um help with that in the near future as a stop gap until we find a bigger better solution for it. Um, in addition to the the OSHA safety guidelines that we've been going through over the last couple years, um, you could help facilitate um, the inspections that are be required to make sure that we're all staying up to par with our OSHA safety and then concentrate on a three, five, and 10 year plan. Uh, we're going to be going over capital here in the next week and and be bringing that forward here soon, too. And then here's what I I believe the operational budget impacts could be would be if we put a ladder company in service. You know, that would um cause us to ha have c higher fuel costs. You know, we currently have um $30,000 budgeted for um our fuel usage with all the all the vehicles in our fleet. um that is a high demand fuel usage vehicle. Um we would probably make we would probably expect a 10% or a $10,000 increase in that line item if we were to have that in service all the time. So we' be moving from 30,000 a year to 40,000 a year. Um additional maintenance costs of that vehicle. Um, you know, I I would, you know, expect us to possibly have to move up 10% in that

line item. Um, it's not it wouldn't be a huge impact, but it would would be an impact. Um, the me the biggest impact would be if we develop a different staffing model in order to be able to effectively deploy it more frequently. Um, and then uh proposed a possible possibly moving forward with a part-time fire inspector to try to enhance the fire prevention and life safety in the fire marshall's office. Um, that would have an operational impact. We uh Randy and I took a look at that and you know we believe we could execute that for a part-time or less than $25,000 a year um position to have somebody come in a couple days a week and actually do nothing but inspections and that being all managed by the fire marshal. In addition to this, I didn't have it on the slide, but um we have been authorized and we we are trading in two of our 2017 Ford Explorers that that in the that are in the fleet program with Enterprise and upgrading to a new F-150 which would be a fire marshals vehicle um and another um Explorer. And besides that, I believe that's the majority of the operational budget impacts that I can think of for this year.

Thank you, sir. Any questions? Question. Did a good job. Got a lot of change and I know this is nerve-wracking for Yeah, definitely. I'm I'm growing into this this position, right? This is not something I've been comfortable with in the past, but I'm I'm trying to get there. Thank you all. Thank you, sir. We'll help you get there. No questions. No questions.

We were asking questions all day. What's wrong with you? Yes, sir. Chief Gray up next. There we go.

So, this is the Davo Police Department and uh actually Chief Don did most of these slides as I've been off for a few weeks and just returned back last week. Uh we'll start out with the 2025 overview and you know it was it was a pretty big year for us. Uh we had our accreditation with the Kentucky League of Cities and we again are still an accredited agency for law enforcement. Uh, a lot of what we did last year was actually just restructuring. Uh, kind of getting ready for my retirement and, uh,

just looking at the police department, uh, dispatch, and then also oversee codes and parking. So it was kind of like okay how do we need uh align ourselves and get ready for uh what we can look forward in the next couple of years. Uh so we promoted an assistant chief with that oversoft dispatch as the dispatch supervisor Rebecca Hafley retired. uh we thought uh promoting uh a line officer over that would uh help do some things there for us that we hadn't quite had in the past. It also allowed us to add an extra dispatcher. Uh volume is going up and dispatch is taking those call volumes and we need those ladies and one gentleman Matthew down there. We went back to uh three patrol captains, one for each shift and uh four patrol sergeants. And kind of what that did is uh we have an overlap on our second shift. And a lot of times the way we do with our 10-hour shifts, there's one or two days that the captains are not there on shift. And that second shift overlap is a very busy shift. And so we have those two sergeants uh or an extra two sergeants in their fill in on on that second shift overlap. So that allows us some days to have two supervisors at least on on some of those busy days on those Fridays and Saturdays. Uh we have a a seasonal traffic unit. I

think some of you probably have heard about if you're on Facebook at all. Uh he started last week or two weeks ago and uh he pretty much runs nine months out of the year. We have him off during the winter months. Uh I think we have him off from uh somewhere in the middle of November to uh February roughly. Uh we have 39 full-time officers uh that work patrol. Uh overall there's 52 between our SRO's uh and between our crossing guards that also report to the patrol side. If you count dispatch, there are 67 uh people that in total that I kind of supervise. Um, as you can see there, we had 16,238 events last year. That number steadily is increasing. And not just that number is increasing, but the complexity of calls are increasing. Uh, that's a lot of calls for us. So again, dispatch is handling all those calls and as complexity those calls become, they're also taking fire calls and EMS calls usually on those complex calls. So uh dispatchers usually handling three agencies and the max we have is two dispatchers down there. So again, we're looking at, you know, somewhere down the line that we're probably going to have three dispatchers on shift to help cover those that uh that crunch time that we look at with on the patrol side. We have a a Kentucky League of Cities inspection. Uh they have a law

enforcement branch. They come out and they do uh an accreditation check, an inspection check, and we had 92.72% on that uh grading scale out of 100. Uh some of the things that we talk about is not only uh but but community events. Every Christmas we do a shop with the cop event where we take kids from the elementary schools here in the community and and go take them out shopping. We also uh not just community events like that and brass band and different parades and marchings, we also have uh we do sporting events. And some of the big things you're starting to see that are more complex are rallies and political events. And you know, I think everybody in this political climate understands that those events are getting more and more challenging for us and require quite a bit of uh police presence at times and most of these events are usually Saturday mornings and things like that or Sunday mornings and that's not really a high activity time for us. But so that requires us to use a lot of overtime really to come in and cover those events. So scheduling for those things like that uh they do create some some problems with scheduling. So that's 2025 and just just kind of an overview essential components uh training. We've always got to have training. Uh, and we can't always get it at DCJT for free. Some of that co complex training has got to come from outside agencies and not just in the state of Kentucky. Uh, so that that's expensive. So, one of

the things we're doing is increasing uh our training budget. Clothing. Yeah. It's expensive. That's all I can tell you. vests, weapons, leather, uniforms, uh just different uniforms for different occasions, too. All that stuff is just going up. Flock camera systems. So, what is a flock camera system? You they're all over town. You probably don't even know they're they're here, but the flock camera system is a license plate reader. And uh very very helpful. Uh for example, you have a hit and run somewhere, you know it's a white car, the officer can just log into that system and look for white cars that's passed a fly camera in that area and it tracks down stuff like that. But not only that, uh I think you know some of you know that KSP had a had a vehicle hit and run last weekend out on W Stony Point and out in that area near Old Bridge. We have a flock camera system there. They knew the car or description of the car. They're able to use the flock camera system to get the exact license plate and track that person, suspect down and make an arrest shortly that afternoon. So, we need to increase that. Like I said, KSP uses that as well as we use that. We can share that with other agencies and other agencies can share their flock camera information with us. So, we're we need to upgrade that and keep that going. Tasers, vest, and weapons, like I said, you know, those are essential needs. Uh that there that expense has always continued to grow. Watchguard bundles. Watch guard is the

body cameras that we wear or that we have as uh on our individual officers. Uh yeah, I I just think that the watch guard I implemented that when I first became chief 15 years ago and you know I just to me it's a necessity. Uh we need to increase that. the uh the storage fees and the warranty is is another $90,000. So for total you're looking at about $186,000. Uh that would be a capital expense. What we'd like to do as far as that 26 27 goes is we would like to add a patrol officer uh just to and the reason we'd like to add a patrol office because we we'd like to add a detective and we don't really want to uh just slide somebody in investigations and lose that patrol slot. Um, that detective would become a pretty much a a narcotics patrol officer/prol detective that would work with the K9 units. Our K9s are mainly a second shift unit. And with putting somebody in that like a detective role, that would allow that person to do a lot of daytime stuff uh that the K9 detectives can't do and do some administrative things. Uh so that would be uh kind of a what we call a slot position that would do a little bit of investigative work mainly geared toward narcotics but it would help the K9 units that that don't get to use some of that. They don't see a lot of that daytime time. And that officer would do a couple days shift, get some of that administrative work out the way, but do a lot of

narcotic stuff at in ignance. We're always upgrading patrol vehicles and stuff like that through uh Enterprise. And this is just our normal aotment of uh patrol vehicles and uh one detective unit. If we switch to the K9 or switch to the uh the detective, like I said, retirements, uh I'm definitely going to retire this fall. Uh we have three others that could retire this fall. Uh we've been speaking with them to see, you know, what they think their uh options are going to be. Uh one of those is a detective and a couple are on the patrol side. So we could lose uh two or three other people in key positions for us. Uh if not this year, I would definitely suspect in the next year. So we've been doing a lot of success secession planning and thinking ahead on how those things will affect us going forward. One of the things we've talked about is a policy committee is just going through our policies. We we haven't really updated and gone through our policies line by line in probably about 10 years and just having a committee to go back and review policy. Like I said before, uh talking about advanced training, you know, just getting people into some advanced training like uh the fire chief talked about, we have talked about partner with them with the drone and that would be some advanced training that we would need to get some, you know, somewhere else, not at DLCJ2. uh he didn't really go into a a lot, but the drone uh pretty much is just a necessary thing for law enforcement and fire. Uh crime scenes, not just crime scenes, but even accident scenes at times are getting very complex and having an aerial unit to go in, take photographs. They've got software

nowadays that can come in and almost reconstruct a a scene for you. Uh many of you know that we've got a you know Houston road in the bypass. We got Peril Road in the bypass. We got Stanford Road in the bypass. We got Lexington Road and 2168. We have four or five very complex intersections and very hightraic intersections. Anytime there's a wreck there, they're usually bad wrecks. And you know, having a drone that could go back and help us go back and get an aerial view of that that accident scene uh is an enormous resource for us. And for a city our size, uh we we need to have that capability. Uh identify critical roads. We've been doing that in the last couple of years. Like I said, just part of our restructuring process. uh creating opportunities for uh movement with inside the the police department as well uh where people are not just stagnant, you know, more specialty units and things like that. And not only not just creating opportunities, those things are needed nowadays. You know, we need an accident reconstructionist. We haven't had one in a while, but we need to get back to that. Uh just some other units. Like I said, we need a more dedicated uh narcotics unit. Uh, like I said, we do have two canines, but we probably need a detector to to help solidify that unit and get better and more results out of that. Community events coordinator, like I said earlier, community events are growing and growing, growing, and we need somebody almost to just kind of handle that. That could almost be a full-time job nowadays. Uh, a PIO. Uh again, we're having more and more events in our community, uh crashes, other things that we're probably getting to a need where we need a PIO just to deal with the press on

some of those things. Uh between Chief Don and myself, at times we're we're stretched pretty thin on some of those issues. 911, uh like I said, I talked about that just a few minutes ago. uh we transitioned them into a new chain of command after director Hayley retired. What we did was also when we uh did that we created uh supervisors what we call senior telly's down in dispatch and we want them to be more like uh a sergeant on patrol. So what we did was we tried to position those senior tellies where they are on one on each shift uh so they could be like a supervisor and that's part of something that we'll need need to do send them to some supervisor training in the future but also is say for example the B county so doesn't like a way or doesn't like maybe have something h happen with dispatch at 9:00 at night or midnight at night instead of them going just talking to all the dispatchers in there. Hopefully, we have this senior telly that their supervisor can come talk to that senior telly and handle that situation on a little bit higher level than what it was done before. So, that that was the reason we uh reorganized a little bit and created that new position for what we call these uh lead telly's or senior tellies. the attack that uh thousands and thousand tons of paperwork come across from the courthouse on a yearly basis. And a lot of times the dispatcher working on shift, mainly seconds when it comes over after after the courthouse

closes at 4:35, they're responsible for it, entering wanted persons, uh protective orders and all that. A lot of times those two senior or those two telecommunicators that are working second shift are the ones that's entering that paperwork. So we've tried to have uh what we call attack and and that's what their primary responsibility is. But usually the TAC is working shift. It's not just a standalone person. So, they're taking the 911 calls as they're entering protective orders and warrants, warrants, and things like that. So, we uh like I said, dispatch is their call volume is growing. As you add uh people to other agencies that are in the emergency service area, you know, that's just more calls that they have to take. You know, currently I think they dispatch for nine different agencies in the county. So, uh, if Junction City's got something and we've got something up here, you know, usually there's just two dispatchers are working. That's it. So, we we we definitely need to grow down there. Uh, not only do they need to grow in numbers, but we need to have a bigger facility. And as you think about a new fire department, hopefully that, you know, maybe dispatch can grow and move out there with that new fire department. Uh they have completed a home uh homeland security grant for implementing and integrating our EMD into our CAT system. EMD is emergency dispatch. So uh that was almost like two different softwares that didn't integrate. So they were over here doing one thing and then trying to

type it in and send it to the patrol officers. So hopefully this grant will streamline that and it will implement into our cash system that we got right now. Uh we gave them one of our old pool cars so they can use that for training and uh and go to different trainings, events, and meetings where they don't have to use their own vehicles. Uh, as you can see there, they uh 35,470 calls and that's what they took in through their catch system and 16,000 was just a Davville Police Department. So you can also see that the Danville Police Department carries, you know, almost half the burden of the total calls that go into dispatch. But uh so somewhere about 19,000 was generated from the other eight departments that they dispatched for. Currently right now, you know, uh I'm not quite sure when that when that slide was generated, but they were at 6,300, you know, and I'm assuming that was probably somewhere in February. So, um, we still got a lot of, uh, year left and mainly the big time of the call volume is, you know, from May to September. So, we've not even, we've not even hit the big part of the call volume. The 911 center, their goals is to hire, fill the position created by a recent resignation, update the radio and hardware software. They're applying for another grant to do that. Uh update the recorder. Uh the recorder is what records the 911 radio traffic. So if somebody calls and says, "Hey, I need a copy of what was what was said on the

radio, what was used on a phone call, that's what's on the recorder there. We would like for them to be accredited as well. So there there would be a cost to that and for them to apply to be an accredited agency. Uh also first responder status at the city county level that would be no cost but still there would be training required for that. Finish implementing a backup internet system in case of outages. So no no services or disruptive for uh responders or citizens. They're working with it to uh get that up and set up and going. Future requests need a new Martin 911 center, which we talked about just briefly. Uh create a five-year plan anticipating the retirement of Assistant Chief Matano and at least one veteran dispatcher and possibly relocating the 91 center to uh a new location. I didn't talk much about codes enforcement and parking, which I al also oversee, but our codes enforcement requests are steadily growing. And I think Josh touched on it just a little bit, depending on what you all do with garbage, you know, those requests will can increase even more. Uh, one of the things that we've talked about is increasing our numbers in codes enforcement and possibly even parking as those areas continue to grow and we we as a city continue to grow. Uh, we we get more and more parking issues and uh it just depends on what we want to do there as as we move forward.

Thank you, sir. Any questions for Chief Mayor? Do we have 14 in 911 in dispatch? Say that again. Are there 14 positions in dispatch? I think there's 15 now. The way we Okay. The way we uh with with with Rebecca's position and the the re uh reorganization, we're now down to 15 people there. Questions, comments? You're not going anywhere. 31 years and 15 as chief is uh it's a long time. That's a lot. All in Danville, too. That's amazing.

I appreciate y'all support and uh we'll we'll try to get this transitional period out of the way quickly. Remember what I said last night, right? Oh, well,

I got to stretch.

Are you ready?

See, she she's pressing human she's pressing human resource skills trying to console him, right? ladies and gents, girls and boys. Are you finished?

It's so cold out here. I know. I don't get cold. Come on. I think uh Mr. Curry is ready to get started. Young ladies, it's just been growing all day long. I'll have your attention, please. We'd like to get this meeting started again.

All right. Uh, Mr. Carrier, I think you got to go ahead and get started, sir. You'll catch on here in a minute or two. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, sir. I know y'all had a loaded day already, so hopefully I won't make this too painful. Um

this is the uh fiscal 27 budget discussion for utilities uh municipal utilities for city dam on the utilities director Marshall Carrier. Um if you recall I've recently had a um departmental update just about a month ago that covered a lot of the 2526 work that we were doing. So I won't I won't bore you with a lot of that information. is focused primarily on what's on the horizon for utilities. Um key goals and initiatives of utilities is just simply supporting economic growth, regulatory compliance, technology implementation and capital and operational delivery. So essentially as a utility we we want to step back every fiscal year at the end of the fiscal year and with with uh finances help and HR's help reevaluate where we are versus where we need to be in the in the in the coming year. So that's essentially where we are. Um but as far as this presentation is concerned some key focal points uh obviously personnel improving communications and transparency which we've done a lot of that work already over the past couple years managing expenses which is a critical aspect of any utility but essentially you know especially right now I mean the market's so volatile that there's a lot of unknown still floating around out there from the state and federal side. So, we'll talk a little bit about that. And then, um, capital closeouts and funding availability for our capital projects. On the personnel side, you know, we're still going to maintain a lot of our trainings for our operators, making sure that they're certified as a class one, two, three, or four operator. We've got some new trainees uh, in our organization um, through the apprenticeship program, which we talked about, and that's working really well. Um, and that's a

great way to introduce uh future employees to the city of Ambles's uh utility program, but also the expectations that are built into that and hopefully to build in a long-term employee at the end of the day. Um, OSHA compliance, that's a big one for us. And we've actually got uh some lockout, tagout, and shoring training scheduled for Thursday and Friday of this week for our guys in distribution and collections. And that's actually we're bringing in a third party to come in and do that training so those guys can be certified at the end of those days. Um and then of course a big player on what we do on a daily basis is our on call policy. You've all heard me talk about that. that's been real valuable and I'll talk a little bit more about that because that helps us curb some of our overtime costs. So, as opposed to that being an overtime cost that can be rolled into our on call policy. So, things that may take multiple hours to get completed that impacts your your overtime budget. You know, Randy knows what I'm talking about. Uh but that's a great way that's helped us save some projected cost on on overtime for utilities. It's worked out really well. Then of course safety committee and and vacancies that we've got currently and I'll talk about those right now. Um right now we've got a couple positions that are vacant. Our water distribution operator that we're going to interview for in the near future as well as a sewer collections operator. So to get those both apartments back up to where they need to be. We've had some retirements going on and on in the past couple months which you all are aware of. So, we need to fill some vacancies there as well as uh potentially filling the executive assistant position. Uh, and the primary I'll just say one of the primary roles of that executive position assistant position is to

help me facilitate grant opportunities. It's one of the main drivers of that position. Uh, not only just the day-to-day stuff, but I feel like two minds are better than one when we're trying to go after funds. you know, we've been pretty successful over the past several years, but there's always room to improve on that aspect, right? And one of the key aspects of that too is, you know, something to keep in mind, you know, in discussions with KIA, you know, we get some money from KIA and we've been successful with that, right? But in fiscal 27, they're projecting some some decline in revenue. So, we're trying to uh look at other other ways to facilitate some of our capital projects and be active in that exercise constantly, even more above and beyond what we're doing now. So, that's going to be a key role in that position. And then, of course, I've discussed some of the trainings already, lockout, tag out. Uh just for y'all's awareness, we we're a potential candidate for the uh we just found out about this a couple weeks ago, potential candidate for the distribution system of the of the year for the Kentucky Tennessee AWA annual conference. So hopefully we'll get that nomination and and if we get nominated, that's one thing, but if we win, that's certainly uh another feather in our cap. Communications and transparency. Um, we feel like we've done a good job in the past couple years being more transparent about our daily activities. You know, Melanie's been real helpful in doing that. Press releases, you know, the the whole social media aspect is is beneficial, right? There's a lot of things that we have going on the daily basis that that the public's just not aware of. A lot of the stuff that we do to that point is underground. So, there's a lot of things that that that you just don't see. you don't see a lot of the where that capital money goes necessarily even though it's for a worthy cause and and

usable cause. A lot of that's out of sight and out of mind at times. So, in order to uh address some of that, you know, civic awareness, you know, we want to engage folks with that civic engagement series, implementing technology, um facility tours, you know, we've had Center College come in, we've had Boil County Library come in to the water and the wastewater plant, educational opportunities for the students, whether it's grade school or high school. We want to capitalize on that. And that has twofold benefit. one educational for the kids, but it also exposes them to utilities as a whole, and maybe that's a career that they want to go into, and hey, by the way, we have this apprentichip program. So, it kind of builds on that conversation, right? Um, we've done really good about u delinquency notices and and the cuto off list. You know, that's always been kind of an an issue for utilities over the years, but we've developed an Excel sheet that helps us do that more in a real time format. So, if you were to come in and pay your bill while our guys are out doing cut offs at the end of the month, maybe if you paid your bill and that line is green, well, our guys won't turn you off, right? So, it builds a lot of efficiency in there, not only for the public's awareness, but for ours, too. So, it's been very, very helpful for us. and then level of service which I'll talk about in the next slide. So there's always been the the complicated discussion with the public from the regulatory side, from the municipal side of of what's a great way to frame up a level of service for any given utility, right? It's kind of one of those convoluted conversations where like I said, a lot of the work that we do is out of sight and out of mind. But when you when you're able to kind of frame it around there's been some articles that's come out and the latest one was in the journal of AWA that that Earl turned me on to and I've read through that and has

a lot of lot of good points and it essentially helps build the framework for a level of service program for any given utility. Right. Part of that is organizational development. We feel like we've secured that in the near term and for the following coming years. Operations and maintenance, we feel pretty confident about that right now. Customer relations, that's always improving. We feel like we're in a good spot there. Financial operations, with the help of finance and a lot of our billing software, we're in a lot better shape like some folks have already queued in on as we have above and beyond of what we have been in recent years, right? Stakeholder identifications, known and measurables, asset management, that's a big player for us, too. Uh we've worked really hard in building out a better asset management plan whether that's projecting in the tenure on the capital side or just the day-to-day asset management. And then t technical capabilities of course we're we're ahead of the game with the SCADA and then we're working right now with finalizing a cyber security policy for utilities with it. They've been real helpful in doing that. There's some other reference material, but at the end of the day, that allows us to build out Excel sheets like this right here. This was part of building, it's called a brick grant that we that we worked with the county on um building resilient infrastructure and communities, right? So, it's primarily focused on generator locations and electricity during power outages, outages, natural disasters, and that kind of stuff. So, square one is figuring out what you got and where they are. So, we developed this Excel sheet for the for the county, but also for our use also, right? It's for our benefit. And really what that does, that's just an example of some of the asset management that we need to push through

in utilities and get on the books for us and be able to identify and point to needs in the system, right? And it's always good for us and emergency responders to know where those generators are, where that power is, where the tornado sirens are located, you know, which ones need to be serviced, and so on so on. It helps build that into a community understanding of the needs. That's part of that asset management. Part of utilities too is managing expenses. So obviously that's a big part of what we do. But you get things in there like fuel costs. You know, right now I think everybody understands that when you go to get gas right now, it's quite a bit more expensive and it could go up um based on crude oil prices and and manufactured gasoline. The the market's kind of in a weird state right now. It's a little bit fluctuated from where it was, you know, this time last year for sure. And based on projections, we're not real sure where that's going to land. And fuel is not a major driver for utilities. It's essentially just fuel for our vehicles. Little bit of diesel in there for generators. But um we're thinking about that in total while we're also thinking about chemical electrical costs. Now chemical electrical costs, especially our plants, are big drivers, right? So our water plant for example the water plants and you know the annual operating budget's around $1.8 million 900,000 of that is chemical. So a 1 or 2% increase in chemicals it can be a major hit in that value right

so we're constantly thinking about that constantly thinking about electrical cost which is somewhere in the ballpark of about a third of your operational cost. So you roll that into personnel cost, you know, health care cost. So you kind of got to keep a running a running thought process on electric on electrical and chemicals and fuel because those are those uh volatile items that can impact your your budget at any given time, right? So fuel, for example, I'll go back to fuel. you know, the recent fuel increase has only come in in the past couple months about the well, really in the past couple weeks is what we're starting to see that. But the unknown is what the future holds at the end of the day. So that's that's some of the things we've got to think about. Fleet program, right now we're spending about $120,000 in fleet. So we're going back into the fleet program and re-evaluating the true needs of our vehicles for utilities. So, we've re-evaluated that number and looked at the number of vehicles that we have in utilities and we're looking at potentially trading in four of those vehicles, try to save some money under that fleet cap and not have additional expenditures on top of that same number. And we've worked well uh with the fleet company in in having those conversations and they've been real receptive to that. Overtime expenditures, I talked about that earlier. on calls help help facilitate a lot of savings on that side to help control some of the health care impacts on the overall bottom line numbers for for our personnel. And then looking at future revenues, you know, you can always point to the color increase, which is ordinance mandated, but it's always kind of a a guessing game on what you're going to actually see the actuals out of that insane value versus what you're projecting to. So, we've done well to work with finance and look at you don't necessarily want to look at the coal increase. You want to

look at your your increases over the previous fiscal years and kind of get a gauge of where you're you think you're going to end up capital project priorities. So, we felt like that we've had really good success in the past couple fiscal years of garnering grants and low interest loan money. uh whether it be through EDA grants, KIA, SRF, uh the EPA, you name it. We've we've really been been lucky to get some of those funds that we have. Again, we don't really know what the future holds for KIA. Uh the best things that that at best it's going to hold still, if not come in less, and that's statewide. So, obviously, we're in that same conversation. So we so we kind of want to with the market the way that it is, we kind of want to take a step back and look at the funds that we have in pocket now versus what we need to go ahead and get completed based on, you know, debt service and and the different factors that Lee is experienced in, but also go ahead and get the work done that we have on the books, right? And if we get more money in the future, yes, that's that's icing on the cake, but we want to keep working through the projects that we have. One of the big players of that was is the Spears Creek phase 2 project, right? We just kicked that off from a construction standpoint. There's over $7 million, right, that that we're working through and that will be on the books in the near future. So, getting through some of those conversations and some of those deliveries of projects that we've got on the books right now is is key and critical right now. um keep looking at grant commitments and looking for additional grants and low interest loans um focusing on regulatory compliance projects. So, wastewater

treatment plant um I'll go back to this slide. Sorry. Wastewater treatment plant phase 2 capacity improvements. That's that's a big player for us right now. Obviously, if you want to maintain ability to grow economically and with your customer base, you have to be thinking about that in the future. Well, that's a $17 million project. It's not something you just want to go put on put into debt, obviously. So, we've been reaching out to U. Congressman Comr's office, Senator Bledso's office. We're looking at every way possible to try to help facilitate funds for a project of that scale for us because that can be a gamecher for us economically, regulatory, you name it, that's a gamecher for us. So, that's a that's a critical project for us right now on the sewer side. And then meter replacements throughout the system. We've got some meters that are, you know, reaching their useful life and we're we're evaluating some of that conversation with train, but also again taking a step back from the cost that they've proposed to us and looking at what we can do internally with our folks. We've gotten caught up on a lot of our leaks and a lot of our maintenance items in the past couple years to the point that we can start to look out ahead and see how can we leverage our folks in house to do a lot of this work. Now, we can't obviously produce our own meters or radios for the reads, but outside of that, what can we shoulder ourselves internally and have our folks do some of those replacements? So, we're evaluating those costs too right now. And when it comes to capital, and Earl would probably agree with this too, um, you essentially have three factors when you're looking at a capital project. Are you getting capacity out of it? Are you getting regulatory compliance out of it? and are you getting reliability out of that? So the dollar best used for investing in that particular capital project is you tr want to try to check

all three of those boxes simultaneously. That's the best use of the dollar for the project. And that's really the the mentality of a capital project for utilities and most anybody's capital projects is you want to check those critical boxes because that's the dollar best spent, right? And you want to reduce rate increases to your customers. The best way to do that is try to check all three of those simultaneously. Some projects that we've got out right now, um, Cox Street water tower tank painting, which you all are aware of that INI sewer detection project, that's that basin IQ discussion that where we have the sensors in some of the key manholes to look for water intrusion into the sewer system. We're doing that right now actively. But what we're able to do with that is build out future capital projects that makes the most fiscal sense on the sewer side. Hone into those key locations where we're getting some INI into our system and address those, replace some of those areas that need to be addressed. And that in turn helps us on the wastewater treatment plant side for our capacity. Right? So for minimal cost, you're getting some good bang for your buck in being able to evaluate future capital projects that make the most fiscal sense and that also makes good regulatory sense. That $2.8 million right there, that's the county ARPA project for Junction City and Parville. We've broken that, I discussed it before, we've broken the pump stations out and then we've we've broken out the Parable wastewater plants. So we've actually already uh advertised and awarded the pump station work with Const. They're getting started now and then we're finalizing the plans for the perville wastewater plant to do by the end of this fiscal year also. So that's that total of we want to make sure we maintain the budget under $2.8

million. So, another good example of of uh good advertising and good competition is that we estimated the uh pump station work to be somewhere in the ballpark of about $1.5 million. We had we had a lot of competition that were interested originally. We only had two biders that came in on the job. One came in at $1.3 million plus, which is under our anticipated number, which is good. you're saving money right off the bat. The second the second lowest bidder was I want to say was around $1.8 million. So that's a half a million dollar swing. So it's always good to have that competition built in to those discussions because you may luck out and get somebody that's quite a bit cheaper. If it if we had to go with the $1.8 8 million that would have blown the Parable leftover money for the wastewater plant essentially out of out of the realm of possibilities. So we wanted to leverage that and that builds money back into the parable wastewater plant for its portion and so we can do some extracurricular activities on that design finalization and that construction. Um that's the Lebanon Road Clarks Run phase 2 sewer project that's getting kicked off right now which you all are aware of. We've done well with the formation of the US150 Water Utility Commission. Those con those conversations are are going very well. It's very fast conversations. Uh we've got, you know, we work with Rock Hessle County, uh Lincoln County, and Boil County, and Gary County. And we've got eight member commission, and we meet monthly. Uh right now, we've just got some seed money to get started in design. Uh we've got a consultant on board to do that. And right now our focus with that US150 commission is to go out and get funds for the project. Right? You know that's

that in itself is a very very large project. That's a 30 one and change mile long corridor that affects multiple counties, multiple water districts. So we're actively trying to seek funds on the back side of that also on behalf of the US50 water commission grand total and this is not including the 150 commission that's its own separate discussion it's its own body but current lowterest loans or grants that we've acquired and that we have in house whether that's zero interest grants or it's really low interest loans somewhere in the ballpark of either a half percent to maybe two and a half% tax, we've got about $14.8 million. So, we're in a great position right now to leverage that, get those projects pushed through while also actively seeking funds on the backside for additional funding opportunities for the upcoming fiscal years. Um, some other future projects that I discussed earlier, these the two that have the asterisk biome are are big cost projects that are not yet funded, but I'm just putting it back on everybody's radar to let you know that those are out there that we're actively getting money for. We've got line items galore for these projects and these projects within KIA right now, but you're getting into the ballpark of being so expensive that KIA can't necessarily justify sometimes allotting that type of money for one individual product in in one district when they've got so many other needs across the state. And then uh lead and copper compliance. That number is built into this number, too. But we've got some lead and copper work that we're working through right now on the inventory side that's going to build us out capital projects that we've already got money in the bank for right now through KIA.

And then a a control valve for Alders Lane. Why do I list that right now? Because that's a critical aspect for our water supply system. If that control valve goes bad in the future, that doesn't allow us to maintain proper water levels in that critical Aud Lane lane tank for our system. So that's a that's a key player for us that we want to get through also. And then I know it's a lot of information, but you know, at the end of the day, it's about projected cost and market volatility. So again, the major players for your water plants and your wastewater plant is chemicals and electrical costs. And we've been good. We've done well in in this past fiscal year and previous fiscal years within the past probably two fiscal years on the electrical side of of staying low, staying under budget. you know, we've got some technological upgrades with the wastewater plant and and the water plant that we've been able to leverage that and stay low. But then you have uh for example um projected cost rate increases from I think it was it was KU of approximately 6% in the recent months. So that that will impact us. Now, have we built in enough cushion to stay underneath where we where we want to stay in the next fiscal year? Yeah, we're we're kind of in that area. On the electrical side, chemicals is kind of the unknown where you're trying to reach out to the market, which I did. We've reached out to the market and they may they're seeing projections anywhere from 3 to 5 and a half% increases. And that's and that's the best guess that we have. So, we've done pretty well to stay within budget on those big players in those in those particular departments. And that's one of the main drivers for us. Of course, personnel also, we've done we've done really well to stay within the budget on the

personnel side. We've actually saved a little bit of money on um on overtime, for example. But we we've been able to promote from within and we've got a couple new guys into our system now through the apprenticeship program. They're doing really good. We're glad to have them. But we've done a lot of movement within utilities amongst the same headcount that we had this time last fiscal year. So we've been able to stay within or be a little bit below that on the personnel side. And then of course Randy will talk about, you know, health care costs. That's something that's out of all of our controls, you know. And to Ry's credit, and I will say this, to Ry's credit, I've learned a lot from Randy in the past two months because we sat down, myself and some others in utilities and try to drill into what is healthc care impacts, right? Because with any department, that's a that's a huge impact to your department is is even the most minute increase on the health care side. And that's even further out of the control of utilities. It's one of those things where and R I know Randy will talk about it, but you try to build that into your budget and hopefully you try to not hit those critical benchmarks and you get some credit on the back side, which is which is good if you're able to do that, but it's always the threat that you're not able to do that and then it bust your budget. So, kudos to Randy for for doing that. He's I think I have some pretty um detailed Excel sheets, but Ry's probably has me beat. Um, I've sat down with him and and he's he's he's pretty good at layering a lot of that information to where it all rolls up and actually makes sense to somebody like me. So, kudos to Randy.

Marshall, you've done a good job in your presentation. I have a question for you, though. Yeah. Where's Randy Boyd taking you out to dinner tonight? I don't know. He hasn't told me yet. He told you that. Any questions for Marshall? I know you probably for the sewer plant. So, who knew?

Yeah, we're we're looking at all avenues right now. I think uh KIA and SRF is a major provider for the entire state, right? I mean, it just is. You know, we can talk about line item grants and EPA all we want to and EDA grants, but those are harder to come by necessarily at times and therefore specific items. But the KIA side, if you if they're projecting shortfalls in in potential revenue, and that's from the state, that's from the federal government down into KIA, right? That's not just them. That's allocations from the federal side also. So, when you have somebody that's that's as substantial as that, when it comes to funding capital projects, you really kind of got to take a step back and re-evaluate where we are, what we've got in house now. How do we go ahead and leverage that those funds, get those projects fully pushed through, and then constantly trying to get more money on the backside like we always have, but sometimes you have to shift your priorities, right? With the understanding that some of those funds just may not be there.

Yes. Other questions, comments? Thank you, Marshall. Mr. Carrier, why don't we entertain entertain a motion to adjourn right now? You've been waiting all day. You're kidding. All right, Mr. Board, you're up. He said he's he said he's good with that.

I like messing with Randy. Mark should just celebr singing his praises today though, right?

Hey Randy, the mayor said you had 83 seconds. I thought we were going to talk about health insurance again. I was ready to go over that again today if you want. Let's see how many slides. So, we'll go ahead and uh if you guys want to go ahead and move through this, we'll get started.

Uh so, our department presentation should be uh fairly straightforward this year. And so, we'll try to keep this pretty top level. And then obviously we've got our compensation plan that we'll want to probably do more of a deeper dive into that here in just a minute. So uh first slide here is just to recap. This is u our department's mission statement uh along with an overview of what uh the HR's department's responsibilities are to the city and to its workforce. Um, one thing with our department, it's kind of what I feel is unique is it's very broad. I mean, and what I mean by that is we work, we touch everything. We work with all the other departments on a lot of these uh disciplines. Um, so I can't really say enough good things about other department heads on being able to work with us because I think the city's got an excellent uh management team. is very promp employee and I think that helps us do our jobs and and and we hold ourselves accountable to to support them. So I just wanted to show you a snapshot of of our mission and we try to adhere to that as well. Um as far as you know when we talk about our mission, one of the things we did is obviously the city the board you has established it strategic plan back in 2023. Uh one of the things that we did is we took a step back and said, "Okay, let's how are we going to align our department goals to help the city meet its goals?" And there's three critical areas with there uh which obviously um Marshall did a really excellent presentation and we talk a lot about uh infrastructure, water, and sewer that's on the uh top of the list for the commission. And so we all know how critical the water industry is. And so we've worked collaboratively with Marshall um and his staff to do some things there to help focus on the water industry. And then obviously parks and recreation, you know, that's a that takes up a lot of resources to really manage and support that part-time

workforce because we average anywhere from 140 to 180 part-time employees each year. Um, and so we got to make sure we have resources that they can get the employees they need to run those programs because it doesn't those programs just don't run off the seven full-time staff. It the really your nucleus of parks and recreation is your part-time workforce. And then obvious we've talked a lot this year with workforce development and retention. Um, that's going to be continue to key as we put in as we implemented our succession plan and we continue to focus on u projecting and planning for retirements. uh because those are still coming. Uh we had several this year um but we have more coming this fiscal year that uh that are known um key key positions. So as far as projects uh in 2026, you know, some of our key projects obviously we talked about that yesterday. Uh we expanded our health plan coverages last year. Uh we actually implemented u as we talk about water for example, we actually implemented our water or utility apprenticeship program. Uh we're excited with that. Uh we actually have two two employees going through that. One in water distribution, one in rehab sewer, excuse me, sewer collections right now. And those programs are actually very fast tracked, more than we thought we be. So what that basically means is u it's going to take them approximately a year and a half to get uh to a class three level which is huge for the city when it comes to building that future workforce because we all know water is also one of those areas that's uh it was a struggle whenever you lose someone at that four to five year window to get them back to the class 4 level is going to be really supplemented with this apprenticeship program. So, we're excited about that over the long term. And then, of course, we uh you know, we have expanded our BCTC leadership program. There's still work to do there, but that's gone really well. That really helped over the last

few years set the platform for a lot of what we've seen this year with a lot of our employees that have gotten promoted into leadership roles, uh especially with the retirements that we've seen. But it it doesn't stop there. It really goes all the way to the front line. we've got to build it for not only for existing retirement impacts but 5 10 years down the road. So that's an infinite project that's all realistically will probably always be on the table for us to work on over the next few years. And then um you know we've uh expanded a lot on a safety side. I'll talk a little bit about safety here, but we expanded a lot of our safety facility apparatuses around the city. um AEDs, fire um fire extinguishers, first aid kits. So, we're really trying to work on some of those things that something we were able to achieve this year. Now, as far as going into next year, um you know, I talked a little bit about this last night, but one of our goals is to formalize a wellness platform. Uh again, we'll have more coming on that. Also, an enhanced EAP platform. While we have a good basic EAP platform, it is very generalized um through our health plans now, but it doesn't really meet our needs. So, we're looking at some more in-depth things there to help uh prov you know, especially on the first responder side. And then, you know, we've talked about it for a while, but I think this is a year that we really need to kind of formalize some of our safety programs. We've done a lot on the functional side. As a matter of fact, right now, for example, we have zero open workers comp claims, which is really good. Uh we've had a really good law um year with injuries. I mean, we have most of our injuries are recordables, you know, so uh with no loss time um and so very minor treatments. Uh but again, this is a year that we're going to really focus I feel like we need to focus on that. Uh some of the things I've talked about is to like like lock out, tag out, confined

space, also our vehicle policy because there's a lot more expanded liability with vehicles obviously then you know and so we need to make sure that everything's well well protected. Um and then of you know Mike Chief Mccertie had talked about this but one of the things we have looked at is I was trying to contemplate a way that we can expand our safety uh resources without expanding additional costs to the city and one of those is we've talked a lot about it now how it looks and how it's going to be defined I don't know just yet we're still working through it but is a collaboration between the HR and the fire department on working on pro additional support for fire or safety programs like facility inspection, some of our program administration, things that you know really tr truly we don't have the resources in our department to maintain all of it. We can manage it, but some of the day-to-day things we don't have the resources. So, I think we're going to be able to to work on that and maximize what we have currently with the city to make sure those things are are established and maintained. Um, now we did this two years ago, but we'll pro this year we're going to go through and do another handbook review. I've already kind of started that exercise. That's just something, you know, two parts of that. One is obviously legal updates, making sure it uh and then also policies still meet the stakeholders needs and then just anything that we do to expand expand on those policies, whether it's through benefits, operational policies, you know, Marshall had mentioned the utilities on call policy that was something that was we implemented. So there's a lot. So those are the things that we're going to try to focus on over the next 12 months. Okay. And um so as far as longterm goes, um one of the things I had done earlier this year is I was thinking, you know, we've done a lot of city's done a lot of good things and we've had a lot of niches over the last three or four years. Kind of hit the reset button and one of the things that I did back in

December said, "Okay, where do we go from here?" And so kind of wrote out really what I feel like is a probably a two to threeyear plan of things. I know I probably bored Earl with all the stuff that I emailed him, but um so these are some of our long-term goals. Um we had talked about the employer health clinic. You know, we've tried to work on that. There's a lot of logistics where it comes with partnerships that it's kind of out of the city's control. So when I took a step back and looked at that, I realized that's probably more of a long-term goal. still we're going to work on it this year. Uh but I don't want to lose sight of it if we're not able to capitalize on that. And then of course healthc care cost containment strategies, you know, that's something that unfortunately that's an inflationary item that we're going to have to address over the long term. What that looks like, I don't know. But also our goal is to make sure that we continue to provide value to the employees with the with the health benefits that uh but also be good stewards at the same time. Um and then over the long term I you know we've talked about that collaboration with the fire fire department safety. We still over the long term eventually we will need uh a safety position especially with the the size of our workforce and the size of safety sensitive jobs or excuse me the number of those that we have in the city. Um eventually we feel like that that position will eventually need to be developed. Now, when that is, I'm not exactly sure, but I think that is one still going to be on our long-term goals. And, you know, tier three programs, we've talked a lot about that over the last six to nine months. Um, and we're really starting to see that, you know, that pie chart shift to where it's more tier three. So, those tier three programs, whatever it looks like, I don't know. But I think that's what we we're going to have to focus on the city is over the long term because eventually that will be the bulk of your workforce or will be tier three employees and and and those benefits and

those programs are just they're just different than the tier one employees and tier 2. So that's something we'll have to really address to be, you know, continue to be strong in the recruitment retention market. Uh especially for new employees coming into into local government positions. All right. All right. So, this right here is a our current organizational chart. Uh, so I do want to I am asking for a little bit a reorganization on that this year. And I'll talk a little bit about our logic behind that. So, currently you have the HR director and then you have the HR clerk. Um, you know, we have two positions. Uh, we do service almost, like I said, very broad, roughly 400 employees. So, we do run on a lean staff. Uh but we are one of the things that I would like to see this year is the HR clerk position. We have created that. Uh got Haley Donahe in that role. She's been in that role for about four years and now um has done a really good job. Has learned a lot over that time and that role has began to expand but also there's more expansion to be done on it and really that job has gone from what I would call a taskbased transactional job to more special project based. And obviously a big key part of that position is payroll. And so uh we don't talk about it a lot but really when we the HR department there we have approximately about $23 million that we administer through the department through payroll, healthc care, uh retirement reporting. And so we have a very large responsibility to make sure that those things are managed correctly. All the dollars are accounted for. we have a responsibility to Lee and her team with a lot of financial reporting and so that job t has taken on a lot of that um support for me and my role and then also we want to have more expanded

support to benefits administration for frontline employee responses like questions around claims questions around EOBS billing um this is something that I would like to expand that role to take on more support in those areas which is why I'm asking for that to be reclassified through the budget process. And then additionally, um especially on like peak days when we're talking like for payroll, um you know, other days when we have things going on, we still need to have a presence for people to be able to come in and ask general questions, whether it's employees, the general public, vendors. And so we've we're requesting to have some uh part-time administrative help uh to our department for those uh peak peak days. And then um as far as budget impacts or budget changes, this is a snapshot of what would be impacted through your legislative budget. Obviously I mentioned the reclassification for the HR clerk position. Uh also we have added in our proposed budget draft. Uh we did put additional part-time labor costs in there. Roughly 20,000 that's between HR and and engineering uh for an intern uh because there's obviously a lot of different operating department items that come out of legislative. And then as far as just the overall operating expenses, uh projected to go up about 75,000. There's a lot of different moving things. So we we've really worked on that. uh myself, Ashley, Melanie, we we all have items that come out of legislative. So, uh obviously there are some operating increases there, but for the most part, our operating budget is pretty balanced in respect to last year's budget when it comes to the legislative. Again, that that bottom number is excluding personnel. That personnel budget is separate, which we'll talk about that the overall personnel budget in the comp plan here in just a few minutes.

Okay. And then u so why do we do what we do? So really it's to have a quality workforce for public services, right? To make sure we can attract and retain those employees. Uh as you can see here, this is just kind of our snapshot. And we talked about this back in January when we did our year-end report, but I thought it was appropriate to include that uh for this presentation just to see how we plan for the future. As you can see, uh 2020 we had a really big spike in turnover that was primarily on safety personnel. Since that time, we've been we've had some es and flows, but the city has done a good job of uh identifying and reacting to those things to, you know, keep a high retention among its workforce. Uh for this past year, our retention rate was at 94%. Obviously, we wanted to be higher, but that is um you know, higher than what you see in a lot of other municipalities. The ones that we could get data on, I think average there is probably more around the 10 to 15%. Um, again, I think that only solidifies the focus when we talk about the uh tier three programs because that becomes more and more of a focus over the long term. And then, of course, this is just a snapshot of safety personnel. Obviously, we can see we've had a little bit of peak and police turnover. Again, a lot of those are out of the city's controls. A lot of those are personnel, personal factors that don't really impact the workplace. But again, you still have to identify and adapt and address those matters. And then lastly, this is a snapshot of our workforce u what I call our SWAT analysis. So these are the things that we've identified that we feel like the city's facing. And so our goal here when you look at these things is take your weaknesses, identify those, make those strengths, uh take your threats and make those opportunities. Uh again you can see I have tier one healthc care uh

retirements on that list inflation is there as well but I think we can um identify those areas and make those u opportunities for for the future. And then of course you know when you really look at the city's strengths you know it's city's very well positioned to address these items over the long term. Uh you know we have a very competitive compensation package. Total rewards is really strong. Uh it's a benchmark health plan. Um you know not only with the coverage but also the the value of what is covered under the plan as far as medical services. Um that wellness platform that we talked about will only expand that. And then of course um you know we are very employees are as I mentioned earlier your managers are very employee centric. I don't think that ever gets talked about enough. I know I see it on a daily basis working with them and so I think a lot of credit goes to all the department heads to really understanding because they've got all their key areas they have to focus on just like the HR department but they also have to manage people and so I think that goes a long way in showing that we have positioned ourselves for a good good future. Okay. So, uh, questions in regarding our budget proposal any

I just wanted to comment. I wanted to thank the department heads for trying to seek part-time positions to fill in needs um versus a full-time with benefits. So, uh, thank you for doing that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And we've tried to be creative with that to the greatest extent because we all know how diff the cost component of just adding that singular position is u so if we can do part-time layer I think that's a win-win for for everyone if there's a lot of people seeking part-time positions or retirees with good experience. So

well and I and I thought about that as Earl was giving his presentation earlier when he was talking about retirees coming back to the workforce. it it actually correlates cuz you know people are living on fixed incomes retirement but inflation is not keeping up with you know like your pensions and things are not keeping up with the rapid inflation so there is opportunities for us to explore that I think we've seen a lot of that with like your police SRO's as well and those have been those that they have really filled a good gap with your retired police officers other questions or comments on to the All right, you guys ready? We'll move on.

All right, so now we'll get into compensation proposals. We've worked kind of diligently through this and we've come to we feel like we have a very strong proposal for the upcoming budget year. So, we'll go ahead and get right into it. So, when it comes to compensation plan objectives, these are your our primary objectives when we're looking at compensation. Obviously, we want your base salaries to be very the city's base salaries be competitive with the market. Uh, keep pace with cost of living adjustments. Also, that compensation model, we want to make sure that is it is equitable. Uh, and what I mean by that, and I'm probably going to stop here and just talk about that for just a second, is when we talk about compensation, it it's we want to make sure it's fair, it's equitable. We have a have a system on how to identify, calculate new hire salaries, promotions, reclassifications. Um, and so all that has to come into play like our experience, scales, all those variables come in um, and have to be thought out whenever we're developing a compensation plan. And then of course, you know, long-term sustainability. We talked about payroll. Payroll is unique in the fact that it's a liability, not an expense. So, for example, if we add, you know, say half million to the budget for payroll costs, that's half million you have to maintain over the long term as opposed to if it's a capital project, that's an expense, right? You you purchase at one time. And so all those things we have to think through whenever we're developing a proposal to bring back to the board. And then obviously we also want to be aware of like unique market changes uh and adapt to those particular demands. Um whether it's you know we know there are certain areas that probably over long term have to be looked at that you know have different demands in the market uh based on recruitment certifications things of that nature. So we want to be cognizant

of those things and we try to look at those throughout the year um and be aware of that. So all these again all the I'll say all that with comment that these are all the things that go through our head when we're developing a proposal versus just sheer numbers and then our strategy for this year. So it's really three parts again. We conduct an updated market study. Uh we've actually got into a pretty good structure with that. We have Hannah resource group on retainer now uh year round and so it really has been a cost saver for us over the long term. So we actually go in really every year December, January. Uh we start that exercise in January completed or excuse me December completed in January. Uh we just have them do a market review of our data every year and it gets it gets easier every year in regards to they understand our compensation structure. Uh they understand the history. They got historical data for the city and it makes it really easy and it's done objectively third party without any bias. We turn on the data to them and they simply bring it back to us for analysis uh every year. And by having a retainer, it saves us approximately $30,000 a year on compensation. We pay $12,000 a year for that contract, but it saves us about approximately 30,000. So over the last three years, we've saved about $100,000 by having them on a retainer. And then of course, I mentioned compensation equity. That's always a key for us. uh just skills I've mentioned our experience scale. We have um you know a 27year scale for non-hazardous and a 20ear scale for hazardous um that has been key to to maintain because uh again it keeps equity in your system and then sustainability. Um, you know, obviously there's a lot of factors that come into play. You know, inflation, labor market

demands, additional labor labor costs, and then some of your variable costs into your budget such as overtime. All and we'll talk a little bit more about those, how those broken out, but all those things we have to look at, not only the fixed costs for salaries, but all those variable costs when we're trying to bring a proposal to the table. Okay. Um, so this is just a snapshot of your workforce statistics where you're at today. Obviously, we've got about six or seven positions that we're I think seven right now that we're currently actively recruiting for. Uh, this just shows you where the city's investing as human capital in these areas. And then budget impact. So for this year, every year we have to look at what's going to impact our personnel budget. Well, obviously one of the first things on there to look at is your CRS rates. Um I'm happy to say that they're going down again for 27. Um and both hazards and non-hazards. Um actually a projection was put out this year which is positive news for that fund. They are projected to marginally decrease all the way through 2040. Uh half of a percent a percent per year. Of course, it's not guaranteed, but it does give us a larger bigger picture of uh I guess being able to take some of the liability off the system by seeing those uh those rates potentially reduce. And I think part of that is when CRS broke out to its own financial advisory board and I think the last statistic is they were roughly 65 to 70% funded their other liabilities, which is really strong. And so that's what's driving I think what's driving some of those rates down as well. And then of course your cost of living rates. This is a snapshot of the last five physical years uh for your DLG rates. You can see you know like when Earl's having his economic presentation we talked about inflation. While the total is decreasing we still have to factor in that that's a decrease on top

of whatever is there. So like from 23 you have 7%. cost of living going up to only 2.7 that's 2.7 on the year-over-year that's already seen there's really last five years you're looking at about 20% when it comes to cost of living and and then the cost variables to your personnel budget uh you know obviously there's a lot there like I mentioned salaries overtime part-time salaries you've got health care costs you've got workers comp uh you've got uh your payroll taxes which is your social security in Medicare, uh, you know, that's 7.65% that you have to match for every payroll dollar that you pay out, whether it's regular wages, overtime, or incentive pay. All these things have to be calculated when we're looking at compensation, um, you know, sustainability and and again, that all factors into our proposal. Now, with all that said, it's a lot of information. So now let's look at what are our options that we feel like are presented to the city for compensation this year. Three primary options and I'll go through these is number one is an experience step increase. Uh that means you would leave your salary bands the same. Um but and every person would move up one step to the next year's tier on experience step. If the city chose to do that model, that would be roughly a cost increase of $188,000 to the budget. Uh, average annual increase is $810 per employee. Average increase is 1.27%. Now, option two would be to move your salary bands, increase the ban by 2.7% which is your color rate for FY27. And then it also moved the employee to the next year's step on their experience scale to maintain that equity. Um if you did that the cost impact of that would

be across all funds would be 500 approximately $548,000. Uh the average employee increase would be $2,300 and average percent increase would be 3.8%. Now, your option three on the table would be to adjust all your pay grades to market level. And when I say market level, we're talking base paid market level. Uh that cost, and again, this is an estimate to do that across the city, you're looking at roughly approximately $1.7 million. Now, what is our recommendation? Our recommendation, and I've had a lot of conversations about this. We feel like the most logical recommendation would be option two, which would means increasing your salary grades by 2.7% all your bands, applying the experience step scale to every employee. Um, if you did that, that would give you an average increase of 3.8% across all the employees. Now, there are variables to that. So I do want to clarify that and there are factors that impact the employees increase. Number one is there the amounts of the pay pay grades after you adjust them mean your minimum maximum dollar amounts uh whether you're on non-hazardous or nonh hazardous scale um the pay grade spread and an annual step increase and the employees experience level. Um, it's a lot to So with that, what I did is I put together a snapshot sample of what it would look like for an average employee. So you can see the visuals of that. So right here is so for example, if you had a say you have a current pay grade of 40 to $60,000. If you went with status recommendation, that stat current step increase for that job is $740.74. That's the amount per step each year

they go up in their experience. Uh if an employee had 10 years of experience on the current grade, their base salary would be 40, excuse me, $47,47. Now, if you implemented what we're recommending, that salary band would go from 40 to 60 to 41 616, which is a 2.7% increase. The employee would go from 10 years to 11 years because they're gaining an additional year of experience. and their salary would go to $49,448. That would be a 4% increase with an annual increase of $2,041. Um, and again, all those variables I mentioned would change based on the grade, but this is a consistent methodology. Uh, it's actually the formulary that we've used the last two fiscal budget cycles. Uh, we did, just to clarify, we did a 2.9% last year using the same methodology. we feel it works. Uh and the reason we we want to clarify the uh sustainability and the equity is for example if you did move this employee up say 11 year step you hired a lateral employee a similar situated employee that had 11 years if we don't make those changes then essentially another employee could come in with the same level of experience making more money or if you promoted someone and those are things that we want to avoid. We want to make sure that it's fair and systematic across the board. And so I can't really emphasize that uh equity enough when we're looking at our compensation models.

Can I ask a question for you for u and it may be where it has needs to be. I know you talk about or look at tier three people in hazardous and nonhazard. Well, but anyway, in the in the hazardous, you have a 20-year ban. Do you need to have a 25 year ban or does that make it worse than Well, we that's to be determined and I think that's a great question and we've talked about that. So, when we created the original ban, you have so many 20-year employees in there.

Uh I think you do want to look at that over time because tier three hazardous is now 25 years. Now the one thing to be aware of is if you say you took this for example if you took this salary scale here you spread it from 20 to 25 years what happens is your year-over-year step would decrease okay but it would allow avoid employees hitting their cap maximum too early um I think it was just a question I know

no it's a great question and be transparent it's one that I've struggled with how do we adapt over time the tier the has is pretty set right in 27 years. So do that's probably something we have to discuss and look at over the long term is that even the tier I mean even nonattress is really affected too because there's more 35 range. Yeah, you're you are approaching the percentage of employees where we need to revisit that all those policies tied to tier three. Um and what what I would suggest to you is so so couple couple comments R go back one one slide to that uh one more

the option three over there on the right that is not necessarily a true uh uh number against the market. We we in terms of base pay base pay we have maintained our position with the market. However, when you consider the benefits, that's kind of where what we consider even even with where we're at right now. So, we're not nec that's that's not necessarily a true behind the market number. Not behind the market.

Correct. Correct. We we are balanced with the 2.7%. The other thing is is you'll remember the slide I showed uh early in the day um where you have senior employees in in the workforce more so now. So when we're talking about uh our pay grades, you're seeing an increasing number of people that are at the top of their grade, right? And and so because of that, um we do need that that's one of the things we do want to consider the the top grade employees as well as your entry level employees having a different really retirement system, frankly. Um where sickly doesn't roll into the retirement system in the same way. So, what what we what we're suggesting with this compensation plan this year is to uh get through this year, we know that that you're going to have a few hundred variance here and there to make sure that everybody gets the minimum of 2.7%. So, those at the top of their grade, um they they we want to make sure they get to 2.7. So some of those employees that are below that top of the grade um will get a couple couple of few hundred more in different positions which is why the average is at 3.8% instead of straight 2.7. So there's a little bit of variation be created because you do have different experiences saying that then I think this year as we get through this budget cycle and as we get through uh establishing this budget in the computer and we move into the fall I think once we get past our labor that we have to do this summer in order to transition our budget the uh October November time frame I think Randy and I need to go back and and revisit all those policies tied to the retirement system, tied to to the the tier of of your employee that that you are, and try to come back and

make sure we we have that conversation with you all so that you can give us good feedback on what our structure needs to be long term. I think the fall kind of that before December and that gives us then a chance next year to uh align the policies with Hannah to make sure our our our scales are correct and then get in the budget process next year with a little bit of an updated um u grading system approach if you will. And so we would anticipate making the significant changes in our retirement internally and how we treat some of those new employees versus your senior employees this year. I I think by the end of the calendar year we should go through that exercise internally and present some of those options to you all and and to gather your feedback

because I think you know if they time and they won't save their weal that they don't save their vacation sit as much because not a good think the city has to think out of the box.

And I think as we're having this discussion, I think it's important to know that that's a not a city policy. That's a statutory policy that's set for the the retirement years. And I apologize, I have my slide that I guess it got emitted, but there was a slide here on the compensation study results. And to Earl's point, the average study results showed that on all your non-hazardous jobs, the city was at with 97% of the market. That's just on base pay. So to Earl's point, um that just shows when we make it up with the compensation, we really are at market on a lot of those positions in the total package. Now, that's setting the tier three challenges aside, right? We're just talking sheer benefits, but um I think the average range in there was somewhere between 7% when you average everything out. But, but again, that's just on base pay, not your total compensation package because when we do the compensation study, we're looking at just salary levels. The the compensation u system that is in place is 5 years old. It served us well postco as we've transitioned with the inflation. It's been able to keep up with inflation. Commission's had the resources to to correct us towards the market. And it's definitely time to revisit that to make sure it's current to make sure that we're not, you know, we we've talked about that tier one for the last couple years, but now when you look at the number of employees in tier one, you're you're exceeding 60%. And so it's definitely time to to have that conversation.

Meaning tier three,

tier three, sorry. Yeah. And I will say this too, it's we, you know, whatever we end up with as far as a long-term strategy, you know, some other municipalities have already some of your larger municipalities, I've seen some of their policies, they've already kind of started to be aggressive to adapt to tier three, whether it's, you know, matching the deferred comp or whether it's sick leave payout. There's all kinds of different ways to look at it. So, I think it's our tool's point. It's time for us to hit the reset button now. Focus on that into the future. So, then we'll go ahead and kind of So, that's our proposal. This shows you how that compensation methodology will be applied to an employee. So, then now we want to kind of talk about the actual cost impacts and what that looks like to the plan. So this is a just a snapshot of the different compensation models. If you again I mentioned if you were to just to do the experience step, you're looking at 188,000 in base salary increase across all your funds. Um, and then if you were to go to the the option that we're recommending, you're adding an additional 360,000 in investment for that to that and that's and the total will be the 548,000 for the compensation model to the personnel uh cost. And as Earl mentioned to you over the last few years, this shows you the city's investment in the personnel. Not only and now there's a lot of variables doing this. It's just not salary. There's healthcare, there's staffing increases, there's overtime, some of your variable cost, CRS rates, but this is your snapshot of your personnel budget. Um, right now, currently for fiscal year 23 is or excuse me, 26 is 23.1 million. Um, you know, projected to go roughly 24.072 with the recommendated changes we're

making. that includes compensation as well as your your healthcare renewals uh for that we just discussed uh yesterday. And then this is your cost breakout. So you really got to look at it by fund type. And so this is your cost by fund with the recommended changes. Obviously you can see a lot of your your uh personnel cost comes out of the general fund. Obviously there's a lot that comes out of the utility fund and then you have parks and wreck which you know the general fund supports a lot of you know, operating costs for the parks and rec system or excuse me, fund. And then these are all your other funds throughout city. Now, this is what it would look like as far as actual increase to per fund. Again, you're seeing a lot um go into the general fund and then I think you're approximately a little over 300,000 general fund increase roughly a little about 110 to the utility fund which to Marshall's credit he and I have talked a lot about utility fund that one's I know that's unique and has it own revenue generated those funds stay isolated he's done a lot of good things organizationally to to really mitigate those cost uh which would not impact the utility fund uh per se. And then this is your cost comparison over the last from last year uh to this year. Um so the bar chart on your left is your current u cost by fund. The middle one would be if you were to do no changes, meaning those no changes are the draft personnel budget that we've projected with healthcare but not any salary increases. So the bar chart on the far right would be all-encompassing of your new healthcare rates and your uh compensation recommendation for the new year. As as I mentioned earlier, you can see the general fund slightly is kind of is going up, but then you can see your

utility fund is rel staying relatively flat. Uh parks and w has a slight increase, but all your other funds for the most part uh would stay flat. So again, there's a lot of variables with that. Uh, you know, one of the things we try to do every year when we're putting together the budget is we we have known what our known fixed insurance premiums are, but we try to those your healthcare claim dollars, which are your variable costs, those move around depending on where claims are projected to come from. So that's why you're seeing like for example, storm water, a little bit of decrease there. It's not necessarily your base labor cost, it's all those other variable costs that come into play. And then uh utilities again is is pretty stabilized because they've made a lot of organizational changes there to help offset that. But then you know there's no increases on the general fund side. Okay. And then this is a snapshot of the overall compensation adjustments since 2022 that the city has shown it has invested in. And again these are base salary adjustments. This is not anything but your base salaries and it showed that the city has continued to invest in in it staff. If you notic in fiscal year 24 is quite a bit higher. That was if you recall that was the year that we took that extra step and invested in police and fire which has served huge dividends to those departments. Not only retaining the staff but being able to get a lot of good recruits and laterals. We we've been very successful on the recruitment market for police and fire. And I think the city has positioned itself well, brand itself as a place that first responders want to come work work for. Now, obviously there's more than just pay, but that that really starts that conversation. And so with the recommended changes, this I like this pie chart because this really shows you what encompasses your personnel budget for the city. 51% of

that is your base salaries. 19% is health care. And then you have all your other variable factors such as your retirement contributions, uh workers comp, uh your variable labor costs, that would be part-time labor, over time, um all those things that uh we try to project every year, which I will say one of the things we've tried to do this the last two years is really try to be cognizant with our u overtime projections because of all the natural disasters that we've seen throughout the in Kentucky in our area that has impacted u has impacted overtime dollars. Uh while those things are hard to predict, we've tried to be uh cognizant of predict uh projecting what we think those overtime dollars are going to be. Uh whether it's locally or supporting other communities with overtime. Uh that's a that's something I just wanted to point out because that is a very big uh moving target that we try to plan for. So are good, Mr. Scary.

What's that? We thought the purple one was workers comp.

Workers comp. Yeah. No, it's not. If it was, I'd be talking a lot more about Thankfully, that's uh that's health insurance. Workers comp is low on your list there. So, thankfully, it's a it's a small 1% of your budget. So, our premiums keep driving down. So, I think uh we actually just did our proposal for next year. So, we'll see what those rates look like. But again, you know, it is uh again, these are all the things that we have to think about when we're trying to look at our budget. And then also, it it really drives that sustainability discussion uh with compensation. And that's how a lot of that gets factored in when we bring back a proposal for the the new year. So,

I guess my question would be 45 chart 89. Which one?

Go back. Which one? What's the name of the char? Yeah. One more. One more. There you go. No, not that one. This one. There you go. Okay. the general fund. It's what's kind of I know it's going to be the biggest one, but general fun to keep on handling this type of an increase. This is 16. That is a good question.

You have to be aware, right, that your general fund is defined by personnel and by expense. Um also buy revenue, right? Um your occupational taxes support uh your general fund, your property taxes support your general fund, um your insurance premium taxes support your general fund. Um, but you do have to as we make these compensation recommendations and suggestions and um, you know, you hear the request for human personnel, you all do have to consider we're at $16 million for the the general fund in personnel costs alone out of a 24 approximately million dollar budget.

$24 million in the general fund alone. Right. So it is, you know, we we do present um to you strategies that we consider are sustainable, right? Sure. Randy and I talk about it and Earl and I talk about it. Randy and Earl talk about it.

Um but when we present the strategy, that's why we say we we didn't present the recommendation. It's go all the way market, right? or you know in some years when some people request five employees and Earl and Randy you know in conjunction with these conversations are like well maybe maybe we do too right maybe maybe you hold off on hiring till mid year um but it is always should be back of your mind and back of our minds it does have to be sustainable because once you hire that employee you have to go forward with the mindset that they are here for 30 Um, and it is it you know it's a substitute

on page 41 chart number 82. Go back to I think you have to give me titles. I don't have I don't have I don't have page numbers. Actually I have I'm sorry. I apologize. What page may I'm sorry? Oh yeah, right there. Right there. Gotcha. It presented that good in my mind. I saw Okay, that's one we cannot afford right now. That's almost three times.

But also that to Earl's point too is we are that number does not again that number is not factoring in the total benefits package. It's just factoring in quantitative numbers of salary dollars. Oh, that's

And also I think, you know, kind of piggyback off leasing here with staffing request, these numbers that we're presenting is your base liability next year without any staffing additions. That is just if you were to to go the direction that we're recommending, that's your base liability. And the the suggested or asked for for new personnel was how many new positions? Um I was actually putting down a staff was talking about I think seven or eight total. Seven or eight. Yeah. I think the bulk of those are in your general fund. Yes.

Y not in addition to the 5 48 increase that we are I don't have the the numbers I don't have the numbers right in front of me but I did calculate them as we were sitting in here and having presentations that gave home me to the exact number but it was the request and all-encompassing was probably when you factor in health care for new employee payroll taxes retirement I think all those requests combined equal somewhere around between 7800,000 you said 70 to 100,000 7 78 800,000 all accounts. Yes.

700. And that number is only Yeah. Well, no, that's that's the that's just the if you add up all the total staffing requests across all the departments is somewhere in the 7 to 800,000 range. All encompassing on total labor cost on top of this. This is not including any staffing requests. So if you think about it right, one employee depending on their pay rate could equal $100,000. Correct.

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So So again, that's where we have to balance all that. So because what we're requesting right now, the numbers we're showing is your base personnel last year plus actually I think this slide may be the easiest to look at. Let me see if I can. Yeah. So right here, if you look at this bar chart, the two on the right, uh the far right is the total labor costs with the recommendation that that we're presenting for next year. The one to the just to the left of it is your base liability. Uh excuse me, uh no where it says no changes, that's your base liability next year. So which and that doesn't include any um any additional positions. That's just your existing full-time head account. Um and then obviously the far right is what your personnel costs would be if you were to add uh the salary increases. So we will as we go towards the the baseline operating budget, what we'd like to do is proceed with the option two as as the beginning proposal to see where we sit um to see kind of what So we're going to be working uh the rest of the week on on trying to get that draft operating budget with option two uh proposed in um and just just see where we sit. and and if and and um because I mean unless you all have push back on on that tactic towards raises, the goal is is to do a 2% raise as a minimum for all employees. Um some employees will get slightly more than that with the experience base structure that we have.

No, your presentation is good. It's great really. It gives us a whole lot of information. Just you remember every year at this point I get lazy because the numbers just like start smacking face. I know these numbers once we say yes we can never go backful.

Yeah. And and we again we all talk about it ourselves as far as like we have to be good managers and good stewards to make sure whatever we're presenting is sustainable and it's it's a wise decision. Obviously we want to do everything we can but also at the same time we got to know that we've got to be good stewards and make sure that we're we're sustaining that. So right now right now on the utility side, Marshall and I have talked about um he's got what seven vacancies and and so what we've talked about is um how many of those are you actually should we lose some right now to attrition so that so that in the future you can add back if you need them? I mean is that is this a good time to to drop drop one or two of those positions to attrition or not? That's a challenge. He's going to try to answer that for us.

But um so that that's your strategy so that you're not not in a situation where you you have to make tough decisions

tied to budget. You know, we're not just wanting to to necessarily grow for for no reason. But um when we were having lunch today, we were, you know, not a meeting. We just have much staff and commissioners. We've not validated any policies or any uh numbers. I say that the Twitter did not have a quorum, but we made a statement that we trust staff. And so for those who are watching this, these are just good questions we have to ask. We still trust staff. Okay, make sure you all understand that. This is not often. Please anybody see us understand once you sign on the dotted line and you sound on the dotted line of won't be real careful but we do trust and we do appreciate being here all day today and they say you like well you know we want to be good stewards and and I know for me I appreciate this question because it holds us accountable to make sure that we're being good stewards to the to the public and to the workforce and uh no I appreciate appreciate those questions because your questions are great. Like when you talk about the tier three program, we know it's a challenge. We've talked about it, but the responsibility falls on us to figure out how to address it over the long term.

I think it's also a balancing act, too, with you know, Daniel's growing. You can't say where you are

or how can you have handle all that you have. And you know, I I know it's money, but you also have to balance it somehow. We have to progress the size or you know the capacity of our local government to react to needs inside of the service boundary. And so that's a lot of times misconstrued. Folks that don't understand necessarily what is involved with those services will will look and say the city's getting big or the city the city the the function of city government capacitywise has to complement the population that is requiring service inside its boundaries. That is not necessarily the population inside your service boundary. So you have you have 25,000 cars a day at the intersection of Houstonville Road and the bypass. 25,000 cars a day. Now that means that our police force, our fire, our utilities, our public works has to have the the internal capacity to react to issues caused by that. So, so that's the tight rope that you're trying to walk with the local government across the board that you're trying to have enough police officers or enough firefighters to handle those emergencies or those issues and enough public works employees to maintain the road while u not while in a in a way that is sustainable based on your local economy. And that's a hard thing. Look at the I mean ice storm just ice storm look at the number of employees we have to handle what we handled

and how well it's handled versus a huge city that might not handle it as well. So that's the credit of employees, but you can't over it's a it's a definitely a tight rope and and u you know we appreciate the feedback um both from citizens and all all the way to our businesses to the city commission making sure and and I know you all listen to it too and and uh it's a tough it's it's a tough tough thing. It's not an easy easy thing

and as the general fund funding increases doing these types of things will be a little easier always be tough to do a little easier

and I think when you talk about like future staffing plans you know we all know there's and I mentioned that I think it's probably important just to reiterate that that let me go back here to um so when we look at where was it at my department so We look at one of our challenging or we we are it's lean staffing in critical areas. We know that we've identified it. How do you how do you address that? Because you know that that's a again that's a cost and that's where we have to be really strategic on those points of knowing where you need to invest your additional staffing when you have the capabilities cuz again Leo you add a job we got to pay for it from there on out. So we have to be really strategic on how we how we identify those areas. So and that's that's a tough conversation because we know it's if you really look at most departments you could probably argue especially your field departments they probably are lean by comparative to the volume of work that they do. I don't think anyone could argue that again I say thank you all for the good presentations all day today. All right. A lot of good information are ahead of the curve. We don't play defense very often. So, I just have one more slide. We'll wrap this up. This is just our long-term beyond. So, how do we look at this? goes back to what I what I just mentioned is like we're constantly looking at our organizational analysis of where to align our resources like through reclassifications, job additions, uh new roles, etc. And then, you know, we're going to continue to look at everything annually. I mentioned we have the retainer program. We've we've set up a good platform as long as that is the direction the board wants to go. That's the the the plan that we have in front

of us is review day, excuse me, review day every year and then just maintain our pay equity and uh continue to look at the total compensation package, not just pay. I think it's important to know that reiterate again, we're talking pay and benefits and of course the tier three program. But we we we say we want qualified skilled and highly trained employees and to me this is what you have to go to begin to maintain and to maintain recruit maintain and retain those types of employees. We're blessed. Yep. Agreed.

All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time. Uh if you don't have any more questions for Randy, we'll just remind you next Tuesday you have a budget meeting at 100 pm um same location uh to cover our draft operating budget and revenue um then that Thursday, April 2nd, you have your community agency budget meeting. That will be at 8:00 a.m. Um and that will be a marathon all day. We'll have some breakfast, lunch, and dinner is on our own. Drunk.

Okay. Uh the the chair would like to entertain a motion to adjure. Y'all ready to go? Do we? All right. Is there a second? Second. Thank you. Well, all those in favor of journey say I. I. Those opposed. Motion carries.