City Council - Regular Meeting

self that building could potentially have as selfuring. They had a different pool of employees, right? So, it wasn't just the city of Rock Mountain being self assured. It was the city of Rock Mountain in conjunction with I'm making this up until the other. And that large number of employees means that any one individual claim that may be high gets diluted relative to the total. So, it doesn't have any ad impact to the the members who are part of that. It's lower. So that was the advantage to go into the Mark III larger pool.

And what I will say is that staff is uh currently having conversations with other vendors uh looking to uh bid our health insurance may stay with uh self-insured possibly go into even a larger pool but we're having those conversation. The issue is with regard to this fiscal year a couple years ago in the previous administration the city went to a calendar year for our health plan. So, our health plan isn't uh up until sometime uh in the in the fall for January 1, but we are currently having those conversations and potentially looking at re-evaluating the broker as well. So, we may we may um have a savings. That is that would be the goal. Uh again, we won't know until we we put it out the bid, but that's our plan.

Yeah. So, you're proposing that we make a 1% transfer from our enterprise funds during the course of operations as part of this budget, which is down from a little less than 3% from what our historical numbers been. Correct. What does that in whole dollars and and and what does that mean in terms of, you know, pennies per hundred on the Elorium tax rate? Because, you know, kind of where Charles was taking this a little bit too. I mean what do those mean? What's 2% of that mean in whole dollars and what does that mean in terms of cost on at Valoria?

Well, I think the cardinal rule is to not do math on the spot. However, uh Cheryl is these are the questions that we want and we'll be able to provide that. Well, I don't need it today, but I I I would like that because you know particularly as you look at you know Senate Bill 1076 uh you know if that comes pass the money's got to come from somewhere. Uh if it doesn't come to pass, there's another question. I mean, you know, maybe we're building more fund balance in our utility funds and that's intentional. That's great. Um you know, it just there's a lot of moving parts and I'm just trying to understand what the component pieces are as we go into the conversation. So sooner would be better than later.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have our first meeting uh on Wednesday, so we'll be prepared to do any calcation that you

That's all I'm asking. Uh I will say to your point, you know, if it's removed from one one spectre, it has to come uh from somewhere else and that's what we'll be looking at. But the goal for us was to present something that was balanced that we felt like was workable and then give the council view on the side what our priorities would be uh moving forward. Uh one thing that was not specifically addressed in the PowerPoint, uh but I do want to bring to your attention, I think it is in my uh budget message, but there were some talk about the downtown grants that we were doing. Uh my budget does include uh the two uh of those organizations, the memorial hospital as well as uh the Duke's property that is currently still in the budget and the other two are not. But if it if we're able uh to do that, I would really like to include those other two projects as well because when we were developing the uh budget, not had a conversation with the owners of those two projects at that point in time, but I later realized that they have also uh invested uh substantial funds into their project even though it wasn't uh you were able to see uh by the eye. uh they've spent money on architecture, they spent money on designs and plans and so uh that's a conversation that we'll have but I rather you hear directly from them. So I've asked the owners of those two projects to come to some of our shops that way you can ask them questions directly but if it was all possible I like to include them as well.

So regarding no regarding the cost allocation study do we have a timeline when we can expect to get that? Uh right now it's pretty much uh I would say it's about 75% uh complete. We're currently adding the personnel figures and some square footage information, but we actually hired an outside uh uh person to start that study, but with the addition of uh Miss Kimberly, uh that is a part of her task now. So she'll be finishing that up. Any questions?

Well, again, uh thank you all for giving me this opportunity to present my recommended budget. I also want to thank all of the staff that was involved even though it was a lot of work on the finance and budget team. Uh every department head throughout the city uh contributed to this because they did exactly what I asked them to across the board. Every department head came in uh less than where we are currently for our current revised budget. Uh they were negotiating. I think every department across the board was able to get uh most of the things that it takes to keep the organization running even though we are running at much lower levels from a personnel standpoint and operational standpoint. I'm representing the budget but again it took a lot of of people a lot of people in the kitchen to put this thing together and so thank you to all of you as well.

Thank you. So I would like this is my first budget. So I do have Thank you for all the time and effort the whole team put into it. Um as far as breaking it down that happens in these work sessions, right? because I'm looking at like the Tar River and the spend is like 6.7 million and other things that I would like to dive deeper into and seeing if we can maybe um get some savings out of them before we we start looking at raising property taxes.

I don't know if we're going to find any savings in the Tar River transit plan. uh right now across the all of the operations that we have that is the one uh that is currently operating at a deficit. So, I don't know how much savings we could have at that, but I do address that in my budget message. That's something that we'd have to evaluate in the future. Uh, federal funding and uh, state funding is tied to that. That something that we couldn't just adjust immediately, but it's something that is definitely we have marked from a staff's perspective and something I wanted to specifically address to you in my message. It's something we have to look at uh, possibly uh, changing in the future.

Yeah. So um I guess you could talk and you could share with us like when can we do the restructure it um and still be in compliance with the state and yeah that's we have to evaluate uh other organizations that have done uh the study that I would like to do I think it takes anywhere from six uh to nine months I think uh Kimberly was involved with one in her former employer uh how long did that take about nine months about nine months and so again uh this budget process we didn't have time to do that just now. But that's something that we definitely have to look at cuz right now it is operating data loss.

Yeah. Cuz I I know back I think it was around 2022 then we received some money to do study on a um on demand service. When we received some um money to do a ondemand like a Uber style micro micro transit. Yeah. We got a $3 million grant for that. I don't know where that city. I guess this is yeah limbo if it's not dead because I've seen other cities do these on demand and they eliminated their bus service and they was able to um you know be more efficient and I don't know about efficient uh because I know the ones that have done it locally

I can speak to that even in our internal plan the cost actually go up. Yeah. Now the efficiency of that is greater. The impact to the rider, the c ultimate consumer is better in terms of outcomes. Uh but it's not cheaper. Yeah. And it's important to know that nobody's transit in America makes none. Correct. Nobody's transit. You know, that's a I'm missing something somewhere. Um

to my knowledge, I I that's what I was going to state to him. Even in cities where they have trams and subways and metros and if you look at our word and what I would love when we start talking about that we got a parking lot full of vehicles that stay parked you know um that are not employed um by anybody and we still have gaps in service and um and I think what the philosophy has been for most governments is that transportation was an essential service for people who did not have the um benefit of transporting as I guess prices around the world increase if they ever stabilize again public transit is more important than that issue is how do we do it and how do we do it for the most reasonable price and the most efficient out there with the greatest amount of service

and I think part of that is re-evaluating uh our current contract uh because I feel like uh when you have these man contracts, there could be opportunities for them to have more skin in the game and not have that liability fall directly on the city because right now while they manage the contract, if they have an accident is typically on on the city. And so what I want to do is have a full uh study to evaluate that, find out if we can find some efficiencies there to help support it because like Councilman Blackwell said, there's a very few and far between uh transit system that actually make money, but we're not in a position for the city standpoint to continue to supplement it uh based on our current financial position.

And correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of them do um the causes are offset by grants. I really can't speak for the other municipalities at this point standpoint, but I I do want to evaluate as far as grants um for us in the past. Have we received grants to offset the um the cost of our trans or have we always been at the mark where we're paying um that out of fund almost round off to $7 million.

Uh well, yeah, that's what I was saying earlier when I said that it was tied to federal and state grants. The issue that I've uncovered thus far is that with regard to the amount of uh funding that we've actually pulled down, but we didn't do that adequately. So, uh sometimes we've requested a large grant but did not have the adequate match and so that had to end up coming from additional funds that were not originally budgeted from the general fund. Um but we have made changes uh with regard to the manager as well as the person who was responsible directly for pulling down those grant funds. uh and so we have not made a higher decision for that yet but we've already uh made uh decisions with regard to moving in another direction.

So if one more thing so if you feel if we did get someone in that position to pull down grants then we can maybe reduce this um 6.7 million expenditure. Yeah, that's that's the plan. I mean because again part of our issue was that we in the past we went for a grant let's say it was a million dollars that was a 50% match when really we probably shouldn't have gone for the million dollar grant we probably should have went for a $500,000 grant because that would have been less than we had to contrib again it's just evaluating the whole thing finding out uh what the niche market is for Rocky Mount and addressing it on a case by case basis.

Thank you. I I was just going to ask point of clarification. Yeah, you're right. We've had to do several settlements associated with um bus drivers and whatnot. Is that included in the historical numbers that we're looking at or is that carved out? I mean, when you when we're looking at proposed cost or the experience, are those settlements or lawsuit cost embedded in that number? It's uh embedded in there this year because what we did to present the budget is that we looked at last year's actual percent. I just want to know what I'm looking at. Yeah. Before it was more of a I guess educated guess and still when you're doing budget is still a very educated guess but the difference from last year to this year is that we're looking at last year's actually sure.

Got it. Thank you. So we're going to get the full full budget from you

tonight I think. Okay. It's uh yeah, tonight we were we were printing them off uh earlier today and it'll have line by line the thing you're talking about. A part of uh what you have before you today is the budget and brief which is a newer requirement for uh the governmental finance officers association in order for us to uh be eligible for their presentation award and things of that sort. This is a requirement that is now mandatory and I do think it adds a layer of transparency of not only for you all but as well because after this meeting our role is to put these budgeting documents on the website for public inspection. Is the lawyer fees included in this? Everything that the city has is included attorney.

Yes. Everything that the city has is included in the budget. Anything else? Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you all and I look forward to discussing uh your priorities and how we uh move it forward. The next item that I have uh to discuss is actually a close session item. So uh if we can get a motion to go into close session for economic development. Got a motion to go in close session economic development. move second oppose.