City Council - Regular Meeting

okay good evening everyone it is 6 p.m. July 20th 2026 and it's time to call the city Franklin City Council meeting to order miss Jones roll call please present here here here here here here Thank you, ma'am. Mr. Brian Reese, thank you for being here to lead us in prayer and the pledge.

Absolutely. I invite you to join me. Our Father, we come before you this evening, and we thank you for the privilege of being here tonight and all the people who are here, not just the counselors and the mayor and those who serve in their roles, but... just the citizens of this city that show up and express interest and care in what's going on here. I pray this week that you'd be with all of our people who are just involved with the fair, just protect them, watch over them, be with our first responders as they serve in different capacities there. Just pray for a great week and just all that's going on the rest of the summer here in the city. Pray your blessings upon it. It's in your name we pray. Amen. I invite you to stand with me for the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. You may be seated.

Okay. Again, thank you all for being here tonight. Is there any announcements or public comment that does not pertain? Please go to the podium and let us have your business. Good business, by the way.

Good business. Greetings. My name is Matthew Abadi. I am a Franklin resident in the city of choice. Today I would like to talk about patriotism. From July 3rd through July 12th, I lied awake hearing the sky filled with celebratory explosions, rockets whizzing through the air, and sometimes would even appear to sound like live munitions being discharged from a firearm. The only thing missing was Francis Scott Key singing the Star Spangled Banner. I did not attend the fireworks display held at Young's Creek Park on July 3rd because fireworks are something that I do not condone. When I was a little child that could barely reach the pedal on my bicycle, a man tossed an ignited quarter stick of dynamite in my direction. It blew a chunk out of my leg. I was immediately raced to the emergency hospital where I received a row of stitches. I cannot even fathom what it must be like for someone who had an entire limb blown off, or even worse. several plural. I do not care to relive that trauma but had no other choice during this celebratory period. I have shared much here about my own personal experience without offering a solution that might help us all to coexist in a more respectful way. Here are two alternatives I have given thought to for this council's consideration. Number one, the dollar amount or of currency or its equivalent allotted each year for the fireworks display held in Franklin can be divided and distributed among each local US veteran organization. There will be no time restrictions on how many days a Franklin resident wishes to set off fireworks within city limits. Number two, continue having Franklin's yearly festive display of fireworks, but instead of allowing fireworks to be set off beyond the 4th of July, maybe we can secure a list of U.S. veteran-owned and operated businesses working within the perimeter of Johnson County that will accept volunteers to help out with cleaning efforts or other useful labor pertaining to the needs of that business. I would like to conclude with a final word concerning fireworks. Fireworks put stress on several city departments, that is the police department, fire department, EMT, et cetera. It becomes a question to me why the ATF does not mandate a training program for the use of fireworks, but in all other areas, whether psychological or physical, where education can be crucial, there's nothing in place to prevent the harm of fireworks. Even if someone is going through labor in the delivery room, in many cases, the labor coach must receive prior training to be present during that time. But fireworks get a pass. Hey, sir.

Sir, we have two minutes on public comment.

Four.

Here are four. So I appreciate your comments, but I'm trying to stay consistent in case somebody watching comes in, but I do appreciate everything you're saying.

I just wanted to say, I have said my piece. Does the council have any questions for me regarding this issue to where my input may be of usefulness?

I would say you're preaching to the wrong choir. It may be downtown in a big building. Call the legislature. We are somewhat restricted in what we can and cannot regulate. I see. But thank you.

Thank you. I do. I appreciate the comments. I know most of everybody up here does, too, because we all hear it, especially from the veterans. So I appreciate you coming and backing that up with your own experience.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay. Is there anybody else? We've got two minutes for public comments. Anybody else? Hearing none, we will close that section and go on to the Senate agenda.

Move to approve the meeting minutes from the July 6th City Council meeting as presented.

Second. We have a motion and a second. All those in favor? Aye. Okay, there isn't any old business. We'll go into new business.

Move to read new business by title only.

Second. We have a motion and a second to read by title only. All those in favor?

Aye.

Okay. Number one, Quality of Life Projects Update, Scott Park and Franklin Family Aquatic Center, Director of Parks and Recreation, Chip Orner.

Good evening, everyone. I have visual aids tonight to help you. So thank you for allowing me to be here to give you some updates on some different projects that we have proposed in the city. I also have some people here this evening to back me up tonight. One is from Charlie's from Crossroad Engineers and he'll be here to answer any technical questions you have about Scott Park. Kyle from HWC Engineering is also here. Once we start talking about the Family Aquatic Center he has a plethora of answers for you for any technical questions you have. And then finally, we're going to talk to you about the funding of these projects. And that's why we have Jeff Peters here from Peters Franklin. He's our city financial advisor. I want to start by talking about Scott Park and I know that, please bear with me that I know that almost all of you know about all these projects but I'm also trying to get it out to the public about what we're doing on these projects. This project dates back about 2011 or 2012 era. We tried to figure out, I lied, let me back up even further. Let's go back to 2008. We all lived through the great flood of 2008 in Franklin. That destroyed a lot of athletic facilities in the community. If you recall back in 2008, the province park diamond that sat next to the police station ended up flattened by police cars and all kinds of different cars that floated on top of it. Matter of fact, there was a concession building there. Some of you will remember this building that literally lifted off its foundation and moved about 20 feet. Didn't destroy the building, but it sure did lift it up and moved it back. So obviously we know about that kind of destruction that happened. There was also another diamond in Providence Park that now has a shelter house sitting next in where it used to be. That one was also destroyed in the flood. They're getting collapsed in. At the time, we decided not to put that stuff back into the floodway, mainly because we were working with FEMA to put all that stuff back together, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense to put it back where it potentially could do it again. What we didn't know at the time was it did do it pretty close again, I believe in 2015-ish, so it wasn't that long afterward we would have been in the same situation again. It also did a little bit of damage, not as extensive, but it did do damage at Scott Park in 2008 as well, but not to the extent that it collapsed all those facilities. So at the time, back in 2009, by the way, I had been the parks director for approximately 95 days when the flood happened, to give you an idea of when all this happened. By the way, I'll be here 20 years next month. So it's been a little while. We decided it's time to, instead of putting all that stuff back, we're going to move it all to Scott Park. So we invested into Scott Park. We did a bunch of upgrades out there. If you weren't around in 2009, you don't see them today because obviously things have aged since then. But they had new scoreboards, new fencing. We built a new concession restroom building at Scott Park that we all see today. That's where all the money went. Well, at the time, it all sounded like a great idea. Hindsight's 2020 and all kinds of different situations. What we did was we created a parking issue in Scott Park, so we've all heard about those issues as well, where we've made all the athletics for the community for youth sports go to this one facility that was woefully under-parked. right? So we created our own issue at the time. So we spent years trying to figure out how could we not undo it, but how do we solve that issue? So around 2011, 2012, we started to look at the property north of Scott Park off of Commerce Drive. We know it as the property behind Lowe's, right? We tried to figure out, all right, so could we lease that property? Could we buy that property? At the time, it was owned by Sandor Realty, which is owned by Sid Eskenazi's family. We know that from Eskenazi Hospital in Indianapolis. Way back then, Rocky, the assistant director and I, went to Indianapolis and met with those guys and tried to work out some lease agreement. Never really came to fruition because they wanted to keep the front half of it. They wanted us to only have the back half of it. You'll see on this drawing, it was never going to work. if we didn't have the front half of it. So we spent years spinning our wheels trying to do that. Finally, I'll plug the mayor just for a second. He finally, on the first few months he was in office, said, listen, How long are we going to talk about this? We've got to figure something out. So we spent the next few years trying to negotiate with them. And finally, last year, we were able to work out purchasing the property. If you recall, the Redevelopment Commission purchased that property north of Scott Park. That's where we kind of are up to date about this time last year. I looked this time last year, the week after July 4th was the first time we met with Rock Crossroad Engineers about what could we do with this property. It has its limitations to it, some good, some bad. It has obviously the canary ditch that runs through and intersects the property, so it's got that challenge of how do we traverse that little waterway there. It has the pond on it, which we have come to find out is a good thing because it's going to allow us to do some different kind of outdoor recreation things that I'll talk to you about in just a second. The current Scott Park, as you can see on the screen, is roughly five acres. The property that is north of it is 35 acres. So this park became seven times bigger than it was. So it allows us to do more things with it. Now what you see in front of you is about a year's worth of work. to try to figure out what concept can we get to fit on these 35 acres, including what can we do with the existing five to make it all come together to work. We spent a lot of time talking with engineers. We spent a lot of time looking at drainage. We spent a lot of time looking at all those different things. I've spent a lot of time in talks with athletic experts, whether they be travel baseball, whether it be local little league. We've met with soccer groups. We've met with lacrosse groups. I've met with horseshoe pitching people, pickleball people, everybody you can think of. What we come up with, as we've landed on, is this concept that you have in front of you. It is not exactly what we wanted at the beginning, but it's what will fit properly onto the property. It includes seven, what I call seven youth baseball fields and one larger diamond for high school or college age schools. individuals. It also includes two full-size soccer fields. We thought we may have needed to downsize one. We potentially could make it back to two large fields if we do a little bit of modification to the pond and I'll show you in just a second. It also includes 12 pickleball courts, three basketball courts, One of the big issues we wanted to solve is it's 900 plus parking spaces instead of the existing 120 that we currently have. It also puts the main entrance of this new sports campus or Scott Park, what I'm calling the sports campus, off of Commerce Drive now. What that does is that will allow us to put a roundabout at the entrance of Scott Park to get the traffic to keep flowing through there and we have a nice safe way to get into the park that way. It also includes shelter houses. It includes a playground, a splash pad. I'm trying to think of other things. A maintenance building is also included in here. But the three things I'm excited about, because I do love athletics, don't think I don't, but it has a cool outdoor recreation feature, and that's the pond that we originally talked about. If you go back there now, you're like, oh, that's a kind of ugly-looking pond. However, we're going to put three fishing piers off of it. and let people fish off of it. So it also has that outdoor recreation component to it. We have potentially talked about putting a trail that runs, that will traverse the entire length of the pond. So you can, there again, if you just want to go walk, you could do that. The other thing you'll see on here is you see a lot of dotted red. You see it. You don't see it on this one. You see it on yours. A lot of dotted red lines. Those are trail connections. So the really neat thing that this does is that this whole Scott Park neighborhood now has direct access to the Greenway Trail because this will connect them up to Commerce Drive and then they can go anywhere in the city they wanted to. They can go on 31 on the new trails. You can go all the way downtown if you wanted to. But those people don't currently have access to it. So that's another really cool feature of this project is it gives people, a lot more people in our city, access to the Greenway Trail where you don't have to drive to it. And I can literally just walk from my house to do that. Mayor, am I missing anything you can think of?

You did a good job. Thank you.

It's tough when you have to do it twice, because I don't remember what I talked about the first time. Those are the main components of the project. Like I said, some of this stuff is going to be dictated by what can we put in there drainage-wise, what can we do. Some of it's in a floodplain. You'll see the red lines, not the dotted, but the solid red lines. kind of the floodplain area where we got to be careful but what we put inside of there that's one of the reasons why I know I got to talk to Sean about it but one of the reasons why we had to downsize that diamond because it just went into the floodplain too much and we're trying to Charlie can tell you about all kinds of two-stage ditches and all kinds of different stuff that has to do the drainage but it just didn't have enough room to fit all that stuff in it so I do think this, I don't want to downplay it, but I also don't want to hype it either because this also has an economic development piece to it. We have designed this thing to take advantage of the travel sports world where perhaps on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays we can have tournaments that come into the city, perhaps with 100 teams that are now going to eat at our restaurants. They potentially are going to stay at our hotels. All those kind of different things. I don't want to underplay it, but I don't want to oversell it either because the city, us, is not necessarily going to make a whole lot of money off that, but a whole lot of businesses in the town will. So that's something I think we want to think about too. Other details I did not tell you yet is that we want to get out there. All this is lit, so it all has professional sports lighting to it, so there again, we can have games at night. It also, currently as it sits, all of this is turf. So the advantage of all turf baseball fields is a couple of things. One is I'm going to come to you later on in a year from now and I'm going to need less maintenance people because I'm not mowing turf. We're not out there trying to get dirt not to be wet after rain events because turf has drainage underneath it and you can immediately play. So that's an advantage. It doesn't require irrigation. There's another advantage. So the turf has an initial upfront cost that obviously costs some money, but what we're going to save in routine maintenance over the years will be well worth it. This project, and the next one will too, will go through what's called a scoping period. And we're getting ready to get to that phase where we're going to really dive into exactly what each little minute piece of this thing cost. We know what we want to spend, but we don't want to spend over that. The mayors give me the directive that those numbers are nice, but he wants to see them down. And that's what the scoping period is all about, is we can figure out what are the nice things they have, but what do we really need kind of thing. So we'll be going through that in the next few months. Any questions you have about Scott Park?

I've got one for you.

Hit me.

What about security within the park there? Because I know some of the other communities around have different things there that are used to monitor activities going on. With some of the issues that we've had here in the recent years with some mis-spent youth,

Great question. I have had a little discussion with Rick at the IT department already about camera systems. I've actually had a discussion with the chief of police about flock cameras. There's all kinds of technology that's out there that we can monitor who comes in and out. A lot of this stuff, to be honest with you, when we talk about turf fields, turf fields will not be open to the public most of the time. Let me give you an example. You can't even have a piece of chewing gum on a turf field. It will run it. You can't take your dog out onto a turf field. It will ruin it. So people that have been to baseball, I mean, the list of rules on turf fields looks like this because you have to be very protective of it. I was concerned about some parking lots that kind of are in what I call deep recesses of this park. Those are going to have to be camera'd and those kind of things just for public safety reasons. So we're going to spend a lot of time on technology. Other technology things that I've been looking into is, like, you're going to have to have lightning warning systems and all kinds of stuff when you're talking about big, large sports complexes like this. Yeah, we're working on those things. That will be in the scoping period. Again, those are going to be priorities to us, so I suspect you'll see those in this project. We also want to protect our investment.

I have a question, Chip. Sure. And you probably have worked through this, but since we're talking about it right now, I mean, I love the project. It was long overdue for the city and the sports recreation of the city. That retention pond that's sitting there, It was designed years ago to accommodate the runoff that was existing with Lowe's and everything else around it. But now we're going to have more runoff. So are we expanding that retention pond or where are we directing that water?

Great question. Thank you. That's what Charlie's here for. He's the expert on that.

Good evening. Charlie Maddox with Crossroad. So the pond It does serve Lowe's now, and back when they originally designed the pond, it was anticipated to take some of this land as well and serve it for detention. The problem is this whole site is in the flood plain, some of it's in the floodway, and it is too low to take any drainage to that pond. The pond is actually higher than the ground where we're going to be building. Detention is something that's required for basically every project and we are adding more impervious area than what's there now. So we've been working with the county. Chip mentioned two-stage ditch is the idea here. So Canary runs through the site and what we've done is come up with the volume that we would normally provide in a pond and we are creating a two-stage ditch meaning we're basically going to expand that existing channel it's going to come up a few feet from where the water normally is and then come out 15 feet either way and then shelf pack up so we're providing the volume that we would need normally that we would put in the pond and we're going to provide that volume in the ditch itself so that 100-year storm net zero is the idea in canary ditch you're going to do that yes so that that that channel is going to be expanded quite a bit from what it is today um and all that's to provide a place for the storm water to store up how far is that going to do that

How far? I mean, are you just talking about in that park area or do you have to go on upstream?

Oh no, all contained on the site. So basically just a little bit downstream of where you see the railroad and then it'll end. We'll have it two stage on both sides until you get down a little more further south to the residential area and then we'll switch to just doing it on one side. Okay.

Just so you know, conversations that I've had with the county, they've wanted to do that for a long time, not just there, but eventually they will do that all through Canary. That's my understanding, and that's why we're doing this section now.

Just out of curiosity, Charlie, so a two-stage ditch will retain much like a retention pond?

Yes. It's a different, with the retention pond, there's a lot more calcs that go into it and there's a structure that's holding back the water and it's only letting it go out so fast. But in this way, it's almost conservative because we're coming up with what that volume is and it's just going to be there all the time.

So the rate of runoff still won't be a problem? Right. Okay.

Right. Our impact is going to be offset. Okay. Yep.

Also, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this property has flooded since the 2008 flood. And it wasn't a flood like we had downtown. I think it was a couple inches running across the property. It never flooded like we had here.

Yeah, from what I've been told by Franklin employees who check on it, and we've checked on it as well, even this year. So I'll... not to get too into the weeds on drainage, but over the past two decades, we've done a lot of work on the engineering and the civil engineering side of things for detention for all sites. So over time, as those detention facilities come online, the storms have less of an impact on the natural resources. The county has done extensive studies already on this area and this specific section of the ditch does not fall within what they were calling a restricted release rate area. So there weren't any issues. And we've gone over the, we've already had the meetings with the county and we've already gotten basically preliminary approval to do this. We just need to get them the full report and show them the final numbers.

So obviously the city already owns it, right? With the increase of individuals and children with that retention pond, like our liability, we'll be fully insured and we'll have the disclaimers and things, but we probably, I mean, there's liability now.

Right, that's what I'm saying. But then now that it's unmonitored.

And I'm all for it. Question, yeah?

Yeah, I mean, we'll obviously have to include and have our insurance and our tort claim things. Yeah, and like I said, probably now people trespass back there as opposed to having it more defined.

Right, but when you open it up, again, I'm for it, but you're just, you have that many more people, just there's probably a larger risk of, right.

Sir, maybe you might have answered this question already. So the ditch being increased to a two-stage ditch, is that retaining the water and keeping the water on site? Or is it going to discharge and go down Canary Creek, correct? It will, yes.

The idea is in a 100-year storm, we're talking like an 08 situation. That's when that full volume would be realized, basically storing up to the top of the bank. For any ordinary rainstorm, That's called the ordinary high water mark. It's like two feet above where the water is basically dry. And that's staying as it is. And then once we get up to that level, then that's when we start providing that volume. So you won't even see the ditch get into that depth unless we're getting a severe weather event.

So east of the railroad track, So is everything going to begin the two-stage process on the west side of the railroad tracks? Correct. So the throughput coming in is going to stay the same?

Yeah, for the everyday storm, this is going to help quite a bit. Thank you.

Hey, Chip, I've got a question for you.

You were mentioning about fishing piers. Is that the only thing that we're going to allow?

It's the only thing we've looked at so far. I don't want to say it publicly. People like paddle boats and canoeing and all kinds of different stuff. We haven't really looked into that yet, but that's kind of early. We're really early into that. I just know we're going to put fishing piers in. It doesn't mean we can't do – because it's a fairly – I mean, if you look at it, it's fairly large. I mean, you could easily – I mean, canoe on it and kayak on it and all kinds of different stuff. We haven't gotten that far yet, though.

And that does increase the liability. That's what I was going to ask. Different analysis. Once you put people on the water and invite them on, it's a different analysis than allowing them to fish from up here. Yeah.

And honestly, we have not looked at any of that yet.

Yeah. Well, that's kind of where my thought came when you talked about liability. I'm like, okay. What was that?

I personally am not in favor of that part of it just because of the liability and kids getting on kayaks or canoes and getting upside down and the liability part of that. I am not in favor of that but I'm not the total boss, I guess.

We don't want to monitor it for the Parks Department, Dan, probably for a second.

I don't have a problem with that either. I know that it's large, and I know that it's something that I could see people wanting to do. And so as long as we have our ducks in a row, I think we'll be good.

I have been asked that, and my answer is probably not.

They will fish anyway.

They kayak and put boats in there now. I was going to say, I have actually seen it.

Right now it's probably more dangerous because it's unmonitored, unkempt, and hard to see. But I would, well, I know that there have been people that have trespassed on there to do such things.

I've gotten off the top of my head two calls in the last 30 days of people trespassing up there.

Yeah. So is there any other questions for Chip on this project?

All right, just when you thought we were done. If I don't have enough, let me know. I do have some more down here I'd like to... Second project we've been working on is, so pool is 40 years old. Construction was in 86, opened in 87. We did our renovation. Some of you may recall, I know at least Mr. Austin and the mayor were on the city council at the time. In 2012, we did a park bond and we expanded the pool and then did a renovation.

Two more?

Oh, yeah. Thanks, Chip. You're doing a great job.

2012 did a park bond. That's when the existing zero-depth pool on the bottom of this page came into existence. We also replaced the water slide. We did a lot of stuff that nobody sees, which we replaced a whole lot of mechanical equipment that was aging and those kind of things. Believe it or not, that was 15 years ago. Here we are, again, now the pool is in a different situation. Now it's 40 years old, it's approaching the end of its life. So a few months back, we asked HWC Engineering, which Kyle is here today, to do what I call a little mini study that tells us, all right, I wanted some professional backing of what should we do with this facility. All kinds of things we could do, right? We could renovate it again and try to make it last another eight, ten years, but we're still dealing with this old equipment and old deck and the whole thing. What would it take to build a new one? off-site so if let's say we wanted to go purchase twenty acres adjacent to Scott Park in theory and build a new one what would that look like and then what does the middle ground look like the middle ground would be what do we let's renovate what we have let's save the the good guts that we still have and expand it out for the next you know twenty years what would that look like Be honest with you, the worst case scenario of going out and building a new one someplace else is probably $40 million today. Ten years from now, who knows what that looks like? Because I would have said ten years ago we could have done what we're looking here at now for $3 million. payment you're gonna find that it's not three uh... so we would what we're proposing to you is do the middle ground is let's let's expand this facility let's renovate what we currently have let's get it up to date let's fix all the things that need to be fixed and let this facility stay at this location for the next 20 plus years. But there's all kinds of challenges when we do that. One is it's woefully under-parked, just like every other facility we have. So you'll see that this expands the parking, this concept, about 112 more parking spots. more than doubles what we currently have that's one what that requires us to do is the one thing inside that current that parking lot is that's where our park maintenance facility currently sits so we'll have to be torn down that's why it's going to move either to scott park or we'll come up with some other alternative for where that would go it also requires us to close that road that it runs adjacent to the current pool that goes down into province park which is a good thing because during the summer months, if you've ever been through there at three o'clock, it's complete congestion. There are kids running around everywhere, interacting with cars everywhere. And I cannot believe we haven't had somebody hit because it's that crazy in that area. This pool does a couple other things. I'm going to just get rid of the controversial things right off the top. It does close the road. It does get rid of the diving boards, so we will no longer have diving boards at this facility. I know a lot of people love diving boards, but honestly, it's the only accidents we've had in 20 years that I've been here. I've been on the diving boards. By karma or some other thing, one of the diving boards broke the other day, and now we have one because I cannot find a diving board stand that is like the original one from 40 years ago. They don't exist. We've looked everywhere to try to find one. Not going to happen. Now, I could spend a whole lot of money putting it back for a year if we wanted to, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense financially to do that. So that's good. The other reason why we're going to get rid of the diving board is because if you know much about swimming pools, the majority of the water volume is in a diving well, and the capacity of a diving well is all of two people. that's only two people can use it at a time so we're we're chlorinating and and maintaining hundreds of thousands of gallons of water for two people from an operational standpoint if you think about it makes no sense plus there are diving boards in the community we can go to the high school you can go to the middle school there are other places that you can do that at so that gets rid of this we're gonna uh... that twelve foot area will now come up to five feet So that already saves us money in maintenance and those kind of things. It becomes a new ninja course. If you don't know what a ninja course is, if you go to the second page, as I talk about some of these features, you can look at them. And you'll see, I think it's in green, you'll see the ninja course for kids on there. It's an alternative. It's still an action-oriented activity that kids can participate in, but it does not require 12 feet of water to do that. Also, 12 feet of water, when we're talking about liability, is the biggest liability that we have because non-swimmers should never be in 12 feet of water. We'll no longer have that at this facility, so that's a good thing. It also expands, I shouldn't say expand, it will actually redo our current zero depth pool. So right now that pool is really geared toward like zero to maybe five or six year olds. Because once you're five or six, once you're seven or eight, you can get into our main pool because then it's about three and a half feet deep up there. What we're going to do is convert that to more of a splash pad looking area where it has the tile that you see down here at this one. It does have a little bit of standing water, but not what it currently does because that's going to be geared more toward maybe zero to three-year-olds. As you go up into this facility, as you're looking at it on this, then that's when the age groups are going to start changing. We're going to create a zero-depth pool off the current main pool that's there now. So what I call the south side of the main square of the pool will now become a zero-depth pool. Zero-depth pools are important for a couple of reasons. One is because they're ADA accessible. So if you're in a wheelchair or you have issues, if you don't know what a zero-depth pool is, I should apologize. Not everybody's in the swimming pool business. It's no different than you walking out on a beach. It starts at this and then gradually gets deeper. That's what this would be, is we would create that up there with a play structure up there. It also includes... uh... two three new water slides so one would attach to the current water slide we would have the current water slide refurbished because it's fifteen years old now and then we would attach another water slide to that same tower what's cheaper to do it the cost of water slides it's not usually the slide it's the tower that cost a lot of money so we're able to save some money by doing that as attaching it to our current one I've also asked HWC engineers as we were going through this process that one of the things that I was looking for was what would make us unique to the south side of Indianapolis? What could we put into this facility that nobody else has, in other words? We landed on two things. One is I call a toilet bowl slide. You see it as the red and white slide there in the middle of the page. And this is also a unique slide because there are some around here, but none of them are raft slides. This is a raft slide where you'll actually ride on an inner tube. And you could ride with two people if you wanted to as well and basically go down this slide and spit you out at the end. These slides come out on chutes. So if you've ever been to a water park in a chute, you basically stand up when you're done. It doesn't actually dump into a swimming pool, which means I may need less lifeguards, less water. It's way safer. There's all kinds of reasons why that's the reason why you see water slides that way now. It also has less height restrictions because I'm not standing up in four feet of water. I'm standing up in inches of water now. That's one of them. The other one would be just a normal body slide that would come off this tower that you'd see at the very top of this concept drawing. We also are gonna use the natural contour of the hillside over there. So this tower doesn't have to be as tall as the other towers because we're gonna use the height of the hill to save money. And then you'll just come down the hill. Anybody ever been to Riverside Park in Indianapolis? They do this there really well. It has a hill that runs up next to their aquatic facility. Their slide tower is probably just a little bit taller than me. and they use the natural contour to come down. That's the concept we'll use here, too. The last thing, which is the really neatest feature, is the pool you see on the top. We'll actually build a new pool that's just on the other side of that road that's a wave pool. And you've probably been to a wave pool when you've been to a water park and that kind of thing. Nobody has a wave pool on the south side. Matter of fact, my research says there's only four wave pools in Indiana. One is in Avon. One is in Marion or Frankfurt. I can't remember which one. Marion. And one is at Deep River Water Park, which is a massive $100 million water park in northern Indiana. And the fourth one is at Holiday World. And so nobody else has them. No, we're not asking you to build a holiday world. That's not what you're looking at here. What you're looking at is Lebanon. Lebanon has one. That's the pool in Lebanon that you're looking at that has a wave pool. Huge attractions to draw people to this facility. All of that, plus we're going to do all the mechanical renovations, all to set this thing up for the next 20 years. So nobody should be coming to ask you in the next 20 years to build a new pool someplace. They should not be asking you to, they may ask you to build, you know, something's broken, they need a fix or something, but this design and this facility should last, Franklin, 20 plus years, if not more than that.

Chip, can you speak on the local people that's worked on these two projects? Dennis McGuire, he's in here with Cripe Engineering. He lives here in Franklin. HWC lives here in Franklin. And Crossroad, they seem like they live in Franklin. They've been here forever.

I may have just said that, but do you want to? I've known Kyle for a long time because he's been in this business with me a long time. I was with Kyle about three years ago standing next to a wave pool that was operating in Avon. It had just opened. Of course, us parks people go and see whatever the people are doing. And Kyle was actually part of that process and I was getting ready to go to my car and I stopped and talked to Kyle just for a second and I said, Kyle, I need you to do me a favor. I need you to take this wave pool and I need you to superimpose it next to my pool and see if it fits. Within the hour, I got it. And this is how that all process started. Kyle is on Walnut Street, so he's just as excited to work on this as anybody. I mean, Dennis from CRIPE, we work with those guys on all kinds of different... They're working on Scott Park. They're also working on this project as well.

And did the Active Adult Center.

And did the Active Adult Center, yeah. So we have some really great local people that are in this business that it's kind of cool to work with. And we've worked at Crossroads a long time, so...

Chip, can you tell me what number 15 is on the map, circulation improvements?

Yeah, if I have my glasses on.

Ramps and stairs.

Where does it add on here?

By the baby pool at the bottom.

Okay, so we currently have stairs. So if you walk down, if you've not been to the aquatic center, you walk down some stairs to get to this zero depth pool currently now. That's what that is. It's requirements for ADA. For example, that's what the notch out you see is. It's for wheelchair access that can't go down. stairs and those kind of things. It's mainly because there's a contour change between those, if you recall, I'm going to date us a little bit, Mr. Austin. The old pool fence line was right above those stairs, and then you came down this hill to a parking lot. That's why those stairs are required, is because that was the contour from the old pool to the parking lot. So we just used what was currently there. That's currently there now. We shortened it up a little bit.

I guess the term circulation kind of took me for a loop.

It's for wheelchair access.

Fair enough. Thank you.

Any other questions that you think of?

So all of the guts of this, the majority of the guts is 18, the new mechanical building. Is that correct? Number 18 on it on the map.

Nope. 18 is a new mechanical building.

That's just for the wave test.

That's just for the, but it could also be for the water slides as well too. Okay. Yeah. So the existing, if you, Christopher, just go down this a little bit. You'll see number 20 is where the current mechanical room is. It's going to require us to expand it out a little bit, which it needs it anyway.

You've got multiple things going on there. I assume you weren't going to have one mechanical room. This will have three.

This isn't going to affect the shelter house that's down below the bottom of the hill, right? It will not. It'll still stay.

Okay.

Now, I should tell you, so the road will close, but the road is going to end up being a trail that will get you up. So I need the parking down there still. What we'll do is use the road and actually be a greenway trail that will wind around this facility so you can walk from down there up to here. Okay. I hate to mention it because we've looked at all kinds of concepts that never make it to you. One of the concepts we looked at was not closing the road. And for four months of the year, blocking the road with gates and letting people walk back and forth in between these two pools. And then on the other eight months of the year, we would open these gates up and the road would still be open. So we wouldn't totally close the road. That was like $500,000 to do that. I wasn't even like, no. I mean, that makes zero sense when I can just put a trail to run up to it and you can walk up it versus half a million dollars to keep something open that honestly should probably be closed anyway. So... So we toy around with all kinds of stuff that never make it to you.

And projections, I assume this is going to, I mean, the cost of a membership then will increase.

Honestly, I haven't looked at that very much, to be honest with you. But I don't anticipate it will actually raise that much. And mainly because, I don't know if the mayor wants me to talk about this or not, we're looking at alternative funding for other stuff too, whether that be sponsorships. The pool right now almost pays, I mean, it probably 95% pays for itself now. So if we do this with more parking, even if it was just a dollar increase, not five or six, if you go to some of our competing cities around here, I mean, they're double our price. We could break even. You got to remember, I had this discussion with the mayor. I love to make money. Do not think I don't. But really, I just need to break even, right? That's really, if I can break even and not, break even in our world means it doesn't cost the taxpayer anything. But if I can make more money, then I come to you. I don't have to ask you for anything.

Yeah, but things break down, and we know that.

That's correct. So that's how it works now is that you don't see me come to you a whole lot because this pool makes a lot of money.

So what's the capacity now?

The capacity now is about 1,000 people. And you're going to ask me what the new capacity is, and I don't think we've figured it up yet, but I know it's way more than 1,000.

So with you building that pool over on the side there above the shelter house, will that cause that to back up with water from that Creek too?

No, it doesn't anything to do with the Creek. The Creek's way down here. So we're, we're talking about is way up on top of the hill.

I know, but I mean, I know that that area there around the pool on the other side of the road.

Yeah. It wouldn't have anything to do with that. Okay. We're so this, this facility is so much out of the floodplain that it's not even close. Yeah.

Okay. I hate to lose that hill though. I learned how to drive a manual update. So yeah, got a lot of memories on that.

That's funny. Yeah.

Yeah.

Any other questions? Just for the initial design of the concept that we're at now, Darigan, this has to go through a scoping period too. We think we have a maximum price. It does not mean that's what it is. It could be way lower than that. We haven't really, you know, water slides, a raft slide versus a body slide might be a million dollars. So that might be an easy decision for us in the scoping period, right? I'll save a million dollars but you can't go down a raft. There's all kinds of processes that we'll go through between now and the end of the year that will narrow this thing really, really down to where it should be.

Chip, what would be your timeline on this and how would you handle it with the summer?

I'm glad you asked that because I should have talked about that at Scott Park, too. So I have given these guys very clear direction that we cannot lose a pool season, for one. So that's part of the issue. Chris, can you scroll down just a little bit? Okay. That's perfect. Where that road is that we're gonna close can actually close in three weeks from now if we wanted it to because that part of the construction can happen whenever we get all the funding secured. It can be ready to go. It can be under construction the whole next pool season because it doesn't affect the current pool. right so we'll run the the the aquatic center next year just like normal with construction going on next to it right there might be a parking lot under construction there might be a wave pool under construction as you're swimming next season then what they'll do is everything south of that road As of August the sixth of next year, whatever the first day of school is in 27, we'll close and then they'll renovate all that. It should all be done by opening in May of 28. And it's hard to believe, but we've done that before. When we built the current zero-depth pool, I remember the construction started in mid-January, and I thought there was no way they could do it, and it opened in mid-May. So they can do it.

Can you talk about the plan for Scott Park as well?

Yep, Scott Park's pretty similar to that. My directive was they can't lose the baseball season next year, so same thing. Anything south of the creek, nothing's going to happen. They're going to have a normal baseball season like they normally would. In the meantime, the north half could be under construction. They could be building buildings, they could be building diamonds, all kinds of different stuff. As when they're done, which I gave them until June 30th of 27, then they have to be out of Scott Park and then the existing part will actually go under construction. Same thing, I don't know whose idea this was, that same opening, it'll be in about April of 28. Then it will all open. Pretty tight timeline for both of them.

But we don't lose anything in that process.

I will tell you that Sean knows this because I've had some discussion with him a while back. I'm already being bombarded by athletic people in tournaments. And they don't even know what it looks like yet. They just heard about it. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah, that would be the beauty of the turf fields. You'll actually be able to charge a premium for those guys coming in. If you can guarantee games, then they guarantee more money revenue coming through. That's right.

That would be a good growth.

But on top of that, though, we're going to have to hire a manager of this facility.

Not only Scott Park, but probably... Do you have someone that's going to manage this facility? We do.

I don't know if you want to say that yet or not, but the mayor and I had budget discussions already. We've already been talking about 27, 28. Okay, thank you.

Yeah, I'd say we've talked about that a little bit. Just as Scott Park itself is probably going to have to have its own manager to bring people in, hire and fire, and make sure trash is picked up and make sure everything's taken care of, and that'll be its own entity there.

Once I get past a couple of approvals here down the line, we'll start working on business plans for Scott Park and this aquatic facility. I just haven't gotten that far yet, to be honest with you, because we've been so focused on we've got to get this concept plan locked into place so these guys can work on the design part of it. As they're working on the design part of it, we'll work on the business plan part of it. What's it look like? What do we think it's going to get revenue-wise? What do we think it's going to cost expense-wise and those kind of things? You've been busy. Yeah.

So I'm getting ready to have meetings with the council one-on-one like we usually do for the budget. We're probably a couple of weeks away from that. We have, we have, we have put in for this budget, someone at the aquatic center, uh, The next budget year would be when we need to really look at Scott park. So I didn't want to mislead anybody that in this year's budget, we don't have anybody for Scott park. And we had the discussion about having a discussion on how we should manage that with chip. So we're not there yet, but the aquatic center we're working on getting some help next year with chip for that one.

Correct. Now that I've told you all that stuff and everybody's so excited about the projects, now comes the fun part. Now we get to bring Jeff up, and Jeff can talk to you about the money part.

Poor Jeff.

Thank you, Chip.

Thank you.

So first off on the money page, you've kind of seen these before as we've gone through bond issues, sources and uses of how it is we fund such things. The bottom section gives you the uses for Scott Park, the pool project. and then everything that we would anticipate would go into the bond issue similar to what you did last year with the sewage works we would anticipate with the bond rating you're probably going to want to buy bond insurance in order to get a higher bond rating lower interest costs because you'll be anticipated to repay this across the 20-year period So anytime that we can bring down those interest costs on a large debt over that long period of time, it will be a benefit to you and the taxpayers. The one thing we don't have in here, and we've talked about it before, is capitalized interest. We've done these lease rental financings before with the city, and I believe the last one we did was for the amphitheater and the gateway project. those bonds were done through what would be the building corporation for the redevelopment commission and when you get debts of a certain size that are not purely revenue backed like your sewage bonds that you did last year you don't have the general obligation bond capacity to issue those debts as general obligations and this is what schools run into all the time so you see the school building corporation the building corporation actually issues the bonds and then there's a lease rental agreement between you as the city and the building corporation and this will allow you to issue those bonds but in a lease rental funding like that you typically cannot make payments until you are done with the project and you can occupy it unless you have a replacement asset so we would envision for this transaction annual see all this paperwork and so forth in the details in the coming months but we're looking at the active adult center as the replacement asset and it just needs to have a value appraised that exceeds the interest costs during construction and then the six-month window cushion That is anticipated that that will work for this financing, which cuts quite a bit of cost out of that, as Chip talked about, is you have 18 months' worth of construction. two years worth of construction interest that you're not going to have to pay by undertaking that. And when you did that exercise with the amphitheater, the asset that we used was Main Street up to and including the roundabout was the asset that was pledged. So looking at if you were to fund this project, And speaking with the mayor and the mayor working with the redevelopment commission, redevelopment commission has agreed to pay the park engineering, the pool engineering, a roundabout and pedestrian crossing. And then the mayor looked at contributing $5 million of cash from the economic development income tax fund that you currently have. in order to bring down the bond amount and the amount of debt that you would put on the tax rolls. Those top two amounts are what we would assume to be the amount of the bonds, which is about $39.5 million. That was taken to Park Board last week. They approved that initially. There will be a series of disclosures to the public, taxpayer impacts, et cetera, that give taxpayers that opportunity to come in, speak about the financing of these projects, and file any petition if they would wish against it, but what we brought to you tonight is the same thing that we shared with the park board the financial disclosures for the public hearings that are will be upcoming are going to be a little bit higher than what i'm going to show you today just because we're not going to take these bonds to market for a few months we want to have a little bit of cushion in there the top part of The bonds and the re-offering premium would be based on market conditions as of today, so that might change. Instead of having $36.5 million of bonds and $3 million of re-offering premium, those numbers might switch a little bit. And the re-offering premium, I know we've talked about this before, Markets have certain conditions that they expect to be met in order to effectively and efficiently issue the bonds and get the lowest amount of interest cost for you. One of the things that the market would expect today are 5% coupons. Well, 5% coupons for all the debt over the next 20 years would be higher than the interest rate that you would get in today's market. But those bond buyers are willing to pay you a premium for those future payments at 5% tax-exempt interest. That's where that $3 million derives. That's what we would estimate it at today. Those things, like I say, will be determined at the time of bidding. The back page gave you a little summary of the tax impact. The most important parts of this are if we were to implement this funding, the repayment stream, the cost would be about 2,965,000 a year. That tax rate to repay that would be just under 15 cents. That cost would be about $149 a year for a $231,500 homestead, which is the median today according to the U.S. Census for the assessed and taxable value of a homestead here in Franklin. But currently, the... city has outstanding park bonds and this is the last year for the bonds that chip had mentioned earlier and today those taxpayers are paying about seventeen dollars a year for those outstanding bonds so if they go away which they will in twenty six the twenty twenty seven net impact would be about a hundred and thirty two dollars for that median homestead in Franklin. And then the bottom paragraph talks about if you did not have the redevelopment commission paying the expenses that were enumerated there and the cash contribution from the city, the tax rate would be about 19.3 cents and that net tax increase to the median homestead would be about $172 rather than $132. And with that, I'd be happy to answer any finance related questions.

Jeff, I just have one comment. So if we looked at this as the high end, correct, the bond, the 35 and the 15, and when we get, and I'm just kind of repeating what Chip said and everybody is aware, this pricing is more than likely going to go down, and you even said when we get to that bidding process and we know exactly what it is, just because we're committing this to the high end or talking about the high end, it could be a lot lower than this.

It could, and it'll refine multiple times, but as you go through the financing portion here in the next couple months, we'll have more refined costs, and we might bring that number down, or we might not. This might be what we actually go out and issue the debt for. Then, as they go through the process of the actual construction, if you end up with savings there, I would say potentially if the savings are on the RDC paid for projects, the RDC would retain that money because they would pay in less. The $5 million that you've committed from the economic development income tax fund, you would pay that amount in less and then the city would still have those cash funds for other projects, operations, whatever it is that it needed. But once we issue the bonds, you will want to spend the bond proceeds first because you do have a problem of you're not allowed to over-issue those municipal bonds. So as we refine the number in the next couple months before we actually sell, which I think we're planning on like October-ish, November-ish, When we get to that amount, the best numbers that we have at that point in time will scale this down and only borrow that amount of bonds. So we'll get it as thin as we can, but we don't want to not have enough money to do the project as it's envisioned here.

And one of the words that you had used for purses in the public, I understood it was a we would publish a higher number to have some room to negotiate. So you'd rather publish a higher number, let the public know, and then bring it down as opposed to the other way around because once you do your publications, you can't go back up the other way.

Yeah, because we have to start over. Yeah, if we approve too low and realize it's going to cost this much, then we have to go back, start over, and then we're months behind. As Chip told you, this schedule is to have significant construction in 27 in order to have this done by April and Memorial Day of 28. Right.

So that's why he used the word publish high, so that we can keep the process going.

I have a question. I don't know if this is a Chip question, but so the impact is to the city, franklin property taxpayers right so out of the city of franklin if you're outside of the city franklin is there a higher fee to um go to the pool or for these amenities or great question we already we already do that okay we have non-resident fees like for pool passes and that kind of thing we would probably look at the daily admission as a non-resident fee too okay

Just because the concept, great question. The reason she's asking that is because the people that live outside of the city aren't going to be paying into this fund that we're trying to get all this construction done to. That's the concept. You chose to live out of the city for a reason, right? Because you didn't want to pay the city taxes. Well, that's why you pay non-resident is to equalize that out, if that makes sense.

And that's in case we get asked. Yeah.

And to be honest with you, that's typical. That's pretty standard in all parks departments I know of.

But all property owners will pay. So my building business, everybody pays. I mean, it's not just the homeowners.

No, but if you're coming from...

But any property here, it's not just the resident, it's any person who owns property within Franklin.

Right. But then people that are outside of that. Correct. Yep.

Correct. Okay. Anybody else with Jeff? I just feel like we're in good shape. Um, financial wise, even with our, uh, with the SCA one tax bill, um, that's not worrying me a whole lot with how we're headed, uh, I think this council, thank you for being able to allow us to pay cash for a lot of stuff. For an example, paying cash for the active adult center, it turned out being a better issue than we thought by even using it for collateral because it's paid for. So that's another aspect that helped us out there. So anyway, thank you, Jeff. Does anybody have anything else for Jeff? I'm sure later you'll be back a few times. Okay. Alright, well thank you. That's exciting stuff and glad to get it out there. So let's go to the next item. Request for approval of grant funds for the Water Tower Mural Project Community Development Specialist, Dana Monson.

Yes, thank you. Good evening. As you remember, the City of Franklin has participated in the Ready One and the Ready Two programs through the state, receiving grants for from ready one, two infrastructure grants, two art-related grants, and then ready two, we received the grant for the active adult center. In the process of doing these, the state, when they had their pot of money, they had the initial amount Plan to expend that that's what was supposed to happen They had a couple projects in other parts of the state that did not happen as a result They actually had extra grant funds if you will So because of the fact that the city was able to get all of our projects completed. We got them done in a timely manner Cross our T's dotted our eyes did everything they wanted us to do and they chose us and one other community to receive these extra funds. So this is considered a reimbursement for the work on the Active Adult Center. So it comes to $275,941.49. So they will be returning or giving these funds to us as part of, considered as part of the Active Adult Center and then these funds can be used at the city's discretion. So one of the grants that we did go for, that we did not get, unfortunately, was through the Lilly Arts Projects, which I'm sure you've seen recently, the announcements on all of those. We applied for a grant to have the water tower painted. So the water tower is the one right down here. that sits at the corner of Walnut and Jefferson Street and is a lovely little eyesore as you're coming into town. When you're sitting at that beautiful amphitheater, that's your background. That water tower is owned by Indiana American Water and since the inception of the Public Arts Commission, In 2022, we have had discussions with them about, can we do something? Can we paint this? Can we make this look better? They are very much in support of doing that. So much so that they have actually given us a donation of $50,000 that is currently in a fund towards that. Their one caveat is that in order to paint this water tower, there's some prep work that has to be done. They do these on a rotation. This is not the rotation for this tower to have that, so we would have to pay that. That's about $200,000. So one of the things that we talked about was if we're going to do this, this needs to be a regional project. This needs to be something that is going to truly have an impact on the tourism here, on visitors here, quality of life here, all of those things. People will travel to see some of these water towers if they're done by somebody that's very well known. In your packet, I gave you some examples of different water towers that have been done by regional artists, national artists, things of those natures. We are really looking to find someone that, first of all, can do this. Not anybody can paint a water tower. It's very particular, very exacting. You have to have somebody that truly knows what they're doing. Second, have someone that can come up with a truly unique design. Some of these, that's the lovely look of it today. You can see it's 39 feet tall. It's a little obvious when you're driving down through there and through town. But what we want to do is look for someone that is a very well-known artist. These were done by Adam Long. There is Eric Hen who has done some of these. He actually lives in Louisville, Kentucky. So he's very close to us, but he has done towers like this around the country. So these are not just somebody that, local or whatever, as much as we would love to have a local person, it takes a very specific talent. And so we're trying to find someone that would do that. that people will say, oh, that's an Eric Hinn. I want to go see that. And there are people that will do so. Roughly $400,000. So we're looking at a total of probably $600,000. And again, that's an estimate. That is not a final number because until we really get into discussions with an artist and things, we're not going to know that. So we've been looking at this for quite a long time. We've been looking at different ideas. None of these are what the tower is going to look like. These are just simply to help you see kind of what we're talking about. We would want it to be something that was unique to Franklin, something that would really speak to Franklin. So in conversations with the Mayor and with Tara, with the Mayor's Youth Council, I would like to request that we take these extra funds from the Ready Grant and add to the $50,000 that we already have for this mural project. Giving that kind of money will help us in better fundraising because a lot of projects of this size require matching grants. They want to see sponsorships. They want to see different things like that. For example, creating places is a $100,000 grant, but we have to have matching funds of $50,000. So it's things like that that would allow us to do that. By also partnering with the Mayor's Youth Council, we would love to have those students and give them an opportunity to be a part of this from the very beginning, the ground up. helping with the fundraising, looking at the RFQ, looking at some of the different ideas as we select an artist and then select the final design and things that it would look at. So we're hoping that that would give a good jump start to get this going. You have no idea how many grants I've applied for for this thing, but it's pretty pricey and it's kind of hard to find grants that are going to pay that kind of money, so...

Dana, I think some of the problem that we had when you was looking for the grants, we didn't have the matching funds. We did not have the matching funds. And it was always, how are we coming up with this? Absolutely.

That was, yeah. Every time.

Every time. That seemed to be what it was.

Yeah. So with those two sources, we'd have three and a quarter already. Correct. Yes. And with the idea being essentially we can do this with funds from other things rather than ever have to use our money. Right. That's my goal.

Absolutely. Just as it is with all of the art projects that we've done. I really, really want to try to find ways to have this paid that's not taxpayer dollars.

How long do you have to use the funds? I mean, to be able to go out and start applying for grants.

It's reimbursement. There is no time frame on it.

No time. Do you know when the water tower, we come back in the rotation on that water tower? What's their plan for it so they don't have to spend $200,000?

It's probably at least five, six more years. It's like a 10-year rotation, and they just did it in 21 or 22. Yeah. I know. I thought that too.

It's unfortunate that they wouldn't be doing that.

It is unfortunate, but they gave us $50,000. They gave us $50,000 and they're agreeing to allow us to do it. The only caveat that they have given us is that they would like to have some type of water feature as part of it. Um, the whole thing doesn't have to be a water feature, but just a Creek running through. anything, just something that would have a little bit of a water feature as part of it. And you take an, an Eric Hein or an Adam long, they can come up with something really cool that would have a, a really neat element of water to it in some way.

Just to defend the water company just a little bit here. They gave us the $50,000 grant when they gave us the grant to do the splash pad. Yes, they did.

That was also as part of that. Yeah. So that was a bigger, a bigger, that was $250,000 that was given towards that, that splash pad.

Dana, kudos to you because Ready Grant only picked out two communities to give this money to because we did our... We. You did everything that was necessary and got our projects done even before the deadlines. That's big. Thank you. It's $275,000 big. Yeah, that's a big number.

And then I guess, is there any, and say we can't, don't get the other grants, is there any other projects that you've kind of got in line that you would think about to use the money for? Or what are other options that we may be able to use it for? I don't know what we can and can't use that money for.

We could literally use that money for anything. There are no restrictions because it's considered reimbursement. So what it is saying is the funds that, as the mayor, Just mentioned we had paid cash for that, so it's reimbursing that. So it's like it's putting back into our general fund, and then we can choose how we want to spend that.

And if it got to the point we seen it wasn't going to happen, we can always come back and. Absolutely.

Yeah. I just didn't know if there was any, anything else or it was really restricted or you had had submitted this with the ready grants is a possible idea and you have to stay, stick with those ideas or if there's something.

The grants I applied for was very specific, but this is not because we did not get the grant funds. This is not, it's very open-ended. So should we want to do, um, a commemoration of the 20 year flood, something different, you know, that is potential. I really would love to see this. I think this gives us a huge leg up to be able to do this, to make this something really unique and really special for Franklin. And on the whole south side with the creative economy, it's going to put us on the map.

And definitely cleaning up and having it there at the amphitheater where thousands of people come every year to see that. Absolutely. I mean, I'm not against it. I just didn't know if there was something else, if something was, you know, if it wouldn't. if we didn't get the other $300,000 basically to do it, or the artist said, hey, we need $800,000 to do it, what does that look like, and then what else could we use those funds for? We could always come back and have that same discussion. Or if it was just specific to something that you'd already submitted.

And I think, Chan, this is introduction, right? Introduction only tonight, is that correct?

No, there's no, there's no requirement.

Okay. So we can take action then.

I mean, this is mainly just information. Um, there's no ordinance resolution that she's basically just, yeah.

But, but Jan, aren't we asking to put it with the 50 that we've already got in terms of placing in that fund?

Yeah.

Yeah. And so, I mean, basically the question is you all want $275,000, right? That's the question. Yeah. And, and, and if you do. Yeah. Then you accept the ready grant funds and directly be placed in the other fund account that, that Jan monitors. And then if you ever wanna reallocate it, then you can come back with a, right.

With a transfer going in the water tower fund now.

Yeah. Correct. So that's, that's basically approval of the request.

So I think we probably need the councils to vote on it and have their approval moving forward. So everybody's on the same page. Yeah.

A very legal term, y'all want, that's how I said it. Do you wish to have $275,000 grant returned to the city? Move to approve.

Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. Thank you, Dana. Good job.

Thanks, Dana. Great job.

All right, it's been a long meeting. We've had the last couple, it's been about 10 minutes, I think. We made up for it, but I think it still is very important that we get council comments. I know a lot of people like to hear that. If we have any, Josh, how about you?

No, I think it was a very great meeting, especially talking about the quality of life here in the city and the amenities that we're trying to add to there. So I think it's great information for the public.

Thank you. Ann?

I have nothing. Thank you. Ken?

Nothing tonight, Mayor. Thank you. Sean? Nothing, sir.

Nothing, sir. Irene?

Nope. Nothing for me. Thank you. Jennifer? Ditto. Okay.

Jan?

Nope.

Lynn?

Nope.

I have nothing. Thank you all for coming tonight. Motion adjourned. Second. So moved.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.