City Council - Regular Meeting

Welcome everybody to the Gallup City Council regular meeting.

July 14th, 2026. Today, anybody that wants to comment, could you please sign up? If you haven't signed up, we can still take the signatures. So to provide comment on any non-agenda items, please register in person with the city clerk prior to the scheduled start of the meeting. YOU ALSO MAY BE SUBMITTED BY, REGISTRATION MAY ALSO BE SUBMITTED BY CALLING IN AT 863-1254. ANYWAY, WITH THAT, AL, COULD YOU DO THE ROLL CALL?

COUNCILOR GARCIA? HERE. COUNCILOR YAZI? HERE. COUNCILOR PIANO? HERE. COUNCILOR MOLINA?

HERE.

MAYOR DEPAULI?

HERE. JOIN ME IN THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE. Next we'll have comments by public on non-agenda items.

Mr. Mayor, our first speaker is Kelly Sari.

And we'd like to limit the comments to two minutes.

Kelly?

Kelly Sari? She left her phone number. I can call her. No. Okay. The next speaker is Sharon Baldock.

Sorry. I'm disoriented.

I'm supposed to address the mic for you.

That's fine.

Okay, so, and I'm going to make this very short and sweet because I do know now it's a time test and Gallup has no extra water.

We have proven this to the state to the point where they are building a pipeline from the San Juan River to cover our needs when the groundwater is gone in just a few years. Whether a project coming to Gallup is a manufacturing facility, a data center, Mother Teresa's free hospital with plenty of fruits and vegetables, we have no water to give them. Mr. Wynn can give you more details, as he does every week, but the bottom line is we have no water. So when someone comes to build here, we need to know how much water are you going to use and where will the water come from. If the company can use only effluent water, yay. If you believe that someone will bring us desal water from Puerto Penasco in the next several years, frankly, God help us. I will, of course, email you my research on why I believe that this will not happen. And I hope that you will ask Mr. Achuthan to provide you with his research on how this really could happen. Please be informed. Thank you.

Thank you. Next, we have Eileen DeRozio.

Good evening.

Starting my two minutes.

Hi, I wanted to tell you that I've lived in Gallup 41 years and I'm very athletic. Everyone knows I run. I've done marathons and all. However, now I'm a senior and I can be an Olympian and I'm so excited. I participate in swimming and running and skiing in the winter. But my comment is the bike trail sphere. We have a bike trail on Najoni and then it ends. And then we have a bike trail, walking trail on Boardman and then it ends. And it's not safe. And I would love to ride my bike here. And I know a lot of people that don't ride bikes and we need to stay healthy. So I think that we should improve our... Am I done? Is it two minutes already?

No, you're done.

yeah that's working okay so um and then when moms and well dads too if you want to take your kid on a stroller walk i call in about this on the maloney and i said it's all black gravel from the winter and when they throw the gravel on the ice and stuff and i was running and slipped a little didn't fall but I have kids that won't come back here and now I have grandkids and I want them to come visit and I want it to be clean. So I need really clean parks and good bike paths and walking paths and hopefully Gallup can do that. Anybody agree?

Anybody?

Okay. Well, I hope we get to work on that. Thanks, Eileen. Keep in touch.

Bye.

Okay, with that, the next item is the recognition of the seniors, Eileen, who participated in the Senior Olympics. And our speaker is going to be Steve Wargo.

Good evening, Council. Good evening to everybody attending tonight. We are going to recognize, well, we have seven seniors that participated in the Senior Olympics down in Las Cruces last month in June. And if you, ladies and gentlemen, would come up, please. We have two that weren't able to be up here with us tonight, but we have seven special seniors that we want to be able to recognize for their contributions to representing the city of Gallup here at the Senior Olympics. All right. And so look for you to come up here. all right wow what a group we can we can go ahead and move the podium here i guess to undo what frank just did here okay their motto is you don't stop playing because you grow old you grow old because you don't stop playing there you go and so we want to wreck our first two we're going to recognize are not here with us tonight Our first three we're going to recognize are not here tonight. Irma Davis, who is in Oklahoma. She's camping with her family. And Vera Jones was not able to make it tonight either. So we want to recognize them for their contributions in representing the city of Gallup at the Senior Olympics. And the first one we're going to recognize tonight, right to my left here, is Demetrio Maldonado.

Thank you.

Right. Tell us what events you meddled in.

I got two silvers and two bronze and rifle and pistol.

And we've already met Eileen D'Orazio. All right. And Eileen, what events did you meddle in?

In the 105, I'm a swimmy.

For the 65, 69-year-old, I got the silver. And then I play sports in the run, the 5K run, but they don't give medals before.

We qualify in the top three and the fourth to go to Tulsa, Oklahoma for next year. Our next senior is Nora Boyd. Nora, what did you medal in? I received two silver, one in pool and the other silver in football field. And I got two gold, one for basketball free throw. I made eight out of 15. And the other gold is, oh, crispy biscuits.

Our next one is Mary Delao, who not only does Senior Olympics, she bowls a lot here in Gao. She's incredibly active. And Nora and all of our seniors really are emblematic of their catchphrase here. So, Mary, what did you meddle in?

I was still there. Happy sick. But, you know, the big old hole. I mean, for the brawl. And, you know, I forget. And our last senior they're going to recognize tonight is Nellie Lee.

And you can see Nellie, those are all the medals you've gotten over the years. Holy smokes. Yes, quite a few there. So Nellie, what did you compete in and win medals in this year?

Can you read our motto? Please read your motto. You don't stop playing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop playing.

We appreciate our seniors. Go ahead, go ahead, Barry.

You're at home. Hope those legs.

Yes. Motion is lotion.

We appreciate our seniors. We appreciate everybody in the city of Gallup that supports the senior center. And we hope that we'll see some of our seniors that I see some faces that maybe I haven't seen at the senior center. Come on out, join us, play games, play some sports, stay active. All right, stay up with these guys here. So thank you all. Congratulations. And we appreciate you attending here tonight.

Thank you, Steve. Wait, wait, don't make a picture.

You know what I think they want to take a picture.

There we go. And then you have to turn around and say publicly counsel. Okay, I got it. I'll share it with you. I'll take that back to you. Our media person can take the picture. Oh, my media. Okay. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. I thought you had to be a senior citizen. I appreciate that. You could be my son's age. I'm going to be 64.

Really? That's pretty young. That's still young.

I hope I can. Agile when I'm 64.

Our next item is going to be a presentation of a proclamation of law enforcement child month. And I got to say, last Friday, I got to go on a ride along in the swing shift. And one thing about Gallup police officers, they do a heck of a job. I was watching the screen, and there was calls every two minutes. But one of the things that was most impressive is the way that they protected the children that were in bad situations. I got to witness an incident where someone was being aggressive, actually being violent, and the police officer stopped it right away, and there was a lady and her two children. So not only is this proclamation for the children of law enforcement, but the law enforcement that our officers do is quite extraordinary. The proclamation is our law enforcement officers dedicate their lives to protecting and serving our community with unwavering courage, integrity, and commitment. The law enforcement profession is truly a family calling with spouses and children sharing deeply in both the pride and sacrifices of service behind the badge. The children of law enforcement officers are resilient, adaptable, service-minded, forming an integral part of the strength and future of law enforcement community. And honoring and uplifting the enforcement children helps strengthen families, agencies, and communities they serve. July 26, March, July 2026 marks the inaugural Law Enforcement Child Month. So this is the first one. Right, Steve? providing an opportunity for law enforcement agencies, families, and communities across the nation to recognize and celebrate the children behind the badge. Law enforcement child month encourages positive community engagement, family support, and local participation in honoring law enforcement children and families. Now thereof, I, Mayor Mark Dipali, and City Councilors Linda Garcia, Sierra Yazzie Asamoah Tutu, Sarah Piano, and Ron Molina to hereby proclaim July 26th as a Law Enforcement Child Month. Thanks again.

And our Police Chief, Erin, is here. Yeah.

I didn't know they were here. Good. Oh, this is the administrative staff, not the whole staff. I thought we had the whole police department here.

Where's our picture taker?

Okay.

I might as well stay in here because. All right. Thank you.

Congratulations.

Our next item is review of calls for service for the 4th of July. And this is from our fire chief, John Barrett.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. I have a little presentation for you and for everybody. So I just wanted to go over some of our calls for service for the 4th of July this year. So I'll wait till the presentation comes up.

Bye, Mary. Thank you.

Thank you, ladies. So we can go ahead and go to the second slide on that. So during the 24-hour period of July 4th, we had 23 PR personnel on duty. We staffed heavy that night. We always staff heavy the night of the 4th of July, just because we don't know how crazy it's going to be. But during that 24-hour period for July 4th, The Gallup Fire Department, we responded to one motor vehicle collision, 22 emergency medical service calls. We had the one special event at the park, which actually went very well. We really didn't have anything go wrong at the park. And then fire calls that day, we had 12 of them from 9 p.m. until midnight. So in that three hour period, we had 12 fire calls. Including in fire calls is one possible structure fire, which turned out to be a bonfire across the street. And then we rescued two people from an elevator that got stuck at one of the hotels. So for that 24 hour period, we only had 26 calls, which is just kind of an average day. We on a normal day in Gallup, we averaged 25 to 30 days. So this 4th of July was just a normal day for us. But for the police department that night, now I can't tell you all the calls, the first service that they had for that 24-hour period, but I looked just firework-related calls from 9 p.m. until midnight. They got dispatched out to 16 firework-related calls. That's where people were calling saying that people were possibly shooting, you know, illegal fireworks or can you tell them to stop shooting fireworks? I want to go to sleep. So they had 16 calls in that three hour period. So if we go to the next slide, I just want to show you some of the fires that we did have. So this is one on the south side. This one's kind of hard to tell, but you can see right in the middle, there's a little bit of burnt grass and brush. This fire, we actually got reported multiple times. People were reporting it from Second Street, but also people were reporting it from the Boulder area. We go to the next slide. This is just a better picture of that fire. This one was fireworks related. And then we can go to the next picture. This just shows a different angle. This one was extremely close to the house. So this one did have potential to take off. But I'll get to kind of how these fires went here in a little bit. So we go to the next slide. This is another fire that we had on the south side. This was also fireworks related. You could see that there was a lot of brush. This also had potential to take off on us. If we go to the next picture, you can see actually how close it was to a house. We'll go to the next slide. This is another fire we had on the south side. This is just a small little fire. This was fireworks related. Go to the next picture. This is a fire we did have in Gamerco. Even though Gamerco is not inside the city limits, the Gallup Fire Department does provide fire suppression and EMS responses to Gamerco. This one was probably fireworks related, but it's kind of hard to tell just because there's a lot of trash that gets dumped right here in this area. So it's really hard. I mean, there was fireworks in the area, but we couldn't prove that it was fireworks related. So the next slide, so on the 4th of July, we had no known property damage from fireworks or fires, which is a great thing. Last year, the fire danger was not as bad as it was last year, this year. And we had several incidents that caused pretty significant property damage last year. So this year we kind of got lucky. We have no known injuries from fireworks, right? We've had people in the past that, The 4th of July is the last day that they have all 10 fingers. We've had those happen in the city of Gallup. We've had multiple people go to the hospital before for fireworks, but this year we had no known injuries. The good thing is most of the fires we responded to were either knocked down by the people in the area or the ones that were setting off the fireworks or they were out prior to our arrival. So to the citizens of Gallup, I want to say thank you. You know, people were out there using fireworks, but they were being responsible. They had water hoses, buckets of water, shovels. And if they started, if something started a fire, they put it out, but they also call this. So I really want to thank the citizens of Gallup for using fireworks responsibly. The next slide is some points to consider. You know, a lot of the fireworks related calls we get on that night and for the police department are people shooting off aerial fireworks. So remember, with the drought restrictions that we put in place, we just want the public to know that aerial fireworks are still legal. It doesn't make sense, but that is the state law and we have to follow the state law. We can only restrict what the state allows us to and aerials we cannot restrict unless we have a city ordinance against them. We did do firework inspections on all of our tents. All of our firework vendors, we inspected them multiple times. Initially, before they started selling, they had some fireworks that restricted, but we told them to pull them from their shelves and they did. So, I mean, we were at those tents probably every other day and they were not selling restricted fireworks. So if you bought them in the city, they were legal to use. The other thing is firework related calls. They're pretty much can be handled when they can. We understand that this frustrates some citizens because they want a quick response. Just know, like Mayor, you notice that when you rode with Gallup Police Department, that calls just kept coming in. I don't want to say that fireworks related calls are low priority calls, but when there's other major things happening in the city, sometimes they kind of get pushed down until officers are available. And then we get a question, well, why doesn't the fire department respond to firework related calls? Well, I can tell you in Gallup, a lot of people that use fireworks like to also intake in adult beverages when they're using fireworks and they may not always be happy that we're talking to them about fireworks. But also it's very common that somebody will call in a fireworks related call and it's not fireworks. It's actually somebody in the street shooting a gun that actually happened this year where GPD was responding to fireworks and they turned the corner and there was a guy in the street shooting a firearm in the air. So the fire department, we kind of leave those to the police department. If they do respond to the call, if they think that the fireworks are either illegal or they're doing them unsafe, or they may be restricted fireworks, then they will call us and we will go out there and take a look at them. So we, you know, both departments, we work very well together that night to handle these calls. There's also a lot of calls about complaints about the noise and the timeframe that fireworks can be used. There is a noise ordinance in the city of Gallup. That's something that we're going to have to look over the next year about because in the fireworks ordinance, it's really not specified on what time fireworks can be used. It's a little hard on the actual holidays itself, but maybe the other days surrounding the holidays, we may be able to think about looking at putting fireworks as the regular time is just the other nuisance noises that happen. But that's something that we'll be looking at and we may bring the council just because we need to update our fireworks ordinance anyways. And then the other question is, well, you know, there's a lot of shows that go on around time around town. So if all these other people are having shows, why can't the city have a show? You have to understand that there's a lot of people that do shows, but those are consumer grade fireworks. So there's two different types of fireworks. There's consumer grade, which are the ones that you and I can go buy at any fireworks vendor right now. There's also display fireworks, which you have to have a special display pyrotechnics license to buy. So there were several shows inside the city. Church did a show. There's a firework vendor on the north side that kind of does a show. Those are consumer grade fireworks. Those are just ones that you buy over the shelves. So we do get that question a lot. Well, if they can do fireworks, why can't we? It's different types of fireworks. If we were going to do a show, we would do display fireworks. And finding somebody to do that type of show, there's not a whole lot in New Mexico. And again, that's just something we can talk about later on. And with that, I'll stand for any questions from Mayor or Council. Go ahead, Sarah.

Thanks, Chief Perry. I do have a few questions, and you answered a lot of the questions that I had previously spoken with you about as well. I guess, first of all, I'm really thankful to both fire and police for making our city safe and glad to hear there was no incidents or hospital visits. I guess I have two questions. I'm wondering if, number one, I'll go backwards. I like the drone show. I think, you know, it was great, but it is limiting to see from far away, right? And I didn't have a lot of people that said, oh, we saw it, but they were backwards because where they were in the city, they saw it. So if you said USA, it didn't say USA, right? So I think that's a concern. And I'm not the biggest fire person, but since I got so many questions about fireworks, I guess my question is, and this is maybe for us to future consider, could the city consider hiring someone to do a display firework, because it does seem like the shows that are doing display fireworks, I know they're not, I mean, excuse me, consumer-grade fireworks not display because of their licensure, is still being seen from pretty far away, right? They're still seeing those consumer-grade fireworks shows that local people are putting on from pretty far. So it's a question like, could we consider doing a consumer-grade fireworks show, or is that not a thing? We can't do that?

Sure, it's not a thing. Okay, that's super helpful.

I think that's good for people to know because a lot of people have reached out to me about that. And I did start to think, well, maybe we just do that. But yeah, if our insurance doesn't cover it, that makes it hard.

Councilor Peano, just to add on to a little bit, since Matt's right there. From my understanding, this was the last year for the current contract for the drone show. So the city will be looking out for either renewing that contract or looking for fireworks display vendors. I mean, so that's something that we're going to have to start doing anyways, just because this was the last year of the contract. But that's something that's going to have to be brought to council anyways. I didn't mean to drag you into it. I saw you standing there.

Yes, our procurement lady would like to add to the second question.

Practice.

And so I will just say they are correct in that this is the last year of our contract with the drone provider. When we initially put that out four years ago, we actually asked for a fireworks show, a drone show, or a combination of both. And it was basically what somebody could provide if they could provide it for the city. We have searched in the past high and dry for a licensed pyrotechnician. We haven't explored it because we had the drone provider on contract, but because it's up, my office specifically is going to start searching for providers like that to try and accommodate everybody's wants and desires. But we had a very difficult time finding somebody, and that is because all the providers that you see that are doing, is it consumer shows or is it the other way?

Commercial.

commercials, they're already locked into contract for many other events. So whereas we want the 4th of July, like everybody else does, they're locked in. I mean, some people have like 10 year contracts. So we have a really difficult time, but we did actually search out and seek and put that in our scope of work. And so we did it as an RFP. So if somebody was interested and could provide, I reached out to everybody. I thought that even the display providers that are doing the display shows, I reached out to them even to even see if they had the ability to get their Pyrotex licensing and to get the required insurance. and nobody provided a proposal for that. So I reached out to all those people that currently provide those type of shows just to see if they could actually step it up and do a commercial display. So we tried and we'll try again.

Francis, what timeline did you inquire about that?

I'm sorry?

What timeline did you inquire about that?

Did you do like now for the next year? We're going to start for the next year now. Yeah, because I think they did it too late. Right? Didn't we do it like... Well, this is the last year. So... Yeah. And even before that, when we were just, what we had was we had a previous contract with, and I think Arizona Firework Display Show, and they went out of business. And so we actually started even way back when we actually were having firework shows. I want to say it's been about five years that we started trying to search and we just lost we're not coming up with anything, but we're going to put all hands on deck and try to go at it again and see what we find. And maybe somebody will be interested in getting those certifications and being able to provide that if that's what we choose to go with. But yes, we did actually put that in our scope of service for either a drum show, fireworks, or a combination of both.

Thank you. Thank you, Frances.

Thank you, Chief. My question is just about information sharing. I appreciate what you guys put out on social media this year. That was helpful and easy to share. I'm asking because I happen to be at a mobile home park in my district and I saw incorrect information saying the city had prohibited fireworks and residents shouldn't have any at all. And I don't know if that's just a matter of... them trying to discourage it or like how if do you have a forum or process for disseminating the information as we make those restrictions that we did this year?

So we usually put it over social media and one thing we have to be careful about is if it's private property, like if it's a mobile home park or apartment complexes, they can ban all fireworks on their property. And several of the properties will do that where they say go somewhere else and do fireworks because that's their own private property. So I know a lot of them try to do that.

Yeah. The issue is just that they were pinning it on us. Yeah. Saying the city.

Makes it easy, doesn't it?

They may have blamed us just so we could get yelled at.

Yeah. I'll look out for it. Thank you.

Yeah. Again, just most of the, I know several of the mobile home parks and apartment complexes, they just say no fireworks on property.

Yeah. Good to know.

Any questions? Yeah. Chief Pablo, Chief Parrott.

My hat's off to you guys, man. That was... Did I hear no accidents at the city function?

So at the 4th of July event that we had at the sports complex, really the two biggest things that we had, we had a couple people that were intoxicated that had to be removed and I think we had one fight at the end, but it was involving two people that were intoxicated and that was... And I don't even think that was just for the 4th of July event. That's just a... That's just a normal day in Gallup.

Both of the chiefs, please pass it down to everybody in your departments. I thank you for keeping us safe. Keeping your app for everybody means a lot. I know that's what you get paid to do, but doing your job as well as you two do is amazing. Keep up the good work.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Thank you. Thank you, John. Our next item is a presentation by Harry Atuchin. He's the president and CEO of Convolt Energy. And Harry has brought with him representative and majority leader and minority leader of the U.S. Congress, Dick Gebhardt, and his wife, Karen Gebhardt. I should have introduced in the beginning, but I figured I'd leave it for now. And Harry is going to start the presentation. on the solar manufacturing fabrication. And I noticed Bill Bright is here because we've been looking forward to solar, this type of thing for 20 years. I'm a big proponent of recyclables or renewables. And Dick Gebhardt said something to me today that really hit home. He said, you know, New Mexico is number two in oil production, but we want to be number one in renewable energy. And this is how we'd start. Terry, go ahead and come up. You want me to turn that thing around? And we're going to have you sit over here.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, members of the Council. It's an honor and a privilege to be here with all of you tonight. I was a public servant for over 35 years, and I started in local government in St. Louis, Missouri. I was on the City Council for five years in St. Louis, Missouri, and it was the most important public service job I ever had. because the most important public service takes place at the local level. And that's where it means the most to the people. I have been associated with Harry and Convolt Energy with my wife for about 10 years. And I wanted to be associated with him and his effort for a couple of reasons. Number one, and there are a lot of hardworking people in the world, but he's the hardest working human being I've ever met. And I've met a lot of hard workers. But more importantly, he has a good heart. He's moral. And he believes in having a company that can achieve important social ends, like renewable energy, which we desperately need all over the United States. I believe that we pretty much lost the ability to manufacture solar panels in the United States for a variety of reasons. We just ceded it to China mainly and a few other countries to the point that there's only one company in the United States today other than Convolt Energy that is making and can make solar panels. But I also wanted to be associated with Convault because my long public service and then my work after public service has always convinced me that the only good can come from public-private partnerships. The public sector has important things that it can only do. The private sector has other things that it can only do. And the only way that partnership can function successfully is if both sides are transparent with one another and are willing to listen to one another. to come up with the best solutions to the problems you inevitably face. So Herring is going to present our hope for the project here in Gallup. And I just want to end with this. I've never been here before. I've been to New Mexico before, but I've not been to Gallup. We've been here two days. We met with the mayor. We met with a lot of other people. I am deeply impressed with this community, its diversity, its interest in solving problems, and its interest in working together, which is the only way You solve human problems and get important things done. So with that, I'm going to come back in a minute and talk about health care for the workers that we hope we'll be able to employ here. I love health care. I've been involved in it my whole life. And Harry is going to give you a great overview of what we're doing, and then we're happy to respond to queries.

Thank you, Mr. Gephardt, for the kind words. Do you mind if we switch to the presentation?

Yes.

Yeah, I have it to forward it.

While we're waiting on the press inclusion to go up, let me just walk you through our history, why we want to be in Gallup. So we've been around since 2013, January, when we started our operations. So when we started, we had a plan that basically said, we want to be in power generation, renewable power generation. We want to be in manufacturing. And the two go hand in hand. On the renewable power generation side, we are an American firm. We're super majority held by Americans. But opportunities came in in frontier markets. Our first project was in Burma, Myanmar. 2013, no one was talking about renewable power in that part of the world. We actually educated them on solar. We developed a very large solar power plant, which we then sold during construction a year before the coup. We have developed very large projects in other places, some of which we are holding on so that we can deliver solar panels from our production facilities here in the United States. So we focused on power generation for 10 years. And during COVID, we sensed that manufacturing is going to come back to the United States based on a number of data points. So the manufacturing side of the business, we purposely held it down until the situation supported manufacturing in the US. And as Mr. Gephardt indicated, there's only one true American firm, First Solar, which is a publicly listed company that is you know, heavily active in the entire value chain of producing solar power. So, you know, our thesis again, the year 2020 during COVID, we refocused on the US. We started to set up facilities in New York and due to various politics in New York, you know, we decided to leave New York and we looked at three states, And one of the states was New Mexico and Gallup. So in 2024, July 4th, I actually visited Gallup and Martin O'Malley, who is here in the room, was the first person that I actually interacted with here at GLP. So we focused on how do we get back to manufacturing? And then you had the IRA bill. President Biden did a great job of passing the bill. but they did a really bad job of policing the borders to help manufacturers like us set up our factories. So what ended up happening in 2023, Q3, Q4, 23, China basically started dumping solar panels in the United States. The prices went from 36 cents a watt down to 21 cents a watt. And the entire financing for American manufacturers just went on a hold. So you've had a phenomenal bill, but inability to execute because of not having the right policies with CBP, trade barriers. And then that reversed when President Trump came in, the trade barriers came up, but the messaging in the system was we're not supporting renewables until October of 2025. And then that actually changed because the administration realized, well, we need to build electricity and power in the country for us to progress forward. And now everything's back up again in terms of financing. So we felt the timing is right. Now is the time to execute. we found that this location in Gallup, New Mexico would be ideal. And we have learned a number of lessons during this time period. One, setting up a factory in an urban city does not work. If I look at the examples of companies that have failed, you look at Meyer Burger, they set up a factory in Phoenix, brand new factory, 180 million spent, and they couldn't staff people in that factory because everybody else was getting picked up by Intel or TSMC or others, and they were getting paid a lot more. Company defaulted. That asset was sold for $12 or $15 million in Phoenix. You look at Atlanta, a very large company is having problems again because growth. They're not able to retain the people. So we have analyzed it, we have looked at it, and our goal again is to support communities that need jobs versus cities that have plenty of jobs. And that brings us back to Gallup. And one other point that I would say is if you go back historically and you look, you look at America and its heyday in manufacturing, 60s 70s 80s and you would find company towns that were manufacturing towns and that's what made american manufacturing great and you didn't have two or three big companies in one big city giving up the labor and fighting for the labor you had large industries in one big in one big city or one big town that basically supported you know employment so we're going back to the thesis We believe in communities that need jobs. And if you look back historically at our company, we've gone into frontier countries helping them get electricity, educating them on solar or batteries, and executing what we can on the ground with them.

So that being said, I want, how do I switch the pages? OK.

All right, so we just talked about our timeline from 2013 onwards till now. Let's move to the next page. We'll skip that. We just went through that. So we have the three core lines of business that we propose here in Gallup. Solar manufacturing. Here we would manufacture solar cells and solar, we call them modules, which is panels. These are two separate fabs within one building. We generate our own power. So on the power generation side, we generate our own power. We're not taking any electricity from the city. We generate solar power, we store them in batteries, and it goes back into our buildings. And during construction, we expect to take some amount of power from city of Gallup, which we are talking to them about. but post that in full operational mode, we generate our own electricity, fully sustainable and renewable, and we don't want to participate in any conversations about your rates going up because we're consuming too much power. So we control our own destiny, we generate our own power, and on the water side, with the transaction that we have with GOP, We have a million gallons of effluent that is currently dumped in the river after it's treated. We're going to take that. We're going to convert that through reverse osmosis into water that we use in our factory and recycle that again as much as we can. So water is a big topic, and we'll talk about water in a few minutes about what we intend on developing in addition to this to support New Mexico. But for this site, we do not have any water from the city. We're not consuming any water from NTUA. We take the effluent. We convert the effluent into water that we use in our processes. So this is processed water. We'll have potable water and processed water. And we recycle that, again, through the reverse osmosis plant. That plant runs on renewable power, again. So the whole campus is supported by renewable power. So the three stools, they all support each other. It allows us to be independent. It allows us to build a sustainable model. And over time, we expect this to be cost effective for us as well. So we control the cost so that we don't have cost escalation coming in when a utility company or somebody comes in and goes to the state and says i need to increase the cost and then it affects our operational cost so as a result we control our destiny we generate our own power we generate our own water and we are not dependent and we're not taking any water away from the people next slide please so what does this entail the fab and the associated businesses generate 900 jobs In phase one, we would start employing three months before the production lines start. We train the staff. The average salary is $72,000. The lowest wage per hour is $25,000. The average wage is $28,000. And more importantly, what our employee owns, meaning all of our employees have equity in the company. And this is something that is very critical for us to retain people. And if you look at the success stories of an Nvidia or a SpaceX where the employees have all participated in the success of the company, we expect to execute in a similar fashion. So these are permanent jobs. direct employment. And by mid 2028, we have full 900 jobs expected to be employed at the factory. So the next question, please. Yeah, so what are the benefits for the city, the communities around employment is number one, we talked about economic activity. Employment is key. We need staff. They need to be paid well. And we all know how challenging the environment is here in Gallup and the surrounding communities with unemployment or poverty line limits. Maybe they have jobs, but they don't make enough money. So we drive that as the first critical point. The second is How do we provide affordable health care for the employees? Large organizations in the United States, one of the biggest OPEX costs is health care. And Mr. Gephardt's going to talk about our strategy there and how do we provide effective, cost-effective health care. And when I even looked at our numbers over the last couple of years, how much we paid per month, even when we had 40 employees, we were paying a pretty large amount to UnitedHealthcare in terms of the monthly rates. So how do we manage that and how do we get a better product for our employees and then help the surrounding community with it? Employee ownership that we talked about. We, we don't need folks with college degrees. We need people who are talented or hardworking, who are willing to grow. We can set up training programs at both, you know, uh, university of New Mexico and the technical university. I think it's NTU and we want to train them. And we've got a very experienced team that has built three of these factories. The company Meyer Burger that we talked about, which collapsed last year, they were number one in the world, 70 year history, company collapsed. We took their people, they're in Germany and probably one of the best minds that you can get in this business. And we would get them to train the local staff. And this is all about supporting local employment. We're not looking to fly people in to be here permanent. This has to be local. And the next item on the list all of this is not possible without fast Internet, so we do need to invest in high speed fiber and that will allow us to. operate our factories efficiently, but more importantly, also provide connectivity to the local communities if they need it. And the next item on the list is desalination water. So a sister project that we're planning on executing. It may be challenging. That doesn't mean we're not going to try. We all know water is a problem. And we're planning a sister project to deliver 100 million gallons a day of desal water. where the desalination plant would be located in Mexico and pipe it into New Mexico. And we have a plan. I heard a comment earlier. I'm a big fan of Mike Tyson. He always said, everyone's got a plan until you get punched in the mouth. We're ready for it. We're going to try. We're not going to stop at it. The last point, and I think this is a very critical, critical piece even more than healthcare, and that is when we have analyzed employees' salaries and where does the money go, housing is your first problem. Lack of proper housing or the lack of housing at the right price. Now, we're a tech company in the end. we build advanced manufacturing products. So one of the products that we're going to bring in is 3D printing homes. And what we're gonna offer for our employees, if you work with us, you're gonna get subsidized housing and that housing is gonna get built with 3D printers. And no one has actually introduced 3D printing into large shell factories on the industrial side. So this is going to be challenging, we know it's going to be challenging, but we know that we can push the envelope on the technology side so 3D printing is going to be a very critical piece of this, we want to bring 3D printing both for housing. As well as the factory build out and. Many of you can research this you can actually 3D print a house in two weeks. and At that cost, if we subsidize it, we can retain people and they have more disposable income for them to support their families. So on that note, I'm going to yield the mic to Mr. Gephardt. He's going to talk about how he solved this problem. at another company in terms of healthcare, because healthcare is gonna be our second or third largest operational expense. And in order for us to retain our people, we do need the right healthcare.

So I yield. Thank you, Harry. So when I retired from active public service, I was asked to be on a board, a volunteer board with all the presidents of all the America's labor unions. And their mission was to try to figure out how to deliver a better healthcare product at a better price for their members. The problem was, whenever they went into collective bargaining negotiations, they never could get to wages because all the money was claimed by health care so we brought in a bunch of health experts and we found out two important things number one seventy percent of your health status is our own behavior secondly 80% of the cost of health care in America is managing chronic disease, diabetes, heart, stroke, on and on. And so we asked them, what is an intervention we can make that would move the needle, that would increase people's health status, would hold down costs and give them a more cost-effective product. They said direct primary care, quarterback doctors for union members. Well, then we set up a 501 to do this, and then we needed some place to do it. I was also on the board of a company called Spirit Aerosystems in Wichita, Kansas. It used to be part of Boeing, and it then was spun off, and it made all the fuselages for all the Boeing airplanes. And they put a fuselage a day on a railroad car or a bunch of railroad cars and took it to Seattle to have the wings put on and the tail put on. They had huge healthcare costs for their union membership. And so they said, we're gonna have to close a parts plant we have in Tulsa because we can't afford the healthcare. And I said, well, maybe I've got a solution with this 501 that I'm on the board of called Solidarity's Health. So I went down to Tulsa, I went to Wichita, I asked the workers if they would approve an amendment to their collective bargaining agreement, because to provide this direct primary care service, We only wanted 80 patients, excuse me, 800 patients, no more than 900 patients per doctor. And that would cost us $80 per head. And that covered not only the worker, but their family a month. To afford that, we had to raise their co-pay and deductible on their back-end insurance. In other words, if they had a heart attack, they needed surgery, whatever. That was 15 years ago. The people were very worried about this because they didn't want to lose their, what they called Cadillac health insurance. And so we finally convinced them We got the vote by a few votes. We've been doing it for 15 years. We got the best primary care doctor in Tulsa and in Wichita because they saw an opportunity to actually do what they were trained to do in medical school, and that is spend time with the people. and really understand their conditions and be able to help them improve their behavior. We had a lot of workers on opioids because they had manufacturing injuries. We had people that were on drugs. And so today, and it covered their kids and their spouses, Today, if you went to Wichita or Tulsa and told these people we were withdrawing this benefit, they would kill you. Now, here's the best fact. We have reduced our overall health care costs at Spirit Aerosystems by 40%. How did we do that? People don't have to go to the emergency room if they have a problem. They don't have to go to urgent care if they have a problem. They call the doctor. The doctors give them their cell phone number. They are guaranteed the same day appointment if they call. No meeting in the waiting room. And they know everything about them. They have nutrition classes in the clinic. They have exercise classes. I would love seeing these senior citizens who are in the Olympics. They had, you know, lessons on how to get better sleep and social connection, which are the four pillars of good health. So it worked, and we want to do the very same thing here with the employees that we hope we'll have here at Convolt in Gallup. It'll be free. We'll have good primary care doctors be in the clinic, and they can then interact with healthcare providers in Gallup in substance abuse or mental health problems or if they need surgery or they need to go to the hospital or whatever. So they'll be their quarterback doctor to have a good interaction between them and the specialist that is needed to take care of someone's condition. So I am over the moon about this. I've studied healthcare my entire life. I think healthcare is the most important thing in our lives. I have a son. When he was two years old, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. They said he'll be dead in six weeks. We didn't take that for an answer. We had a young intern who came in and said, I went on the computer. This was years ago. This was in 1971. And he said, we think there's a triple drug therapy that along with max radiation, we might be able to shrink this huge tumor in his belly, and we can eventually get it out. He's had 14 operations. Right now, he's 50. Three years old. Every time I see him, I cry. There's nothing you can tell me about health care. It's the most important thing in your life. And we're going to give great health care to the people that come to work for Convolt Energy. because we want them to be motivated and excited about making this company a huge success for themselves, because they're all going to have stock in the company, and for the community of Gallup, and for the country that we all love.

Thank you. So health care is a core fact of what we want to do. Can we flip to the next page, please? So we've got a lot of data that we have put together in terms of the impact that this opportunity brings to Gallup. We have talked about the jobs. We have talked about what it does for the poverty levels. Two percentage points in three years This factory, when it's fully operational, reduces two percentage points in terms of your property numbers. Next slide, please. Direct employment versus indirect employment. We all know that the factory has to be served. Transportation jobs, entertainment, food, All of these are going to add to the indirect employment. And again, we've got all these numbers and we're going to put them on a data sheet on our website sometime tomorrow. Next please. So what is our roadmap? Solar cells, solar panels. Many of you have been using computers You used to go buy Windows. You got it on a disk or you downloaded it. You paid one-time fee, used it for five years. Today, that is not the case. You pay a monthly fee, you pay a yearly fee. It's a subscription model, whether you use Windows, whether you use Microsoft Office, whether you use Adobe. And it has moved from a standalone service, a one-time transaction, to... a subscription service that gives you revenue that is consistent. Now, why is that important for us? We manufacture hardware. We sell it. And we don't want to be in a situation where we don't know who's going to buy it in three years or two years. You've got a $700 million factory that is being built. We need consistent revenue so we can pay our lenders. So we want to offer a software service when we sell that solar panel. We provide a 25 year guarantee on the product and we now want to monitor it for 25 years and ask our customers to pay a small fee so we can monitor the performance, we can monitor if anything else is going wrong, whether it's running at a high temperature, whether the cables have a potential to catch fire. So this service, instead of somebody else performing it, we're going to offer that along with our product. The next phase for us is glass. We have to import glass. We don't make glass in America for solar. And what we have calculated with all the geopolitics that are going on right now, you would have to have six months of inventory. The six months of inventory, if you run the working capital cost and the interest costs in that six months of inventory over two years, you're actually better off manufacturing the glass than you are buying it from Asia. So glass is going to be a core component. And battery manufacturing. We talked about desalination. One of the big byproducts of desalination is brine. Brine is sodium. The next generation of batteries are going to be sodium ion batteries. The raw product is brine and sodium. So if we have a desal plant that is generating a lot of brine, we would then convert that to sodium. We love Gallup because Gallup has I-40, it's got the rail, and you can actually ship it on rail, bring it to our site, and that reduces our overall cost to produce. All of this is, again, self-contained. We generate our own power. We generate our own water. We recycle as much of it internally on that campus. And over time, We see the same hydrojunction technology that we're going to bring in on the ground-based solar. We want to start producing triple junction cells for satellites. They need cells, and we can manufacture those cells. Now, we're in the power business. We know what it takes to manufacture cells. And over time, I think we'll probably manufacture the subsystem for the satellites, the power subsystem. So if you're making the cells and you're making the glass and some of it is plastic, we can make the subsystems. So this is a growth pattern in terms of where we are today, where we expect to be in the next 36 to 48 months. Next slide, please. So we talked about our manufacturing plant. The footprint is 1.4 million square feet is the footprint for the cell at the Mario plant. The glass factory is another 1.4 million. So over time, over the next 36 months, it's a 2.8 million square foot building by itself. Next slide, please. I'm going to skip on this. These are our competitors. I can tell you First Solar is the only true American company that manufactures the entire space. Most of the other loans are international companies. Whether it's Hanwha, T1, Wari, Jinko, Canadian Solar, even though it's got the name Canadian Solar, So we have an opportunity to build this. And why not in the most patriotic city in the United States? Why not? So next slide, please. Again, we've got our analysis on who our competitors are, what they're doing, how well integrated they are. Again, we're producing product with a fully sustainable model. Even our expansion is fully contained in that campus. Next slide, please. So, you heard Mr. Gebhardt and how passionate he is about healthcare, because that, you need to retain your employees if they get really good healthcare, they get really good subsidized housing, you're gonna retain those employees. And if we can get young folks trained, whether they work on the production floor today to start. They can grow into automation, they can decide whether they want to be in cell production, module production, whether they want to be in power generation, whether they want to work on the reverse osmosis plant, they have a choice. We want to grow leaders and we want to rotate the leaders through those businesses so that they are trained on how to run a larger operation. The deep tech part, and we're in a public setting, so I don't really want to get deep into it, but we are going to advance the technology with the German team that we have. So when I look back at the history of the company, we have developed projects in very complex environments. We have taken what's been given to us and we made the best use out of it. Can I sit here and tell you that this is a done deal? This is going to happen? This is for sure? No. But we're going to do everything we can to execute this. There are going to be naysayers. That's fine. We want to have a conversation with you. We want to open this dialogue. You've got very talented people in this council. We'll sit with them, we'll work with them, we'll tell them our plans, we'll be transparent, and they can tell us, hey, this works, this doesn't work, why are you doing it? And that's how we expect to engage with your community. Next slide, please. So the rest of it is all technical data. I'm going to skip that. I think we have communicated to you our intent. And our intent is manufacturing. We want to move from being a pure hardware seller to a hardware and a software seller. Why? We need that revenue. We saw this in 23, 24. We had 30, 35 employees. We were ramping up. Prices went down. We had to let them go. We don't want that to happen when you've got a large factory. So we need that revenue. So we are going to adapt to the market. We are going to sell hardware. We are going to sell the software along with it. We have to guarantee that anyway. And these are the trends that we have to adapt to. If we don't, we don't survive. We want to retain the employment. The employment provides growth, health care, housing for our staff. And I think that's the only way for us to succeed. It needs to be a full package. And we are going to continue developing the project with the desalination. I don't think anybody can convince us today to stop it. We're convinced it is the right strategy. The state needs it. The whole Southwest region needs it. We see an opportunity for us to get raw material for sodium ion battery manufacturing in the future. So we're going to continue on this path until somebody can tell us why we are wrong. And if we're wrong, we'll adapt. But otherwise we have a strategy. We are going to execute that strategy to our best. We're going to communicate that to your council and to the mayor. and adjust if there are things that we have not considered that affects the community. But I can tell you today, we don't take your power. We don't take your water. In fact, we want to bring water. And this is our plan. So I'm going to stop. I'm sure you've got questions or comments starting from the council and the mayor, and then we'll leave it up to you.

Well, Harry, thank you so much. You know, it's really refreshing to have your presentation. It shows us the way Gallup can be and the way the future, you know, renewables, recyclables, things that we need to look forward to. Don't argue, just build things for disposal. We got to work with disposing also. That would be the recycle water. You know, Gallup is in an interesting place. In 1980s, the nuclear mine shut down. later in the 80s, Burlington Railroad, which at the time was AT&SF, pulled out of town. And then the coal mines, one of the coal mines shut down, and then both refineries shut down, and then another coal mine shut down. So we lost a lot of jobs, and we've not replaced those jobs. And this plan that Harry's come up with, along with Mr. Gabbard and his wife, is one of the best things that's ever happened to Gallup. And I want to tell everybody tomorrow at 1230, they'll be back in this room to answer questions and to go over anything, any questions anybody might have, because we don't really have the time today to answer any of the questions. And we'll continue with that. But right now, I'm going to leave it open to the council to ask questions. And Linda, did you want to go first?

I do have several questions here, and I know we met previously, but my first question is a clarification. I know you keep saying we're not going to use water. You're going to have solar for all your electricity, but you're not using potable water, but you are using effluent water. You do need water, but effluent water, right? So I just want to clarify when you say we don't need any water, that's not entirely true. I mean, I understand it's poop water, but it's still water. And then that follow-up is like, Is there no, like throughout the whole phase of manufacturing, you would not need any potable water or you would need some? It seems hard to believe that you wouldn't need any.

So if I didn't explain properly, I do apologize. We talked about effluent water, the 1 million gallons a day that GLP has, which we would process. So what we're saying is we don't need any potable water from the city. We're not tapping into your pipes for any potable water. The effluent water that is being discarded today after it's been treated, we take that, we convert that, and we utilize that for the campus. That water today is being discarded after it's been treated, and that's the only water that we use. We are not touching any potable water. Now, We have a limited amount of water, which means that on our production side, we can only put three production lines. That's it. We're capped. Unless there is more effluent water, we're capped. We understand that. We know that. And that's our plan. So our growth is set to that effluent water that is available. And this is one of the reasons why we want to develop the desalination project, right? That's how industry grows.

And the total for the affluent water is what you would need?

So we have a million gallons right now, which is what we have allocated to us. And we would then run the RO process on it. You have a recovery anywhere from 60 to 70% of that. And that's what we utilize internally for the campus.

So a million from GLP and how much from the city?

Well, right now we have no contact with the city. There's no conversation right now from the city yet. It depends on what the city wants to do with the effluent water that is remaining. I've been told that it's being used for your golf courses. They may be additional, but I'm not, we haven't. We haven't talked about it yet. So all we have today is the 1M gallons coming from.

Okay, and then, um, I do have a few questions. So. I apologize if I missed this. It was a lot of information. How is the project here being funded or being financed? Is it currently being funded already? Is the funding secure or is the project dependent on future investors?

so the funding is equity and debt it's all private capital on the debt side we have three large banks that are willing to finance the project subject to planning commission approvals subject to us moving forward with engineering and finalizing the engineering and the costs. The equity is ring fenced already. We've already got the equity participants on the sideline. They follow the debt. So if the debt is there, they follow. but that's gonna be dependent on us completing the planning, permitting, engineering, making sure that the costs are all in what we've expected and what we have budgeted. And it's a fully private financed transaction. we don't have any upfront money from the city the state or federal you know in our manufacturing business we get tax credits when we perform when we execute and that's federal and whatever is going to be provided by the state it's usually the same formula for any industry any sector they've got a formula depending on how many jobs you have actually hired and so forth. So those are all back-ended, but we have to perform. And this is not an easy task because we have seen the geopolitical landscape and manufacturing is not easy, which is why most, 90% of the people that I showed you on that board are Chinese origin companies, different funding sources. We don't have that in America. We don't have that luxury.

So just the clarification on that. So then no permits or like environmental approvals have been done yet, right? None of that's been completed.

So we executed our agreement about a month ago. So the first thing that we have done is come and talk to you. We've been fully transparent about our strategy. We have not filed for any environmental permits. We do have, I believe, phase one on that site. We don't believe there's a phase two requirement. But we will continue our processes, which include permitting approvals, environmental reports, engineering reports that we have to execute before it goes in front of our financing parties.

And the last thing, and I'll talk to you about, I have some other questions, but to the fellow council members, the only other comments I'm making, questions, just, um, I love the idea of housing and I love the idea of, you know, healthcare. And I know that was a big thing that you guys talked about tonight, but I'm leery about how that all pans out. I mean, I think we have a new hospital CEO and she's really gung-ho about making our hospital the strongest it can be, but it sounded kind of like you guys feel like you are, and you're going to be able to bring in more healthcare providers and healthcare than our own hospital currently is being able to provide. So maybe I'm misunderstanding that, but it just seemed, you know, I want to be gung-ho too and say, yes, we're going to provide all this healthcare for all your people and your 900 jobs that you're saying. But I'm cautiously optimistic about that because we have historically struggled with getting providers here. And I know the hospital has worked very hard locally to have our own providers here for our community. So to make such a bold claim that essentially you guys are going to now have a pipeline to new providers that are going to come in and service all of your workers seems far-fetched.

Well, when somebody told Elon Musk you can't land one of your spaceships back on Earth, everyone said no. I don't think this is as complicated, but I'm going to hand the mic over to Mr. Gephardt, because I think we need to clarify that. More importantly, in our own company, we've got seven doctors who are shareholders in our company okay so and they've got a pool across the country they are existing shareholders in our firm and they bring a breadth of experiences from you know heart to gastroenterology to whatnot but i'm gonna you want to address this because i think this is well

The only health care professionals that we will hire is however many primary care doctors we need and maybe some PAs, physician assistants, to help them run the clinic. We're not going to have a bunch of other people. They're going to provide primary care, quarterback doctor, And if people present with a serious problem that has to be addressed by a specialist or in a hospital setting, we will recommend them out to the right provider here in the community. And if the community doesn't have that specialty, and I'm not fully aware of what is here, then then we'd have to go to some other town in the area and find the help that we need. And we're going to try like all get out to find the primary care doctors here. We don't want to bring in doctors from somewhere else. That's what we did in Tulsa. That's what we did in Wichita. And we got the best people because, as they said to us, they love doing this because they have the gift of time to really deal with their patients. What we have found is that 85% of what people need from health care can be done in a primary care setting. Let me add one other thing. We went into the community and bought the most used generic drugs. And the doctors dispense those free to the people who come into the clinic. If they need medication for high blood pressure or the usual stuff that people get prescribed, we make that available at no price. And so that really helps people as well who work for this company. I hope that answers your question. I'm not sure I...

It does. I mean, I certainly hope that if this moves forward, that you guys would work with our local hospital and clinics that are already here on some of that.

Absolutely.

Definitely want to. I want to see that succession and I want to see that people can, you know, stay here and become providers. And I think that's been a struggle. for our community. And so certainly if you can provide that and have the healthcare for employees at your company, I do think that's a benefit.

And we're going to provide these people with backend insurance. They're not going to be just being covered for primary care. They're going to have back-end insurance with some good insurance insurer, and they will pay for the cardiologists or the neurologists or the dermatologists that people need to see here in the community.

Yeah, thank you. That helps clarify. I'll be optimistic, but I just want to I you're right. I think you should never just say no, because you never know what you can do. But I want to, I want you guys to be aware that healthcare here has been a struggle. And I hope 1000% that this can, what you're saying can truly come to fruition.

Yeah, and if any of you want, I invite you to come to Tulsa. We also have three clinics now in rural Wisconsin, and we're just building six clinics in Northern California. These are all for union people, and we're about to enter into a contract with all the unions in greater New York City. to put clinics all over New York City to do this there. To me, this is the future of healthcare. And I've said many times to people I know at Medicare and Medicaid, you need to do this at Medicare and Medicaid. You need to provide free of charge to people on Medicare and Medicaid primary care so that you can improve their healthcare, prevent disease, have a healthier people, and cut the cost. Healthcare is the only industry that I've come into contact with in my 85 years that the only way you can cut costs is to increase the quality. I mean, all the times we argued about Medicare and Medicaid in Congress, it was we had to put more money in, more money, more money. Well, this is an industry where if you provide a better product, a more cost-effective product, you not only increase the quality of the product, but you save bundles of money.

Feels like you should go back into health care.

I never left it.

Mr. Gebhardt, tell us the story, though, about the drug addiction, mental health, and alcoholism.

Yes, absolutely. So at Spirit, we had a lot of people who were on drugs, opioids. We had a lot of alcoholism. and all of the related problems that come from that. It was epidemic proportions in Tulsa. And we were able to get them to people in the community that could help them with intensive care for that problem. The primary care doctor can't do that. That's not their vector. So we got them to good people in the Tulsa community, and they got them the help they needed. As I said a minute ago, we had lots of people on opioids because of manufacturing injuries. And We got most, if not all of them off of opioids. We got them to physical therapy providers in the community to get rid of the pain that came from their injury. That's why they were on opioids because they were in pain. So you go at the problem, you go at the cause of the problem. You don't go at the symptom of the problem. And that's the whole point that healthcare needs to take into account.

Thank you so much. Linda, do you have any questions?

Thank you. There's one point that I want to make. So when we hire folks, and let's say we want to bring talented youngsters who are from Gallup and went off to Albuquerque, they went off to Phoenix, if we want to bring them back and employ in our factories, they're going to ask for three things. Do I have a competitive salary? Do I have healthcare and housing? But more importantly, do I have enough high-speed bandwidth in my house and when I operate? Because if they don't have one of those, they're going back to Phoenix or they're going back to Albuquerque. So we have thought about it. Yes, we learned a lot from New York, what it actually takes to stay in the factory up, what it takes to hire the people and retain them. And we need a holistic approach. And this is the holistic approach that we have put together. And if you remove one piece out of it, you have a problem. And that problem could lead to us not having employees. And if we don't have employees on the production floor, we're not generating the revenue. And if we don't generate the revenue, these lovely lenders pick up the phone and call you up and say, you got 30 days to make this payment, else something else. We have thought through it. And we've put a holistic solution together. So I'm going to come back to other questions that you want to have.

Yes, you know I always have questions. So thank you all for being here. Thank you especially for agreeing to hold a public meeting for constituent engagement. It's very important to me that you listen to our community as you develop your company here. And I also hope there will be maybe another thing down the road besides the 1230 meeting tomorrow because this is short notice and a lot of people work during the day. Hopefully we can work together to find another opportunity. I know you're not in town for very much longer this time. I did want to ask if we can make this presentation available publicly for people who would like to view it. Is it okay if we share this?

Yeah, I just have to run it through our legal. But we are putting in a project site that is going to have the vast majority of this data. And we just need to make sure that the lawyers have disclaimed all of it so we don't get sued by somebody for something. Okay.

those detailed plans that you shared. Also, is it possible right now if you or possibly Gallup land partners can show the geographic area that you're planning to develop? Because I know I've also gotten questions from that on where will these buildings actually be located?

Yeah, I don't think it's on that presentation in a week in short, but there are some modifications that we're making in terms of where it's located. But I do know that it's north of the rail loop is where the factory is going. You know, we are working on finalizing the, what do you call it, the planning or zoning change and all of that. So we're happy to put that up on Zoom. on that website in terms of where we're planning on. And within the next 24 to 48 hours, we can actually create the project data site and have it online.

Okay, thank you. And then I'd like to ask about two state policies that might affect you. Recent legislation allows for microgrids for industry to be excluded from the net zero carbon law. Would you all include a clause in your agreement with the city promising net zero carbon by 2045 as required for all other forms of energy production in the state?

Is that a law?

New Mexico has a net zero carbon by 2045 for energy industries, except microgrids are excluded.

I don't think we would have a problem with that. We're solar and batteries and standby generators in case the power goes down. But I don't think we would have an issue with that, especially if it's by 2045, we have to do it. We're happy to sign up for it.

possible legislation that hasn't passed yet, but how would a statewide moratorium on data centers affect your plans for the software component of your development? And would you respect a tribal moratorium on data centers?

I don't know the answer to that today. If there is a moratorium and the state puts it, then, you know, are we going to be in trouble? Possibly. Because we can't sell our solar panels with the software service that comes along with it. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I think that is something that we need to think through and plan. But I don't know the answer. And the world is changing. fully interconnected now. Any product that we're making is interconnected. Now, what do we do with the network operations center that is going to come in that is going to connect to all of our internal servers that are running the entire operation? And that's not a small operation either. So I don't know how this is defined. I don't know how it is I don't know the answer to that. I mean, this is new.

To see what that exact restriction was and go from there.

So we don't know what that states. You don't know what it says you can do and not do. We don't know. We don't know the answer. I think this is all developing pretty quickly, and we need to think through it. But we need that software for our service. I mean, if we just sold a solar panel without monitoring, you know, our revenues go down. And when your revenues go down, let's say the overall market has a problem because the next person sitting in DC makes some change to trade barriers and says, you know what? I don't want trade barriers anymore. Let everybody come in. Then we have a problem. Then do I go fire the people? And at that point, people are only going to say this company failed and it fired its people. They won't really understand what actually caused it. So we need to think through these things and talk through it. And if we're saying, hey, I'm signing up to be fully sustainable. I'm not consuming any power from anybody else. I'm not consuming your water. And I'm building a business that is hardware and software. And I'm selling it to my customers. And they're paying me just like you use your computer and you pay Microsoft and you pay Adobe and you pay all the other guys. And we're exactly the same. I don't know how many people use their apps on their phone to pay their phone bill, to pay their electric bill. You're using an app on your phone to make a payment. So if they're making a payment to us because we're monitoring their sites on a monthly basis and we're running our servers to monitor it, I don't know why we should be penalized for it when we're sustainable. We're supporting the community. So we should think through that. I think this is a very complex topic. We're not other data center guys that are building this humongous data. That's not who we are. So I don't think that applies to us. And I think we're here to support manufacturing.

Okay, and so so ultimately what i'm getting is it depends on the definition of a data Center in any of those proposed moratoriums and.

yeah and who right if you are not a manufacturer and you're just a developer and you're just building a decent and that's one thing. But if you're a manufacturer and you're saying hey you know I am integrated and i'm providing this service to my customers. Right? Then we should be able to execute that. If we're selling four gigawatts of solar panels to an African nation, and we need to monitor it, we want to provide the service for it, and we want to do it, and all of a sudden we can't do it because of a policy, how do you think about that? Two, this is also progressing very rapidly, right? Like if we start selling subsystems for satellites and we want to monitor that and we want to run through analysis and predict when something is going to go wrong, telemetry is off, you know, something's off and we need to be able to calculate and manage it because we get the revenue from it, do we stop it? So these are things that we should, I think it should be discussed and it comes down to, Who, what, when, where, why? Right? Those five Ws.

So lastly, I do see the potential benefits. I also see some risks. And so these are the things that I would like to see from Convolt in order to commit my support for the project. And as I make these five requests, I also offer my support. However, it may be helpful to you. I would want to see written plans for environmental reciprocity. So not just the state environmental study, but actually giving back to the earth as our ancestors had the wisdom to do in this area. And we've talked about that already a bit. I would want to see a plan for housing stability for Gallup residents, because as you bring in housing and people, it can definitely impact our rent rates and it can affect the availability of rental housing, which we're already in a crisis of. So we need to consider how that influx of housing and people will impact, especially our low-income residents in Gallup. I want to see some written thoughts and plans about human trafficking prevention. Gallup is in the top 10 cities for missing and murdered Indigenous women, and that matters as well when we're bringing in construction, bringing in temporary workers, bringing in more high-paying jobs. It's a concern that we are on the interstate and rail for that purpose as well. I want to see buy-in from or a plan to get buy-in from all the local chapters and tribal representatives on your plan. And I want to see some plans for the sustainability of economic growth. I see your numbers on economic growth and impact, and I appreciate that. My concern is more about boom and bust periods for employment and also around priority of hiring our local people, of course. I looked at, this is a separate note, kind of more for the mayor and council, but I looked at our code and found the charter for the sustainable Gallup board. And it seems like maybe that group has been out of commission. I wonder what it would take to reinvigorate that board and assign them to work with convolt on this process and planning so that they can look at sustainability of both the economic and the environmental. yeah and i know bill bright is here tonight so i um did talk with him before and found that was kind of how i found out that they have not been meeting but i do think it's a worthwhile um investment to get that board up and running again so that we have an assigned group to work with convolt as they develop their plans so if i can comment on some of the points that you made i think we're fully supportive of working with you on the points that you've talked about

especially around trafficking. And I think Mr. Gephardt and Karen and I are already working on strategies to address that. I think more councils in this country should bring that topic up because it just gets buried. Okay, so completely supportive. Two with the local chapters. We need your help because four years ago, Mr. Gephardt tried to connect us with the nomination. It took three and a half years to get a response to the meeting. And it only happened because of Martin. And that was a year plus ago. Follow-up emails, nothing. So we're ready. But we also understand that they have other priorities, and this may not be a priority, so we want to work with you, but I don't know that if you tie us up to an approval from the chapter. he's 84 i'm going to execute this project for him. Okay. So we're not going to wait for an approval when we know we can't even get a meeting in four years. So I want to be clear about that. We need your help on that. We're happy to spend all the time that is needed to meet them. But they need to move with speed. Same thing with the water designation. We want to do this. but there has to be reciprocity on the other side. And that's our only point. All the other points were totally in conjunction with you. We're happy to spend the time and walk through that and execute that housing. Obviously, we would have to do the planning with you, get your approvals. And at that point, we can sit and talk about the impact, how to address it. So I think we're on the same page.

Very good. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. Ron?

Yes, sir. A few words from the older part of the council coming up here. Medical, near and dear to my heart. I'm at that age, what can I say? We just finished approving at the state level our medical malpractice caps. We had no caps in New Mexico for years. I had a small hand in that, a very small hand, and we got that approved. Now we're going to have caps on medical malpractice lawsuits. I lost my doctor, and his wife was also a doctor. We lost them the last three years, three years at least. Because of it, they couldn't afford the malpractice lawsuit. And my point is this, and it's just a point. What you guys are bringing to the table for our city of Gallup is a shot in the arm for us, excuse the pun, but it's a good shot in the arm for Gallup. I think all the doctors we can bring into Gallup, whether part of Commvault or part of PHS or part of RMCH or private practice doctors, it's good for Gallup. The more doctors in Gallup, the merrier. And we have a very small handful of primary doctors provider doctors and i mean everything we need we've got to go to albuquerque farmington you know there's nothing can be done here for the most part uh for the most part so i appreciate what you're doing for the medical part of this journey uh like i said call it a shot in the arm call it whatever you want for gallup but it's good for gallup i got a couple of questions uh What's the timeframe when we get to government approvals?

Ideally, we would like to get our approvals in over the next three, four months to move forward with our financing. And we want to have execution or start of construction, I want to say January, February of 2027. so between now and december is when we need to execute on all the engineering the reports and permits and approvals that are required and get to financing closure in q1 preferably in late january early february nothing happens between december 15th and january 15th So that's our timeline. First phase, we expect the production lines to be up and running within a year of that, the first line. And then within 18 months, all three lines are fully operational.

Okay. The monetary part, getting with the banks, is there a time constraint on that?

Look, we don't know. So this market is now very heavily driven by tech. All right? Tech drives the market today. And tech goes up and down. Right now it's heated. You can say it's overheated. So we want to strike while the iron is hot. We've got capital providers that want to provide the capital. They like our strategy. They like what we're here to execute. And Karen has done a phenomenal job of bringing them all to the table, and now we need to execute. So we've got a time period between now and before Christmas to get everything packaged up, submitted, so that it goes to investment committee, and hopefully the committee closes sometime mid to late January, and then you go to construction. What happens in the midterm elections that creates headache? We don't know. What happens post that, you know, in terms of policymaking in DC post midterm elections? We don't know. So what we're saying is, Let's execute now. Let's get out of the midterms. Right now, the capital is there. The people want to invest money. They want to deploy money. Now is the time to do it. And if Gallup can benefit by these projects moving forward, let's execute. But we don't know. Look. I've, you know, Karen and I have been on the banking world for a long time. We have seen two cycles, right? From Bear Stearns to the global financial crisis. And we have experiences from that. And we have seen the ups and downs. The market is there today. The capital is there. The liquidity is there in the market. You've got $5.5 trillion worth of liquidity in the money market world. So the liquidity is there. Good projects get capital. As long as you don't scare them. So the time to strike is now before the midterms. We don't know what happens after the midterms.

Okay, very good. Thanks for that information, Mr. and Mrs. Gettpark. Thank you for coming to Gallup. Thanks for your hard work on this project. I really appreciate it. Now, I got one more request. This may sound a little off the wall, but this is one. There's probably going to be about half a dozen requests, you know. But one of them is, would you consider, during your construction phase of your project, to include enough money in there to build the city of Gallup a public library. And like I said, it's off the wall, but it's one of probably half a dozen requests.

Under one condition, as long as there's a section for space.

There'll be a section for space.

Now we're good. The three items that we talked about are, one, even before that, to dedicate two resources to the city. We want to get that park cleaned up. No needles, no drugs in that park. That's number one for us. And that's important for our employees that we want to attract to show that you've got a good city quality of life here in town. Two. I think you need a recreational complex where employees and their kids have basketball courts, soccer fields, football fields. You need to have that. So these are two that's part of our budget. Happy to work with you on the library.

And five others.

But there has to be a space section.

Other projects, that is. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. I've asked enough questions.

Thank you, Ron. Thank you. Okay, Linda.

Thank you. So they asked the majority of my questions. But I know that we did talk about what you would be able to contribute when you become a manufacturer in yellow. And you did say that you were adamant about the youth and to build a recreational complex. So we talked about a place, you know, our sports complex, Northside, our behavioral health, let me know. Brian Mitchell, different locations, but you were positive with that in our parks. And then we did talk about a little bit about the library. So I'm very happy that this company wants to contribute and be part of the city. You said that you would all be, we would just be able to leave. You would be part of the city, which I really like about that. So a lot of my specific questions were asked that I feel comfortable with, but I also have some questions about, you mentioned like 900 employees. How many, once it's built, how many would be living and working at that manufacturing?

So the 900 are... local jobs that are generated. It does not include the team of 10 people we have in Germany that come in and train people and go back out, because those guys are not going to live here. They're going to come in. They spend six months at a time getting the factory up and running. They train the people. But they're in Germany. They have to go back. So there has to be a local team. And those 900 jobs are local jobs. You can get the people, but getting them to stay is the challenge, right? I've given you examples of what happened in Phoenix and what happened in Atlanta. These are competitors to us. One of them is completely folded, and the other one's got a very big challenge, and they've spent $4 billion on that plant. So we have to retain them. For that retention, you need that whole package of things that we talked about. You probably need a library for their kids and you probably need that sports complex and you gotta clean up. You can't have drugs and needles running around in parks.

I know they talked about housing and I know that's a big, not really, it is a problem, but not a problem. But I also wanted people to know that constituents, the city and other counselors and whomever that the city is looking at rehabbing older homes. We are, right now as we speak, looking to go to older homes and get them rehabbed so that we can be ready and have, and for the constituents lower income or seniors or whatnot because that's very important to me because that's the district that I serve. But also those that are coming in that are gonna be making high paying jobs. So I just think it's gonna be a community effort that we all work together because I truly believe that it's time for this city to be revitalized and I support you and I know we're gonna have more questions but I think we're gonna have more answers and we're gonna have questions with you all. And I think I want this to be number one state that we that we will be number one in the state of New Mexico. For renewal.

You know, I told the mayor today earlier, I've learned a lot here in a few days. I didn't even know that New Mexico was the number two producer of oil in the country. That's why you have this state fund that comes from the money that comes from that oil. And, you know, I don't know what they're spending it all on, but I hope it's good things. Maybe there'll be a library in there from that as well. But yeah, Why shouldn't New Mexico not only be number one in fossil fuels, but number one in renewables? I believe, you know, I was in public service a long time. I always said that climate change is the toughest political transaction and human challenge in human history. But we can't get to where we need to be by identifying villains. The villain is not the oil industry. We know that we can't keep burning oil and have a safe environment. So we need everybody to work together to solve the problem. And that's what we're trying to do. So New Mexico could be the epicenter of not only continuing to produce oil and the money that comes from oil, but then devote those resources, some of them, into renewable power. Look, if we don't solve climate change, it's not going to affect me. I'm way too old. But my grandkids are going to be impacted. Let me tell you, you don't have to be a climatologist to look at what's happening in the world today. Flooding everywhere, fires, wildfires. Your fire chief talked about it. You avoided some bad wildfires. But I remember a couple of years ago, you had horrible wildfires here in New Mexico. They just had some in Utah. California, they have them every week. People in India have no water. The water issue is the issue in the west of the United States. The Colorado River is going dry. This is a problem. We have to wake up and solve the damn problem. And we only do that Thank you. We only do that if we work together. That's our human genius.

All work together, it can be done and it will be a success. And it would be a greater Gallup.

This is the greatest country in human history. I'm in awe of this country. I'm in awe that we've governed ourselves for 250 years. Just remember in 1789, our founders gave us a precious gift that no human before them had ever had. And that was the ability to govern ourselves in groups like this. And my greatest worry is that we're going to give up on it. And we're going to let one person make all the decisions. And that's a disaster.

I have a comment. Sorry, I appreciate it. Yeah, I know I'm about to probably get booed on this, but maybe not by the people. I would be remiss. I know that it's been very late, but we have allowed Commvault to give a lengthy presentation. And I know that many people in the audience came to speak, and I know we're having the meeting tomorrow, but we have talked about wanting to let public speak. And I'm just curious, if you came to speak, is anybody here to speak and cannot come tomorrow? So anybody that wants to speak and cannot come tomorrow, raise your hand. Oh, she just left. I just, if you can come tomorrow, great. I just, I'm sorry. I mean, we, we have citizens who came specifically to ask questions and we allowed a very lengthy presentation and I, we asked a lot of lengthy questions and then we did not allow public who came and sat through this entire night to ask any questions tonight. And we gave them no notice of the meeting tomorrow. And I'm, I'm disappointed by that. And I just, I, I understand it's late, but. We just had a whole conversation the last few meetings about giving public comment, encouraging our citizens to come and ask questions. And now we're like, just kidding. Come tomorrow to ask all your questions when they sat here and came after work. So I would be remiss if I didn't say that out loud. I have spoke on this before about my feelings about this. So, Sophia, I mean, if I just I'd just like to open it to the council. If anyone cannot come tomorrow that we let them speak because they did come tonight.

Absolutely.

I find myself pushing back tears tonight. There are a lot of unanswered questions. There are a lot of things that need further discussion. I understand that the company would like to have some kind of timely response. On the other hand, years ago, we had something here, seeing my good friend Bill Bright in the audience. In 2012, the water board morphed into the sustainable gallop board. These things need to be looked at with the sponsorship of the city by that group or some similar group. And I leave that with you as a suggestion. At the same time, though, and I want to finish my comments by saying I was able today to meet with Harry and Dick and some other folks to look into these things a little bit. And like I said, I have real questions. But I want to say that the vibe is very positive, Mark.

Thank you, Larry.

It's positive. And I'm moved, frankly, by you guys. And I'm so glad that you have approached us Dick mentioned to me what is maybe the most important thing, which is transparency. We need to be transparent about our water. We need to be transparent about everything, Linda, right? Absolutely. We lose nothing by honesty and transparency. And I'm here to, once again, speak in favor of those values and some plans that would operationalize those values. Anyway, I'm hopeful that this group can deliver what they want to deliver. And I think if they can, we want to welcome them and we want to thank them and take them on as partners. That is not to say that we should not ask questions. But they have shown, they showed me this morning, and they've shown all of us this evening, I believe, that they are very willing to communicate. And Harry, I appreciate that. Dick, I appreciate that. And I know everybody in this room appreciates that. And this is what we need in the world, and this is what we need in Gallup. And thank you. And thank you guys very much.

We'll see you tomorrow, Anthony. Everybody, well, again, okay. One point of clarification for Councilor Yazzie's question about engaging the Navajo Nation. Representative Wanda Johnson introduced us today to Johnny Johnson, who's over the Eastern Agency. And he invited us to make a presentation to the Eastern Agency meeting, which includes 31 chapters in late August.

Thank you. That's a wonderful start. And I can also help you get out to District 6 and 14 so that the local chapters are informed. Thank you.

I can come tomorrow, but I just wanted to know that there are two, at least two people, and maybe more who are listening on YouTube. I'm Leanne Gilson, sorry, Gallup, that said there's no way to make public comment and they can't come at 1230. Maybe you have one of them now.

Let's take a break and then we'll take the public comments then if that's what we have to do. I just didn't want to run the meeting any longer. We'll go ahead and take a break. So let's adjourn for 10 minutes.

Well, I said I can come tomorrow.

I just wanted to say they can't figure out a way to comment on the live stream. And those two people want to comment, but there's no way to do it. And they can't come at 1230 tomorrow. I know, and that's very disappointing.

Are they calling in? Is it possible, Mr. and Mrs. Gephardt, can you come at a later date?

They can come at a later date, yeah.

I don't know what your schedule is like, but I really appreciate hearing from both of you.

They're going to hear it tomorrow. That's why we offered it.

Can we reschedule that? Well, let's have it tomorrow.

And then we'll have another meeting scheduled.

I think that would be appropriate.

Yeah, it just happened.

All right.

Ten minutes.

off consent anymore.

Just sail through.

Yeah, what the well, yeah. Let's get back to work. I think my wife and son. The grandkids are there.

So yeah, they probably we just got back to the paintings and then we don't need one.

And

Okay, with that, we're going to start with one phone call, comments.

Where's Harry? Hi, Connie. Yes, this is Gallup City Council. We are on presentation item number four, presentation by Convolt Energy, and we have you before the Gallup City Council, and you may address the council. You have two minutes.

Thank you, council. I apologize, I didn't realize that we were back on. But okay, my name is Dr. Liu. I am an OB-GYN in the community. So after listening to this presentation, I do have some concerns that are predicated on my own brief experience in biotech and our community's lived experiences. I have seen companies like this with grand speculative plans and promises, the kind that get pitched to investors and on TED Talks, but it is really one thing to dream big and figure it out, and wholly another if it feels like a gamble of our small community's resources on an all-or-nothing project that really does require a long list of ideal conditions and what-ifs to execute. To give you some context, it wasn't that long ago that we had a company called Rhino Gloves who came here, opened using city water and electricity, took $19 million from Navajo. from the government. And I'm not sure where Rhino CEO, Mr. Mark Lee and his co-conspirator, Mr. Colin Collier are now, but I know that they don't have to drive by an empty building that left them abruptly when they left abruptly. And they don't live in a community that had to absorb the cost of an industrial size, unpaid electric bill. So to the council, one, This project requires serious due diligence with legal and economic expertise, and I hope you will do that in earnest. That how realistic the project is, the contingencies, the economic impact, and whether or not the resource and energy needs are realistic, because that is what will impact us. You cannot assume that the other partners who have signed on to this have done the same. And then two, I'm asking you to be very clear about what tax rebates promises are being provided and what grants. I would advocate that we need a moratorium still on data centers to ensure that this affiliated industry doesn't creep into a build into a closely leaked industry, whether by this company or another. Ultimately, I hope we can move away from the old mindset that we need to depend on project-based short-term injections of external investment by large corporations for a city to be successful. Because I do think that the local projects that we have locally, like Gallup Community Health, which grew from three employees to 170 over three years and serves the community as an economic driver are the kinds of projects that you will support to help our local economy foster a local capacity and not leave us dependent on investors from other parts of the country and the world. Thank you.

Is there anybody else in the audience? Lynn?

Leanne, again, and I said I can come tomorrow, and I can, but this is more of a question for the city and the mayor and the city council. Can you proceed with anything like this without an attorney, a city attorney? We realize that's a pretty big issue that you will need to answer, obviously. And without the Gallup Economic Development Corporation, those are two things that we'd like the city to think about. It's not really a question for you, but for them. Well, and it does pertain to you as well, obviously. Thank you.

Good evening. Lynn Heineman from Gallup. Just three very specific small points. I'm not going to get into the whole big idea. This is a big deal to consider. But one sort of an aside. At least for myself, I think, in terms of context, it would be helpful along the way here for the city council to help educate the community about the trade support. Idea and development, because that's important and I haven't heard that much about it, but maybe I'm just out of touch. 2nd thing is to quickly find out what this moratorium state moratorium means. So that's understood. how it's going to affect or or not because that that's kind of new news so a lot of us and then the third thing's just a side thing about the library and the rec center years ago in santa fe in one part of town they built the library and the swimming pool and a park right adjacent so kids go swimming and go to the library they go library and go swimming so just a model there to to consider these things that have been mentioned things too

Thank you. Okay. And a swimming pool. Is there anybody else?

Hi, thanks. I'm Jean Phillips, longtime Gallup resident and plan to stay here into my old age, my older age. Um, I just saw that you were taking comments for folks who were not able to come tomorrow. And so I zipped over from home. I have a lot of skepticism about the promises that have been made here. I spent a lot of time on Commvault's website, and I'm sure that Representative Lundstrom will accuse me of misleading the public for conveying information on a website, but there are 15 projects listed on this website. One of them, which is a solar array, has been sold. One is operational and that is a project to convert waste to energy, which sounds great. Let's do that here. I will donate chicken poop. And one is on hold, and I believe that one is subject to litigation. And then there are 12 under development and zero functioning operational solar manufacturing or recycling projects. So, there's no track record of doing any of the things that are being promised here. There seem like a lot of really huge ifs, including desalinated. Desalinate water from Mexico. That is a big if whether that can happen will happen and if it does, whether there will be water enough for something like this, when there's so much need for water for other purposes. So I'm skeptical. I don't understand why this is. something that's so water-intensive is being proposed here. Thank you.

All right. With that, thank you, everybody.

Thank you, Harry, Dick Gebhardt, his wife, Karen.

And we'll go on with the rest of our meeting tonight, and we'll see you tomorrow. If you'd like to, Harry, yeah.

As a company, we have been developers in the past. So a developer develops a project and sells it, and there's nothing wrong with it. And we have migrated from being a developer to owning the assets. We own a power plant. We run it. We've had projects that take a long time to develop. There are projects here in America that take 15 years to develop. I can give you plenty of examples of that. On the manufacturing side, The management team is the only team outside of China that has built three factories and built it and operated it from a burger. And that's the team that we have. Other than that, it's mostly Chinese companies here operating in America. This is not easy stuff. We can do easy stuff, but we chose not to do it because these are impactful. So we're going to continue and we're going to try and we're going to execute. There are going to be believers and there are going to be non-believers. but we are going to execute. And if we've been fully transparent about our stuff, there's nothing here to hide. And you want to talk about the litigation, let me just explain that to you, because I want to address it. We went to New York. We executed. We spent $5.5 million on the site. We had incentives from the state. State came back and said, we want you to go to Buffalo. We said no. We're in Watertown. We've already employed people from Fort Drum. They're all veterans. But they wanted us to go to Buffalo. We said no. And there was retaliation. We can't say anything about it. We can't sue a state. We can't sue a county. We will never be able to do business in America if we did that. So what do you do? Move forward with your plan. There are going to be naysayers. We're not going to be able to change that. We can only believe in what is right and execute what is right. And that's all we're going to do. And there are reasons why we don't say anything. Nobody wins. We have not taken any money. We're not asking for any money from this city. We're not consuming any of your water. We're not consuming any of your power. And I can tell you, we have not gone and asked for any money. What happened in New York is different because they wanted us there. But they didn't deliver. They wanted us to go to Buffalo. And we didn't want to go to Buffalo. That's the end of that.

Thank you so much, you guys, for your presentation. It's a wonderful light, bright light and gallop for us to pursue. With that, we'll move on to the next item. This is going to be the...

Thank you. Tomorrow at 12.30.

We'll be back. We'll have a public meeting set up for a session.

Happy birthday, Bill Bright.

The consent agenda, these items are placed on the consent agenda. So city council can designate by unanimous consent. Those routine items they wish to be approved or acknowledged by 1 motion. If anyone, if any item does not meet the approval of all council members, or if a citizen request, so it will be heard as a separate item. With that, Al, if you could read the items.

Consent agenda, item number one, approval of minutes for the regular meetings of April 28, 2026 and May 12, 2026. Consent agenda, item number two, appointments to the Planning and Zoning Commission, new appointment of Curtis Hayes and reappointments of Matthew Long and Kyle Spoler. Consent agenda, item number three, event permit, road closure for Children's Museum Color Line. Consent agenda item number four, event permit for Champion Ford. Consent agenda item number five, event permit for Route 66 rides July 24th to the 26th, 2026. Consent agenda item number six, event permit for the Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial. And consent agenda item number seven, approval of Northwest New Mexico Council of Governments membership agreement and board appointment.

Motion to approve the consent agenda as it is one through seven.

I think number seven.

I think number seven.

Sorry, Ron.

Motion to approve consent agenda items one through six.

Second. Councillor Molina?

Yes.

Councillor Piano? Yes. Councillor Garcia? Yes. Councillor Yassi? Yes. Mayor De Palma?

Yes. Yes, thank you. So so my question on this was what I noticed in the letter of agreement. A city of

It states that in fiscal year 2024, the city of Gallup opted to increase membership above the required 2.5%. And so now this year's new agreement is kind of calculated off of that increased amount that it sounds like we voluntarily opted to do. So my question being new was just why did we opt to do that? And what would be the expected dues this year if we went back to the

That would probably be a better question for the COG when they come to do your update at the next meeting. The memberships have consistently increased through multiple years, depending on what membership. It's the same thing with the league. Cost of living increases also come into play. Things just cost more as we've moved on. In my time in the city manager's office, I have seen a steady increase to accommodate a lot of the services that they provide for us. And they do a great job at what they do. They assist us with Water Trust Board. They assist our board members that we appoint. And it's just, to me, business as usual. Things just increase over time, ma'am.

Okay.

But for specifics, I don't attend those board meetings. I just handle the paperwork, which is not a really great answer for you. So I apologize for that. But it is pretty standard that we do see increases in membership dues.

I'd also like to add that the amount of revenue they bring to the city for projects through grants has increased, and they are very diligent on continuing with the interchange projects, I-40, the railroads. elimination grants, the Chrissy grant that we just applied for for railroad safety. We're asking a lot more from them, and they are providing.

And our Water Trust Board applications.

That's just... Yeah. Come on up, Brendan. And actually, Brendan drew out multiple tags for hunting, so he just needs to be able to pay for them. Those Navajo Nation tags came with the price tag.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Brandon Howe, Deputy Director at the Northwest New Mexico Council of Governments. That jump that you're talking about, so it's important to get a little bit of history about the Council of Governments membership structure. Prior to that jump, there hasn't been an increase in membership across the board, not just the City of Gallup from all our members. And so when Evan assumed the role as Executive Director, one of his first tasks from the board was to increase the membership. And so again, for years, the membership structure had stayed the same. The revenues have come in the same amounts. First off was Evan's attempt to establish an annual increase, which is at 2.5%. The City of Gallup is not the only entity that increased above and beyond that amount. We've gotten McKinley County, Cibola County, and the City of Grants that have drastically increased their membership rates. Again, a lot of it is to support the staff that we have here. We were having to do special contracts, fee for service contracts, just to maintain the staff that we had. The membership structure and the membership base is the most important funding that the COG gets. Without that membership base, we're not able to leverage other funds to bring in state programs and federal programs that make us whole. So that was really the attempt. The first directive from the board to Evan Williams was get the membership rates increased. And so that's when the city of Gallup made that jump. And it's been two and a half percent ever since then.

That's helpful. Thank you.

And Brandon, I was wondering if, do you know, just offhand, just out of curiosity, because I know you have brought in a lot of money for the City of Gallup in the last fiscal year, what the COG actually brought in for the City of Gallup?

I believe I sent the report just earlier this week.

Okay.

It's in the $20 million.

In the $20 million range. The reason I'm asking for that is just because I think it just indicates like, right, like we're paying a large amount, but like we're paying $75,000 for membership and you brought in over $20 million of revenue to the city. So I think it just helps us have scope to look at the total picture.

Yeah, and one of the important things that we like to remind our members, that's just one metric. That's an easy metric for us to showcase, right, on a return on investment. There are other things that the Council of Governments provides, right? We do strategic planning. We work closely with the staff, the management team on just project identification, prioritizing things, helping things move. Again, we supported that first site, the Main Street Group, the Downtown Coordinating Committee, the Housing Committee. We're on a multiple, Initiatives for the city, and it's not always about funding and that's 1 of the things that we like to stress. It's not always about funding because there are down years, right? There are years where we strike out. Um, and obviously that doesn't look good on the return on investment, but. There are other facets to the Council of governments that we like to offer to the to our members.

Thank you, Brandon.

Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

Tasha.

Yeah, just to be I just wanted the history. Thank you. No, not at all questioning the value of your services by any means. And then my other question about this also maybe being new, you know, what's what's the process? This is kind of more for the mayor, I guess. What's our process for these appointees to communicate? back with the city or get directives from us regarding representing our views, priorities, and perspectives on these external boards. I see our appointees to different boards a little differently. When they're internal, I think it's really valuable to have at-large community members advising the city on things. When we're sending representatives to an external board, it seems to me like they should be somebody that is internal and part of and kind of um privy to what the city is working on and what our priorities are um so it i mean it just seems more it seems common sense to me that maybe somebody from our community development department or finance or planning and zoning or the council would be a representative to an external board like the cog versus large community members but i i'm not aware i just haven't like witnessed if we've had reports back from our i mean it's the same like with the trade port authority right we have we have people representing us there how do we communicate with them and how do we get updates or give them directives well as far as your appointment it's always been the mayor's discretion that is obtained by the voted council now

If there's a process for that, as far as appointments go, I'm not aware of one. It has always been the mayor's discretion as far as appointments go as provided by our charter.

And for communication, one of the reasons we did leave Louie on there was because of his continued, he's been on it for 22 years and he has a lot of experience. So we'll leave him, I plan to leave him on one more year just so he can continue guide the board and then guide new people on there. I've asked Cody Bollock because he's a retired veterinarian. We need a veterinarian clinic and he's also a medical person and he's well aware of the county. We need his expertise on this board. Mainly for and hopefully stay on the board for a while. Michael Schaaf again was already on there. So we left him on just to keep the continuity. And then I figure next year we might shuffle these around. and make some changes. But as of communication, I do have conversations with Michael Shaw and Louie about the different things that happened to the board, but Brandon keeps us well-informed of what the board actions are. And so to actually talk, get any information from our board members, Brandon's already always got that for us.

Okay. Okay.

With that, then, is it okay if I request that in the future, when any appointments come to the Council for approval, can we get some supporting documentation about why you're choosing folks and Just in general, I don't know a lot of people personally as much as you guys do, I think. So it's helpful for me to understand why we're choosing who we're choosing and why they're being recommended to serve in these capacities, regardless of the board or the candidate. I just want that.

We'll have a sustainable board to be coming up, I'm sure. There we go.

I feel that sentiment. I think that's a great thought. I mean, I do like that we're getting new people involved. I do agree. Like, you know, the person that recommended, I like that person. Great. He's very smart, but. He doesn't work with the city. So it is a question of like, how does, how do we pick those? How do, how do those appointments come to be? And I know it is the mayor's favorite, but then, you know, just let me, let me get, let Brandon give you an explanation of who he works with, with the city.

He works with everybody. No one's left out. He works with Keegan. He works with our water department. So having a city person on the board isn't, isn't required. So go ahead, Brandon, tell us how you operate.

Again, as Ms. Hayes mentioned, it is at the discretion of the governing body and the mayor. One of the things is just establishing internal procedures is really what you're asking. Is there an internal procedure for taking the information that is discussed and decided upon at COG board meetings or external committee meetings and bringing that back to the city? So the way the Council of Governments work is we work Directly through the manager, we, we were. That's that's our main point of contact with the council of governments. We work with all staff, a lot of staff at the city, but our primary point of contact is the manager. And so when things of importance are on cog agendas. Frank is there, uh, Frank is. Pretty he attends most of our board meetings, uh, even when they're in farming and, uh, so it really funnels through the, the manager is kind of the procedure that. A call likes to follow, not just with the city of Gallup, but with all our members is working directly with the managers. And so, uh, actions, items, information shared through the board. Always gets funneled through the managers.

Thank you. No further questions.

So I'm going to make a motion, please.

Okay, I motion to approve of Northwest New Mexico Council of Government membership agreement and board appointment.

Second. Councilor Piano?

Yes.

Councilor Yazzie? Yes. Councilor Molina? Yes. Councilor Garcia? Yes. Mayor DePaul?

Yes. The next items are discussion items, action topics. And the first one, I'm proud to do this one. It's going to be the appointment of our Mayor Pro Tempore. Per Article 2, Section 10 of the City Gallup Charter provides the following. The City Council shall elect from its membership a standing Mayor Pro Tempore who, in the absence of or incapacity of the Mayor, shall have the same power and duties as a Mayor. I recommend Linda Garcia. Linda's had a wonderful... She's given her whole life, essentially, to the city of Gallup. She was born here. She went to Gallup High School, and she became a counselor, what, three years ago? 13 years ago. She's always given to the city and she's she will continue. She'll continue taking care of the city. She helps a lot. She tells me what I'm doing wrong and what I'm doing right and how to proceed. And I really appreciate it. And I think she'll be a wonderful mayor pro ten. And even with my presence or absence on the board on the council. Anyway, Linda, if you have anything to say.

Thank you for having faith in me, Mayor. And I just want to say, when I took my vows to the city of Gallup, that I will continue to live a life of service, sacrifice, and conviction to the city of Gallup, as long as I have breath, and always with God as my guide. So I will continue to serve my constituents with God's spirit, so you have the faith to keep it going.

Thank you, Linda.

I just want to make a quick comment. I will say this is it. I think this is well deserved. And I also think that one thing I really like about Linda is that every time she's asked to speak on behalf of the city at different events, she always says on behalf of the city councilor and the mayor, she never says like on behalf of myself or as Linda, she always says on behalf of the council, which I think is really a great thing. So I do appreciate that. I've heard her say that many times and that's really nice. So I'll give you a right now. Okay. Thanks. $10. Just kidding.

Mayor, good choice. I think you made an extraordinary choice. Linda's a leader. Like you said, she's been a leader of this community all her life. And she's the right man for the job. Congratulations, Linda.

Thank you.

Yes, I agree, and Linda, I just want to say that in the short time we've worked together, you have earned my respect, and it's an honor to work alongside you, and I'm happy to support this appointment. So with that, I'll make a motion to approve the appointment of Councillor Linda Garcia to serve as Mayo pro tempore until December 31st, 2027. Second.

Councilor Yazzie? Yes. Councilor Piana? Yes. Councilor Molina? Yes. Councilor Garcia?

Yes. Okay. Thank you very much, Linda. Appreciate it. The next item is a resolution and budget adjustment for the electrical vehicle charging station grants. And our speaker is going to be Matt Robinson.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Before you, you have a resolution and budget adjustment. To accept a grant, the city was awarded to install electric vehicle chargers at the George Kalanis Multicultural Center. So this will be a good revenue source, I think, for the city, in particular the tourism office. Been working very closely with Mr. Norris from the electric department. It's really been wonderful to work with, very supportive, knowledgeable, and has really helped advance this project along. So we're looking forward to getting these installed and in operation. And with that, I'd stand for any questions you have.

That when you're going to have those installed for their sake.

Mayor, Council, first we'll have to accept the grant, go through the paperwork, all that good stuff, and then more than likely either find somebody on a state contract or go out for a bid because of the amount we're dealing with here, which is close to $900,000. So I'd hesitate to put a timeline. We have a year. according to the grant to get the job done so i'm confident we can get that done already i know the electric department to their credit already got a jump on some of the work over there they had to do the work anyway so it's kind of all coming together so i don't anticipate it'll take any longer than a year um i apologize because i just i probably knew this and i can't remember but

So there's going to be two stations, right? And then remind me where it's located. Is that the Cultural Center?

Yes, the George Galanis Multicultural Center, Mayor Council.

It'll be in the west parking lot. The first two spaces on the northeast corner of that parking lot.

And they're sort of fast charging, not slow charging.

Unfortunately, yes, they're fast charging.

Yeah, we want the slow ones.

I wanted the slow chargers. Spend your time walking downtown. But it's the fast chargers is what the state requires.

Yes.

My only question is a request to appeal to DOT for a crosswalk at Borko. Yes. So that it's easy for people.

There's already a crosswalk there. It's just fairly poorly. And we are working with District 6 to put in flashing lights, those type of things. So we are in process.

District 6 is state.

And MDOT. Thank you.

Um, with that, if we have a motion, motion to approve resolution and budget adjustment for electric vehicle charging stations grant.

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

The third item is the budget adjustment in fund 219 for fiscal year 26-27 to account for the recently awarded grants for the senior center. And Steve Wargo is our speaker.

Good evening again, counselor. This is I'm here tonight just for ask for a budget adjustment and fund to nineteen last month. If you remember, I was here to show you the award what we were awarded from the state along with the area aging agency. The reason why we need this budget adjustment is the original budget that was put in earlier in the spring. Those are based off of previous years numbers, and they did not reflect the same numbers that we were awarded. And so the numbers are similar, but not the same. And I think I believe it was like 375 dollars difference. So there really isn't. It's basically we're just moving money around the amount, the amount of money that. We received is as far as the grants go, it's going to be a little different than what the budget was projected. So, it's just a change in the budget also within this, because you'll see, I believe on the 2nd page, it talks about revenues and expenditures. Employees are paid off of what's called a time study. All right and the time studies, the time study percentages have changed as far as the amount of money that employee may be getting out of congregate meals compared to home delivery compared to transportation. So based off of time studies and overall just formulating the budget, it's just moving the money around. So we're just asking for basically being transparent, letting you know that the money is being placed in different areas this year. We're asking for a simple budget adjustment just to make you aware of it.

Steve, thank you so much. In the write-up or in the agenda, it doesn't have the amounts. So just to be clear on the amounts, when I go to the tab, it says the total award is $520,125, right? And then the amount of local funds to be used to support the program is $385,065. So I just want to make sure what we're approving.

We're just, when we budgeted, we guesstimated what the feds were going to give us.

The last meeting we accepted the Title III money and such, and it was different than what we guessed.

we should be fine as far as the numbers go because it was submitted by the city to the state back in the spring there were some areas that I've already identified that we have extra funding so we should be okay I don't anticipate having a lot of issues hopefully

Understood. I think we were just looking for the number. What's the difference in actual?

Yeah, the actual amount.

Statistical.

It's about $375 is what the actual difference is.

I think we have $375 less.

Once you factor in the amount of money that the state gave us, along with what the city matches, along with the grants, the total amount of money difference is in the neighborhood of $375 for the year.

Oh, that's helpful because it kind of was seeming like you were trying to, you know, you're like the way it seemed. It's like, oh, I had to find a couple thousand dollars to transfer in and out. But you're just talking about a couple hundred.

And it's basically just being transparent, letting you know that there are going to be some movements within the budget. And that's why it's a budget adjustment. There's no transfer coming in. It's just an adjustment. We're just adjusting numbers.

Motion to approve budget adjustment and for 2019 for fiscal year 26-27 to account for recently awarded grants for the Senior Center. Second.

Councilor Garcia? Yes. Councilor Yazzie? Yes. Councilor Molina? Yes. Councilor Piano? Yes. Mayor DePauley?

Yes.

Thank you, Council. Have a good evening.

Our next item is approval of the settlement agreement with the Gallup Police Officers Association and our Speaker of the Union, Marcus Largo.

Good evening Mr. Mayor, City Council, staff members in the audience and those watching online. I have the pleasure of bringing before you a settlement agreement between the City of Gallup and the Gallup Police Officers Association for the purpose of our annual economic negotiation. This year, we're able to settle with this bargaining unit a 4.2% increase to all of the bargaining memberships hourly wage, as well as an increase for their retirement payout from the standard 33% to 50%, as well as recognizing a floating holiday for the purpose of a personal celebration. All of this was calculated in the current fiscal budget. So there is no fiscal impact. So staff recommends approval. And with that, I stand for any questions.

Mayor, can you explain the retirement payout part of this?

Absolutely. Mr. Mayor, Councilor Molina. So the ineligible city employee who reaches retirement eligibility is allowed to cash out their sick time up to 1000 hours that monetary value of that cash out is 33% of their hourly wage. So they're able to use their sick time and receive a payout for that. We're moving that percentage from 33% to 50%. So when a city employee retires, they're able to utilize their unspent sick time for the purpose of retirement.

So they're given 50%. of the hourly rate? Yes, the employees based on a 2080 hour year?

It depends. Our, our regular full time staff are 2080 hours. However, the police officers are 2184 hours, and the fire department is different as well. So depending on their position within the organization that we're talking, yeah, that's the number we're talking about, right?

A couple 1000. Very good.

So, I mean, just to do the math, like if you made $28 an hour and you did $1,000, it'd be $28,000. If you got 50% of that, right, you'd be getting $14,000. Is that right?

No, it's based on their hourly rate, the number of sick time that they have. So let's say for... Oh, yeah.

So let's say example of absolutely not what we're doing.

Yeah. Well, so it's actually would be a third of what their hourly rate would be. So if the example is the maximum of 1000 hours, and they made what was I'm sorry, answer what was your $28. So a third of that would be applied to that 1000 hour cash out. But we've increased that to 50%. So it went from 33 to 50%. Yeah, so it'd be half of that amount. So 14.

So I think you had it. So my math was correct. You guys just all told me no, just to like gaslight you. That's cool.

Mr. Mayor, Councilor Pejano, my apologies. It's rather late. Yeah. Asking me to do arithmetic. Didn't have your calculator. Okay. All right.

Got it. Slide that's losing my mind.

Make a motion.

Motion to approve settlement agreement with the Gallup Police Officers Association.

Second. Councilor Yazzie? Yes. Councilor Piano? Yes. Councilor Garcia? Yes. Councilor Molina?

Yes.

Mayor DePauley?

Yes. Okay, thank you. Might as well stay there. Yes, sir. Approval of the settlement agreement with United Mine Workers of America.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, City Council. I again have the pleasure of presenting you with a settlement agreement for approval with the United Mine Workers of America. This time around, we had the privilege of having a full re-opener, which meant we were able to discuss any issues we might have had with the current CBA, including minor corrections, inclusions, revisions, or exclusions. This year we had settled on six items. The first being a cost of living increase for all bargaining unit members at the full amount that was approved by Council at 5%. The additional retirement payout increase from the 33% standard to the 50%, as well as an edit to Section K regarding new classifications. more so respecting the creation of new positions that cover tasks and duties, essential functions that would be related to bargaining member duties, as well as additions to the recognized classifications. This year we've included the customer care fill technician, the fog inspector, and the water and sewer line locator. The fourth item is a revision to seniority section G regarding job bidding and transfers. This section updates the language as outlined in the agreement to recognize bargaining unit position vacancies and how those vacancies are handled internally and communicated to the bargaining unit. The next section would be Article 20, Section A, which is a revision of the holiday schedule to include the holidays that were approved by Council in a previous fiscal year to now include Juneteenth, Spring Recess, National Navajo Code Talkers Day, and Indigenous Peoples Day. The final article that we reached an agreement on was Section G, which is a term of agreement for the proposal, updating the terms of the collecting bargaining agreement in accordance to this settlement agreement. The term of the agreement is gonna be standing for three years, commencing on the date of execution, expiring on June 30th, 2029, where we'll engage in another full re-opener. So the opening negotiations for next fiscal year will be solely on the topic of economics. There are no fiscal impacts for this as the benefits are already included in the fiscal year budget for 2027. And staff recommends approving the settlement agreement with UMWA.

Marcus, I have a question. So this 5% is for those employees who are with the union, correct?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor Garcia, yes, you are correct. This 5% increase is for the identified bargaining unit membership for UMWA.

And then the non-union employees, we voted at 5% for them also, correct?

Correct.

So this fiscal year, they will get the 5% that we approved? Correct.

Let me clarify. You gave 5% salary. And as I've explained, we've done a study of what the percentile our employees fall in compared to other people within the same job. Our goal is to get everybody to the median income 50 percentile, but that's going to cost well over $7 million, which we can't afford at this time. So our goal is to get everybody the 25th percentile. Well, looking at the study, we already have some employees who are there. So those employees, we will be giving a cost of living increased. Small 12% cost of living increase for those that we have some employees. It's a mixture of everybody we looked at we looked at the the executive assistant. Compared to the New Mexico average executive assistant. Sorry. we looked at directors compared to the average director salary. So we didn't really look at what you make. We looked at what your job is and what is the comparable salary for municipalities, counties, schools in the state of New Mexico. We have some of those employees that are at like the 10th percentile. So that means they can go almost anywhere else and do the same job and make more money. So we would like to give those people with the 10th percentile that are way down on the bottom a bigger raise, 7, 8% to start bringing their percentile up faster. People about the, what do we say, 16, 17 percentile right in there? Correct. Then we would give them the 4% to 5% raise to get them closer to the 25th. So people at the 25th, give them a cost of living increase. They're there. The people furthest away, a bigger raise to get them moving up. The people at the middle, kind of a middle raise to get them moving up. Goal is to get everybody to the 25th percentile and then start working to get all of our employees to the 50th percentile.

So you want to do that now, even though we did the 5%?

I'm taking 5% of total salaries.

Oh, okay.

And divvying that up amongst those employees. So I've got to stay within your budget constraints of the amount of money you gave me. So the way I'm giving it up is the amount of money you gave me, just depending on where they fell on that median income.

And then that will be when? When do they get the risk?

We are working it now, and it will, since this is an administrative issue, not a negotiation issue, it will be retroactive.

And then how long will that take, do you know?

I'm hoping for the next pay period, if not pay period three.

Okay. And then I think I understand. I have a clarification question too.

But with the union, I mean, with the United Mine and any of the unions, that's not retroactive, correct?

Things will not be retroactive. That is a management bargaining tool that we will not give up.

Because we're approving 5% tonight. So they're okay. Correct. Correct.

Yeah. And I was hoping that the union negotiators would look at the same thing because there's disparities in pay amongst their own employees. But they chose, again, it's a union negotiation. They chose across the board. That was their choice. Maureen, pass the money then.

Frank, you said this survey, survey, is that what it was?

It was a study.

We hired a company.

Where did it come from? You know the name of the company off the top of your head, Marcus?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor Molina.

It doesn't matter. What I'd like to ask is that you send, Councilor, a copy of it. We need to be a little bit more aware for our employee stand compared to others. Thank you. Sure. Be happy to. You paid for it.

I have a comment there. I think this is true. I really, I mean, well, actually, I can't even make a comment because this is about the United Mind workers. Now we're getting off onto other employees. So actually, technically, it's not an agenda item. So I'll address that later. But I have a question about separate about the employees and the way you're doing all that. But I just realized now we're kind of going off because this is about the United Mind. So I'll come to you.

Mr. Mayor, Council, I'm more than willing to answer any questions you might have regarding the methodology that we use to approach this structure. The goal in mind was to ensure that it was fair and equitable. And we want to ensure that that process is also transparent. So I'm willing to answer any questions you might have outside the city.

Thank you. It's nice to make a motion for approval of the settlement agreement with the United Mine Workers of America.

Second. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Thank you, Marcus. Our next item is the public hearing for the proposed transfer of an ownership and location of the canopy dispenser type liquor license number DIS-00832 to Burnt Corn Holdings LLC doing business as Vergy's Restaurant Liquor and Lounge. But I'm going to turn this over to the city clerk because he has some information for us.

Mayor, Councilors, this morning we received notice from Mr. Jerry Hamm, who is the license broker for Burkhorn Holdings, who is the applicant for the transfer of ownership, the location of license number 00832. He's advised that he and his client withdrew their application with the New Mexico Alcoholic Beverage Commission. So therefore, we're requesting staff is recommending that no action be taken on the site.

Thank you. So no action.

Yes. Sorry, I'll clap.

Okay.

Do we need to make a motion?

I don't think so. It's removed. Right?

You can make a motion to remove the item from the agenda.

But based on the guy's app, on his...

The application. Who's not here. The guy's not here.

Yeah. I don't think we should take action. Because he's not even here. No one's there to talk. We just got to let her. If it comes up next week, it comes up next week.

I don't know. We don't know what's going to happen. Cool. Well, we don't know that.

So, okay. With that, that concludes and then we'll have comments by the mayor and city councilors and today I'll let Linda go first since she's the mayor pro tem.

Before I go on with some of the activities that have been going on this week and haven't gone on, I want to ask our fire chief if he would come up and explain about the hydrant coloring. There's a method to this, and people are asking, and I'm just saying, I don't know, they're pretty colors, so.

Do you want this, John? Are you good? No, I'm good.

Mayor and council, we've gotten a lot of questions about the fire hydrant coloring too. So historically fire hydrants in Gallup have been yellow. So the fire department were rated by ISO, which is the insurance services organization also called Verisk. They're the ones that give us our rating and that's how we get our fire protection funds from the state. It's rated from one to 10, one being is excellent fire protection, 10 is Two firefighters and a golf cart. I guess you could say like 10 is like no fire protection at all. Currently, we're an ISO class three. We are going to be going through our rating here pretty soon. So we're looking at every single way we can increase our points in our rating. And one of them is by color coding fire hydrants according to the NFPA standard. And it's not just for ISO, but it's also to help our firefighters. So what we do is we do fire flow testing. So every year, every fire hydrant gets opened and flush, which is actually good for the water supply system that we do that gets a lot of the gunk out. But also we fire flow. When we fire flow hydrants, we do two hydrants at a time and we fully flow one of those hydrants for about five minutes. It uses a lot of water. We limit ourselves to about 100 hydrants a year because we're in a desert. You know, we have a water crisis, so we limit it to 100 hydrants a year. But what that fire flow testing does is it allows us to tell gives us numbers on how many gallons per minute that the hydrant will flow. So after we get those numbers, we'll paint the hydrants and we just paint the top and the caps. So if it's light blue or blue, that means that it's going to flow 1500 gallons per minute or more out of that hydrant. if it's green it's between 1000 gallons per minute and 1499 if it's orange it's between 500 gallons per minute and 999 gallons per minute and if it's red it's below 500 gallons per minute so you'll notice most of our fire hydrants in town are blue so that means that we have 1500 gallons per minute or more out of those hydrants so it helps for ISO, but also if we're going to a structure fire and we have several hydrants that we need to connect to, if our firefighters have a choice between connecting to a blue hydrant or a red hydrant, they're going to connect to the blue hydrant because it's going to give us a greater water flow. So it helps us in firefighting. And right now in the city of Gallup, we have a little over 1,000 fire hydrants. So doing 100 a year, it's going to take us about 10 years to get them all fire flowed and painted. But I think this year, after we do them this year, we'll be around 400 hydrants that we've done. So we're about halfway there. And the other thing you'll see is the barrels of the hydrants. If they're yellow, that means it's a city hydrant. When we start testing private fire hydrants, because there's a lot of fire hydrants in the city that are private, they're not owned by the city, we'll still fire flow those, we'll paint them, but those barrels will be red. So if somebody calls in a hydrant's leaking, we can just tell right away, is it a city hydrant or a private hydrant that we can get with whoever owns it to repair it.

that's your color coding thank you thank you good information the actual truth is the firefighters were bored one day and they went out and started painting my other uh um i want to say that i believe it's this weekend they're having the red versus blue boxing uh This Saturday, 4 o'clock p.m., correct? Chiefs, both Chiefs. That's at Larry Brian Mitchell Recreation Center. The admission is $15 for adults, $10 for children, and they're also selling tables for $200 that will benefit the boys and girls. Correct? They sold out. Oh, my goodness. Wonderful. How many tables were there? Do you want to add anything else to that sheet? Just come and ask for it.

I don't see your name on the list, though. I was looking at that list of fighters. I'm disappointed.

I asked to be sparring with Sarah, but they were feeling... We're going to have a city council.

This is the next fundraiser. City council against county commissioners. Let's just put it into the universe.

There's another joke over there somewhere.

I just want to, it's a little long, but I think it's very important because I saw this on Facebook. On July 13th, the Gallup Police Department, in collaboration with the New Mexico Department of Transportation, conducted a cleanup operation along I-40 eastbound ramp. vignoles overpass and surrounding property lines the different effort included support from the new mexico state police mckinnon county sheriff's department the gallup fire department our city of gallicode enforcement office to address uh and mitigate criminal activities in this area so um The pictures alone show the tons and tons of trash that was out there. And also guns, drugs, people that had warrants. And also there was comments already that, well, that's their homes. What are we doing lifting with, you know, with their homes? But I just want to say there's always, there's the Catholic Charities that helps them. Debbie with behavioral health. The Burrito Project, NCI, Hojo, our Judge Gregor works with them. Church on the Streets have a men's program. We have the St. Joseph's on the north side. We have Four Corners Recovery, and I'm sure there's so many more that we are helping them as they come out. We're not just abandoning them because they're very important people to us. So I just want to mention that we are because we do have such a great problem in Gallup now that we want to take back control of the issues that are going on. So we have a very diligent police department, sheriff's department, all the departments, fire department, that are working together, like they say, trying to get these camps that are out of hand and shut off because they're very, very dangerous now. You know, they're coming in. We you know, we know our homeless and we know our transients. And I've noticed so very many dangerous people out in the streets of different nationalities. And I know they don't come from us. So whomever is dropping them off and I know who they are. they're dropping it off to the city of Gallup because they said they don't want they don't want the problem that the city of Gallup has with the city of Gallup will take it and we're not going to take it anymore so that's just very important to me that we just a part of our cleanup for Gallup to make it better. Also, we will have a cleanup Literally, I'll clean up on the north side this Saturday. So everybody bring out their trash because we're going to be busy. Our north side is always the largest. Also, I'm working with Ron and myself for August 1st to be southwest. It's Chihuahua and Chihuahua. So it's half of his district and half of my district. And what we do and what I'm going to do Saturday is I always like to thank our city workers who come out. And even though, like you said, they get paid, but they work extra hard cleaning up our city. we always provide them with a meal. So I'll be providing with a meal on Northside, for Northside. And then Ron and I are going to go in hampers and do for our districts. So I just want to mention that. And then I have a list here. For the events that happened in July. July 10th and 11th was the Wild Team Championship Road, Well, right at Red Rock Park. And I attended on Friday, and it was packed. And there was some young gentlemen out there that were from, I think, Idaho, Ohio, Kansas, Colorado. They had a lot from out of state. And it was packed, and it was enjoyable. And it's always, they go out of their way to make an extraordinary event successful. On July 11th, they... They started the 22nd Annual Gallup Farmers Market at the Courthouse Square. That'll be every Saturday. On Saturday, 14th, we had the Arts Crawl. I didn't think we'd have that many because the wild thing was on at the same time, but we were just as crowded, and it was another successful event. Did we have... July 14th, 15th, the Gallup Summer Indian Dances and the Art Market. And I go there as much as I can, especially Tuesdays or after our meetings, whatnot. And it's always packed. And that one is just so enjoyable. Matt and Dio did an excellent job there. A lot of tourists there, a lot of tourists that I get to meet. On July 18th, we have the Gallup Concert Series. at the courthouse square. I think it's Phantom Bat.

Mayor Council, Studio Rex is our headliner Saturday night. Starts at 7 o'clock.

Thank you. 7 o'clock? Thank you, Mayor. Again, July 21st, 22nd, 23rd, our Gallup Summer Indian Dance is in our market again. Thank you. July 24th to 25th, our Route 66 rides will start. That's going to be a great big event. And that's because I could just repeat everything else. And then July 31st through August 9th, we start 104th Gallup Intertribal Indian Sooner.

And then just other events that go with that.

Thank you, Councillor Garcia.

Oh, it's us. It's us going. Yes. We didn't even we didn't announce it. That's funny.

Okay, I'm going to talk fast. Not that that's what I normally do. But 4th of July, I went down for a few hours. I saw Councillor Garcia and

Um, good job to the tourism department and Matt for putting that on. I saw lots of people, a lot of people playing softball and a lot of people at the gourd dances. Um, so, um, and I do want to shout out former counselor Shaw. Um, I've seen him a lot lately and he was there helping with giving out some pizza. So I want to give a shout out to him as well. Appreciate him still being involved. Again, the red and blue boxing event at the Larry Brian Mitchell Rec Center that does go to support our local Boys and Girls Club. So it's a great event. I will be there. I'm disappointed that I won't see you do boxing, but we can't injure our leadership of our police. So that's not good. But I am excited. I'm excited. I think it's a cool event. So definitely come out and support that. I believe you can buy individual tickets at the door. I went to Wild Thing. I did see Councilor Garcia. I went both nights because I'm just, you know, obsessed. And I brought different people with me both nights. One, my husband and some friends. And, you know, I could not believe how many people qualified on Saturday. One guy qualified on Friday night. And I, you know, if you guys go to wild thing, like sometimes you're like, oh, the bulls were not too bad. I don't know what they fed those bulls on Saturday night, but some of those bulls jumped so high. I thought they were going to for sure jump over. And I don't know if many of you remember the incident of, I don't know what year it was, but a bull did jump over the fence. It was one year. So anyway, it was crazy. Some of those bull riders and those woolly riders, those are some future bull riders. I was impressed with those little four-year-old woolly riders. So great job. I thought it was a really fun event and weather was really great. So that was awesome. July 4th through the 17th, Miyamura is having a soccer kiddie camp. So it started today through the 17th, 9 to noon, ages 6 through 14. And it's $45 per child and registration is like an 830. But I have some stuff on my Facebook too, and I'll put this. So we actually had a really fun kiddie camp soccer camp. This weekend, I mentioned the Red vs. Blue in front of Linda, but also looks like Amigo Chevrolet is also doing a free admission car show, free hot dogs, free apple pie, door prizes. Who doesn't love free apple pies? So that seems like from 11 to 2, so it's a fun little baseball hot dog apple pie event. situation going on uh ceremonial had their golf tournament this past weekend um and uh i i didn't golf in it but i i just kind of shouted out because certainly had ceremonial had it which was cool and also my husband his team won everything so i know i know that seems par because par for the course Some joke about golf. Okay. It was too hard to get that. I know. Thank you. So I was, but that was cool that they do. It was like their first year back to have the golf tournament in a while. So good, good job ceremonial. And then. I went to a Friday night ride thing recently and they had a great band. They had a lady teaching line dancing and stuff. And so I made the mistake of wearing flip-flops instead of my boots. That was fun, but I did line dance and flip-flops. So really fun, you know, Friday night rides. I'll not make that mistake again. It was tragic. Um, but a lot of people were out there listening to the band and doing line dancing. So I thought that was really fun. So that's every Friday night. Um, And then also, yes, Councilor Garcia mentioned this, but the Route 66, Route 66 rides July 24th through 26th. And then there's a car show at Champion Ford that same weekend that we just approved tonight. And then the Desert 66 Desert Challenge, which is, I think, with, is that with kids? Is that all with kids? Is the Desert Challenge with kids or adults?

The first day of Desert Challenge.

is the kids and then the next day is adults okay so that's really fun and that's so that weekend you know not this week but that next weekend is going to be crazy busy with so many things so don't go out of town stay here and then um there's also doing route 66 that with the city of gallup and the chamber are doing uh different balloon rides friday july 24th from the gallup golf course um i think there's an admission you have to pay for that right no it's free

the firm out of the doses okay so you gotta pay the front but if you're interested in blue radio separate deal

They have vendors you can pay to take a ride.

So if you're interested or you just want to go check out the balloons, which is also equally fun, if you're scared of heights, just check out the balloons. That's happening. And on July 25th, that same weekend, Scooters is doing a back-to-school backpack giveaway from 11 to 2 for children for free backpacks. I mean, if you go out of town this weekend, you're missing like 17 events basically. So just, you know, just not this weekend, this weekend too. And then the last thing I'll just mention, it's sold out, but I'm part of Kiwanis Club, which is a civic club. And this weekend in the evening, they're doing night golf. I just got to say night golf is really popular. Thanks for the golf course accommodating our Kiwanis Club. We have 18 teams. It's only nine holes because we don't want to be there until two in the morning. And I have like 10. Yeah. And 10 teams are like on the wait list. So, yeah, I just help volunteer. I'm a volunteer with Kiwanis. So I'm the one that oversees all the teams. And man, I couldn't believe how popular. I think because night golf, they don't really, you don't have to be a good golfer because no one can see. So it's really cool concept. Yeah. But they're going to, we have a cart contest. So we're going to light up. So if you live anywhere near there, you're going to see a ton of golf carts just lit up and then we're going to do like a reward for the best lit up car. So we also wanted to do that for safety reasons. So yeah.

So anyway, cool, cool events happening this weekend and next weekend.

Don't let Linda on that one.

Thank you, Councilor Piano. Who's next? Ron?

I'll make mine quick because I know my wife is missing me. But I do want to talk quickly about Convault. I see a lot there that evolves around a lot of teamwork. It is an employee-owned company. That's a pretty big deal in the private sector. But I do encourage everybody. I'm not there yet. I'm getting there. The library helps making my decision, but I'm still not there. But I encourage everybody, the people in this room as employees, the people in Gallup as citizens, continue to do some more due diligence on this. This is a big thing. There's something I ran on my platform was all about bringing not just business in, manufacturing business. That's what we need. We can bring all kinds of business, all kinds of restaurants in there. All we're doing is moving employees around. You bring in this kind of business, we're adding employees. We're adding jobs. So I encourage everybody to do some more due diligence on this. Convault is a very teamwork-oriented organization, it looks like, which brings me to the city of Gallup. Our team... Everything we do revolves around teamwork. We all work together. I appreciate that. And the point I'm trying to make is very simple. Safety is a part of everything we do, everything you do in life. Getting up in the morning out of bed, you've got to be careful getting out of bed from the time you go back to bed at night. As the city, we expect everybody Every employee to go home, same amount of fingers, same amount of toes they came to work with. It's very important. And I congratulate the employees for all their hard work and keep safe.

Thank you. Thank you, Professor Molina.

Mayor Mrakas, Yes, Council, you're asking us what you do, and I had wanted to recognize a couple folks that were here earlier they're not here anymore, but. Mayor Mrakas, Cynthia gazdia and one of the participants from the indigenous civic leadership program it's happening right now it's a three week pilot Program. being hosted by the Native Professional Advancement Center. So I was able to meet them on Sunday for a little panel and they are job shadowing for the next three weeks within the city and county. So that's a really cool program and I hope we can host some more of them at our next meeting on the 28th since they'll still be around. I am also hosting my Know Your Rights and Tenant Organizing session for Hillcrest Mobile Home Park on Monday, the 27th at 5 p.m. at Faith Christian Fellowship. And we are inviting any residents of local mobile home parks that want to attend to come by if they're interested in learning from our guest attorney from the Center on Law and Poverty. Again, Know Your Rights for Mobile Home Parks.

Who's the attorney?

Oh, I don't remember the name.

You don't remember.

coming out from that worker and that's any mobile home park because they don't have to be milked right yeah um just lastly i you know i think it's great that we are cleaning up trash and dangerous materials i think that we need to seriously consider plans for a year-round drop-in center and temporary shelter that helps remove the need for people to sleep outside and that includes people who are using I just believe fundamentally that all people deserve safety, and we're removing that very important protective factor when we clear encampments. I have no issue with prosecuting illegal activity, but I don't see any reasons for us to put already at-risk people at further risk, and I'm committed to working for a solution that makes a difference in this area. That's all.

Thank you, Councillor. The one thing I want to add, I just need to add one thing. And Matt, what is the event on Saturday with the veterans? I already forgot.

I got it.

Oh, thank you. Thanks, Frank. Frank will take it from there.

Okay. Saturday, Operation Veterans Wellness, 925 Park Avenue. Okay, um, very good thing. Um, and Welch and. Puts on every year, um, supporting our veterans. Many needed areas, um, go out and show our veterans support also this weekend, July 18th and 19th. We have the 24 hour enchanted forest mountain bike race at. A wonderful thing. Apologize, I'll miss the red first blue since I'll be volunteering with the county fire up there. I'd prefer to go to that because there's no cell service at McGaffey. Remember, Rex Museum still has the Route 66 traveling exhibit. Please go by if you haven't seen it. If you have seen it, go twice. You'll see what you missed. Also, our Red Rock Park Museum has been getting new updated exhibits. Stop by, seeing a lot of people coming in and out. The seniors, July 16th, they're going to have a craft workshop for seniors at the Senior Center, 11 to 1. So if you know any of your 60 plus people that would like to go over. Wonderful to get acquainted with the Senior Center and see the new programming that's been going out there. Great to see. July 4th, I was not here. I went up and looked at housing in Gunnison. I really liked what they're doing for their housing programs. Got to see a live firework show, kind of rub it in. They took a lot of political heat up there for doing it because it was a very smoky, overcast night due to all the fires. Not the fires that the fireworks started, but the array and all the others. But from what I hear, thank you, Matt, Vince, John Lestoya in the street department, Gallup Fire, Gallup PD, all the groups that made that such a wonderful event. I've heard some great things from the public. I'm going to cover a little bit about the Route 66 rides coming up in two weekends, Friday the 24th, Mass Ascension, 6.40 a.m. at the golf course. So come up to the golf course, watch the balloons take off. That evening, 8.30 p.m. or around dusk, we're going to have 66 balloons on 66. Airport all the way to Virgie's. Come out. We're going to have Elvis there. Elvis will be in the house. Zozobra, Elvis balloon. Zozobra, sea turtle, bunch of local balloons, but be the only place on 66 where you will see 66 balloons glowing up the night. Saturday, the 25th, 6.40 a.m., Red Rock Park, Mass Ascension. Red Rock Roller Bike. We're going to have a bicycle ride leaving Red Rock Park at 7 a.m. Those of you that want to enter, visit Gallup website. You can register. I'd like to thank Brian Letty from the county and Adventure Gallup Board, who's going to be putting on that bicycle ride, riding out of Red Rock Park, riding up into Gallup. underneath the railroad tracks, up White Cliffs, Superman Canyon, and coming back down through Church Rock. Wonderful loop. Should be some beautiful views of the balloons as they're flying, as you're enjoying yourself pedaling the bike. Yes, that was sarcasm, because I don't pedal the bike. Car show on Cole Avenue, 10 to 3. Come see Farm Truck in Asian. They're coming in to emcee the event. Registration, if you have a classic car, between 8 and 9.30. Route 66 motorcycle run will start at 10 a.m. Going to do a short loop through Windrock down to Lupton and back in. Those that ride on the motorcycle run will be eligible to ride through the Tunnel of Fire, which will be that night at 8.40 p.m. Front Street here. We will have all the balloons and no balloons themselves, just the gondolas and fire. They'll be lighting up the skies. Bring your kids, families. They can roast s'mores in the burners. Believe me, marshmallows don't last in several hundred thousand BTUs. So done. But we've got nice little packs of marshmallow, graham cracker and chocolate. They can make s'mores and watch the classic cars and motorcycles ride through. We also have the Route 66 Desert Challenge starting at 1215. It is fun to go out to the motocross track, see those little kids on their bikes, ice centering on the berms and working through. Some of them are great riders. That starts at 1215. I think there's a pre-ride for adults who are going to be racing the next day. They will also be coming in and joining us. I'd like to thank Gallup PD for doing the escort of the motorcycles and UTVs coming in that night into getting them in safely to ride through the Tunnel of Fire. After the Tunnel of Fire at the courthouse, we have some great dance bands, Silver Country Band, and... Black Pearl Band, New Mexico Emmy Award-winning band. They'll be playing at the courthouse. We'll also have several exhibition-type things like last year, throughout the day, kids' games, you name it. Sunday, 6.40 a.m., Mass Ascension at Red Rock Park. 7 a.m., the Route 66 Desert Challenge. That's the motorcycle. They start off at the motocross park, ride the motocross park, and then go out and do a full desert race. Very, very challenging. Got to witness it last year. Got to see all the riders taking off. It was very impressive. I'd like to thank Greg Kirk, Matt, Ben Welch, Bill Lee, Bill Ngo, Ted Gonzalez, My daughter, Merritt, she's putting together all the s'mores packs and doing all that. Parks, Vince, and Jake have been coming to every week's meeting to plan this. Who am I missing, Matt? PJ Compost from the chamber, very big part of it. Elena from the museum. I think that's everybody. Anybody else who would like to start joining these where we're discussing events in Gallup? We're trying to put on more. Thursdays, 4 p.m. here in the City Manager's Conference Room. Please come by. Help us out. Got all my notes here. I think I covered them all. Did I say Elvis was going to be here? Elvis?

Elvis and Zobra Burns.

Zobra Burns, though.

Matt has to add a few things.

You got some more, Matt? What am I missing, buddy? Actually, Mayor Council, just a quick correction. Operation Veteran Wellness is Friday. The run begins at 6.30, registration at 6 a.m., and the gore dance begins at noon. So that's a Friday event at the sports complex.

Is it 17?

I don't know what the numbers are, but it is Friday.

Hey, guys, the 17th is Friday. I'm looking at next year.

Time in the head.

Bueno, I'm done. No, I'm good.

I think you guys touched about everything. I already talked about my ride-along and the different things that went on this week. worked a lot with Conval going over the different options and opportunities and the city, again, has no obligation. It's just a matter of them submitting their plans and moving forward. So thank you so much for everybody. If we have a motion.

Motion to adjourn.

Second. Councillor Molina? Yes. Councillor Piehl?

Yes. Just a second. Mrs. Molina called, said it's quiet at home. Can we wait 30 more minutes?

Yes. Yes. Yes, you did.

Yeah.