City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, Garden City. Like to call to order our city council budget meeting for Monday, March 16th, 2026 at 6 PM. Our first order of business is the pledge of allegiance. Everyone, please rise. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Mr. Smith, if you take roll call, please. Mayor Jacobs, here. Mayor Prom Dold here. Council member Hughes here.

Council member Wit. Joe. Council member Wit absent. and excused. Council member King. Show council member King absent and excused. Council member Dold here. Council member Kerapotus. Show. Council member Kerapotus absent and excused. You have a quorum of four. Okay. Uh item four is the approval of the agenda. And for a motion, Mayor, Council Member Hughes. Okay. Um, I'd like to make a motion to um I don't have Zach usually says it all the time. Um, just approve the agenda.

Approve the agenda dated March 16th, Monday, March 16th, 2026 at 6 PM. Support or from council member Dole. Comments from the table from public. All in favor? I I opposed. Motion passes 40. Okay. Item five is our uh our budget discussion considerations and uh I'll turn it over to Mr. Gibbons for quick second.

Yep. Thank you, Mayor and Councel. Um just uh tonight is our second session of departmentled budget presentations for the fiscal year 2627. Um you'll see a number of departments uh presented tonight uh that weren't covered in the first budget meeting. Um after tonight, it's our goal to uh complete our draft proposal for the budget and provide it to council at the next regularly scheduled council meeting uh for consideration by council over the next month. Um so uh just encourage council to ask questions tonight and um feel free to follow up with questions later on as you're provided the information.

Okay. Thank you, sir. Uh, first up tonight is our clerk budget. Uh, clerk, uh, Mr. Smith.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Uh, so tonight my presentation, we're really going to do about three things. We're going to um kind of go over who we are in the clerk's department. We're going to look at what we did over the last year because I think a lot of going forward is seeing where we were and uh what we've accomplished over the last 12 months and then we're going to kind of talk about uh our plan going forward for this coming budget year. So, first off in the clerk department, who we are currently, we have two full-time employees in office, which is myself as city clerk and Lisa Bradford, who is our office manager. We also have one part-time floater um in Deanna. Uh she floats between her base of operations is in the clerk's office, but she also floats between us, water, and uh tax and assessing. She's kind of our uh Jill of all trades, I guess you would say. Uh she goes wherever she's needed on any given day. Um sometimes even where she plans on being one day has changed over the course of the morning. Um so we really appreciate her flexibility for that. Uh you will notice in um our number sheets there, we do have a line item for election specialists uh for this year. Uh for the last five months, our deputy clerk uh has kind of been over at Radcliffe assisting uh with communications and parks and wreck uh helping them uh implement some new programs and things like that. So, in his absence, what we've done is uh we have a plan for two um experienced former clerk's office staff members um from back in the day uh to come in and help us through election because we are about eight weeks away from really ramping up for the 2026 election cycle. This will allow uh Lisa and Deanna to continue to help uh focus on our day-to-day activities in the clerk's office and allow our part-timers to help me with election related activities. uh they will have flexible hours depending on the workload. Um as we get closer to

election, the hours will increase, but it's kind of going to be an as we go process to see how much work we have and we'll work our schedule around that. What I want to talk about is our 2025 year in review. One of the things that our clerk's office has that uh several others around us may not have is because we have Garden City Hospital, we process vital records here. Uh so our residents can get their records here. They don't have to go down to the county. Last year we actually had over a thousand requests for birth records purchased. Uh that is consistent with year-to-year. Um we were about 10 more than in 2024. Our death certificates, we had 425 uh individuals who passed away inside the Garden City limits. Those death records are filed with our office and kept as our record and then they're available for purchase from us. uh 2025 we actually this was the first year we saw an increase in records filed uh since the height of COVID in 2020. We had seen kind of a steady decline since 2020 uh where we peaked at almost 700 records filed. 2024 we are down in the 300s and then last year uh we saw a spike uh for some reason up into the 400s. So far in quarter 1 this year we are trending about 30 behind where we were last year. So that's good. uh you know, we never really want to see tons of death records get filed with us. Um but we are seeing a a slight decrease again this year. Uh vital records, uh the processing is is not for nothing. Uh we did generate about $42,000 in revenue last year just from the sale of birth and death records. So, uh we also do licenses, permits, and garage sales. Uh we had 618 animal licenses last year, which is approximately about $12,000 in revenue

uh through our licensing of dogs and 500 business license transactions. So the 500, we say transactions because that includes both our renewals. Um we send out renewals to about 470 businesses every year. Uh also delinquent collections from prior years and we had 49 new businesses last year. We did 190 garage sale permits, which brought in about $1,200 in revenue, which the way I kind of look at that is like it's 1,200 may not seem a lot, but that does also, you know, offset the cost of one of our shred days. So, that's helpful. We did do our third annual fee free citywide garage sale last June. And if anyone watching at home tuned in last week, they will know that we are having our fourth annual fee free garage sale this year from June 4th to June 7th. And this will be a ongoing thing the first full weekend of every June. The CL office is also responsible for processing foyer request. Foyer request. This was our largest increase in transactions over the last year. Uh we had over a hundred more requests u freedom of information act a lot of people you know it's good it it encourages transparency um a lot of people do also like to get police reports on themselves or others and uh we did see a 44.4% increase on the amount of requests we got. Uh we do extensive ones uh there is a fee for uh we do provide many of them that are are shorter requests free of charge. uh we are hoping that these numbers will either level off uh or they don't become hit a point where we get so many that becomes untenable to continue without charging for everyone. Uh we also did 23 bid openings last year. We did a lot of bids for the fire station, Radcliffe

Center, um DDA, uh some parking restriping and uh a alleyway repaving as well as our DPW uh yearly bids that we put out for various road projects. city council. Last year we had 30 meetings. Uh we council made 214 motions and passed 14 ordinances last year. So a few more ordinances than in the prior year. And we also did 110 pages of minutes. I actually went back and looked. We did 111 pages the year before. So I attribute that to uh maybe I had fewer spaces between uh lines. The clerk's office also coordinates our community shred day. Uh we had two community shred days in 2025. We had a spring one at the Radcliffe Center and our fall one here at our traditional city hall site. The shred days um in addition to being a free service that we provide for residents to shred their uh private documents. We also use that as a fundraiser for the food pantry. We take back prescription drugs and we also do the Cram the Cruiser school supply drive. Um, I'm proud to announce uh I've always said, you know, like I wanted to bring two shred days back a year. We get tons of calls all throughout the year. Hey, when's the ne when's the shredder going to be on site again? Uh, so this year we are doing two shred days. They will be Saturday, June 6th and Saturday, September 12th from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. And both locations will be here at the normal city hall location. One of the other projects, side projects we had last year was I was able to secure grant funding through the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks, they had funding available from the state to improve ADA accessibility at our polling locations. And since we

used the police department as our early voting site as well as precinct 9 on election day, that qualified. So, at no cost to the city, we are able to take the crumbling access sidewalk leading into the building and we got a brand new sidewalk there um at no cost to the city. The grant required no city matching. Um was minimal paperwork. So, it was a nice little uh project that we were able to do just uh with a not a whole lot of uh you know involvement. Want to talk about a little bit about the education and training that we do throughout our office. Um, in front of you there is a list of the various trainings that we've done. Uh, I think there probably might be a couple more, but and when I sat down and thought about it, our office, we utilize a lot of in-person training, uh, and off-site training, but we also through the Michigan Elections e-learning center, we have a lot of web-based kind of go at your own pace training options. Uh in 2025, I completed every two years as a certified clerk, we have to complete a uh accreditation continuing education. Uh so that was a 16-hour web-based training. Uh so that was completed. We also go to two member education days a year for the Michigan Association for Municipal Clerks. This is nice because we get to gather and we get to hear legislative updates from the Bureau of Elections as well as uh the leadership on the clerk board. Uh as you know elections a lot of talk in the news. It's always nice to go and hear from the state themselves. Hey this is what's happening. These are changes that may be coming. These are changes that have occurred and this is what it affects us and what we do in the clerk's office. Uh we also go to quarterly meetings for the association of Wayne County Clerks which is nice. Um kind of a little think tank group. We can put our heads together. Uh

even at the very least it's networking. When election day rolls around and we need one more ballot bag or anything like that, it's like, "Oh, nope. We can call fall back on our connections we made and uh work with our co- clerks." Uh I've also last year went to a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services quarterly trainings. These used to just be uh web Zoom based, but last year they opened it up and they said, "Oh, come on in person." The neatest thing about doing the person in person training, other than actually meeting the people you talk to on the phone when you call about vital records questions, is they gave us tours of the vaults in Lancing where every birth record is kept for statewide and you just see rows and rows of this climate controlled room. So that was really kind of neat. Um Michigan Municipal Risk Management Authority training sessions. I was just at one last week on cyber security and AI for management. Um, so these are free trainings that they put together for us to just kind of help us go over things that could help minimize our liability for things in the future. And u also last week I was at the Bureau of Elections train the trainer election election staff class and that is required of us every two years so we can be certified to train our election staff for the upcoming year. So, this is just a few of the uh education and training programs we do. One new thing that I've not yet done, but I want to do for 2026 is attend the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks Masters Academy. What this is is this is a supplemental training session to your initial accreditation. So to get your MI um certified mun Michigan municipal clerk certification, it's originally a three-year one week a year, 40 hours a week program. Once you go through that, um then you're eligible to go to the M's academy. What this is is it's kind of

right now I'm a certified municipal clerk. By going to M's academy, you earn points for each of these things where you kind of level up your clerk status, if you will, a little bit. Uh so I had completed my initial one a couple years ago. The scheduling just hasn't worked out uh to to go to masters but I believe it will work uh this year. So we do have a funds that I've put in the budget to attend that. So that's kind of our year in review. So that kind of leads us to where we're going going forward this year. Um so going forward I've identified a couple reduction possibilities in our revenue and a couple projected growth opportunities that we could see. our projected reduction possibilities would be with animal licensing. Um, animal licenses, it really, I can't stress enough, when we do have animal control enforcement out on the streets, we do see an increase in licensing. Um, when we when we're not seeing the unlicensed dogs, we're, you know, not getting the revenue from that. Uh so depending on our enforcement levels that can affect our animal licensing. Uh also birth and death records. Uh we have what we always refer to as the school enrollment bump. So every year between mid July and midepptember we see a large jump in requests for birth records because every year we see kids getting ready to go off to school for the first time. mom and dad realize, "Oh, I don't know where the birth record is or I never got the original one. I have to go get one." So, we'll see, you know, a steady request thing and then we hit July and it spikes July through September. We're about two years away from no longer having that anymore because Garden City Hospital no longer has the birthing center. So, we're just at the point where the last babies born at a regular pace at Garden

City Hospital are going to be entering school for the first time. So, come after 2027, we're probably we'll still be consistent, but we won't see that extra bump that we get from the first time licensings being issued. Uh projected growth opportunities. Um business licenses. Uh this is one of those things that's kind of driven by our uh developing of our vacant locations and bringing new business and new business uh investments here into the city. Uh so working together closely with community development to get those businesses in here and help them not only open but stay open and continue to thrive so we don't have that vacancies uh will help us. Also, in terms of our delinquent enforcement, I really hope this year that we are more on top of we've always kind of taken the yeah, it's late, but we we penalize, we penalize, we penalize, and then once we max out, then we start enforcement. I want to start enforcement sooner. So then we can clearly identify which businesses are still here. And if they're still here, we get them paid and current. Or if they're gone, we can take that off the books so we aren't saying, "Oh, well, we still have this much that we can bring in." Well, at least no, we'll have cleaner records of what we can expect to generate. Um, another growth opportunity would be with grant opportunities. Um, with it being an election year, it's it's going to be a busy year. Um, but like I mentioned, I kind of showcased that Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks won. um was not super super uh labor intensive in applying and getting that. Um so I really uh would like to when I have time to do targeted uh smaller, you know, not necessarily swinging for that grand slam because if we hit four or five singles, that's still something that we can get.

Um, so smaller targeted grant ones that don't require city match, uh, things like that that we can just, you know, hang our hats on. 5,000 here, uh, 5,000 there throughout. Um, so that's what I would like to look into as we go through. I know, uh, at the, uh, Michigan municipal risk management training last week, they did mention, um, they've got some for cyber security, for improving multifactor authentication through a lot of city systems. Um, so that might be a smaller one that we could still get but still do a lot of benefit to the city. Uh, talk about election revenues. Um, we get election revenue from two sources. We get it from state grants and also reimbursement from the county. We do have some potential early um, election revenues for this coming season. uh early voting staffing reimbursement for the August and November elections coming up, which was really nice uh when we ran the numbers on that because the state because that was voted in by the voters. Um and we're constitutionally required to have that early voting for every federal election there. We have to run it nine days, has to be open eight hours a day, which it's never just eight hours because you have your opening, you have your closing. Um, so for us to staff that efficiently, uh, last year, uh, cost roughly $18,000. However, we are reimbursed up to $15 an hour for our staff over there. So, we were able to get reimbursed $17,438. So, we were actually we processed over 3,000 voters across the elections in 2024. and out of city monies, it only cost us $581 to run that center. So, uh, we are pleased with that. And then also, um, there may be election equipment

upgrade grant funding available. Um, like I said, this is all contingent upon availability of state and local funds, um, which we hope we'll be able to access, but nothing is really guaranteed with that until the budget's finalized. And that's going to lead me into my next thing I want to talk about is our voting system. Uh the voting equipment upgrades. So the statewide voting equipment contracts expire in February of 2027. So the uh it's got out for bid right now for proposals to be submitted. The county and state will look at them and evaluate them and then they will make the recommendation. Garden City doesn't have the ability to choose their own system that they use. We go with whatever Wayne County uses because it's a uniform system throughout the county. They hope to have contracts in place by December. There is funding for these uh updated inf infrastructure currently in the first proposed state budget for this year. However, we know the state budget's still very much in its early stages. Unfortunately, as much as I don't like it, elections have kind of become a political football uh when it comes to budgeting, things like that. And that's what I really want to stress is anything election related, election infrastructure, this is where we can't cut corners, and it shouldn't be a political thing because elections really are the forefront and cornerstone of our democracy. Um, so I'm hoping what is budgeted in the initial state budget stays in there and we don't have to make an adjustment. Um, but they are estimating cost of upgrading to be about $15,000 per precinct. We run 10 precincts. We run two absentee counting boards and we run an early voting center. uh if for some reason the funding was not there, we would have,

you know, I this would have to be looked at as a a capital uh improvement for next year. Um but I'm hoping um that they I'm hoping Lancing sees elections the same way we see it here at the local level and their importance and knowing that if we have to upgrade um you don't you know if you have to cut something from the budget, don't do it off of elections. Speaking of elections, we do have two elections in 2026. Uh we have our primary election in August and our general in November. Uh this is the first midterm election cycle with that required early voting. So I'm anxious to see um just how many people turn out for the early voting. If you kind of I kind of put our numbers in there from 24, which we should expect it to be a little bit lower because president's not on the ballot. But it's just neat to see how we went from 232 people the first time we did early voting to we actually dropped in August to 140 and then November came and we exploded to over 3,200 voters in the nine days over there. Um but I I voters everything I heard they liked it. They liked that they could go vote in person, use the tabulator, but they didn't have to worry about where they were going to be on election day. they had a 9-day window to come in and do the voting. Uh, our voter turnout for the presidential election was almost 70%, it's the highest it's been in decades. Um, so, you know, say what you will about the current political climate. It people are very motivated and they are very passionate about voting. So, I would have liked to see that at 70, but I'll take the 69.37. Uh, we are going to train 80 plus election inspectors for this year. Uh what I want to do this year, we in addition to our normal pre-election lecture kind of training, um some of my more experienced staff members who would

be more of a leadership role in the precincts, I'll bring them in for kind of some specialized training on the poll books, on the tabulators, so they can get really familiar um with everything that they may encounter on election day. cons continued cost-saving measures because I'm going to bring this up probably every budget presentation for as long as I'm here. Um, when you look at the cost to run an election, just know that our biggest saving that we've had in the past 7 to 10 years was when we switched from the oddyear off elections to the evenear elections. Because if you look at the cost and be like, "Oh, we're paying, you know, $30,000 just in staff to run each election." Just know that if we didn't have that switch over, we would be doing that every year. So, at least this way, we're going to have to have the elections for state and federal levels here. So, we might as well just do it once instead of having every year this expense. Um, that isn't to say we're just going to rest on our laurels and be like, "Oh, we do this now. We're not going to try to save money anywhere else." um future cost-saving opportunities. We have a permanent ballot list now, which a lot of people associate just with absentee voting. My PSA to the public would be put yourself on the permanent ballot list and what will happen is every election 40 days before you will be mailed a ballot. You do not have to vote that absentee. If you like to vote in your precinct on election day, you can take that ballot. You can vote it at home. You can bring it with you. put in the tabulator, you can take it to early voting. But for every voter who we have on that permanent ballot list, if they are on the permanent absentee application list, that's one less application we don't have to pay to send out because they will get that ballot. So, if you always vote absentee and you just want that ballot sent, put yourself on the list. Um, and that way you know when's my

ballot coming? 40 days before the election. Every election. The other thing that I looked at doing for this year, um it wasn't really um cost work out costwise is precinct consolidation with the early voting. If more people are taking advantage of that and absentee voting, we do not have as many people at the polls on election day. A lot of jurisdictions have condensed and consolidated some of their precincts. What I'm looking to do is uh the precincts that currently have two precincts in one location um at Memorial School, Lather School and um Farmington. I was drawing a blank there to cond consolidate those to go from two precincts in each building to one. So every voter would still vote at the same location they go to. It would just be one precinct. So only one table. There is a lot of u geom mapping and notifications that were required to go with that. Um I kind of brought it up to the county at one meeting and talked about it and um what we came away with was it might be best to just wait till 2030 when they do the next redistricting because we don't want to redraw our precinct lines or anything like that two years before we redistrict in case they change. Um but if um 2030 if it's intact, what we can do is we have to send out notifications with the redistricting, we could use that to kind of piggyback the consolidation on that. Cuts down on precincts, cuts down on equipment, cuts down on staff, cuts down on testing. Um so it should save us uh eventually if we can do that option. U cost for our 2026 election cycle. You'll notice on those sheets, um, if you're looking at what was used in the line items so far this year, there's a

lot of zeros just because we haven't got to that part of the budget year yet where we're going to be using that. So, we're kind of going to use as much of what's budgeted in there for our absentee ballot applications, ballot postage, supply replacement, uh, public notices, all this, a lot of the stuff for the August election will happen actually in this fiscal year. So, we'll use what was budgeted for this year and then um it's a little bit less for next year. A couple other expenditure accounts notices um for election related stuff um to kind of help us see how we spend our election funds. Previously, we kind of had an election supply line item that was just kind of a catchall. Like any election expenses, yep, we're just going to pay for it out of here. but it doesn't really paint a clear picture of are we spending this money well? Are we spending it efficiently? So, we've kind of broken it off into several um different line items. We've got one for equipment maintenance to cover um outside things that aren't covered under our maintenance contract. So like our voter assist terminal um ADA compliant devices the the sip and puff the uh audiovisisual aids things like that those aren't covered under our standard maintenance. So if we have to replace that we can come take it out of there. Uh maintenance contracts that is just the standard to make sure we have support for any equipment uh issues or upgrades that need to be done between elections. and also our contractual professional to cover our testing uh the testing of the equipment before we get to election day for our clerk's office expenditures. Uh I feel last year we did a really deep dive line item by line item to to cut where we could um everything. So a lot of our numbers are very similar to what they were in 2526. Um, a couple quick notes is I did

combine the meeting conferences and workshops line item with the education and training line item. So, we're kind of phasing out that meetings conference because our office isn't going to go to meetings, conferences, and workshops that aren't educational or we don't get some benefit out of. Um, so we put that all into one. uh the legal publications line item that kind of fluctuates based on what we do here at council in terms of ordinances and making sure um we're compliant with our publications on that. I kind of mentioned we did more ordinances last year than we did the year before. So that's what caused the cost. You know, when we do more ordinances and things like that, costs rise for that. Um and also our membership and dues line item. I did half um what we had budgeted for it last year. um we didn't fully use it. Uh I really kind of with the meetings and conferences if it's not if we're not getting benefit from it, I don't see the benefit of being a part of it. So we're going to, you know, make sure that we maximize our value for what we spend on that. And then our increase in personnel costs are kind of set by the contractual 3% increase. And with that, I will turn it over to you guys if you have any questions or comments.

Council, uh anybody questions, comments? I I have a question. I'm not so sure if it's for you, Mr. Smith, or if it's for the city manager. It was my understanding when we moved Jacob over to parks and wreck that he was going to come back and help with elections.

Um, yeah, there's nothing stopping him from continue to do so. um we can reallocate them if we need to. But we recently um inquired with two of our former uh employees of the clerk's office, both who are retired, very very experienced at Garden City elections, and um saw a great opportunity to pay them uh part-time money to come back and really help us uh make sure we can deliver safe and effective elections and to add that stability um that they've provided for a number of years. So, um, you know, there's nothing stopping us from allowing Jake to help, but at the same time, um, you know, now that we've moved to every two years, um, really about a six-month period in which we have to do elections every two years, um, having two people willing to and, uh, based on our initial conversations with them to to repeat coming back cyclally every six for six months at a time and help us get through these elections. really one um adds a very affordable manner. Instead of staffing up just for every six months out of every two years for elections, having to maintain a employee for the whole two years, we're going to see if we can strategically add two people who uh give us one experience and competence at it, but also affordability um that goes with uh conducting the elections. So, um again, when it comes to elections, it's all hands- on deck. Whatever we find we need, we'll we bring to the table. Um, but it's one of those things that hang out there that, wow, if we go down one person, um, we're really in trouble for elections. So, what we're trying to do is develop a plan to really make sure almost no matter what, um, we can participate effectively in the democratic process in Garden City. So,

uh, I I have a question. It's not really budget, but since we're having two shred days, uh, have we thought about ever doing one at Radcliffe at all? Um, we we did um like like I said, we did do the Radcliffe one um last year over there, which there was nothing bad about the one that we did at Radcliffe. Um just what I kind of heard afterwards is people were like, I didn't really know where to go. I'm not as familiar with it. I think because we've done it here so long, like people they know where they're coming in off of Central, they are, you know, they're used to it. Um, so and then we didn't necessarily when we scheduled at Radcliffe last year, we didn't know that there was soccer games going on at the soccer fields right there. So it threw us off a little bit when we set up and the first car rolled in, I was like, "You got shred." And they're like, "No, we're here to park for the soccer game." So, but um, you know, we we didn't have any issues with it being a red cliff, but I just think people are just used to the setup that we have here.

Okay. Thank you. Uh, further comments from table, mayor. Uh, mayor prom do with with all the cutbacks we've had to done throughout the departments, are you comfortable with the employees you have that you can still provide the high quality that you have in the past?

I'm never I'm I'm never going to say no, we are I I would turn down more staffing. Um I I think we're at a good point where we're going to try what we're doing this with the part-time election specialists. Um it the clerk's office we always kind of try to pride oursel on doing doing more with less. Like how well can we do this? Um and there are some days where it's like okay staffing does become a little bit of an issue uh just if I'm not there or one full-time person's not there. Um if our floater is a four day a week position right now um so if it's a Friday and they're not there and my one full-time's not there department head just kind of runs the department you know and um but I'd like to see how this works you know I'd like to to give it a shot with the election uh specialists um but I would not say oh in the future if we're in a better financial situation don't try to give me anybody else cuz we will always you know especially if the foyers continue like they are um they they do are a little timeconuming.

Thank you. That's all I have. Um council member do just wondering if we're going to find money in the budget to get him a new um a new name plate that's going to say master clerk Smith. Oh absolutely that that we're building that into the training budget. It's the assumed well and it'll have an asterct and everything. It'll be great. Thank you for all the training you do though. Okay. Uh, further comments from the table. Okay. Thank you, uh, Mr. Smith. Very good.

Okay. Next up is our city treasurer, Miss Shannon Shepard. Good evening, mayor and council. It's a tough act to follow. I don't know that I can I can beat that, but I'll do my best. Um, so tonight I'm going to um present just a brief overview of the 2627 budget. Um, a lot of the stuff Tim had um touched on a little bit in the presentation from a couple weeks ago. Um I'm just going to delve a little deeper into uh some of those uh topics. Um so first I'll um basically just going to focus on the um major components that kind of shaped the budget. Um I'll start with our major revenue sources, discuss the water and sewer fund, healthcare cost pressures, and then just kind of some of the broader financial factors that uh like I said helped shape the budget. Um so the city's revenue comes from multiple different sources. Um it goes to different funds for the general fund. Um our primary revenue source is property taxes. Um state shared revenue and various other charges and services. And then we also have revenues that are restricted um to specific funds. Specifically the uh water and sewer revenues support the utility system. And then our act 51 revenues support our major and local roads. As I'm sure you guys know, property taxes are the city's largest revenue source. Um, according to the assessor's report, um, the total assessed value increased about 4.6%. But the state inflation rate multiplier is only 2.7%.

And so, as you know, under the Headley amendment, the taxable value can only increase um, uh, at the rate of inflation or 5% whichever is lower. Um, so there we're only able to increase that by 2.7%. However, when a property does change ownership, um, it the taxable value resets to the current market value. So, there is a way to kind of recapture some of that. Um, I don't want to say lost value, but some of that value that we weren't able to capture. Um, that's typically called uncapping. Um uh state chair revenue is another important general fund uh revenue source. Um these distributions are partially based on state sales tax collections. As you can see from the chart here, or maybe you can't see because it's small. Um the state's forecasting lower sales tax revenue which results in about a 1.8% decrease in Garden City's uh share of those distributions. Um city currently has around 22 million um in various investments. Um we maintain a conservative and diversified investment strategy. We focus on safety, liquidity and uh reasonable returns. Our portfolio includes CDs with a local credit union. Uh we have some short-term commercial paper and the majority is uh in our participation in the Michigan class investment pool. Um over the last few years uh we've we've had some higher interest rates and uh that helped increase our investment earnings. However, as the rates begin to decline from those recent highs, we do expect our investment earnings to slightly decrease on that as well. Um, just to kind of paint a picture of that, um, about a year ago, we were getting rates

above four and a half percent. And then I just checked Michigan class this morning, which typically provides the best returns, and we're at 3.7. So we're like almost a whole percentage down in less than a year. Uh, so I'm going to move on to the water and sewer fund. Um it operates as an enterprise fund just meaning that it has to be self-supporting. Um most revenues come from user charges and those revenues have to cover the costs of operating and maintaining the system. Um our major expenses uh in the water and sewer fund are personnel, wholesale water costs, sewer treatment services, system maintenance, and um infrastructure improvements. The city purchases water from Great Lakes Water Authority and our sewer treatment services are provided by Rouge Valley. Um we are uh projecting to add to the water and sewer fund this year. However, keep in mind that we the fund does still owe the general fund a debt uh based on the prior year's um subsidy. Basically um the plan is to pay back 1 million this year and then incrementally over the next four years. Uh, one of the primary cost drivers in the water and sewer fund is the wholesale water that we purchase from GLWA. So, I want to kind of discuss their cost increases and how we plan to respond to that. Uh, GWA is uh increasing both their fixed monthly charge and the commodity rate. the fixed charge is going up about 6.3% and the um commodity rate is going up just over 7%. In response, we plan to continue to follow the strategy that was approved by council based on the water rate study

that was done last year. Um and essentially rather than matching the large fluctuations um in the wholesale cost we just plan to implement an annual 5% increase on the commodity rate and this year there is no plan to increase the fixed charge so that will stay stagnant. Um this approach helps smooth out the rate changes and it provides a more predictable cost for the residents and um based on the activity this year since we will have a fund balance the strategy seems to be working as intended. So that's good. Um another major cost pressure in the budget this year is health insurance. Uh we're currently expecting about a 30% increase which translates into about $1.2 $2 million. Um, typically those increases are driven by like rising national medical and pharmaceutical costs, claims utilization and adjustments within the insurance market. And since personnel costs represent a large portion of the city's expenses, increases in health care have a pretty significant impact on the budget. Um, and since these costs affect every department, we're continuing to evaluate the long-term strategy for managing all of our benefit costs. Uh, so we kind of looked at all of these factors individually. Just kind of wanted to bring them all together as a whole um, and see how they are all affecting the budget. The main drivers are the health insurance cost increase, the water rate increases, decreases in state share revenue, the headly limitations on our property tax growth, and declining interest rates. Having said all that, while there are several of these cost pressures influencing the budget, um the proposed budget reflects proactive planning to address these factors.

Um, so to kind of sum it all up, our property values do remain strong, although growth is a little bit limited by the Headley amendment. Um, but at the same time, the rising health care and water costs remain key budget drivers. But despite these challenges, we are continuing to prioritize conservative financial management. And lastly, I just want to emphi emphasize that the proposed budget reflects proactive planning uh to maintain the essential services for the community. And I'm happy to answer any questions. Okay. Council uh questions or comments for the treasure.

Member Hughes said we try to get ahead of the needed funds that general fund was that all part of the plan put a million dollars back into the general fund by yep and um so and then the 5% increase was already set to try to anticipate smooth out the great exactly so this plan seems like it appears to be doing exactly what we Yes. Y we don't see huge fluctuations in

right price, you know, in increases. Exactly. Great lake water sens.

And if I could just add um this really became apparent to me that this this concept of smoothing out doing increases in a steady fashion. Um had we increased our water rates from 2017 to last year, we would have just had another 5% increase last year as opposed to the drastic change we had. Now over that time rates would have increased but steadily in a manageable fashion. So our real goal here with the water fund is just to offer consistent stability and yes our plan is to rise at about 5%. You know certainly whenever we didn't have to we wouldn't but as you could see with Great Lakes Water Authority and some other pressures that you know things don't tend to get cheaper and and just inflation alone tends to drive um increases. But this is evident that GLWA had a greater increase in their water rates than we're going to pro provide to our residents. And that was the impetus behind the rip the band-aid off that plant Moran suggested during their um fling was just get set again so then you can smooth rates out into the future. And I really just as a concept smoothing and I wish healthcare could get above get on the same plan is to smooth our healthcare increases. So, one thing we're facing, as the treasurer stated, is a 30% increase this year where we've had to kind of scramble and find another million dollars in the way we do our and and how much we have to spend all next year just based on healthcare costs. And those costs are happening across the board throughout the region. Um, you know, we've spoke to our healthcare reps and we're not the only ones experiencing these kind of increases. I've spoke to other municipalities. So um you know at the very least the things we can control to keep smooth for our residents to give consistent consistent uh efforts in our water system but a consistent price um translate pretty well. We're only one year in and it it already is kind of okay this this is the right plan. So,

mayor, further comments from uh or questions from the table? Mayor, mayor proen do I'd like to kind of piggyback on on what uh city manager was saying about the projected 30% increase. Is that normal annually? No. It's it's not normal.

It's not it's it's an indication. Um, you know, we talked to our uh we have a company called Gallagher who who negotiates our healthc care rates and works to give us the most effective cost and and works with us indie injury to get delivery of this service. Um, they stated that uh Blue Cross Blue Shield for example had a tremendous monetary loss in the last year and healthcare costs are just on a rise across the state. Um, we had some higher claims usage but nothing out of control that would have caused a 30% increase. Um it's really just uh part for the course for all of Southeast Michigan. Um there seems to be an adjustment in healthcare costs where the insurers are catching up to cost their they saw in the previous years. Um so um we're investigating all options. Um but right now we're just we're we're we're baking in that 30% increase to make sure um that we can afford everything we have right now next year.

Thank you. Further comments or questions from the table? No further. Thank you, Miss Shepard.

Council, if I could just real quick add that the the slide she had where Garden City property values went up 4.7%. And we are only able to capture because of inflation 2.7% of that. And it's just I don't know if you recall in the first meeting when I and I've showed it a number of times because it really is the crux of our financing issue is taxable value. We're doing a great job of making Garden City, adding value to Garden City, making it a great place to call home. Um, but and and with those increased property values, expectations get higher. Um, but we're unable to generate the revenues necessary to keep up with that. Like I always said, great for the homeowner who lives here and lives here for the 30 years, but tough for us to keep up. And uh, and just understand that's the constraint. So when when we rearrange personnel across departments and try and be as efficient as we can, it's because we're constantly facing that pressure of a 30% increase and we can't even catch up with the value we've added to the property. So um it's just, you know, the dilemma of a Michigan municipality and the environment, but we do pretty good and it's kudos to our employees to continue this.

Okay, next up is our community community development department building planning uh DDA. And since Mr. Miller cannot attend. Mr. Gibbons.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Yes. Um, as council is aware, Mr. Miller is out of state uh dealing with a uh family issue. Um, so I'm going to be covering his presentation this evening, but also also as council is aware, uh, Mr. Miller has indicated that in the fall he intends to, um, retire from local government. Um, so we are actively in the very, very difficult job of finding someone who can wear all the hats he does. And as I talk about and as he was going over his presentation with me today, I uh I realized what a hurdle that is. So we will work dig diligently to do that. But I just think Matt does a wonderful job and he's going to be tough to replace. But uh glad to be doing this tonight because I get to talk about the good things he does in his department. So what is the community development department? Um it is a uh sort of a jack of all trades. Uh it covers our administrates our building department, our planning division. Um and through a contract with the DDA is also functions as the administration for the downtown development authority. Um engages in residential business and industrial development, something needed in our town if you're going to compete um with other communities for um you know businesses and residents. You need to have good solid community development that improves your town uh your home your uh community with over time. Uh neighborhood stabilization program. This is a program where we have the right of first refusal to purchase uh homes that have become tax foreclosed. And then what we can do is use that program to um acquire those homes and um transfer them to a developer to uh greatly improve the the quality of housing stock we have in Garden City or properties. Also, they oversee the property maintenance board of appeals, which deals with dangerous buildings and oversees the um uh the maintenance of uh our housing stock through uh dealing with problem uh properties and especially those subject to condemnation. Um and lastly um really became um evident the importance of a

community development uh department was with grants particularly um with the sidewalk grant uh the community development department administrates that grant because it it is a combination of of many departments that have to go together. The community development department is perfectly situated to administrate it. um also with the talents of our current um community devel are um street lighting grant uh two separate street lighting grants that are going to provide a significant amount of LED lighting switchovers is administrative through there and housing and safe streets um and we're having an amendment to our um master plan um could currently be carried out uh all through grants obtained through the community development department it's admin administration is um set up. Uh tough a little bit of a tough one to read off of the um TV, but um ultimately it just shows you all the different uh areas it touches. The community development director Matt Miller is responsible for um seeing to the planning commission, zoning board of appeals, property maintains board of appeals, and the DDA uh planning, building department, and downtown development authority with uh various employees under each. Um the while we do have employees in the building department, those employees uh we have two a 1.6 FTE worth of employees. So it's one full one part-time employee in our building department that's actually assign employed by the city. The rest is through Buchelli who we contract with to provide our inspection and other building department services. Um so the community development director oversees that. In 2025, uh, we saw some significant upticks and some minor decreases, but generally all upticks in our building department activity. Um, 2,84 permits issues, that's one and a half percent. Uh, 5,162 permit inspections, that's almost an 8% increase. Um, you know, our mechanical, electric, and plumbing inspections uh vary, but um, you know, electrical

significant increase. We saw 63 more assigned permits and we saw 29 new vacant retroed properties. Um, you know, this is a good combination between our community development division and our ordinance department and Kelly Kovac's over there who work together with our building department to locate, identify vacant properties, get them inspected, and bring them up to um the minimum requirements of our vacant buildings. It's something that we really focused hard on um when we if you recall when we employed the rental um oversight over at the ordinance department. I called them the rentals are but also there the vacant properties are. They need to focus on um those two types of properties. Make sure they're registered per ordinance and make sure they are maintaining um basic minimum standards. Some more numbers. uh commercial CFOs down a little bit but our res and our res but significant amount of residential CFOs uh 376 though rental certifications um so 437 residential but 376 rental certifications means inspectors went out inspected the property and m and they met minimum standards for um being a rental uh being a residents allowed for rentals in Garden City um that is something um you know I've talked about as a police chief as a city manager um and that the community development department has a heck of a good hand in is just making sure that um if you're renting a home in Garden City, you're providing a great place to live that doesn't have a negative impact on our neighbors and uh rental certification process is important for that. CFO inspections are up 3%. We had one um neighborhood stabilization property and one dangerous building. dangerous building means it's basically a condemnable property and we're working to make it not needed to be in con condemnation. And uh another uh excellent thing that's occurred is is the move to online permits. You know, we're living in a society today where people don't necessarily want to drive up to the building department and work on getting their permits. They want to

be able to go online. They want to be able to automate and make these things happen faster. What that helps with is compliance. The easier you make it for people to comply, the more likely they are. Um the building department through the community development leadership has has moved in that direction quite well. Um 75% increase in online permits and a 42% in um online inspection requests. So um doing a great job of using automation to be more efficient and more effective. Um graph just just shows the permits between 24 and 25 where we've risen where we've fallen a little bit. But if you'll notice, um, you know, the oranges this year, um, we're rising more than we're falling. Um, so the the work is there, the development is good. Garden City isn't is a town that's pretty much built out. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of opportunity for new development, but we don't have big swaps of farmland. So, we don't see huge increases to these things, but the the steady um work we have is indicative of a uh of a town that is doing good work in uh developing and keeping its properties um on the rise and doing the work of regulating those properties that need it. Uh the planning division, eight planning commissions meetings this year, two zoning board of appeals, 650 zoning inquiries. This is something I was glad to see tracked. Um both Mario and Matt both track how many zoning inquiries and the amount of times someone's calling about, hey, can I do this on a property is a good sign for us. It means someone's asking the question about, you know, am I allowed to do this on this piece of property which I've either acquired or want to inquire, acquire, sorry, not inquire, uh, inquire about something you want to acquire. Um, and I I like that kind of data. It gives us an indication. If more people are calling about zoning issues, that means there's more people worrying about doing something new or, you know, um, improving a property. I think it's a derivable um um thing from that stat. So, kind of neat that they're acquiring

that and as they ca as they collect this data, we'll be able to look back in the into the past and see how we're doing. You know, the more people are talking about the properties in Garden City, the probably the better we are. Um there's two batches of zoning amendments um under consideration, eight site plans and one special land use. Also, um we're doing a uh certificate of occupy occupancy use statement for every business. Meaning, we're going to ask you what what what we're going to approve you to do a certain activity at a business. And then we're going to have a statement that you're signing that this is what I'll be doing at that business. So that when people deviate for it, we have their own signed admission that this was what our intended use for this property was. And when they don't, well, it gives us the opportunity to to to enforce our rules with their knowledge that they signed off on. This is what I was using it for. Uh Matt and I are both um you know have found that handy both in um being able to verify that was an approved use when someone's doing something that's questioned, but also to go back and hold those owners accountable to say, "Hey, you said this is all you were doing. You've signed it right here. We're going to hold you accountable." So just a just an excellent way to uh to proceed. Uh building department budget highlights. Um basically at the end of the day, you're paying about $129,446 for a building department. um pretty efficient. Um like I said, we're not one of those cities that is building so much that we're going to see a tremendous amount of um revenue from building departments because, you know, it's just not a ton of new construction and new. But at the same time, we're steady. Um our contractual services are priced reasonably. Our salaries are within budget and our expenditures for the level of service we're getting is pretty good. Our planning division um the same paying about $84,000 for planning services. um you know mostly done through contract and offset slightly by the uh the revenue. Um next up uh community development as I said before is uh contracted to uh

administer the downtown development authority. Um, this means uh handling board of trustees meetings, lucky squirrel events, Christmas tree lightings, light pole, flower baskets, common flowers, streetcape maintenance, hometown hero banners, 2025 business incentive grants, um, and some um, parking improvements and alleyway improvements to improve the appearance and um, travelability and parking in our downtown area, which, you know, can hopefully only better support those businesses down there. Um, one of the things most recently, um, utilized, Matt had contacted SEMCOG to get some data out about how many people visited our chili cookoff community event. Um, turns out, um, cell phone companies, uh, you can SEMCOG through a through an application can get data about how many visits we had of cell phones essentially to the downtown development uh, area during the course of the Ketch Cookoff. So, we found out 5,000 people visited. Um, the data is really neat. It can even boil down to where did they come from? You know, we had some we we found out that they came some phones some phones came from out of state that came to our downtown and and a lot from our area. But um very neat to see and it helps emphasize the importance of these type of events and the value they have to the downtown area because they bring people in. They can see our businesses. They can see the quality of uh of Garden City and it it does two things. One, it brings people in, but two can only inspire us to to to advertise even better in the future. So, an excellent job they did there and I thought that data was pretty informative. The DDA budget, it's already been passed. Um, they've done a good job of utilizing their revenues to improve the downtown area, but also to start to begin uh to build up that fund balance uh to do the next um capital project that might be needed to improve our downtown area. They're up to 96,000 by the end of 2627 is anticipated. Um, so they're operating within budget

efficiently with an eye on doing greater things in the future, which is what we really want from all of us here in Garden City, but definitely at the DDA where we want to see that money produce value for our downtown because in downtown is the heart of a community. It's essential that we provide excellent place for people to drive through and get a a strong opinion of us, a good strong opinion, and uh and move to Garden City and and spend their dollars here. 2025 staffing levels. We got one community development director. Um like as I said before, one full one part-time building employee. Um a quarter of an employee for uh supplementing assistant director at the in the DDA. Um and then our planning and our um contracted building department. Um have a quarter of employee from McKenna and then um uh three and a quarter full-time employees for building. And uh we also have uh Gary Palmer who who we contract with to maintain the DDA and does an excellent job and uh you could tell uh puts a puts his heart really into it and make sure um he does the most with his job as well. Um last slide is uh community development director 2025 pro projects uh miss housing readiness grant um that is um you know an opportunity to examine housing and adjust our master plan to accommodate um housing in the in the future. Um, Eagle grants, uh, placemaking grants, uh, are all on, uh, horizon, things we're applying for, and I think Eagle for the, uh, street lights is one that we already did. Um, still going to do plenty new current and new business introductions. Um, continue to administer the sidewalk grant, make future and new business connections. One of the things Matt does a pretty good job of is connecting with our new businesses, visiting them, staying up to date on their needs, and what he can do better in the future. um continue to organize those great

community events, do ordinance amendments that that uh encourage development um but also maintaining, you know, quality environment for development. Um he's doing he's already done uh an analysis of the available properties in the DDA and now he's working on the entire city. Um, also, you know, with uh the utilization of brownfield property tax tax credits, specifically now that the law changed that allows us to uh use brownfield for what are part residential projects. So, it really opens up what we can do. And this is where having a professional educated know uh um in planning like a a planner be involved in these brownfield tax property credits because knowing the changes of the law and how to utilize them which he's had been doing pretty well in navigating has been impressive to see and it provides tremendous value to the entire community and the DDA. Um but uh um community visits and um uh he still does as I said he doesn't just visit the business though he visits residents and neighborhoods and people with all their random problems. I I think he said he he collects stray problems. Uh I think he said the other day and he attends conferences to stay up to date in the changes in laws and what we need. So um he does a good job of training, but he also does a great job of administrating um our community development needs. That's it for community development. I'd be happy to answer any questions as best I can uh in Mattstead.

Council, any questions or comments for Mr. Given? Mayor, I just want to say that um Matt Miller will be um hard to replace. Yes, he will. And he does wear many many hats and I appreciate how much work he's done, you know, courting um new, you know, new business owners or people who are interested in investing in the city and and um he's contributed quite a bit for the growth that we're seeing in this.

Absolutely. Um, you know, uh, having a planning degree and a history in planning, but also clerk and all the other things Matt's done, he's he's developed such a wide knowledge of government that it's it's fantastic because he I always joke like whenever I'm uh there's a new subject that's a novel to me. Um, he's already dealt with it twice. So, uh, yeah, he certainly will be hard to replace. Mayor, Council Member Dol. Um, speaking about the DDA's fund balance, I know the state doesn't like DDAs to have money without a plan. So, do you know if they have a project uh they're looking at?

Matt has quite a few projects he's talked about. I don't know if they have a specific one they're committed to. Um, you know, the park is always one on the horizons. I think uh downtown uh park is fantastic and Matt agrees and we've talked about that a number of times and getting the money there to be able to pull something off like that because as we see for the chili cookoff being able to bring people into our downtown to recreate um has has tremendous advantage for the businesses and for just the overall opinion in Garden City. Also, there's plenty of parking lot uh that can always use a little bit of uh dressing up and other little uh downtown streetscapes and things like that. So, you know, I would leave it to the DDA board to decide, but I know there's plenty of projects that that money could be used for. Um, I know my personal favorite is the is the park idea, but um

always been my favorite, too. So, I know we've talked many time and so uh that'd be something I'd be excited about, but ultimately the DDA will will have it. There's there's plenty to do there and I'm sure they've had something in the works. So, Yep. Um, yeah, I I can't I can't speak for Matt on exactly specifically with his conversations, but nothing that I'm aware of is particularly official. Yeah, he hasn't he has not brought anything official to the DDA board yet, but I know there's been discussions and things should be coming up soon before he leaves.

Okay. Further uh questions or comments for Oh, okay. Next up, uh, DPW and I will bring up our, uh, supervisor, Mr. Brad Omen.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. This is where we stand today. uh 25 full-time employees, two part-time seasonal employees, and 10 part-time employees in the custodial division who do an outstanding job for us, serving over 27,000 residents. I'd like to thank my team for all their hard work and everything we were able to accomplish this past year. We have a great group of hardworking individuals on that chart from top to bottom. And I would also like to thank the mayor and council for their support of the department. Our operational costs are split between the general fund, the water and sewer fund, and act 51 funding. We have 13 full-time employees funded through the water and sewer fund. Six full-time employees that are split between water and sewer and the general fund and six full-time and 10 part-time employees that are funded through the general fund. Our purchases and service services can be uh can be and sometimes are split between multiple accounts. Uh split between general and water, roads and water, general and roads and uh all roads can be split between major and local. Our overall budget for the coming year hasn't really changed that much. uh some small increases in certain accounts to cover uh the increase in costs. As you're aware, everything has gone up. Uh

one key increase to this year's budget is personnel costs. Uh we are proposing to add two full-time maintenance positions. One of those positions is filling a vacancy from 2024 and the second will be an additional addition to our workforce as we are taking on additional responsibilities and duties and uh we want to have another guy working in the water. We felt last year we cut back too much. that chart. Sorry, I that that's what our new chart would be. Uh a new responsibility that we're taking on is the full maintenance of city parks. Uh we have always maintain the parks with cutting grass. Now we'll be in charge of uh garbage removal and restroom maintenance. Uh we all want clean, well-maintained parks. Uh but remember that comes with a cost. um the addition of these two new employees will be able to achieve that uh future equipment purchases to maintain our fleet in the CIP. We didn't make any purchases this past year. We just moved in everything to this upcoming year. Uh they include a purchase of a new backhoe to replace our 2001 model. uh two one-tonon dump trucks to replace our 2005 trucks and the purchase of a zeroturn mower in the CIP for 2829. I have proposed the purchase a new vector jet truck uh to replace our 2002 model. Uh this piece of

equipment is a must-have for any DPW. We use this to clean storm and sanitary sewers. Hydro excavating water main breaks uh where there's a lot of utilities in the ground. Uh this is much safer to do it this way instead of uh uh excavating with a machine. Uh pod hauling water services for repair or lead service investigation and much more. Uh these purchases can be made using Act 51 andor the water fund. Again, this year we'll be conducting our 4x4 neighborhood improvement program. Uh this program is designed to target services in a fourb block area for four weeks. The DPW duties will be street repairs, water and sewer structural repairs, inspection and cleaning of the storm water system, tree trimming within the rightway, street and traffic sign replacement. Uh I think this program is very worthwhile. Uh the residents see the results and they appreciate it. A topic that was brought up at the council's goal setting meeting uh was water main brakes and replacements. One of our duties in which we take very seriously is the maintenance of our water distribution system and delivering safe drinking water to our residents. Our system has over 100 miles of water manes, over 11,000 service connections with a daily average demand of 2.3 million gallons. Uh we do have an aging system. The majority of the system was installed in 1930s and the 1950s. Our crews do an excellent job

maintaining our system. Uh water mane brakes are a problem. It's a regional problem with most of the water main breaks occurring in the winter. Uh and it's also weather weatherdriven. This shows the number of breaks for the past 10 years. Uh these are listed in calendar years. Uh a 10-year average is about 75 uh breaks per year. Uh per the council's request, we are prior prioritizing our water man for future replacements. Uh we are doing this using our asset management data system. Uh this is a GIS system that works off the satellites to pin it to the exact location. We have been digging back into our records. Uh this will give us a good view of where the worst water manes are. Uh this is also a great tool to use along with our paser ratings for combining future water man and road projects. Uh I have included in the CIP $1 million each year for water man replacements which I believe is uh much needed. Uh we are also pursuing grants for replacements. Another uh water related topic I'd like to touch on this evening is lead water service replacements. Uh we have been aggressive in replacing the lead lines. Uh since 2019 we have replaced almost 400. As of today, we have 264 known lead lines and 354 of unknown material.

Uh, our contractor is uh working in town as we speak. Uh, been working off a $1.5 million grant that was awarded to us last year from Eagle. Uh we still have about a million dollars left in that grant and we were recently awarded uh a million dollar grant from HUD for the investigation and the replacement of lead lines. So I hope to have all lead lines replaced in within two years and it will all be uh grant funded. Do we have any questions? So, Mayor Proend Do.

Yes, I have a few. Uh, first, I got to commend you and your team. You guys do a fantastic job day after day. People don't understand what you go through and uh 10 to 20 degrees out there in the snow, the wet, 80° uh downing these holes, replacing your water means the hazard you have every day. dealing with lead pipes, hazardous waste, collapsing wire down the hole, heavy duty equipment. That got me thinking, do you have train uh money in your budget for training these employees?

Uh yes, we always do. Uh uh esavate training, uh traffic control, that's a big one. Uh we send just about all our group throughout the year to different events. Uh uh some are actually free training which is good. So very good. Uh another one. Are you going after the tree grants again? Excuse me.

The the tree grant money. Are we going after that again? Uh we did apply uh with our partners with the Alliance of Rouge communities which is like 31 communities for a grant uh through the N uh US Forest Service.

Uh and then we're going to apply for the uh grant for the DTE through the state for uh the tree program. And last but not least, do do you feel two employees is enough for what you guys do? Umly taking on Parks and Wreck. Um I believe so, but I'll take five if I can get I've always been the type you do the best with what you got. Uh I think adding the two will definitely get us on firmer ground. Yeah. Yeah, we see that too. Thank you for what you do. Thank you. I have

Thank you. Further comments or questions from table with um Mayor Prom about the great job that you guys you do and I you know I all through winter I'm driving by and I'm seeing those guys out there and it's cold and it's wet and they uh every day you know they get up and that's what they do you know but it's greatly appreciated. Okay. Thank you. Uh further comments from the table. Okay. Uh on to the next one which is you major and local uh streets. Mayor,

uh this was touched on previous at a budget meeting. Uh we're anticipating a larger increase act 51 funding uh from the state uh more than years past which will bring uh about 4.5 million funding the roads. Is that correct? Uh our certified road mileage is 1 well 101.2 miles of roadway 21.06 06 of major roads, 79.96 of local. We are allowed to transfer up to 50% of the major funding into our local roads. Uh for this year's road bond projects, uh the projected cost is $7 million, $6 million in concrete reconstruction, 700,000 in concrete sectioning, 300,000 for joint and crack sealing. Uh these contracts will be brought to council next week.

Questions? Questions on the roads? questions.

All right, thank you. On to your next one. Uh, water and sewer. Uh, as Shannon talked about, touched on this earlier, uh, last month the, uh, Great Lakes Water Authority approved water and sewer rate increase to all its members partners. Uh the numbers that I received was 5.8 increase in water, 4.26 increase for sewer. Uh this is backtoback years they have had above a 5% rate increase. Uh historically GLWA uh increases have been below 3%. Uh I believe this is due to the rising cost of treating water and uh they want to do more future capital improvements. U just seen on the news last week the big water main break in Farmington. Uh so obviously that's what they're shooting for is to generate more money for their projects. I believe also they uh they they were capped at a certain amount that they could uh raise rates and that expired I believe last year. So

with that uncapping they're going to go for whatever as much as they can unfortunately. Uh questions, comments? Um may council member Hughes I know they ended up at 5.8 and 4.25 25. But they were shooting for higher than that, weren't they initially? Oh, yeah. I forget the exact number. They did lower it after uh they had the public hearing. Thank you. Further comments from the table. Thank you, Mr. Omen. Thank you.

Keep up the good work. Give you a minute to set yourself.

Yes. On fire. All right. Next up is Parks and Recreation. Uh, director, Mr. Zack King.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. I got to talk in a moment. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Thank you for having me here tonight. Um, with parks recreation, we're going to go over a few things. First off, I'm going to start off with the overview and accomplishments of the department. Then, we're going to talk budget numbers with parks, Radcliffe, and the ice arena. Then, we'll go over some program stats with the department as a whole. We'll talk about grants and training, and then the cost recovery of the department. Um, I took a moment and looked back at the five-year master plan and looked at some of the residents suggestions on what they want to see in their parks and garden city. And really those all those suggestions boil down to three things. Um, they want physical health and wellness, they want mental health and nature access, and then community connection and safety. Um, we I believe that the parks department is doing really well with these three objectives and we continue to strive for those moving forward. Some accomplishments and highlights of the past 12 months um is the recent addition of the information desk at the Radcliffe Center, the Radcliff uh gymnasium completion. Uh ball field maintenance. We have started our parks um with our parks team. They're working on those fields to bring them back up to playable conditions. Um especially with the introduction of softball leagues again this year. That's one of the most thing one of the most complaints I hear is the field condition. So, um, with that returning this previous year and continuing this year, we're hoping to improve those. Uh, we received additional CDBG funding for additional restrooms at Radcliffe. Uh, those are in completion, almost complete now. Uh, in the past 12 months, we've had two successful, uh, charity hockey games uh, at our hockey arena. Um, those went really well. Between last year, the Westland uh, Garden City Police Departments and this year, the Garden City Fire Department and the Garden City Police Department. Congratulations to the fire department on their win. Um we've introduced an afterchool tutoring program 100% grant funded through my leap and then we're working with the Quantis club and actually public works this previous year uh has

been doing upgrades at the park. Uh they have a plan put together on moving forward. The Rackcliff Center being the hub of a lot of recreation in the parks department. Um a lot is going on there and I wanted to highlight some of our community volunteers as well. um our thrift shop volunteers, our commission on aging volunteers and all the community volunteers that come out for all our events throughout the years uh throughout the year. Um they're very vital to the operations of parks and wreck and they increase those values. The parks department is broken into three different departments. Um parks being department 757. You'll see me reference that a few times tonight. That includes all the park facilities. So Garden City Park, Mhler, Rotary, Quanis, Manor, Florence, Arc Colola, and Helen. And then we have the Radcliffe Center department 758. And then the ice arena department 759. The parks arration department, like I said, is divided into those two departments. Um, this is a like thousand foot view of a lot of the funding changes that happened from the 2025 26 approved budget to what we're requesting here in 2627. Um some of those increases is the 3% wage increase uh contracted increase. Um some revenue increases are those returning those softball leagues. Some of the changes from staffing changes. A lot of the changes at the ice arena from August ice u we're going to introduce to this uh to this new fiscal year. Um new programming that we're running across the entire department. Um the usage of our Radcliffe gym has gone up now that that's completed and more usable. And Radcliffe facility rentals have also increased. Um, I'll dive more into these department by department. Starting first with parks, department 757. Uh, activities that operate in here is softball, kickball, and cornhole leagues. There's a lot of Garden City Youth Athletic Association field use, soccer club field use, um, big events in the parks, there's music in the park, movies in the park, pavilion rentals, and then of course playgrounds and green

space. Diving into the changes in revenues. So, I've I've kind of separated I go through each three departments. Um, and I bring forward on these presentation slides a lot of the big changes I saw in the department is moving forward. Um, in revenues in parks being pavilion rentals, we've seen a little decrease. Um, I want to actually fix this with some marketing and some Facebook advertisements to increase that pavilion rental use. Garden City Park is a great park. We're also working with Wayne County Parks to be on their top 100 parks list. I'm hoping that'll bring people to Garden City to rent those pavilions. Um, so while the trend is showing letter and I budgeted for lower, we're hoping to bring that right back up to where we used to be. Also, leagues, um, we've seen a, um, not necessarily a decrease in our league usage, but the cornhole leagues that were operating out of the parks during the winter, that revenue was moved over to the Redcliff Center because that's where we're operating out of and that's where we're paying the staff out of to run that league. And then ball field prepping. This is something we haven't done previously that we are recognizing in the budget. Um, we charge per uh, prep on the field. uh expenses and salaries. The reduction um the biggest reduction in there is moving the park attendance over to public works. Office supplies reduction, operating supplies we increased as we think we'll see we need some picnic tables this year and a few things to inc uh increase our park uh view. Um and then equipment maintenance. Again, we're moving our park attendants out of the department. Uh we won't have as much equipment that we need to maintain. Overall, the requested budget is a net of 199,000 to the city. Um, if you can see, I also listed the staffing in this department and some of those big changes to the operating cost. The Radcliffe Center has a host of a lot of different programs and activities for the city. This budget proposal includes no reduced hours for this upcoming summer. So we'll run year-long Monday through Thursday 8:30 to 8:30 and then Friday and Saturday from 9:00 to 1 and

Sunday closed. Of course we operate out of those hours pretty frequently for rentals. Um there is an increased price on the rental for those times. Services offered um which don't generate revenue but are offered at the Redcliff Center is our home pantry, the veteran services ship services from the uh senior alliance AP tax aid. There they are now working with our uh seniors every Tuesday and Wednesday to get their taxes done. It's a very good successful program and they've actually let us know that we've handled the registration and the you know we're we're on the hook for providing the space for taxes and doing all the registrations for the appointments. Uh they said we're probably one of the best venues that host and they would like more room next year. So we're looking forward to that. Our senior center has a lot of free or reduced priced activities, our family resource center and that new addition of the after school tutoring. Um through the budget session, I had to learn a lot of what like what previous years looked like and we came across some numbers of like what what RILF's doing today. And I wanted to bring this forward um because it's really is actually kind of surprising. So you can see the activity in 2425 that center cost a little over half a million dollars. They budgeted in 2526 to cost $373,000 to the city's general fund. As of today or yesterday, March 15th, the Refa Center is actually generating money. Um, of course, that's not what's projected, but because of the cost and expenses and the increase in revenues we've seen over the last eight months, we're net positive. Uh, the projected final of this fiscal year after we do spend and stuff, I I believe this is actually a worst case scenario that 289,000, but we're moving in the right direction.

Excuse me, I just want to clarify as of March 15th, the city's made $20,000 in the operation of a Radcliffe Center. So now will that continue throughout the rest of the year? We don't know. But it's just just worth noting the drastic difference in um revenues versus expenses compared to the previous year. We spent $550,000 to operate the Radcliffe Center in 24 and 25. And so far we've actually we actually made money on it so far. That that that may or may not continue throughout the may it may slow down a little bit, but it definitely has changed our projections at the Radcliffe Center. So, um, you know, if if we're if you were, uh, which you were at those meetings in January where we had to make some drastic changes to the operation of the Radcliffe Center and Parks Direct as a whole, um, this is this to me is a number that was a wonderful indication that we're headed in the right direction. Couple that with the fact that if you walk through the Radcliffe Center on any given day when they're open, you'll notice um, that you can barely see down the halls because there's a lot of people and a lot of activity and a lot of programming there. So, um, when he when I was looking at his presentation and saw this slide and heard that number, I was, uh, very pleased, very pleased at the, uh, the efforts of the parks and recck department at Radcliffe.

Yeah, it really contributes to that, uh, increase of revenue as we release more and more programs and then just spending less money. um hopefully allows us to actually bring afford some uh purchases we believe will further help either reduce cost or increase cost um to council for approval and maybe spend some of that money that we were able um to reduce. Um here are the changes to the Rackcliff Center revenues. Our revenue sources are our programs, our facility reservations and our rent. Um we try to keep this as much status quo as possible. A lot of changes are happening at Radcliffe and we're seeing a big increase in activities and people purchasing tickets and stuff like that to our events, but I didn't want to overestimate. So, I try to keep a lot of this the same. Um, it does change a little bit of how we report in BSNA. Uh, we changed a few GL's around like the very first one there, the independent classes. Um, that revenue is going to be from courses where we pay that 7030 split. So, a lot of our classes we offer, instructors come in, they want to host a class in our building, they sign a contract with us, we do the marketing, we provide the space, they bring their education, and they bring their experience to the community. Um, when people register for that class, we take in that revenue through our reparation software. If it meets the standards that instructor wants, then we run the class. When the revenue is collected, we pay out 70% to the instructor and we keep 30% for the services we provided. Um, that is where that revenue will be reflected in that GL. um dance express that increase is combining all the GL's they have they have one for recitals one for their class revenue we move moved that into one the next one the instructor revenue this is something we kind of don't really have right now but this is classes that we host where it's a paid employee teaching that course which is mainly our dance express our adult f adult adult fitness classes and our adult dance classes center rental um we're seeing an increase in the rentals at the recliff center that is reflect Ed there. The

dance recital, like I said, we moved this money up to the dance express account. So, we emptied that one out. Um, senior activities, we've seen an increase in those activity uh registrations. That's reflected there. The fitness room, now that we're open to all ages and more equipment and a bigger space um thanks to some grant funding, we're seeing increase in memberships for that. Advertisements we're bringing back. We didn't have them previously, but we're looking to do that again for the Rec, the Echo. Those are reflected there. And then, of course, the rent agreements. uh increase in in uh percentage. The changes in expenses at the Radcliffe Center um is some that uh um salary reallocation, different people moving different places. Uh also the biggest increase you see there is from operating the front desks during the summer for our full hours. If we don't see the influx of people through the summer, we won't run at that capacity with staffing, but that does reflect full staffing through the summer at Radcliffe. Operating supplies increased as we're running more programs. We're bringing more revenue. Dance Express expenses went down a little bit. They're not spending as much. The thrift shop moving over the Redcliff Center. We only increased this a little bit because we never know where that's going to go. But we have seen they are doubling if not tripling their income from the wood center over to the Redcliff Center. So we see that number going to continue to uh go up. Contactual professional there wasn't a lot used in this account without the right cliff center. We don't see any major expenses coming up. So we reduce that a bit. the HVAC preventive maintenance. This was taken out the previous year because we were going through an HVAC uh uh redevelopment, a whole new system. So, there was no preventative maintenance. That will come back. Um printing and publishing we reduced. We're not mailing the reconnect anymore. We're doing those postcards once a year that significantly decrease cost. Utility costs we see go up, which we actually believe this is worst case scenario with all the new HVAC and all the new lighting and LEDs. We really I want to see something close to the police department where that really comes down and we're also want to

be focused moving forward especially in what grant money we have left in the HUD. Um would be nice to do anything to reduce those at utility cost. Um so we're hoping that's a worst case scenario and then retirey cost change a little bit. The current net appropriations in this budget request is $299,000. The ice rink in this budget you will see a little bit of an increase. We're proposing an additional month of ice um from August until midMay. Activities include drop in hockey, birthday party packages, specialy skates, figure skating, open skates, sticks and bucks, learn to play hockey, home of the Garden City Figure Skating Club, the Garden City Hockey Association, and the over 30. We also have ice rentals, changes in revenues. Um we see a decrease in this birthday party package. Um that's actually because more we have two different types of birthday party packages there. One is you can rent our party room during an open skate and it gives you access to so many skaters or what we're seeing more often now is they're just renting the entire ice for an hour or an hour and uh half and then having the entire place themselves for their party. Um so that's happening more often. So that's actually reflected in our um ice rental cost since it's actually a rental. So that's why we're seeing those birthday parties goes down because we're just finding that birthday parties at the rink, they just want to bring as many people as they can and not have to do it during open skate on our time. They can do it on their time. Um the ice show, this wasn't previously representative. This was mixed into a GL lower below. So that got adjusted and we moved ice show rental to its own GL item. That's why you're seeing that revenue there. Figure skating ice. Um, this is our program we run and when they rent the ice for the figure skating, we're seeing increase of that. And I I guess I won't keep repeating myself, but a lot of these increases is because of the August ice. Offering a whole another month of ice at a premium rate is why you're seeing some of these increases. Some of those contracts, giving confirmation of this, we're moving forward with

um drop in hockey increase. The Garny Hockey Association is uh reaching kind of reaching their peak and kind of decreasing a little bit. They're not renting as much ice. Um they don't have as much teams. They're looking to build that program back up. Um over 30 hockey and figure skating. Uh the figure skating goes down because again we represented some of that in that ice showj. And then our ice rentals are going up. Um this is two things. August ice is why that's increasing so much. And two we're just seeing the revenues come in. So this better reflects our revenues expected for the next year. Other arena revenue also increases. Um some of the changes in expenses uh is the salaries and wages. Um operating supplies goes up a little bit. Some of this again is to account for that um August ice. Hate to repeat myself, but equipment maintenance goes up a little bit for that. Contractual professional goes up a little bit for that. Um telephone wasn't represented, so we included that in the ice arena. um that utility cost, which is going to be our biggest increase with running August Ice. That department nets $197,000 to the general fund. I want to go over a little bit of the uh stats we have. Uh sportsman was able to pull some of these out, so I wanted to share them because they're actually pretty surprising and I I like what I'm seeing so far. Um this is our youth programming, so everything that falls underneath of our youth coordinator. Um and those 7030 splits, of course, everything that runs through our sportsman software. In 2025, we saw 145 registrations in that. Um, so far year to date, this is just two months worth of data. Um, January and February, we saw 604 registrations. Um, multiplying that out for our expected programs. Over the next 12 months, we'll see 3,624 registrations. Youth programming includes Camp GC, which we really expanding this summer. We're moving from 30 kids or actually from 20 kids a week to four weeks to 50 kids a week or 50 kids total um in 10 weeks of that. So that's actually with the myap um OST

grant we received. Uh so we'll be increasing that program significantly this summer. The Nature Explorers program, Spring Break Camp, which will be running in a few weeks here, Nerf Wars, Kids Power Karate, Music and Movement, Season Sprouts, Parents Night Out, Spaceport Gaming Camp, and many, many more. Next up, our adult programming. In 2025, we saw 271 registrations. This is mostly our leagues of uh um our softball, cornhole, kickball, our kickball. And now with the introduction of pickle ball, yoga, and cardio drumming, we're seeing already a huge increase, already beating 2025 numbers this first two months of 2026. We expected uh 1510 registrations in 2026. Next, we have our senior programming. I had to make this text really small because they do so much between art classes and authorized exercise and authorized mindful motions. Uh bingo at the wreck, a new program, grief and loss support. Um Eminem bunko pinnacle red hats MDSC. We have a lot of parties. We're increasing those to 12 a year. We want to do lunches at least 12 times a year themed around something within the month. They do special events which actually a lot of the bus transportation for these special events and trips are funded through the thrift shop. So they raise money all year long and they contribute to that bus cost which makes our tickets really low um for the seniors. Our lunch and funds and we also have counseling from Medicaid uh provided by the senior alliance tai chi um some aerobics and tops. In 2025 we saw 3,78 registrations. Uh so far we've seen center 14 and we believe we'll see 2400 moving forward. Art programming we have uh art facility at the Radcliffe Center. It is used almost daily actually taken up two days of the week right now for our taxes. Uh we have acrylic painting um creative freedom. We have drawing fun with mixed media. A new class coming out little artist um sculpting soft pastels

watercolor painting craft day and circuit classes. Um, a lot of these programs are offered by the same art teacher every day. Uh, very very big asset to our building. In 2025, we had 57 registrations. I think this is actually low. I think sportsman wasn't fully I think our art programming sometimes falls in our adult and sometimes falls in our youth uh categories and but now that we have its own category, our own dedicated person, they're running so many programs, we're moving it out. So 2025 is actually pretty low. And that 38 registration so far to be 228, I believe that's pretty accurate. But again, some of those programs run in adult and um youth. So, some of those numbers are over there. Dance Express program in 2025, we saw 774 registrations. In 2026, we've seen 88. That only includes people in the 30-week course. Right now, um we still have our princess um dance party and our summer dance this summer. So, we're going to see 620 registrations. We believe dance expression includes that adult fit hop, the dance party, um summer tumbling, tumbling itself, adult dance classes, and then everything offered in her 30-week course. Special events and programs. This includes like our family night out, the daddy daughter dance, we just had breakfast with Santa, breakfast with Easter Bunny, Halloween dog party, pumpkin spooktacular, elf workshop, and many more. Um in 2025, we saw 494 registrations. So far we already have 270 largely contributed to the Daddy Daughter dance. We completely sold out of that event and actually offering another one next month because of it. Um we expect to see 1620 registrations in this moving forward. The ice arena programming, this is everything the ice arena offers. um open skate, be a rink manager, drop in hockey, all of our specialty skates, um including a new one this past year, stuffed turkey skate, um and sticks and pucks. In 2025, we didn't have people pre-register for dropping hockey and sticks and pucks. So, those numbers are

not represented in that number. So, 612 um pre-registered open skates. We are moving to a lot more stuff being online registration, so we know ahead of time who's coming. um drop in hockey I don't believe is there yet but six and pucks is 100% online. We've already seen 662 registrations. I'm estimating 1360 or 1400 um registrations moving forward. But I think I'll see that move up and it's not a true representation of those programs at the ice arena because a lot of those you pay when you come in and drop it's like a drop in. So it's not actually pre-registration. So it doesn't show up in the registration software like that. I want to highlight our home food pantry as a big asset to the Radcliffe Center. Um the pantry hours are Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 9:00 to noon. Uh we actually had to add, as you know, some things happen at the federal level and people were without food for a bit and we had to actually add Wednesdays to support the community's needs. So we did that this past few months. Um with PAD, uh we serve residents of Garden City and families of the Garny public schools. We serve about 110 families per month, which is 250 individuals per month. We also have a federal funded emergency food assistance program that helps 30 to 35 families per month. Um there are no residency requirements for that and that's a third Wednesday of every month. And we also have Focus Hope running out of the same area and commodities. They deliver and distribute the first Wednesday of each month and 11 seniors receive boxes. Moving on to grants and training. Currently ongoing um grants is the My LEAP out of school time grant. That's about $98,000 a year. We're hoping to continue that every year. Um, something that grant doesn't cover, it actually ends September 30th of this calendar year and it doesn't pick the funding back up until January. So, actually we'll be without a few months um of that funding for that program. We're hoping that this pro we we're hoping we can figure that out by then uh to still provide that tutoring to those three months. I didn't include it in the budget proposal currently, but I think we have some solutions and some other grant funding we'll find before then. I

don't think it'll be a problem. Um that also includes the summer camp. We have the senior alliance. We have uh funding from them for staffing and for programming. That's chai and um authorized exercise. And then we also have senior staffing from CDBG. Training courses we taken in the past few months is the safe surf man certification. We need this to run the cafe and the kitchen at the Radcliffe Center. We have some cash handling certifications, CPR certifications, first aid, surf safe food handling, which is for the part-time employees, um monitor management courses, and most recently our senior coordinator went to get her certified senior adviser. She took the course and hopefully going to pass her test next month. I want to go over a little bit of that cost recovery of parks and wreck because we're a department that has that ability to bring in revenues. Um the 202425 fiscal year activity, so this is what happened in 2425. Um, as you can see, the three different departments are depicted there. 1.9 million operating cost. Um, just under a million dollars in revenue with a cost recovery of 47%. That's kind of the number I've been looking at through some of this with a net loss of $1 million to the city's general fund. Moving forward to the 202526 fiscal year projected, that number changes to operating cost of 1.7 million with a uh with a projected revenue of 1 million with a cost recovery of 58%. Uh with a cost of the city's general fund 720,000 Yeah, $720,000. Um this is using the projections of this current fiscal year. And then moving forward, the proposed budget uh for 2627 operating cost 1.7 million with revenue of just over a million with a cost recovery of 59%. With a law with a cost to the city's general fund 696,000. Um we hope we're moving in the right direction in parks and wreck with increasing our revenues and decreasing

our expenditures um especially as it's needed. Uh moving forward, I think when I was looking at like what's next for the department, I kind of wrote these very generically and kind of one for each department. Um but I truly believe like especially moving into this role uh with a new set of eyes. This is the few things I want to take out of moving forward for parks, Radcliffe and the ice arena. First I want to take a look at our um park facilities, improving amenities, addressing capital needs. I think one of the things that will largely increase our uses of the parks and serve the residents better is moving that um trash and maintenance over to public works. I think they'll do a great job at maintaining the parks and it'll be a more friendlier place for our residents to visit. I think that's a great addition moving forward, but I also want to take a look at um SAMCOG sent us some numbers of people visiting our parks. They don't include youth data. So, you only know adults with phones. So, if the youth has a phone, you don't actually know through Pacer if a stu if a youth visited the park. we can look at that adult data um through cell phone usage and see who's using our parks where and when and how to allocate that money especially to our five-year master plan. This one is something I've been working on the past few months and can want to continue the next year is strengthen expand the Redcliff cent's programs, services, and facility use to maximize its role as a central gathering place for the Garden City community. Um I think we've done that this past few months and I think the community is seeing that. Um and I'm excited for that. So, I want to continue moving forward and keep that at the forefront of what we're doing moving forward. And then I also want to review the ice arena's operations, programming, and capital needs to maximize its potential while maintaining consistent and affordable pricing for the community. Something as a lot of people probably know, there's a company out there purchasing ice arenas around us and doubling their rates. So, this is opportunity for us to look at what capital needs, the ice rink needs, what's important for them, what can we do to improve those facilities, but also staying affordable and not increasing our rates. I know I spoke a lot, but any questions?

Council, questions, comments for Mr. King? Council member Hughes. Um, if you look at the um proposed budget for 2627, there's two pages. I apologize. Yes. Okay. One's a typo and then one's the correct one. Okay. So, there's a $300,000 number on the bottom left. That's a typo. Thank you. That would have been a good number, though. It would have been. That was a really good I always really had my hopes. Feel free to set that as a goal. Mayor. Okay. Council member D.

I have a few questions. Mr. King. Um, so throughout your presentation, the youth programming, the adult programming, all that over at Radcliffe, were all of these programs offered in 2025? So to make what I'm asking is to make the comparison between 2025 and 2026. Are we looking at tit fortat?

I get that. So no actually the programs definitely increased. We're bringing some back. Some were like there programs that ran in 24 we didn't in 25 and now we're bringing back in 26. Mostly because those staffing changes. Some of that staff moving from full-time to part-time really had to figure out what they could do. So they really reduced their what the programs they offered in 25. And now we're ramping back up and seeing what exactly can a part-time employee provide in coordinating those classes. Um allowing them to work to their full potential and work with the classes that are running. They're increasing their rates um significantly. The the classes I listed on that was a report of the last 12 months what has ran. So what has gone from 12 months ago till like March 15th, so today that's what you're seeing there. I could actually I didn't look at that. I could give you a list of what was offered in 24, 25, and 26. Um 24 we don't have perfect registrations numbers for, but I could have provided those as well. Um because you're right, it's not at technically apples to apples, but there was a big staffing change done before 2025 and that's what resulted in a lot of decrease of funding or not the funding, but a lot of decrease in programs offered, but with the same staffing, we're doing way more now.

Okay. Um, also there the $98,000 grant. How is that split up between the camp and the tutoring program? I don't know the numbers off the top of my head. I could I could provide those. Um I believe I believe it's almost 5050. No, it's um I believe it's around 58,000 for the school year and then 30 something,000 for the camp session. And it's that's decided by the granting agency. So they gave us the numbers to operate on. Okay.

And they were given numbers and we had to go within those. I will say though like those numbers are solid. What we have to do within those two uh things. But when me and Sean put together a budget, we are making lots of changes because we're learning what it takes to run this program. So for instance, something we budgeted for is transportation. We didn't we didn't budget enough for what we're going with the Garny public schools and what they can provide. So we need to increase that. So we're moving stuff around as we speak. That's why I say can't remember perfectly because like even transportation blends between the summer and the school year. Um Okay. And you mentioned also it's a little out of my league because I don't play, but we're bringing back adult softball.

That is correct. That's one of my goals for the next few months is to bring back adult softball. Um we're a little late to the game on the spring leagues. I'm hoping to bring back Sundays this coming spring. Um but summer I want to run three days a week co-ed and men's and men's um softball leagues. That's something that was kind of the registration wasn't there. We've done our best to try and draw people back in. Um I think one of the things was field maintenance and one of the things was like the rules we applied our softball leagues to. I'm actually in the past few weeks been speaking to a lot of the community that used to play with us, why they don't play anymore, what's going on. Um so I'm learning, taking notes. Um, I'm not a softball player myself, but we do have a lot of staff that does. Um, I have a lot of, uh, family and friends that play in Canton's league, and I'm kind of learning what they do best, and how can we have that here? Because when it brings down to it, kind of what I've learned about softball is they don't want the full competition like Canton. Like, we're Garden City, we want to play our neighbors, and we want to do our thing. We don't want the um the big hype that sometimes Canton brings and very strict rules and en enrollment. So, we're looking to find that. Um, of course, you have to play within a league uh and play by what rules are set with softball. So, everything's fair and across the board, but bring that um I think the the word I keep hearing is that homelessness left a few years ago and they want to bring that back for softball.

Wonder if we can budget to just create a big bubble over Garden City. Um, so I I did see that um you're doing a lot of continuing education. I'm assuming that's in the budget moving forward for different things that may come up. Yes, it is. It's it's split between all the different departments, but there is continuing education. It's very important. Okay. And last but not least, uh are you estimating the kitchen in your revenues?

We are not. Um this is actually something I wanted to say in that revenue slide. It's hard to expect more revenue when we don't have the data to show it. So of the kitchen's a good example. We should exceed our revenues. and center rentals because we're looking to rent out that kitchen. I think it'll be a big place. We haven't done any programs in the kitchen yet. We're working on two right now between a baking and cookie baking cookies and decorating them and also some um soup like how to make soups, that type of cooking class, and one other um those are going to be underneath our instructor 7030 splits. We've had a few people stop by and even want to rent the kitchen. Um one of the slowest things or what people hesitate right now is there's no utensils in the kitchen. Um so you kind of have to bring your own, but we have everything else. Um, so that's one of the the things why we haven't really rented it yet, but we're getting that interest. Um, actually something surprisingly I wasn't expecting, but grad parties, they want an indoor large facility like our gym with a kitchen, and I think we're going to excel at those this summer. Um, so I think that that revenue, and they're not looking for a full kitchen. They're just looking for somewhere to prep some small stuff. So, as it sits, that's good. Like, we already have rentals on the books for that uh moving forward. So without that historical data to predict those revenues, I'd hate to throw a number out there and say I know I'm going to meet this but then not. Um but I I really do believe Redcliffe will exceed its revenues. I mean we are this budget year and I think we will next.

Okay. So that being said, do you have somewhere in the budget to outfit that uh the kitchen? I'm hoping the city manager and likewise with council will look at the how we're doing right now at Radcliffe being positive $20,000 and say let's let's spend a little bit more to make that revenue. Um whether it be the kitchen outfitting, there's some stuff for the gymnasium that didn't fit underneath the grant uh that we are actively looking for grants to apply for. I think my focus from grant has shifted a little bit more from facilities to staffing. So we're actively and actually with Sean we're looking for grants to continue that youth programming just like the out of school time my leap grant we have now I'm currently actually applying for another one that's very similar in fashion we're looking for like an afterchool teen hangout again that costs like staffing so it's kind of shifted our grant focus to that um so we're hoping we can use even some of the money this fiscal year for that being so net positive at cliff

thank you thank you further comments or questions from the table if

I could just add add mayor um based on especially like buying the equipment to produce and and the shift from seeking uh grant support for operations versus capital. I'd much rather us buy utensils and much rather us outfit a room for a teen hangout and then find a grant to do the staffing. That is sort of the inverse of the problem we had with Radcliffe when we met back in 2025 to address this issue is we had a lot of capital spending but not a lot of operational. though. Um, what's been great to see over the last 6 months is a a focus on sustainability. What's come out of this and what I've noticed is and and it wasn't because I don't believe strongly in parks and wreck, but I've lived in Garden City long enough and seen 30% increases in healthcare and collapses of of um of housing markets. I've seen I've live I've been in here long enough to know that if it's not operating efficiently with a solid revenue stream and it's not affordable, we could build it today, but the first time we encounter trouble, we lose it. So, what's been super positive about what I'm seeing out of parks and wreck now is that sustainability I'm looking for that we've invested this capital into the Rag Cliff Center and now there's a really good chance that it becomes a sustainable asset through good times and bad. So, um there's uh utensils we need to get, but also as as as they've performed so well, it's it's behoo of me to make sure I encourage that. And uh so there's been some requests coming from parks and recck that I'm likely to um either approve myself or bring the council. One of them is batting cages um retra retractable um netting for being able to do braatting practice in the um uh gymnasium. And and we have open hours. He's put on the slides. Our intention is to maintain its current hours, but our intention is to maintain at a minimum its current hours. Um because we're sort of approaching this with an entrepreneurial spirit. Um if we find demand for people coming in on a Friday night or a a Sunday afternoon to hit baseballs in our our cages and we can accommodate that with the revenue stream that justifies it,

we're going to do it. Um so they have full approval to seek out new opportunities to grow the facility. um with the requirement though that they maintain fiscal responsibility that keeps it a lasting asset for the community for as long as we can. So um a lot of good things happening in that respect. So appreciate it.

We're still working on that plan, but I really do hope our the addition with the batting cages. We've had a enormous outreach for batting cages in Garden City. Um we actually have people come to open gym often during our slow hours just to do that type of work with what little equipment we have now. And I've kind of like approached the idea a few times like you know what would you pay? to rate looking at comparables in the community and I do believe our Fridays and Saturday nights by renting out those cages we could bring staff back to the front desk meaning we can leave the building open for other activities um and that would cover that cost. So yes, of course we only budgeted for those hours but we're really hoping our revenues will outshine that and bring those hours back especially during the winter when the centers used the most.

And thank you for the question about the stats. Let me know if you want the 24, 25, 26. I'm just curious what I'm curious myself. So, I might need the push though to do the reporting. Other questions or comments? Okay, thank you. Um, I know the next page is Maplewood. Do you Yeah, I can just cover that and then we can move on to the F FRC and that'll be the ass the last Maplewood is just uh one slide and should be able to

Why don't we do that then? So you'll notice in this year um a specific uh department for just Maplewood. Um as we discussed way back in January 2025, it was a concern of mine as I looked at the entirety of the parks and recck department and Maplewood um was was and I'll still basically consider it under that umbrella, but I wanted to see, you know, when you separate the individual parts of our uh our budget, I I I want to be able to see what what its true cost is. what's the cost of the Maplewood Center to the city of Garden City? So, we can make future plans to maintain that asset, sell it, do whatever we need to do. Um, positively though, um, you know, I've we've looked at the Maplewood Center in the sense that we've have probably consistent rentals at least for another five to six years. So, I really wanted to pull it out, make sure that we're watching our expenses there. If there's opportunities to improve parts of the facility, uh, either through a grant or some other opportunity, we need to do so. Um, but really you're seeing that separated just so that we can keep an eye on what it's costing us so that we know if it ever trips the level of we've got to take some immediate action. What's nice to see is that, you know, we probably have a net $61,000 coming out of it on a budgeted yearly basis. However, there is one thing always hanging over that building. It's a very, very, very old school building. And you'll notice that reflected in the building maintenance repairs. I think we're actually at 40,000 this year. I believe we've made some repairs and hopefully we can stay down to 30 next year, but those costs could go very high really quickly with the age of the facility. So, I pulled it out um with its own separate budget. I got it out of the Radcliffe Center because it was mixed in there and it was also mixed in general government and it could get and and the cost of it and the revenues from it can kind of get lost in the budget and I don't want that to be the case. I like to be able to see things easily and I want council to be able to see things easily. So, this is the Maplewood Center separated out right now. um no reason for a a particular change. However, there has been some thoughts I've had about um there's

energy grants and uh even the state at Eagle is is is toying with the idea of creating a revolving fund for loaning out money to do energy related repairs. So, you know, Maplewood might be a target for that depending on what our plans are going into the future and what those costs would be. But they're just some things by pulling it out at creating its own budget and keeping an eye on it this way, I think it'll encourage a little more effort to um either solidify it as an asset or deal with it sometime in the future. But as I said, we've got renters for probably at least another five years. So, I'm not too concerned in the short term, but I think long-term planning this is a better way to go. Okay. Anybody have any questions? I have a quick question. Go ahead. Um the room that the thrift shop vacated. Yes.

Are we renting that out? I um I heard there's somebody that uses it

there. There was interest in it. Um but we couldn't settle on a price that recognized the value of renting that out. You know, when we rent to a renter and we or lease it out, you know, we're obligating ourselves to a certain repairs of that room, make sure it's running, make sure they're accommodated, and the risk of just the liability that goes with having them in there. We couldn't hit a price in my negotiations with them that led me to believe it would be a good idea to bring forward yet. I'm always open to renting every piece of our space so long as it provides us the requisite value and I'm I'm going to continue to shop that concept. But as of right now, I don't have anything. We did though, you are correct. We we we had conversations that just didn't lead to a place that I felt like was good for Garden City. Correct.

If anyone's looking for that space, I I'll gladly talk. Further comments or questions on Maplewood? Okay. Thank you, Mr. Gibbons. Thank you, Mayor and Councel. All right. At this time, we're up to communications. I'll bring up uh Mr. King again.

Good evening, Mayor Council. Happy to be here again. uh the communications department, better known as GCTV. What we do is we provide uh video support for the city, special events, support and coverage. We cover the online social media and display boards around the city. Uh we manage the city's website. We connect with the community, one of our primary goals. Uh we handle the contracts and the software with emergency notifications. Um we do a lot of road support with our current um road bond. Um we offer special projects and then marketing promotion for the different uh city business. Special events in the past few years the GC opening day and tournaments. We provide video support for those and audio. Veterans Day Memorial Day. Uh this upcoming year actually a new addition another ceremony similar to those two with the high school at our facilities at city hall here. Um chili cookoff community festival, police, fire and DPW open houses, ice skating shows, parks and rock events. the DDA community tree lighting providing video and audio. The Santa Ride, one of the um one of my favorite events every year, and the Garden Club garden walk. Uh connecting the community. We do this in a few different ways. We do this through social media, the city's website, and now mobile app. Let's get out of here. Oops. Um we connect the community different ways. social media, the city's website, mobile app, um a new application we have launched, the GC fix it for reporting concerns, the information desk, a new initiative at the reco center, and emergency notifications. Social media, we do content creation, management, and administration of the city's online presence. Our goal has always been one post a day. We posted 560 times in 2025, exceeding that goal

between Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and now Next Door. Uh we also connected the community through the city website and mobile app. Uh the mobile app is new. We've actually yet to market it. Uh but we're looking at that now. Here are some screenshots of that app uh and the website. Um it is now available on the App Store and the Play Store. The website sees about 170,000 visitors a year visiting over 544,000 pages. We saw a big increase in this over co and since 2023 it's kind of steadied out on our visits per year on those pages. Um every year a goal of mine is to trying to get through majority of those pages um on the website. There's about 510 total pages to make sure accurate and updated information is on each page. Every department also handles their sections within those websites. Um, so a lot of that content creation is all done through the CMS through every department. Um, so thankfully we don't have to do all the updates, but we do try and do a review that application we just launched a few months ago, GC Fixit, for reporting online concerns. It really eases and makes the process of reporting a concern a lot easier for residents and allows us to handle them with a little bit more efficiency and uh, more data reporting on those incidents. This is what it looks like now. Now, if you want to see click fix, one of the cool features it has, it shows you what other citizens are reporting, which allows you to see um where things are happening, if something was already reported, if already a fallen tree branch or a pothole has been reported, you don't have to. Uh likewise, and if you try reporting a second report report for the exact same incident, um it kind of pops up and says, "Hey, looks like something similar has been reported in this area. Do you still want to continue?" And you, nope, yep, one of your neighbors already reported it. You can move on. Um, this also has an app which is not only also included in the city branded app I just spoke about uh that we're working that marketing plan for, but this has its own. Um, you can use them interchangeably, either one, whichever you prefer. Um, a lot of citizens that are roaming through the city or or through other communities already have Cclick Fix maybe for their community.

They can really quickly take a photo, submit their report. Um, like I said, GC GC fix it has a uh better application reporting um what those incidents are. So, actually that top one you see is not actually for us. That one's for priority waste. That's all the trash reports we've received in the last two months. 336 requests total. Um, and then you can kind of see broken down in category what's getting the most attention um versus the least. Something probably used previously done in each department, but now across the several different departments that taken those reporting, we have one dashboard that can uh report what's happening. A new initiative and a partnership with the parks recreation department is the information desk. Um we have we accept calls and emails to that desk. We direct calls to different departments as needed or try and answer questions if we already have that knowledge in our knowledge base. A majority of the calls come in. We enter cclick fixes in for whether it's potholes down trees or those trash pickups that are missed. We're taking those calls in, reporting them and relieving that work from the departments. um like like one of those one of the mo most common calls we get is that trash pickup. Uh in the last two months, we received 2316 calls totaling a talk time of just over 20 hours. Next is our new software, Code Red, uh for emergency notifications. This is Code Red by Crisis 24. Um Code Red began July 1st. Since then, we have 2346 subscribers to Code Red with 13,000 emergency contacts in there. Um, the usage report, I actually have a typo below. The numbers are very similar to the usage, so I overlooked this, but I actually wanted to say we have sent out 46 messages. That's about once per week since we've implemented it. Um, and we have reached 130,000 messages contacts sent out. Uh, these broke up between um emergency road closures and stuff like that or planned road closures. Um, we used it a lot for the sidewalks this past summer. um letting certain quadrants know about activity with the

sidewalks and coming through and replacing them. Especially where we started that was so condensed with so many missing sidewalks through that uh sidewalk gap program. We're able to send out notifications to everybody so they get contact of us. We use that a lot for that and then we also use it for special events. Moving forward to the department's revenues. Uh the department brings in revenue through PEG fees. This is public education and government fees that are inside their franchise agreements for providing cable services to the city. This ranges from 1 to 2% collected on the cable bill. Um something that I kind of talked about a lot last budget session and I'm still hoping for this budget session is changes in registration to include if you were providing streaming services. Uh for instance, W you can go to WOW. You can't get a cable box anymore today. They're still providing it if you have it, but you can't get a new one. Um but what they will sell you is YouTube TV through WOW. they want to collect on that on those costs to 12% to return back to the cities. Currently, that's not in there. Um they're looking like they're looking to change that. Um I'm staying informed on the uh forms on what's happening in the legislation on that, but that would be a good increase. Um as you can tell, our expected actually uh this was a little unexpected this year. I predicted a loss in some of this uh from people moving from WOW just naturally the department the company is trying to push people off their cable platform. Uh so we've seen a big drop in that revenue. We actually saw an increase AT&T revenue. So it turns out people still want cable and they're just going to a different location to get it. So whether they be Comcast or Iverse, Iverse makes it the easiest to still get those cable uh boxes. Comcast makes it a little more difficult. They want to switch you to streaming, but you can still get them today. Um so no changes actually in the road project uh revenue. That will still be the same coming this summer. Um but the peg fees I am predicting to decrease as again people switch from cable and cut the cord. changes to expenses. You see the difference in salary allocation. Um there actually is in the current budget is a full-timer uh communication

specialist, someone dedicated to communications outside of myself and Jake. Um I'm not set not convinced on hiring that position yet. It is in there in case it is needed. Um but I believe the workload that communications offers, we're going to split it down the half and um we'll be able to uh facilitate everything communications needs it is there. tiff. At one point we do believe we need it, but um it is in the budget, but I don't think we're going to hire it or need it as of right now. Um contractual services, we have a lot of our contracts have a 2 and a half% increase no matter what. So that's remped there. And equipment maintenance, we just haven't been using that budget as much. So we decreased that a bit. Uh with a net cost, the city is $100,000 after PEG fees. Looking ahead, we can continue uh to cover city programs and events. Um something I actually want to expand on moving forward is marketing all large city events. Um the city runs a lot of them ourselves, but it's not just us. The straight farmhouse has a large event uh with their October Fest and um a lot of different, you know, the Garden City Garden Club just had a huge conference. I want to work more closely with those nonprofits that really support the city and help market their events. We've kind of done that already with a new initiative on the city's website. You can now all those organizations can upload their calendars to our website. So when you go to ours, you can see their events and programmings. They have been using that. Um actually give a shout out. There's one person that uploads a lot of them for a lot of different um uh programs. So they've been getting them in there. Um so that's really helpful having all that information. That alone opens up our eyes to say, "Oh, yep. There's a big event going on. What can we do to help market this and bring people to Garden City?" We want to continue doing additional interviews and live Facebook sevens. We've been doing that this past year. They're very successful. We have time to do them. want to keep doing that. And the big focus in the next few months is going to be that mobile app marketing plan and the CCL fix marketing plan. We want to make sure that we implemented those applications in time where staff had time to get used to them and learn how to use them before we went to market it um because we do believe there would be maybe an influx and

reporting on that. And then of course continuing on the information desk and making that as best as it can be. Any questions for communications? Council member Dol. I'm not sure if it's because I'm getting tired or because I'm turning into a popsicle up here, but um before we get into the technology division, so you're you're saying the communications department is um we're expected it to cost just over $100,000 to run. That's correct. Okay. And that's not counting our contracts with um on the technology side.

No. So the the technology division is represented in department 265 our general government services technically already presented before uh not really presented but already including a previous budget session but with technology in the past year I've done a lot to reduce those costs so I want to present those kind of today but this that's outside of uh those costs are not in department two 177 which is communications those costs are completely separate okay so that is just communications that's running the website clic staffing Um, obviously recording council meetings, broadcasting those, our equipment for that. Um, and the actually one of the largest costs is the website CMS uh for our website provider. That's one of our largest costs we pay out too.

Okay. You mentioned a second ago that it is Jake out of the communications budget or parks and wreck. Currently, there two Jake currently represented in this budget is 0.5 of myself and five of Jake.

Okay. So, we're a person and then there's actually another full-timer and that full-timer can be used either way like whether we hire the full-timer or we continue with our part-time communications assistance. That bucket of money is the same. Uh so, we plan because the only the additional costs would be hospitalization like the medical and those type of comps you get as a full-time employee. So, those are accounted for if we do that. Uh but if we don't, we'll still have our communications assistance like we do today assisting with our program assist facilities and meetings and such like that. How many assistants do you have? Because they're all part-time there. Are they halftime or less?

Yeah, very part-time, very minimal event based, schedule based. Uh, no one has dedicated hours. Um, previously we did have eight hours a week dedicated to video editing. Um, that person actually got a job with a local news company, so he moved on. Um, so we haven't filled that position in that weekly editing. Um, so no one's guaranteed hours in communications. We're moving towards a pool of if the com if the departments combined parks, recreation, communications, a big pool of not volunteers, that'd be nice. A big pool of part- timerrs that are cross-trained in all these different things. So, we have a large event doesn't necessarily have to be communications assistants coming in and doing all that video and audio. It can be our uh recreation assistants. So, kind of moving towards that big pool of part- timerrs that can do these different things, whether it be the ice rink or Radcliffe. That's something we're actually doing now is we're taking some of our park attendants um that won't be working this summer and some of our ice arena um employees and kind of cross training them at Radcliffe how to answer phones and stuff like that. We haven't returned the favor yet. We haven't cross trained Rackcliffe employees at the ice arena, but we're getting there.

Okay. So, the full-time position that's budgeted for is not technically filled yet. No, but it's it's all Okay, I got and those that you know it works out to be kind of the same. The budget request last year was $50,000 for part-time assistance. We'll we'll nowhere near use that within communications with what we've done this past year. Um but the same salary amount for the full-time would be close to that. So the only additional cost if we move that way would be the benefits. The comps. Yeah. Benefits. Okay. Thank you.

Other questions or comments for communications? All right. We'll go to the technology division. This is more of just a cost analysis like I said uh the technology actually lives in department uh general government services 265 um because they support all the departments in the city likewise to communications but more so in the cost um so over we have a contractor as you know Scott innovations we recently approved their contract um they handle all the services I'm just essentially their point person with the city um so they do the network connectivity they manage our software licenses they manage manage our cyber security our phone and fax services which was previously the cities but since we moved to the cloud is now in them and then server management. Um tech projects they did in this past year and currently still ongoing is the fire department network move. Um we actually I completed a citywide technology inventory with HR to get our inventory back onto par. Um we reviewed the WOW and Comcast contracts as you know we brought those forward to you. Comcast stayed the same but WOW was a big decrease um in cost. We reviewed the Microsoft licenses types per department again reducing in a significant decrease in cost and then identified costs saving areas within the technology division. This is the Skynet team. Uh our account manager is Ty Dolan. You met him at our last council or previous council meeting with uh the contract for Skynet coming forward. Um this is actually a new structure. So I kind of introduced this a little bit last budget season. Um this is fully implemented now. So this is something they're providing to the city. They have an entire project team. We all know Will and his dedication to the city. He is on the project team with Tim and Amanda. And then we have a new division, this ticket response. Uh Doug Lee, he's the manager of all the different um people actually doing the responses to our request. Uh our person we've seen the most lately and a lot of city staff know is Megan. She's been a great asset to Garden City. Kind of uh a lot of people tell Will that he's her replacement. She uh she's good good to be the Will's replacement in Garden

City. Uh so she's that here every Tuesday. actually she's been in the city every day for the past two and a half months working on Windows 11 upgrades and city needs. Um and then we have Jordan and David who's been mostly remote. We also have an entire remote pod of staff that can help with like password resets and that quick stuff. And then we also that phone vendor um we have support with him Eric technology expenses. Um, as you can see, we see a decrease almost across the board from 20256 budget to 2020 2025 to 26 to 2627. Um, a lot of the stuff we've already brought to council before you and seeing those decreases in those contracts and a lot of the decreases we've seen is just doing this analysis and seeing where we're spending money at and where we don't need to spend the money at um, previously not being done. Um, so SCerations, we brought that cost down. I'll show you a little bit about that in a second. Um, network and continue providers, that's Wow, and Comcast. Uh we brought that down. We recently brought that new contract in front of you for the next five years. Um technology license, we've decreased that. That's mostly Microsoft Office. I did separate out Duo authentication because that's somewhat new. Um and this is the first fiscal year we're budgeting for it. Um phone services, we're decreasing that. Um that cost has come down a bit. Also just reducing the phones we didn't need. Um and then anti virus and spam filters. Um that is staying the same. So an overall reduction in appropriations for the technology expenses and like I said all these these actually are represented in two different GLS and general government services. So it's 265 809 is where the most of the stuff lives and then the telephone stuff lenses it lives in uh 265850100 and your uh budgets reducing those counts. You can kind of see here with the new device count how Skynet allocates their devices. They only look at three things now right now which makes it a lot easier for inventorying and decision-m city moving forward on when we need more networking

or what we need to uh facilitate the city's technology needs. Um so personal computers and laptops is combined in one now called workstations. We have 156 of them. Um a small decrease what we were at before. Physical servers we saw a decrease in that were from 6 to three and then virtual servers were down one from 11 to 10. Um that other stuff is still active. So we still have two network firewalls, one enterprise backup, 85 wireless network equipment um APS or 23 network switching uh switches. Um those are now included in the cost. So we're still keeping track of them, but no longer affect our bill with Skynet. Now it's that per device count that really matters. And some of that decreasing that device count is staff previously having a desktop and a laptop, moving to a docking station, now only carrying a laptop as your primary device and on the go. Especially for department heads. Looking ahead, we're going to continue to identify costsaving areas in the technology department, complete the fire station network reconfiguration. Actually, the police department and the court have reached out for computer replacement p uh plans from Skynet. So, they're working on building those with those departments. Um it looks like the courts can move forward with theirs doing full replacement this next period as he presented in his budget and the police department's planning for that year replacements. And then um currently they're working on a network topology uh project to kind of better document the network the city currently has. We went through over the last five years a big change in equipment. Um it wasn't all documented so they're doing that now.

Any questions? questions from council table. Okay, very good. Thank you. Thank you very much, uh, Mr. King. And now I'll let you set that up. Might need a fire pit in here soon. All right. All right. Next, our last but not least is uh family re resource center and our director is uh Mr. Sean Han. Han.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Uh I'm going to make this relatively quick because we've been here for a long time and you're cold and I'm sleepy and we're going to get through this. So, our mission statement has stayed the same since last year. Actually, a lot has stayed the same since last year in our presentation here today because of the nature of grant funding for our program. There's not a whole lot of things that I actually have the ability to mess with. Um, our services have remained consistent since our last meeting. We are looking at doing some uh acquisition of some new grant opportunities to try to expand some services and offer some different things than we have in the past. But as it stands today, we are offering the same things that we were last year. We are partnering with the Radcliffe tutoring program though to ease some of our uh troubles with providing tutoring services. Instead of us doing it individually, we're able to have them participate through that other program which is very helpful. Our funding comes in through the Wayne County YAP contract, which previously was referred to as CWW because the Conference of Western Wayne oversaw our funding and we were a subcontractor of the Growth Works um organization. In this last year, we had the opportunity to apply for the same grant that Growth Works operates under and we were able to get it separate from them. So we've a we've been able to sort of cut out the middleman of the process and that's helped us a lot with uh improving our revenue just from that source. So last year we budgeted for about $100,000. I think we did about 65 thou our average for CWW was always 65,000. So then this year uh we can bill up to $250,000 on a fee for service model. Our one10enth mill last year was also included in the $100,000 for uh child care fund for CWW funding. This year it's been separated out because it is a

completely separate funding source. It's through the uh Wayne County Jail Millage. And then our first contact programming, we have reduced a little bit what our expected revenue for this year is. Largely, we've done that because with the increase in our ability to bill through the YAP contract and there's there's some similarities between the services available between the two contracts. We're trying to uh even out our funding a little bit. We don't want to have all our eggs in one basket. So, this is the first step towards balancing out how our funding is divided and how our programming is operated. Our current first contact initiative is a three-year grant totaling up to well now it it's up to 5 million. Uh current ends May 31st, 2027 because they gave us the first of the two one-year extensions that they can do. So they have the opportunity at that point to extend again if they would like to. through the Wayne County. That is the Wayne County YAP is a two-year grant which started in January uh totaling up to $500,000 for the two years and they have the ability to give us a one-year extension three separate times. So, they may choose to do that. Uh actually, just a little note on that. I pulled up quarter 1 from our um from our CWW funding from last year. And in quarter 1, January, February, March, we did $7,667. This year, just with January and February, we've done over $15,000. So, uh, that just shows how we're having a little bit more control over the contract that we're in has helped us out with our funding opportunity through, uh, YAP. And then the 110th mill, we just talked about that. Uh, our staff requirements. I know we talked about this at length last year, but uh essentially the county has a lot of very strict requirements for providing youth programming, especially in the arenas of prevention, intervention, and diversion. And so

because of how strict the requirements are, we we have to have a very highly qualified and highly trained staff. And I would put the family resource center staff up against anybody doing this type of work anywhere in the country. And I'm pretty sure we would come out on top. Um we're an internship site. We we have you've seen this one before our budget information from 2425 2526 our year-to- date and our projected essentially because our program is um the intention is to not have revenue or expenses. It's a net zero program. Um we do provide a significant amount of resources to the police department. So this year we are projecting somewhere around $280,000 to go towards staffing and and police services relating to juvenile and youth. So when they the officers that write tickets for youth, being able to offset some of the costs of things that we're already doing through the police department, but because they're benefiting our program, the grant can help to fund those things. So that's instead of revenue, we have the the inind service that we get with the police department. Any questions,

council? Any questions, comments for uh

I do have one more uh thing to add. We have expanded our service area just a little bit. We're still within western Wayne County, but in the last couple of weeks, we've reached out to a few different uh police departments in other communities. One of them being uh Novi, and we received our first referral from them al uh already this week. So, Garden City youth and surrounding area youth that get in trouble at the mall or anywhere else up in that area because it's a pretty popular place. We've started to receive referrals through Novi Police Department. And we have a meeting next week or this week tomorrow Wednesday meeting Wednesday with the Inster Police Chief to talk about some programming that we could potentially offer to to their residents as well. So, we're we're we're looking at doing a lot of different things at the Family Resource Center, including expanding uh opportunities to work with the rest of parks and wreck to provide some more recreational opportunities. Um, also, and if you if you need help picking out stuff for that kitchen, you've got a staff person with 15 years of catering experience that can go to Restaurant Depot with you.

All right. Uh, questions or comments? Uh, mayor, I'd just like to thank you, Sean, for all the things you do for these children. I wish there was a program like this when I was young would have saved me a lot of money and trouble. Thank you. We do our best. Thank you. Oh, mayor. Council member Golden. Dearborn Heights program still moving forward or

so Dearborn Heights had a change in mayor and a changeover in um a significant percentage of their administrative staff including police chief. So everything is still moving. It's moving a little slower than we expected when we first started. We do have one of their three school districts that we're actively working with and getting referrals from. We're working with their school resource officers. We also because we have that meeting with the Ingster police chief, they have a shared school district. Some of the Dearborn Heights schools are in Instster proper. So that's going to also help to get that conversation going back up again. So it is moving. It's just moving a little slower than we thought. Okay. Just curious. Other comments from the table?

Member Hughes. want to thank I want to um thank you for what you do and I think it's just um it's a it's a great reason for people to be to live in Garden City is to know that they have that support for their youth. I I've not seen any programs like this before and it's it's a great program. Thank you, Mayor. Council member, I just want to thank everyone that showed up tonight and gave us their presentation. and it was a lot of information but um it's all here so thank you

uh further comments here uh again I same as uh council member do I want to thank all our department heads last meeting this meeting uh a lot of information a lot of good stuff uh I think we're moving in the right direction and thank you for all the presentations and giving us all the uh info we need uh at this time anybody from the public wishing to speak. Uh okay. Uh no public comment at this time. This meeting is adjourned. Thank you.