Planning Commission - Special Meeting

Good evening and welcome to the Town of Garner Town Council meeting, a special meeting here on June 8th, 2026. And we're going to do this mostly the old-fashioned way. Unfortunately, technical difficulty keeps us from broadcasting streaming live. I understand that we are recording audio from the booth over there that will be available for the folks at home. later on. So we'll push ahead. We don't even have to talk as loud as I was afraid we would, but we'll get started. And I'm going to start out here a little bit unusual way, but I'd like to give a special welcome to the folks here who did. I see at least a couple of citizens who made it in here despite the other things going on. I also have to shout out to Mr. Matthews, who apparently has pointed out to the Hurricanes fans here that the Canes are still in it. Yeah, that's a good deal. Yeah, hats off to them. I said, are they based here in Garner? Somebody said, no, but a lot of their fans are.

Well, they rehearse practice over here at the Ice House occasionally. So that's sort of Garner rights, I guess.

That was a piece of history. I'm also going to take just a few minutes here. It might be five or six minutes, if you want to relax just a minute here, just to give you what I call the mayor's introduction to what we're doing tonight. This is a little bit different, and I'd like to give you kind of the philosophical basis behind this You're going to get a lot of technical information from a lot of people that know it in a lot more detail. But I'd just like to kind of go on record for those of you who have not been as fully immersed in this process as some of us. There's a lot to it. And I want to remind everybody of the basics here. For example, fiscal year 27 starts July 1st, 2026. Just get that through your skulls here for a minute. That's coming up in just a couple weeks. As far as the basics and restating the obvious, I always find it helpful to remind everybody that at the town of Garner, our job one is public safety. Almost every town anywhere was based on public safety. Our fire, rescue, police, public works, engineering, inspections, planning, all of this is for public safety. Public safety is also our expense number one. not just the tools, trucks, equipment, and fuel, but the people. High-quality, well-trained, fully committed first responders and the outstanding staff that back them up. I don't have to remind you about the value of investing and the importance of maintaining your investment. Many of you have invested in a home. You understand that to protect your investment, you must maintain your home. You might even be trying to improve your home so that it further increases the value of your investment. Great employees are one of the most important investments of our town. We have spent several years studying how to attract and retain the very best. By making sure that our pay and benefits are competitive, we have been able to fill virtually all of our critical positions. We have been able to keep these outstanding team members by investing in their continuing training and by providing them the best possible tools for getting their work done safely and efficiently. We listened to our teammates. We added 86 fantastic teammates this last July 1st. After talking about it for eight or 10 years, we merged with our longtime community partner, Garner Fire and Rescue. As I've said many times, We did not do this to make them better firefighters. They were already the best to be found. We just wanted to help them take care of the less glamorous back office stuff like IT, accounting, HR, building maintenance, so that they could focus on doing what only firefighters can do, perform rescues and fight fires. Our Garner Fire and Rescue Department shined again last week. They were up for their five-year renewal by the International Commission on Fire Accreditation. The assessment team members came from all over the U.S., spent a week here looking into every detail. The team's leader told me quietly that Garner was the best he had ever seen. The Garner Police Department set the bar over 30 years ago when they earned their national accreditation. They have kept it and their own commitment to our community for all these years. In 2014, Garner Public Works Department became the first in North Carolina to earn the national accreditation. Our departments and our individual employees continue to be recognized for their achievements and high performance. I've been watching this town grow for over 60 years. In all that time, I've never seen a better team or better teamwork than we have now. Over 370 town employees work together every day to keep Garner a great place to be. You do not have to look very far these days to see other local governments in distress, bankruptcies, misappropriations, firings, threats and allegations, lawsuits, in a word, dysfunction. Every time I attend an event with other government leaders or talk with people in other towns, it reinforces my belief that Garner has the best of the best. Our biggest challenge these days, obviously, is how do we deal with growth? We will not solve that problem today, but we must take an important step. The purpose of today's special meeting is for town council to give our town staff direction on three specific items so that they can prepare the budget ordinance. This ordinance must be passed at council's regular meeting scheduled for next Thursday, June 16th, to avoid the possibility of service interruptions or financial confusions. just June 16th. It was originally scheduled to be done by June 2nd, but in order to have continued and more discussion, we put it off until June 16th instead of June 2nd. You will hear many more details about these three items today, but I have listed them here in what I consider to be from the simplest to the less simple, the opposite of what it shows in your program. We are not required to address the issues in this order, but I may try to direct our discussion to focus on these three critical items. And the items that must be included in the budget ordinance are item number one, FY27 fee schedule. This is the annually approved list of how much does a resident or a non-resident pay for the use of town facilities, services, classes, et cetera. Council has previously expressed little or no objection to staff recommendations on this particular item. Item number two, total FTE employee positions for FY27. FTE is full-time equivalent employee position. Council seemed to be satisfied with the staff recommendation to add nine positions, but might want to discuss it in more detail. Now, here's my editorial note, mayor's note. Nine new positions will represent less than a 3% increase in the number of our employees, about 2.5% increase, while our population has grown by 8% in the past year. And please remember what I said earlier about the importance of good employees, attracting and retaining. Item number three, the final item we have to work with today, is the property tax rate for FY27. In the previous all-day budget work session, Council seemed to lean toward option three, which might be expressed as a proposed increase of 2.5 cents to the tax rate, which includes 0.5 cents for operations, 0.5 cents for new positions, and up to 1.5 cents for debt service, what I also call savings for future projects. It's not just paying off old debts. It's saving for future projects. Several future projects are listed in the material our slides will be looking at. but the ones that come to mind for me in terms of future projects. Two new fire stations that we need, a new public works center built on the current location, Meadowbrook Park access and improvement, new boathouse at Lake Benson, regional stormwater control measures instead of more small mud holes all over town. We keep talking about traffic calming solutions, et cetera. These are long-term projects that we'll be talking more about. But please keep in mind our mission today is to give staff clear direction on these three items. I'm aware that often an answer gives rise to more questions, but I will ask council to please focus on completing our mission today. There will be time throughout the coming fiscal year, as always, to make adjustments, pass budget amendments as necessary, address more specific issues, prioritize various projects, and have more input. Let's get our work done today and keep moving ahead on the many other pressing issues that demand council's attention. We have to refine our UDO and include our Garner Forward dreams in actual guidelines. We must learn how to avoid the plague of so many more small mud holes growing in our town. We must keep on helping our neighbors. How will we add the financial fountains that produce the revenue to do this? How do we control the financial drains that threaten to keep our property taxes increasing into the next century? Oh, and how do we deal with growth?

Don't forget that.

Thank you for your patience and for working with your council in these challenging times. I'm now going to pass this along to Town Manager Miller to give us some information, some background, help us make some good decisions.

Good afternoon, Mayor, members of Council. We have prepared for you an agenda today to continue discussion on the recommended FY27 budget. And I'm going to briefly review the agenda with you, and then we'll jump right into today's discussion. So the purpose of this meeting today is by the end of the discussion, staff is looking for guidance on three particular areas that we need to include in the budget ordinance for Council's consideration. First is the FY27 property tax rate. The second is the total number of full-time equivalent positions for the FY27 budget. And then the third is the FY27 fee schedule. So we're going to spend a few minutes with my colleagues, Ms. Warren and Mr. Beck, sort of walking you through where we've been in terms of our budget discussions for the FY27 budget. We're going to talk about the recommended budget, also some additional information on capital and debt service. We're going to share some more information for clarity as well. The additional budget portal comments that have been submitted have been provided to you on the dais, and those comments were submitted as of earlier today for your consideration. We're also going to talk about some of the reallocation options that was presented to you during your May work session. And then there's gonna be an opportunity for continued discussions and questions from council about the FY27 budget. And so we're gonna make sure we have enough time to answer all your questions in terms of the direction and priorities and approach to the FY27 budget. The final piece will be the final direction from Council on those three items I mentioned we need for the budget ordinance, the property tax rate, the FTE count and the fee schedule. So I'm going to ask Miss Warren to kick us off to sort of remind us where we've started with this journey. So Miss Warren.

Good afternoon. So just a reminder, Ms. Miller just went over the agenda, but here's just a quick reminder. We're going to go through all of the things that we've proposed to you to date with the review of debt and capital, and then we'll have some discussion afterwards. A reminder of what our overview was or is for FY27, talking about our town, our people, strengthening the foundation of our community by investing in the people, infrastructure, and services that allow Garner to thrive. This includes maintaining a safe and resilient community, investing in inclusive and high quality services where all residents benefit, supporting and retaining a talented workforce, strengthening our operational and community infrastructure, and ensuring that we're planning responsibly for our future needs and challenges. When we think about what the principles are, we think about some of the five pillars we looked at. We're limiting a property tax increase a sole solution, but also ensuring that we are addressing our required expenses, fulfilling our ongoing project commitments, and then looking at how can we leverage our partner resources and maintaining our compensation strategy moving forward. As a reminder, the recommended budget totals 97.9 million. This includes a 54.5 cent tax rate, Of that tax rate, 45 cents would go to the town's operating budget and nine and a half cents would be set aside for debt service. It also includes utilizing approximately 2.2 million in fund balance that would cover one-time costs in FY27. And a reminder that the value of one penny for the town in FY27 is just over a million dollars. With that, I'm going to turn it over to David Beck to do some review over our capital and debt.

Thank you, Sarah. Good afternoon, Council, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to run through a few pieces of information for you that kind of pull together some of the various discussions we've had leading up to this regarding capital and debt. You've heard from our financial advisors, Davenport, who have I've shown you a couple iterations of the debt model and our current debt capacity and affordability as it relates to the future capital projects. So just kind of wanted to run through a refresher on some of that and pull some of those discussions together here for you. As a quick overview, we do have several options when it comes to how we pay for capital projects and other capital improvements, capital purchases. The primary method we do that is through taking on debt. That can be general obligation bonds, installment financing through a bank or other conventional type loans. We typically use that for larger scale capital projects. As you've seen through some of the debt modeling and some of the capital improvement plan, discussions. We have some some larger scale capital projects that that are a need of the town, and that would most likely involve debt financing at some point to achieve those projects. We also utilize Pago for capital projects or capital purchases. This is, you know, drawing from available revenues or reserves to make those one time purchases. or fund smaller scale projects with those dollars. You'll see that in some of our revolving capital programs that we operate and we fund on an annual basis. So we have the VERT program, which is for vehicles and small equipment. We have PERFORM, which is for building maintenance and repairs. And then we have our IT capital fund for IT infrastructure. There are some other options available to fund capital projects as well. We have certain dedicated revenue streams like fee and lieu. The primary one we see is fee and lieu of parkland. The town has been able to utilize those funds previously for land purchases for future park development. We also have grant funding. Obviously, we've been successful with grants lately for Yergin Park. We also have large lap grant for the Jones Sausage Road improvements. And then there could come from other sources as well. We could have land donated or something on those lines. But most major capital projects, and when we talk about kind of what's on the horizon for the town, we've discussed a public works campus or expansion. We've discussed future fire stations. projects of that magnitude are most likely going to require new debt for the town. With some of those major projects, there are some initial soft costs up front. If it's something like a future park development or something along those lines, we may purchase land. We may do some initial high-level design for that project. Those soft costs can typically be fronted from the town's reserves, and depending on the timing of when that project actually comes to fruition, we can reimburse the town's reserves through some of those debt proceeds if we take the necessary actions to do that and within the allowed time frame. We have a number of those projects slated in the CIP or the budget. We have some feasibility studies. We have some design. We have the Yergin Homestead, which we have proposed to fund that out of fund balance, a pay-go option for that, along with some building demolitions of town-owned vacant properties. When we get into the debt portion of the phase of a capital project, we're kind of further along with design. We're moving towards construction. And so we need to make sure that we have the dollars on hand to actually carry out that project at that point. As I mentioned earlier, we do fund certain revolving capital programs every year. I listed those out previously and current funding for FY26, those programs are being funded at a level of about $5 million, As you've seen on the estimated tax base for next year, that's about five pennies on the tax rate that we are funding these revolving capital projects. And I think we've been very successful with those programs. We've been able to take care of quite a few building maintenance needs that aren't quite a major capital project, but also aren't your typical annual maintenance needs, something that's a little that requires a little more money. Penny for Parks has been very successful. They've been able to replace a lot of equipment within the parks, and they have that dedicated revenue stream for that. And in the FY27 budget, again, it's a slight increase on that revolving capital fund of about $5.4 million. As we talk about debt, the primary resource we have to fund those obligations that we would have to pay if we take on new debt is our debt service fund, which of course everyone knows is a reimagining of the previous revenue savings plan. Sets aside a portion of the tax rate each year to go into a reserve fund that can fund current and future debt service obligations. Currently, that's 8 1⁄2 cents. with the current recommended budget proposal, it would elevate that to 10 cent going into the debt service fund. And essentially there's a truing up or a calculation at the end of the year where we determine how much is in that reserve at the end of each fiscal year. So we put money aside, like I said, currently eight and a half cent, but we're also drawing from that reserve every year to meet our current obligations. And as you've seen in some of the debt modeling provided by Davenport, the money we are putting into that reserve is currently sufficient to cover our current debt obligations. But to take on some of these larger scale capital projects we've talked about would require new debt funding, which will come with additional debt service down the road. When you look at kind of where that balance of funds lives, It's part of our fund balance. Fund balance gets designated into several different categories. The debt service fund falls into the committed fund balance category, which means that internally, town council has assigned stipulations or strings to how that money can be used, but it could be at council's discretion repurposed for other uses if council so took that action, but At the end of each year, you'll see that reflected in the financial statements as part of that committed fund balance. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Ms. Miller.

Thank you, Mr. Beck. So that's where we started with the recommended budget. So as mentioned previously, the FY27 recommended budget includes using about $2.2 million in one-time funds that's coming from the town's fund balance for the following initiatives. And we've broken them out into two areas just for clarity. The first is for the operating budget, looking at equipment cost for the real-time information center that's being requested by the police department. The town's share of fire equipment and upgrades. Council recalls this is a cost share item with our fire department in Wake County. And then a Juergen operating equipment, equipment that we're going to need to open up Juergen Park in the fall. Looking at CIP and a transfer from the general fund, there's a few one-time costs that we've identified that we feel is an appropriate use of our one-time fund balance. Completing the stormwater utility study, we talked about this at the retreat in terms of preparing for an FY28 stormwater utility. Juergen Homestead and the requirements that we have contractually to maintain that property and that structure until a future use is determined. Peacock Dam Remediation, this is part of the work that needs to be done for the future home of the Public Works Center and the work that we need to do as requested by the Department of Environmental Quality. We've identified several structures on public property that are becoming issues for safety and maintenance that we need to address. And then additional funding for our public art initiatives, specifically some work that's being done to vision and create the Avery Art Park. In addition to using one-time dollars, the recommended budget also includes a 2.5-cent tax increase. The recommended budget includes 1 cent for operational expectations and obligations. This looks at health insurance increases, ongoing operating impacts for Yergin and White Deer Park splash pad, some training costs increase for some of our departments, specifically strategic initiatives, legal services, and our engineering department. continued support of the very successful youth Council and civic Academy as well as addressing some of our increased costs for workers competent and town insurance. five cents is committed to going to several new positions in the budget, looking at an analyst for the. Real time information Center fire analyst for the fire department, a stormwater supervisor to help with the work of preparing for that stormwater utility. And then executive assistant, paralegal, and a grants manager or grants administrator to help support overall town. And then in addition, one cent going to debt service. This was recommended to start building capacity for some of the large projects we know that are coming up within the next three to five years. We know we have a public works facility that needs to be replaced, and we have at least two fire stations. So at your budget work session on May 15th, Council discussed and wanted to see some options for reallocating the two and a half cent tax increase that's being proposed. And this is the information and options that the staff has prepared and presented to Council at your May work session. So all three options include increase in revenue about $200,000. This would be interest revenue. With interest rates maintaining where they are now, we feel like that's realistic to be able to think we can get a little bit more revenue from our interest that we're able to collect on the town's investments. The first option looks at using the increased tax revenue, but also using some more from fund balance in order to reallocate the tax rate. The second option looks at that interest rate revenue additional, but also reducing the VERT spending for FY27. And then option three looks at not only keeping the increased revenue for the interest rates, but also moving one-time funding from the PERFORM budget, as well as reducing IT revolving funds. And you'll recall from your May work session, option three is the manager's recommendation if council would like to look at reallocating that two and a half cent tax rate increase, put a little bit more money towards the debt service fund that helps us build future capacity for future projects based on the additional revenue, but also alignment of timing for the projects, both from the performance standpoint and the IT standpoint I believe that option three is the most feasible. So this is what that would look like in terms of that reallocated expense. We'd have half a cent going to operational expectations and obligations, and we would increase the revenue, overall revenue, by $200,000, reduce perform by $225,000, and reduce IT capital by $97,000. We would still have five cents for new positions, and we would add a half cent to the debt service fund. So making it one and a half cent on the tax rate that would be added, taking the total amount for FY27 to 10 cents. These would be for future capacity for projects like the fire stations and the public work center. So today we're here to answer additional questions that Council may have about their proposed tax increase, the reallocation options, any additional questions or comments that you have for the FY27 budget. Our goal is to get final direction from Council this afternoon on the three things that we need to draft the budget ordinance for your consideration at your June 16th meeting, looking at the tax rate for FY27, the total FTE employee count for 27, and then the fee schedule as well. So with that, Mayor, that sort of is an introduction and sort of a reminder of where we've been in the process and certainly are open to Council's questions and comments. And I'll ask staff specifically if you'll come up to the podium over here if we need you to answer a question specific to your department area.

Thank you for the excellent summary. A lot of work has gone into this. I'm going to suggest we run through the council members here and get initial questions or impressions. We'll have plenty of time to run back through in more detail. Let's start with Mr. Vance and kind of get a general approach. Where are we? Where do we start? What are your first thoughts?

First thoughts. First, I will say thank you to the staff for all the hard work that you did and make the adjustments. Since our last budget meeting to implement the requests of myself and also the the council members who will speak for themselves. And at this time, based upon what I'm seeing, I don't have any specific questions, but as the conversation goes on, I probably will have some, but at this point I don't.

Okay. Thank you. Mr. Dellinger.

Yes. In looking to kind of set our conversation this evening up for success and providing direction to staff, I have a couple of clarifications, questions I appreciate the mayor's introductory statements with regards to public safety and fiscal stewardship, but I did need a little clarification on some of your introductory remarks. Could you repeat what you said about the nine positions in the FTE, the FTE positions? Can you repeat what you said?

The main point I was making was that nine positions, new positions, proposed new positions, represent less than 3% of, an increase in terms of employees, about 2.5% increase. Our population in general has increased 8% in the past year. That was my relatively modest response there.

And what was your characterization of council's support for those positions?

Interested, but may want more details.

Okay. And the other was a clarification on the 2.5% tax increase. Can you repeat back what you said about council's inclinations towards the two and a half cents?

The last time we talked, there seemed to be some interest in moving ahead with option three that's been decided here, but certainly no commitment was made, whether it be two and a half, two, one and a half. Clearly no decision was made on that. That was the open-ended portion.

Okay. Yeah, I just wanted to, you know, level set. I think everybody has conversations. Everybody's having different conversations with council members and Just want to make sure that we're level setting for our conversation this evening and not anchoring in any particular direction. And we're kind of coming to this thing with a clean slate and open mind to what council members may have to say. But at that, I've got a few questions, but I'll let council proceed and I've got my list.

Yeah, write those questions down. We'll be back. I've got them in. Yes, sir. Mr. Stallings.

Nothing at this moment.

Mr. Singleton.

while we are only adding or suggested nine FTEs this year, excluding the fire department last year, we added about 30. So let's tell it like it is. Okay. Let's be honest with people. I suggested nine this year where we added about 30 last year, excluding the fire department. Let's just remember that. Um, I got several, lots of questions to ask, lots of concerns. Um, And I'm not voting for 2 1⁄2 cent or 2 cent. I may not vote for 1 1⁄2 cent because of my concerns. Just being blunt.

Okay, yeah, first impressions here, first thoughts. That's right. Again, we're here tonight because staff is looking for this direction, and council has not decided on that at all. That's why we're here tonight to talk about it some more. Mr. Matthews.

I appreciate all the hard work and efforts going into this, and... As the mayor mentioned, there's a lot of towns in and around the Carolinas and probably other places, got all kinds of issues, which I'm proud to say we don't because of our financial responsibility, whether it be at management level or down at budget level or down to David's department down there. We've got a good, strong accountability for what we do, and I'm very pleased with that. And there's no doubt in my mind we'll continue that direction. I know there'll be some ups and downs on some things tonight. But again, we're growing immensely. And everybody's coming to Garner, both commercially as well as residentially. And this is going to be a little bit of a tough budget. But I'm not here to single anybody out or beat up anybody. I just want to sit down, let's look at the numbers and see what we can come up with, hopefully collectively. And always remember, we can do budget amendments online. during the year if something comes up that we didn't do this go around. So we look forward to a good discussion and hopefully we can move forward and meet our timeline on this thing because it ain't going to be easy. It never is. And I've been in this business going on about 20 years doing budgets, both the county level as well as municipal levels. And I've seen some things come and go. And We'll see where this goes. Hopefully it'll go smooth and we can move forward. We've got other things on our platter following the budget. So thank you for what y'all have done.

Mr. Mayor. Thank you. I'm going to suggest in the interest of a continuing round discussion, the staff has asked for direction. So I would like to pass the microphone back to Manager Miller here. You've heard some feedback. I will run back with more detailed questions. But other observations you'd like? like to make or other things you'd like to address? Where do we go from now? How do we make a good decision on these three key items?

Well, it sounds like there may be some other questions that Council members have, so this would be sort of part of our discussion where let's let's make sure that we're providing the information and answering questions that other Council members have. After we do that, then just open discussion among Council members around these three particular areas. The tax rate, the FTE count, and then the the fee schedule as well. Ultimately, as indicated on the screen, we're looking for approved direction on how to prepare that budget ordinance for your June 16th meeting.

Okay. With that being said, let's continue our kind of round-robin discussion here. Mr. Vance, if you come up with other questions, comments, issues you'd like to address.

Not at this moment. I'll pass.

Mr. Dellinger.

Yes, and also appreciate the acknowledgement of our ability to address DO BUDGET AMENDMENTS THROUGHOUT THE YEAR, BUT ALSO ACKNOWLEDGING THAT IT'S EASIER TO MAKE A BUDGET AMENDMENT TO COME ASK FOR MORE MONEY THAN TO TAKE MONEY AWAY. YOU CAN'T TRIM A BUDGET IN THE MIDDLE OF BUDGET YEAR. WE'RE VERY COGNIZANT OF THE FACT THAT STAFF GETS A BUDGET, THAT'S WHAT THEY OPERATE FROM THROUGHOUT THE YEAR, AND WE'LL RESPECT THAT. SO I THINK IT'S IMPORTANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE WE DO HAVE THAT AUTHORITY AND ABILITY TO ADD APPROPRIATIONS OR FUNDS TO PROJECTS AS WE GO THROUGHOUT THE YEAR. address this budget in stabilized but also uncertain times, there are certain decisions we have to make now that we may need to reconsider later in the next fiscal year. I'll just take one, and I'm sure everybody's got one. I'll take the, with regards to just the art budget, I think we are fully supportive of public art. I think there's been a lot of good work that has been done to date with regards to that. I think that it was well-funded from the get-go. I think it is projected to be funded well from the get-go. I think there's a lot of work that has been done over the past several months to reconfigure that committee, to bring in new voices and perspectives, bringing in different people from different parts of town who have different ideas and different mediums. And so I'm still supportive, as I've had conversations with council members, of reducing that from 100 to 50,000 Um, I think we also need to give that committee an opportunity to report back to council on what has been accomplished, not just what's been planned. Um, and then come back to council with plans and also a plan for leveraging the funds that the town has allocated to them as well. I think you need to, I'm a big supporter of leveraging our funds to bring other dollars into the town. Art is a perfect example of a way to do that. We've, um, made our recommendations. We'll be coming back to council on our new members. We have some folks who are very talented in the arts, but also in fundraising and relationships. And I'd rather see what they can bring to the table before we kind of add more on top of the budget we already had allocated for art. So I'll put that out for maybe council discussion. I don't know how we want to do this because we kind of need everybody's feedback to give direction, but I'll tackle that one first.

We have to start somewhere. Thank you. Good observations. Mr. Stallings.

I will say and this is in reference to the art reducing from 100,000 to 50,000. My initial thoughts on the arts budget would be this is a committee that has just been formed. I don't think we have had a report back yet from council of I guess the membership. I don't think we've taken a vote on the actual membership yet. I don't think we even honestly know what has been planned unless you have been involved in that process of forming the arts committee. So for us to allocate, I think it was allocated $50,000 last year and then increased to $100,000 this year. My initial thoughts would be to for it to maintain that funding level of $50,000. And then if there is a need to be increased throughout the year when they do report back to council on things that they may want to accomplish with the committee, then we make that appropriation then. at the appropriate time.

Yes, good observation. Well said. Mr. Singleton.

Since we're in the public art discussion, I agree. Cut it from 100 to 50. Cut traffic calming from 200 to 150. Increase rebuild Garner from 100 to 200. We talk about housing affordability. I'm going to help folks. The county's already going to have a tax increase. We've got people, older citizens who won't stay in their homes. And if we're going to be serious about it, we need to increase that budget line from 100,000 to 200. Got 50 from public art, 50 from traffic calming, and added to rebuild Garner to help our longtime citizens with any housing repairs they need.

Yes, specifically the preserving home partnership.

Preserving home, yes, sir. I said rebuild Garner, preserving home. You know where I was going towards this.

Yes, thank you. I agree that preserving home is a big partnership, a big bang for the buck, serving our current citizens to stay in their homes out there. I have heard lots of support for the same thing. Mr. Matthews.

I'd agree with my colleagues on trimming back on the art because we can always come back and if they present something that's needed on an item-by-item basis and as far as preserving homes, I'm 100% behind that too. I'd rather trim on that and put more toward the preserving homes because that is a big issue. I'd have group of my colleagues on those two items.

Back at me?

Yes, sir. In reference to that ivory as well, that's a very good recommendation that's being made in reference to the public art. Being a part of the nomination committee and looking at the skill sets of the individuals that are coming in and with the reset for public art, I think it's imperative to allow this new committee an opportunity to set the path for the future relative to a public garden garden. And to do that would be to allow them to look at what they would like to be considered. And then after considering that, what is the cost? And that way we'll have a better feel as to the cost that would be needed to complete whatever is being presented. So I agree with that.

Good. That was a good round robin of topics on that one particular topic there. And back to you, Ms. Miller, on that particular piece that we just heard five opinions on plus a half.

I just want to make sure we hear correctly. So it sounds like there's consensus to reduce the public arts spending for FY27 back to $50,000. Reduce the traffic calming by $50,000.

was a suggestion but i'm seeing a no so okay so there's that one again so reduce traffic calming measures we put two hundred thousand dollars in now but i think what might help is if we go through one one at a time yes because i've got questions about the traffic calming so to tie two of those together that might ultimately be what we do mathematically But I think the direct tie, I think the cut is there. There's agreement on the cut. And then if there's a reallocation of that to somewhere else that council wants, or they just want to cut it and go into general fund, and that's a separate conversation. I think it keeps for simplicity's sake. So if Mr. Singleton wanted to bring up traffic calming and we go around on that, and because I have some questions for staff on that too, just pipeline stuff for public information.

I like that approach a lot. We kind of get a roundabout on public art, for example, like we just did. May I ask for clarification then?

Where are we with preserving homes? We recommended $100,000, but I was hearing support for increasing that to $200,000. Do we need to have a discussion on that as well?

I think so. I think people have a list. We'll talk to each item. I think the one-to-one reallocation will make it very to keep track of for one, and it'll be easier just to kind of take each issue and then kind of see where we're at. Mr. Singleton says, oh, look, we saved $100,000. Let's put it over here. Then we can talk about, well, are we going to put it over there or what are we going to do? I think that might be most productive.

Yeah, I think the way we started is specifically on the public art, and we've kind of roundabouted that. And then you were the last one to speak. Did you have another? topic in mind, do you want to volunteer to start on Mr. Singleton's topic or let him start?

I mean, we can since it came up or we can go in order, kind of go in an order. Mr. Stallings wants to defer to Mr. Singleton or if he has an item, I guess he could take it. It's a new path.

So I want to bring up the grant administrator. I know we've had several conversations about this one. And I know the conversation where we left off was well we need a grant administrator because the compliance we're growing and the amount of funding that we're getting in the compliance element of it may become cumbersome which I think everybody on council agrees that at some point in time we need a grant administrator. And I know I've asked the question so how are we managing grants currently and what does that process look like. I think what was overall and to be clear I have advocated for having a grant writer because we definitely want to make sure that we're being as we're focused on bringing in money as well, too, in terms of having somebody that's laser focused on writing these grants and trying to maximize these opportunities that are within the federal government or the state government. I was researching this morning and found tons of them that we can have a sole person focused on that. And I think lumping these two positions in because a grant writer and a grant administrator are two totally different things. And I think it's interesting that we listed in the council feedback questions the Wake Forest Grants Program Manager which I know I know the former one very very well who has even told me that these are two different positions. And listed in the feedback questions as well too it said Focusing on grant writing increases the town's risk of severe consequences related to noncompliance. Just that language alone concerns me about having this position because it shows that this person will be very, very focused on the compliance end. And we know that if this person is focused as we grow and our grants management gets more complex on the compliance end, they won't have a lot of time on the grant writing end to be seeking out these grants and researching and focused on bringing into town more money. So I'm ultimately advocating for either we hire a grant writer with this one FTE or we split it out and have two positions or we don't have this position at all. Because I don't see us hiring somebody that's specifically focused on doing both because we're just setting them up for failure.

Good observations. So your topic of the round, you might say, is grant manager, writer, administrator position. Is it the right position? And out of the nine suggested positions, I think that's the only one I've heard any discussion on, which is a good thing. So let's run through our little cycle on this, if we may. And let's go to Manager Miller first, because I know there has been some discussion about the details of a grant administrator, a grant manager, a grant writer. Would you like to give us your thoughts on this?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. So I know we've talked about this some, and I've had individual conversations with council members on this. I think that is there a need and opportunity for both skill sets? I would say yes. But as I evaluate the immediate needs of the organization, and I conferred with Ms. Jones on this as well, It's really important to make sure from a compliance and reporting standpoint that we're meeting all our obligations and requirements for existing grants, but any future grants that the town receives. We've been very successful across our departments in being able to leverage resources and receive earmarks and receive grants. We've been able to do that, but part of the areas where we continue to need to focus is on the compliance and on the reporting aspect of it. There are consequences for the town if we do not do that in a timely way or do it accurately. Everything from having to give the dollars and funding back to having to give it back with levels of interest to essentially harm to our reputation as an organization and community in terms of not being able to manage grants and funding. So when we talk about severe consequences, there are things to consider in terms of what the expectations and needs are. When the recommended budget came out, grants administrator was sort of the closest position I found in other organizations within the county that mirrored not only council's desire to be able to leverage more grant and funding resources, but also take into account some of the operating opportunities that the town attorney and I had identified. Since then, I've done some more research and have presented to council another option of a grant manager that would really be able to focus on both supporting our departments and locating and finding grants and writing them and submitting them, but also helping in support with the compliance and the reporting as well. I would continue to recommend one position in the FY27 budget based on just the looking at all the other resource needs that we have and other things we need to address. But certainly if council wants to do two positions, we could do that. And I would recommend that we would do that with the additional interest, revenue interest that we think we can receive that $200,000. But that means looking at a two and a half cent tax increase and working from that. So I think the options are out there in terms of being able to address some of the needs and concerns that council has with sort of the workload and focus, but also some of the concerns that myself and Ms. Jones have in terms of the compliance and the reporting aspect.

Yeah, I like the dialogue we're having on this particular topic. Let's continue that. Mr. Singleton, your observations on the grant fighter manager position?

What's originally in the budget on page 70 talks to someone, a position, We'll be responsible for developing and submitting high-quality proposals, overseeing compliance and reporting, and insurance adheres to federal and state regulations. And then Ms. Miller gave us some information on June 4th, and she says the grants administrator slash grants program manager's position is more common among local governments. Our size and position would lead grant writing, compliance, and reporting. A sample job description provided, she had that, focuses on writing compliance and reporting of grants. So this person would be focusing on seeking more grants, but also administering those grants and overseeing those grants. Now, the question I have is we already have people in different departments writing grants. Would they quit writing grants?

They would not. Actually, what makes successful grant writing or seeking out earmarks is that you're going to need the technical expertise of our department. So this position would work directly with our departments to learn what their needs and opportunities are. to be able to find some grant resources or earmark opportunities, work with them on preparation of those applications and the guidelines for those applications through the submittal process, and then once awarded, would work with them on the compliance and reporting. So we're not going to be successful just having one person do all the grants. They're going to have to work in partnerships with our departments because our departments are the technical experts into the projects and services that we need. They're going to have to work together be able to share that information and prepare applications.

So in your updated document on the 4th, you're suggesting now that it's a grants manager, excuse me, grants administrator slash grant program manager or grant program manager, whatever you want to call it. But that's more what it's, they're going to be seeking grants, but also administering the grants.

That is correct.

In other departments.

That is the vision.

That's a better description of what we had. I think the confusion we had to begin with. Okay. Thanks for answering the questions on that.

Mr. Matthews.

I do like basically what you just said and what Mr. Singleton said also, the manager position, because it's the first time we're getting into this. I remember the first time we hired our first attorney. We know how that developed out. So if this is successful, we don't know what's going to happen down the road, how many people it's going to be. But initially, I do like the idea of the and working with. So however we want to word that, at least get us through this first year and see how this program goes. And we do have a good, strong legal department. I know we'll be looking over some of these things. So as far as the legality, but somebody can really get in there and make some things happen as well as work with those other departments. So I would support that.

Okay, that brings us back to Mr. Vance.

This is a very good conversation here because this is one I... that clarity on it from the town manager some time back to get a better feel because I'm under the thought process that when we look at a position and the needs for those positions, we ask for the operations and what is necessary and needed within the operations to get things done. And I have a tendency to lean towards the needs assessment more so than what my personal belief is when it comes to something like this. And the needs were stated for a grant administrator, which and not for a grant writer. And what I'm hearing here again is that Rick, if I'm wrong, is that the grant writing piece is not where we need to have the need to support, but in the administration of it. And that is being done by the grant writer. I will only admit that I had to do some research myself to get a level understanding as to what it takes to do this. And And with my limited understanding, I would lean towards what the needs of the organizations are at this point in time. And it seems that the needs are for a grant administrator and not for a grant writer at this time. So I'm leaning toward just looking at for a grant administrator more so than both because I asked that question, why not get both? The need was not there, was not demonstrated that a need was there for a grant writer because of what was just stated by the town manager.

Thank you, Mr. Dellinger.

You need both. And we don't need to talk about how it gets funded, but you need both. And this is a situation where we do a good job at something, but when you have somebody who's specialized and dedicated at doing a thing, they're better at people who aren't specialized and dedicated at doing that thing. I worked with foundations and philanthropy. There's a whole world of opportunity, and now we've got to talk about it in public where we could have had a leg up on somebody. We have two entities, DGA and GEDC, that are non-profits. This person could amp up the capacity for grant writing and opportunities for those two organizations and bring in millions of dollars over the next few years that aren't taxpayer dollars. The administrator and compliance piece is a totally separate job than grant writing and relationship building to get philanthropic dollars into the town. It's the only job in this town that will pay for itself over time. It is a no-brainer. when it comes to opportunity and generating revenue that isn't raising taxes. And we talk about taxes and fiscal. We do a good job. But when you have somebody who's fully dedicated on staff now to putting all that stuff together, going out in conference, making relationships, we're freeing up staff time to do other things. Maybe they can lean a little bit more into the compliance side and help with that. There are returns on this type of investment that are hard to measure in existing staff time. But at the end of the day, dollars, dollars, dollars. and I think we need a grant writer in this budget, and if you say we need a compliance person too, let's get a compliance person too. The grant writer is not going to generate any new volume of anything for us to track for a significant period of time, so it's not an added burden on anyone to have that position getting its legs and starting to learn how to get this money into the town. And if we say we want it in the future, we're not saying it's a bad idea, We're just saying we don't need it right now. But I disagree. If we need it next year, we've got to invest in it now. So invest in it now. This person will pay it for themselves five, six times over over the next three years, bringing in millions of dollars that we don't have to raise taxes for. Get it now. In a year and a half, we'll be sitting here saying, that was the smartest thing we ever did in Garner was hiring that grant writer. Man, they saved us so much money. Man, they brought in so much revenue for affordable housing and for parks and for downtown. We've got DGA sitting there. They could be writing grants all day long, all over the country to foundations and stuff. We've got the RAC Center down there. We've got Yergin Park, all part of downtown. You'll free up staff capacity and add an amazing amount of capacity by adding a grant writer. And we just don't want to be sitting here in two years saying, we should have done that. We should have done that. And if it doesn't work out, well, I mean, what are we out? We're not out much. Just do both. If we've got compliance needs that are critical, meet those needs, get that person, but do not set somebody up to fail by trying to get them to do two separate things. They are not the same job. They're not the same personality. They're not the same skill set. They just have grant in the name. Only thing they have in common. My position is get both positions and let's just rock this out to the best of our ability and get money into the town. Let's do it. It's going to be awesome, though. It'll be great.

Well, I don't have a vote, but I like to voice my opinion once in a while, and it took me a while to wrap my head around this stuff. I remember as we sat in there in the training room that day, and as Mr. Downs just said now, if you give a person two jobs, it moves one way or the other. I remember back in my insurance days, if we were talking about bringing on a new employee, it's basically service or sales. And if we hired someone to do both, inevitably, they reacted to the sales, excuse me, reacted to the service and did that at the expense of finding new customers. It is hard to do both. There's no question about it. There's no question that many times in my prior life, we said, well, let's hire three salespeople and we'll find a way to service it. Oh, wait, where's that money come? They're all out there digging. Well, let's hire three service people. Well, that's not the right balance. What's the right balance? And here, just like in my old job, we had limited resources. We wanted to hire two. We wanted to hire three. We were lucky to hire one because that's money out front. I'm kind of leaning toward the idea that Manager Miller has mentioned. Let's take baby steps. Instead of incurring more expense right now, let's make sure we solidify keeping the grant monies that we already have, and let's go ahead and hire our first town-wide grant manager who will consolidate that and lay the groundwork for a grant salesperson, grant writer, if you will, next time. Because the fact is, it's only $150,000, $200,000 to set it up and equip this position. But what do we take that $200,000 away from? For every $200,000 we add, every $200,000 of expense we add, we have to think about where we're going to cut it from. I can go either way on this, but to just vote about adding an additional tenth FTE, we've got to think about where does that, I'm going to call it $200,000, where does that come from without raising the tax further?

It comes from the future. This is what you call investing.

Yes.

That's what this is called. It's called investing. You have to make the investment to get the return. It is that simple. Where that money comes from, We'll figure it out. But you'll get the return on that investment. It's the biggest softball decision in this budget to bring more money to the town. Are you going to hire a salesperson or wait a year? How much revenue are you going to miss out on? How long is it going to take that person to get ramped up to understand what they're doing, six months, nine months? That's how long it's going to take for somebody to be effective at this, and it'll be a year before they get any money in here. But you don't want to look backwards and say we should have done it. You want to look forward and say, it is just, to me, you do both. We have both needs. If you need a firefighter and a police officer, you don't say, well, let's pick one or the other. It's like, no, no, they're totally different jobs. They're totally different jobs. And if you believe it's going to be good for the future of the town, you invest in it now, you figure out where to get the money, and this person will pay for themselves, Mark my words, this person will bring in at least $3 million over the next two and a half years.

I like that.

If they don't, I'll quit. I was wrong. I'm going to step off this task right now. It's a terrible idea, but I don't think it's a bad idea. I just don't.

No, it's not a bad idea. I can't help but think, where's the money come from? Let's go back to Ms. Miller for observations, or where this money might come from, or Can we manage both? Can we effectively use both instead of starting with one?

I believe we can always use both, and this is, you know, a new strategy for the town in terms of a sort of dedicated focus on grant writing and grant administration. What I'm sharing with the Council is I think before we talk about bringing more grants in, we need to make sure that we are in compliance and reporting for our existing grants. And so in terms of the position itself, It was recommended in the FY27 budget as one position with a focus on both writing and compliance to be able to develop our program in terms of an overall grant strategy for the town. Certainly as part of that work is evaluating what needs and future opportunities are out there and potentially looking at adding other staff. The decision wasn't made lightly in terms of adding one position over two. It was really based on looking at all the needs of the organization and affordability and being fiscally responsible, but also listening to council's priorities and your interest in wanting to look at more opportunities for leveraging revenue for the town. And so that's why it's recommended. If council wants to add another FTE for grants, both to do the writing and the compliance piece of it, we can certainly do that. And as I described earlier, I think bringing in some additional revenue with our interest rates revenue will be able to help cover that. That just means that looking at that two and a half cent tax rate is going to be even more important to make sure we're covering the other needs we have within the budget.

Okay. Would you repeat the part about the proposed 2.5 cents increase?

Are we getting ahead of ourselves? I don't think we need to talk about sources of revenue. We need to figure out what the needs are and then come back and talk about where we're going to get the money. So, I think we don't want to. We have a lot of issues, I think, to talk through, and some are revenue generating and cost saving. We need to proceed through this informal, structured thing we've set up, and then we can talk about the tax rate at the end. We don't need to begin to talk about the tax rate. We'll come to see what our needs are, and then we can figure out if we need to do a tax increase

Okay, so unlike the public art where we pretty quickly agreed on the $50,000 limit, we're going to leave this one kind of open as opposed to giving direct guidance right now.

Yeah, because my quick question, and I know we can move on from this, one comment I will make, I don't think that this is one job, and I do think that if we did decide to go this route, we probably could save ourselves money by splitting this job if If the primary focus of this job is that we need compliance, we're getting grants in to have complicated reporting structures, we need somebody there to be able to fill that compliance gap, I would suggest us taking this position a step down. I don't know what that would look like if y'all have seen what a compliance specialist or somebody would be, and we market for that. I don't think we would market for a grant administrator that would write grants and do the compliance because I don't think that position would do both well. So my suggestion would be is look at this position as a sole compliance position, and then we probably could save ourselves some money on the position itself.

Okay, good observations. I think the last observation I heard from Mr. Dellinger was maybe kind of hold this one open as we continue other discussions.

Yeah, see what our fellow rest of the council, if they have any thoughts.

Yeah, did you want to comment on the grants situation again? Okay. Well, let's kind of keep that one open.

Mayor Gupton, based upon what Councilman Stallings said, can I get a response from the staff to see what their thoughts are about what was discussed here, reference Mr. Stallings' statement?

Regarding the two positions compared to one, or the reclassification?

Reclassification.

So I don't have a whole lot to be able to share. I'd have to look into that. The position as recommended really was a higher level position because the focus was going to be on not only finding grants, but submitting grants, working with our departments, and that higher level experience in terms of compliance and reporting. What we don't want to happen is bring more grants into the town and not have a way to report in compliance because then that falls back on the finance team. on the legal team, and that's just increasing workload and not providing the resources to do the job effectively. And so part of the reason for the recommendation was understanding that operational need, but also hearing council's interest in wanting to leverage those dollars and look at bringing in more grant dollars, earmark dollars for projects and services. and being able to balance both those needs and interests as we look at this as a strategy for increasing revenue for the overall budget.

Okay, thank you for the explanation. Mr. Mayor, back to you.

Could Mr. Stallings repeat what his recommendation is?

My recommendation was to reclassify. As Manager Miller has stated, this is a higher-level position at the grant administrator level. If we're looking for sole compliance, we can hire somebody at a lower step that will be solely focused on compliance and save us some money on the position.

And then hire the grant seeker later. Later. Yes. Later. Okay. Well, again, that's kind of in line with I think what Manager Miller said. Let's get started with our first full-time grant oriented.

My point is we shouldn't hire somebody to do both. So if we're hiring somebody to do one job, we should hire somebody at a lower step. So there should be a compliance specialist or whatever along those lines of the reclassification is. It will be less money than hiring a grant. Yes, yes.

And I would just add for clarification, I don't know without doing more research and talking with HR what the classification for more of a compliance reporting position would be. And so I just want to make sure it's clear. I don't know if it would be less or not. We just need to do some more research on that.

And I'd like to remind us that this is a good example, great discussion, important decision. But our mission today is to give the guidance to staff on three key items. so they can draft the ordinance. We need to do that today. We have opportunities next week, next month, next quarter to re-examine, adjust, make adjustments. This is not the only time of year that we can add a person. And if they don't start on July 1st, that's not a whole year's salary. And they're not going to be starting July 1st anyway. So there's ways to step into it. I'm just trying to figure procedurally, how do we do this? Are we talking about... 9 FTEs or are we talking about 10 FTEs? Do we want to go now and give that directive and then work the rest of this stuff around it or get a little more feel of where we are, what's important, how important is the preserving home, how important are these other projects and get a little feel. I think this is a good initial dialogue. I'm not sure if we're ready unless you're changing your recommendation to hire one now. I keep I think I'm hearing Mr. Dellinger say let's hire two full-time, but let's authorize, let's budget for two full-time positions.

If we're going this route, I would want two. But if we are saying we want one position that's solely focused on doing compliance because that's the primary need, I think we need to do more research to see if we can get a specialist in, somebody that's not at the administrator level.

We would certainly do that as we seek to add any new position. Again, our challenge is today we have to, one of the key questions we have to answer, the key direction we have to give to staff is how many full-time equivalents will we add at this time? How many are we authorizing?

Mr. Mayor, if I may comment, I hear what we're saying here, and if we approve this, I'll just say full-time administrator, the duties can be tweaked, I understand, but for the sake of budget, if we approve give staff direction to move forward with the administrator and to move the process along, give them approval for that one position. And then we can, they can get what HR, tweak this position where it's what you're talking about. Would that be something satisfactory? I'm just, I'm throwing a feeler out here. Yeah, that would be satisfactory. Okay. Okay.

Again, thank you. Good discussion. And I'm glad we have the right slide up here because these are our three items. And we started out with some ideas of different expenditures and different allocations. We quickly got to the full-time equivalent count. Again, there was talk of nine. There was talk of ten. And at the end of the day, end of today, we have to tell staff count on nine or count on ten or count on eight full-time equivalents to make this budget ordinance set up that will be approved next week.

Mr. Mayor, we don't have to do that today. Today is the 8th, and we have to approve the budget by June 30th. We have 22 days. We don't have to approve the budget next Tuesday. As a matter of fact, I don't think we will because I don't think we're going to be settled on that. We have until June the 30th to approve the budget. I've been here. We voted on the budget on the 28th and the 29th. So we've got plenty of time. As our clerk out there is nodding her head, we do not have to adopt the budget next week. Period. That's the law. We do not have to give them FTEs or the tax rate today. Especially if we're going to be out here an hour and a half, I don't think that's going to happen. So we're just talking. This is what I want to have this to talk. Wasted 15 or 20 minutes to begin with. We're here to talk about the budget and specific things. Okay? We don't have to answer these questions tonight. We're not bound by any law, bound to do it by June the 30th. Let's just get that clear and out here on the table. We're not forced to do anything tonight. We're here for discussion and... Ten FTEs, nine two FTEs. Who knows what we're going to do? But I don't think we're anywhere close to answering those questions.

Well, let's talk about that. We do have to decide what is our mission tonight.

I've got questions, specific questions I'd like to get answered first before I write any mission about inconsistencies I have found in the budget.

Well, I think it's very important that we decide, do we have to make, do we have to give direction, make decisions on these three key items tonight? And we were targeted to have this done by last week, but we wanted more discussion. We stretched it out a bit further. Let's hear from our attorney, please, on what steps we need to make and what are our deadlines for items A, B, and C, 1, 2, and 3. What do we need to do so that we're not in a mad scramble on January 29th, hoping we're ready to have a budget approved? I don't know what's happened in the past. It's been June 29th, right? Yeah. Yes.

So Councilman Singleton is correct that municipalities have to have a adopt a balanced budget by June 30th, basically before the new fiscal year starts on July 1st. Unlike the federal and state governments, we're constrained on what we can do going forward. So if we do not have a balanced budget, there are limited expenditures. We don't have a complete shutdown of the government. We have we can provide some essential services, but we will have to, as it gets closer to June 30th, do an analysis of what we can lawfully spend on without a balanced budget. This may put in jeopardy July 3rd, because that's not an essential service. We can still pay employees, but the legal department would have to go through an analysis of all of our existing contracts to give you that risk analysis of what can... what we can lawfully do expenditures on during the time that we don't have a budget, and then you'll have to make those choices until such time as you can adopt a balanced budget for this upcoming fiscal year.

Okay, so what steps do we have to go through to pass a balanced budget by June 30th?

So the manager of the budget team, they need direction on creating the budget ordinance, and the budget ordinance is the vehicle by which you adopt a balanced budget. So these three, the tax rate, the FTE count, the fee schedule, and then overall what revenues and expenditures are, those are the critical elements that go into the budget ordinance.

And when does staff need to have direction from council on these three items, tax rate, the total FTE count, and the fee schedule? in order to, even if we put off our decision, the approval, until June the 30th, which is a scheduled work session, if we put off, if we delay passing this budget until June 30th, what is the next deadline before that? What do you need in order to pull together the ordinance that we will vote on on the 30th, if that's the case?

I can't speak for the manager, the manager and the budget team have to put together the ordinance for your consideration and adoption. So there's not a legal deadline in between now and the 30th, but I would not recommend waiting until the 30th without some clear direction, because if for some reason it doesn't get adopted on the 30th, there are significant ramifications to what the town can do in July. until such time as you can meet and adopt a balanced budget.

Do we have to publish our proposed ordinance before the 30th?

You don't have to publish it any more than putting it in an agenda packet for that. However, there are also issues with Wake County. I don't know how, when Wake County needs to know what the tax rate is to be able to put out the tax bills. So we would have to check on that particular deadline.

I would also add that there's a process where staff then needs to upload into the system and make sure everything is ready to move forward with an adoptive budget as well. So, you know, that usually is a week to two week time frame that we need in order to close out books and make sure we're ready for July 1. And that happens on the operational side. So just let council know that.

Yeah, what I'm looking for is what steps does council need to make by what dates to do this in an orderly, non-panic position? You had an input.

Yeah, I think, you know, with every budget, and this has been in past budgets, and I think the work has been done over the past several weeks, it's iterative. And we're providing more and more direction to staff on very specific things that they can then check off the boxes on. And I think where we're at now is continuing to check some of those boxes off. They need that information as soon as possible because that's going to influence where money has to move and the budget. So I think we're, I mean, to Mr. Singleton's point, we do have time, but I think the most productive use of this time here is to continue to cycle through some of these outstanding issues, provide as much direction on as many as we can tonight. And staff can report back to us on what they still need direction on. And we continue to iterate until we're narrowing that list of unsure items, whether it be the tax rate itself or positions. So, I mean, we're making progress. But to Mr. Singleton's point, I don't think we're going to answer all the questions tonight, even though we can make progress on them. I think these schedules, again, one that on its face, we could probably be like, yeah, that looks good. But if it looks like we need to raise a little revenue somewhere, we may come back to it and say, maybe we need to raise some fees somewhere. So I think we're on the right track, but I think it is an expectation setting on the timeline where we still need to be aggressive, but at the same time be realistic on what finality we can provide to staff today, but then also over the next week. But again, I applaud staff's engagement and council's engagement in providing direction on items to date.

Mr. Mayor, I would agree with what Councilman Dillon said. We are checking some things off here as we're moving forward. I don't know if there's a grand way you can do it all, but we're making progress, which is good, and we're on the subject of FTEs. I guess my question is, is this the only FTE position there's any question of where that block can be checked, if you follow what I'm saying?

I think that some of the operations, and I think Mr. Singleton may have some questions on the operations. I think there are some conversation on executive assistant, and I think the crime center conversation is yet to have. So I think those are on our list. We may resolve most of those today. I think that'd probably be a good focus point, but I'm not, council's going to council. Whatever council wants to bring up, we can. So I think continuing to go through this process of questions and answers and talking it out is helpful.

So are we gonna stay on FTEs? Well, I think if we wanted to... That's one of the biggies. So if we're on FTEs, maybe we should stay focused on that. And whatever questions anybody's got, now would be the time to do it. I'm just making an observation. Sounds like a logical approach to me. That'll give them some guidance on that one issue.

That's making sense. Again, my concern I look back to our original budget, our Garner budget calendar and plan that we started back in January. We did things in February, March, in May. We had a full-day session. And this seemed to say that we were targeting adoption of the budget ordinance for June 2nd, which was last week. We put it off to approve the budget ordinance until June 16th. And now I'm hearing we don't have to do it until the 30th. I'm confused.

I think those were targets, targets that the staff was gunning for at that particular time. And as time progressed, we are at that point where we evolved to the point where we're at these three points now. Because that was a question I asked early on as well. Those were target states, but not actual dates that will hold firm with things that may change like we're doing right now.

And would you repeat that again?

Give me the days that you're looking at now with the dates are established to give us a timeline of schedule as to shoot for and to be prepared to do if we're able to meet the requirements of the budget, the budget process. It gives us targets and those targets were ambitious and we will hear now at this point of. Evolving to look at the the various things we need for the ordinance. I think we're closer than what we think. We just got to continue with the process. That was a target date, but now we're just evolving the process and working things out, fine-tuning things. We're closer than what we think here. I believe so. That's my opinion.

Okay, so somebody on the council here, tell me what target date we should have for what task to be complete.

Why don't we get some questions answered first, and then we can work on that. Yes, sir. Before June the 30th, we'll have it done.

I don't like June 30th.

I said before June the 30th. Chances are within the next two weeks, we'll have it done. And we'll do the 16th. It might be the 22nd or 23rd. But I suspect that's where we'll get.

Yes, sir.

We're losing total focus here. We've been asked about a two and a half cent tax increase. And I don't really think, even though at the budget session, some people said they would do a three cent tax increase. I don't really think there's a stomach to do two and a half or two. So we need to focus on that. I asked the staff to cut a million dollars. They've cut $322,000. I've asked the staff to cut 1% of the budget. 1%. We've got people around here who are suffering gas doubled in price. And I asked the staff to cut 1%. You couldn't even cut 1%. 1% is what I asked. We're talking about 1%. We need to get serious about Diegum tax rate and quit worrying and lollygagging them out of date and talk stuff. I got operating expenses here I ask about. Specifically, I go ahead and bring it up. I ask about the Yergin Park operating expenses on page 72, $455,998, which funds two FTEs. I ask for a line item budget, and I got it. The problem is the two FTEs aren't in here. It says this request funds two FTEs. I got it for 27 to 28 and the FTEs are not in the line item. Somebody tell me where they're at. That's a big issue, Mr. Mayor, because it's two FTEs which aren't on the line by line item because we don't get that detail unless we ask for it. That's a concern. I'll be a concern to you.

So the two FTEs were actually included as part of the base budget. That was part of what was on page 72. It says that funding of 1.8 was also built into the FY27 base to include costs associated with 12 FTEs. So the request funds the two FTE operations to support additional equipment. So those FTEs were already included in the budget. The 455-988 is for the additional equipment. and some ongoing operating costs.

That's not what it says. It's very misleading. And I go back to Manager Miller's response, and she repeats what I just said. It says the FTEs to be added in FY27 complete the number of crews. The funding of the two positions was included in 27 as in planned alignment with the parking opening in fall 26. It says, and this is all under the Oregon operating impacts. So your operating impacts says the two FTEs are included in that. It says it in both documents. But something's not correct. It says in the base budget. Where is it?

The FTEs, so we can clarify that language, but the 455 covers equipment and ongoing maintenance. The 1.8 was built into the FY27 budget based upon approvals from last year, which included the two FTEs that were approved as part of a phased approach. If we need to rephrase that, we can certainly do that. But what is included is $455,988 for operating and equipment. Two FTEs along with additional annualized costs and other operating equipment, including revenues, were built into the base budget.

I have questions about that, too. So if it's built into last year's budget, why is it in this year's budget? I mean, this is where there's a fundamental approach change we're going to have to take with our budget next year because it is not analytical with regards to the previous year's budget and whether we budgeted accurately or appropriately. I won't say accurately. You always budget accurately because my understanding was on that half cent that's being asked for, there are Juergen operating impacts of $229,489 that were position based. And then there was an additional under operating increases with 226,500 that were equipment based. Is that correct? And that's where I'm lost because it's split and now I'm not understanding the language of it was included in the base budget for this budget in last year's budget. That's not how we budget things.

Let me give some clarity on all this in terms of the budgeting approach and how you look at budgeting for operations that fall over two fiscal years. And so when the town decided to put a bond referendum out for Yergin Park, We knew that the bond referendum itself would pay for the capital project. It's paying for all the design, all the construction, everything that you see happening. What we decided to do in terms of that project was to be proactive in terms of making sure we planned appropriately in the operating budget for the staffing and the maintenance that needs to have to run a signature park that's being designed. In terms of doing that, looking at the operations, you need to look at the operations in terms of the fiscal year. When is the park going to come online? When do you need the staff and equipment? And how do you manage that over multiple fiscal years, knowing that a significant project like Juergen Park is not going to happen within one year. It's going to happen within multiple years. So in terms of the overall project, both the capital side of it, but also the staffing and the maintenance part of it, It was programmed in terms of multiple years. And so that's what you see in your budget. We talked last year in terms of what staffing needs to happen in FY26, knowing that we're opening in FY27 to make sure we're ready and prepared when the contractor turns the park over to us. How do we align those needs and budget appropriately within enough time within the budget so that it meets the needs, but it's not over budgeting for positions that we don't need yet, but then sets aside additional dollars and positions that we know once that park is open, we're going to need to maintain it. So the two positions that we're talking about are for public works, and that is for the maintenance and overall use, the things that we're going to have to do to help maintain that park. And it was done strategically as a way that it looks at us being fiscally responsible in terms of when is the need for these resources and how do we apply them appropriately to the fiscal years to minimize impacts from one fiscal year to the next. So when we talk about these two positions, yes, we knew we were going to need them, but we knew we were going to need them in FY27 because of the opening of park in FY27. That's why they were included in terms of what we need, what Public Works needs in order to maintain that park. If there needs to be additional clarification on that, Mr. Singleton, happy to provide that to you. But that's been the discussion and the work that we've had for several years in terms of what do we need to do to plan and program for Juergen Park opening.

Well, my follow-up question is on 72, it talks about funding $1.8 million. It was built into the 27 base budget to include annual ask cost, et cetera, et cetera. Then on page 160, it says $1.5 million.

You're looking at 172, you said, and then what other page?

I'm looking at 72 and then page 160. One says 1.8 million and one says 1.5 million. 160 is the second item.

I'll let Ms. Warren speak to that. So the 1.5 is for public works only. The 1.8 includes the annualized cost for public works and parks.

So the five FTEs for public, excuse me, for parks and rec is $300,000.

A $300,000 difference. I'd have to go back and verify how that's broken out, but if my memory serves me well, it's approximately that amount of money. It's one park manager and three recreation specialists.

Let me interject here as we approach the time for scheduled recess that we've come by. These are very important questions. These are all critical issues. but I'm not sure this is the best place to resolve these. These seem like detailed one-on-one or two-on-two conversations of working through this to gain some understanding. I think council's mission here is to chart the larger progress, never losing sight of every penny and every dollar. But I think council's mission is to paint the directions, paint the big limits. And our very specific assignment is to come up with a tax rate A total FTE count and a fee schedule, whether we have to do it tonight or a week from tonight or on June the 29th, I don't know. I've gotten conflicting messages. We were shooting for June 2nd to have this done. Now we're shooting for June 16th for the budget adoption. Now I'm told maybe we don't need to adopt it until the 30th. Very, very confusing to me. That being said, let's take a 10-minute recess, come back in at 6 o'clock. and figure out how to continue a productive conversation and what we might be able to handle in smaller groups. It's all important. It's all legitimate questions. But we seem to be running in circles. Recess, come back at 6 o'clock.

But the state law also says all budget discussions are to be public, not a one-on-one or two-on-two meeting. For towns.

Decision-making.

All budget discussions.

Who was the last one to get ready for this? Oh, it was me. Sorry. Y'all were all prompt. When do we start back, Kyle? We're live recorded. Thank you. Thank you for taking your time there and helping us regroup and get back on track here. Everybody takes their seats. Coming back We do need a little clarity on when we really must give this direction to town staff to avoid last-minute change. We may be able to get by with June 23rd. If we have to have another meeting between now and then, we do want to give this full attention. I think we were able to clarify. Ms. Jones, let me know if I'm saying this wrong, that council members can have small group discussions about the budget with staff or with one-on-one with each other, where they're not taking action, they're having discussions, they're learning and clarifying. Ms. Jones, am I correct?

That is correct. Council may not have a closed session to discuss the budget. Individual council members can have discussions on their own, but council as a body cannot discuss take action, or discuss the budget except in open session.

And the rules and the laws have changed over the years, and there may have been a time when they were not allowed to have as much communication as now. But I want to encourage every council member, feel free to contact your town manager, your assistant town managers, who will direct you to the appropriate staff member to help answer detailed questions to learn about this or that, find out where does this FTE equal this FTE, questions that you have. Those are legitimate and logical and very desirable questions that we want to ask and get full answers to. However, it probably doesn't take all six of the council members hearing that conversation. If one of the council members comes back and is in agreement with one or two of the key staff people, I think we're going to trust that outcome and have confidence in that. We don't need to see every decimal point. I'm glad we have people who can see decimal points. I'm glad that we have people who take it very seriously. However, I don't. It's not going to be necessary for all six of us to sit down with every single conversation. We need to keep moving ahead. That being said, we were making some good progress initially talking about where do we cut, where do we add. We talked about reducing the public art. We talked about... one or two positions on the grant-related. That's still up in the air. We're talking. And if we're taking the pressure off tonight that we have to come up with a tax rate and the FTE count, that gives us a little breathing room so we might can get out here before 10 o'clock tonight or earlier. And so let's keep some more of the little open discussion going if we can. We had good discussion on public art, good discussion on the grant position. Mr. Singleton was next to come up with an idea. He mentioned a preserving home. That has a lot of support, a lot of interest. Would you like to expand on the preserving home program, how it could work, how we could find some more money to invest in that particular program?

I just brought up the peers that were unanimous in cutting the public art from 100 to 50 and applying that to preserving homes and then looking at traffic calming and reducing that by 50 to add 100 because of the needs. They have a list. They came to us and asked for more money. We gave them more money. And I'm sure that the list will continue to grow as you have people in their homes who want to stay in their homes. And this is part of our housing affordability that we talked about. So older people, and look, they're already getting a tax increase from Wake County. And they may get something from the town of Garner. So not only will their taxes go up, their homeowners insurance can go up. So, you know, the value is not going to be assessed this year, but the Property Act, their homeowners insurance will go up. It affects it. And then if they have an assessment next year, who knows what the legislature is going to have, it will be an impact. So we want to try to help people stay in their home. I think all of us agree with that. I don't think there's any disagreement with that.

And that money stays in Garner, which is an important thing.

Yeah. Oh, I couldn't agree more, Mr. Singleton, that preserving home is the greatest thing. It multiplies our resources that we invest in it. $200,000 is well spent. The only question is, where do we take it from? We found 50 over there. I'm not sure about letting up on the traffic calming. I hear a lot of citizens say, please calm the traffic in my neighborhood. So I'm not sure where it comes from. But it's a good discussion. Mr. Matthews, would you like to make a comment on the preserving home program?

I'm all in on that. And I think that's money well spent. As we said, it stays in Garner. and it is part of the affordable housing program where we have our seniors stay in their houses, not have to leave, and the bottom line is the same because it's a home for somebody that they couldn't sell and go buy another one. They can stay right there and make it livable for them. That's a win-win deal. That's a home for somebody.

Right. Mr. Vance, comments on progression?

I agree with the assessment and the recommendation, plus the preserving homes use that money to leverage more dollars to be used right here in Gardner. So I'm in agreement with that recommendation.

Thank you. Mr. Dallinger.

I mean, in general agreement, I also think that we need, this may be a place for our new newly formed or forming affordable housing advisory committee, but have some level of Oversight of reporting, get reported to. I think as we flesh that committee out, I think anytime we're giving money to a partner, and it's a good partner that's actually proactively leveraging our funds, it may be a good introductory type of activity we have around affordable housing for that committee to get familiar with.

also sort of get maybe the semi how often do we get reports from them is it just annually or um we will get them at no less than annually but we usually get them uh bi-annually because we've been spending their their dollars um twice a year and they give us a reporting of the first half of the funding so we've been doing uh twice a year currently yeah i think that the cadence of that is important in in kind of um

that reporting cadence and need. I think any time we're sort of setting a regular amount aside, we want to make sure that regular amount is meeting the need, or if the need's not there, maybe it needs to be reappropriated in another way. But I'm fine with adding some funding to that program, again, with just some additional reporting frequency and updates and evaluation on behalf of the town.

Mr. Stallings, comments?

I'm supportive of the reallocation.

Yeah, I believe everybody loves preserving home and keeping our folks in their homes. That's for sure. That's where we're going to get a little feedback. Ms. Miller, would you have some input?

Yes, just for clarity. So I'm hearing consensus on increasing for preserving home from 100,000 to 200,000. 50,000 would come from a reduction in our public art program. And are we also talking about reducing traffic calming with $50,000, or is that still under discussion?

That sounds a little premature. I'm not ready to give up on traffic calming yet.

Okay, so there's an interest in doing $200,000, and we need to find $50,000 in order to do that.

I think right now it's at $150,000. Is that $150,000?

I was hearing $200,000, but is it $150,000? Is that? That's why I want to make sure I'm clear on that.

I think currently before we have the traffic, I think those are two separate things.

Is that the consensus of council? We're at 150?

Preserving homes.

It was a little confusing because I think it was a 75,000 thing and then a 50,000 and it kind of overlapped.

We budgeted $100,000 for FY26 a few months ago. At Council's request, we checked in with Preserving Home. They said they could spend another $75,000 based on the Garner homes on the waiting list. Council approved a budget amendment for $75,000, which is provided in this fiscal year. And what was recommended in the FY27 budget is $100,000 for Preserving Home, specifically to be able to repair and help maintain Garner homes.

And I think what I've heard Council say is we hope that we can find a way to put $200,000 toward preserving homes for fiscal year 27.

But I'm hearing it's only $150,000, according to Mr. Stallings.

Currently, right. I just want to separate the traffic. I think we're talking about traffic comment, and we're talking about the $50,000 that we took from public art at the same time. So right now, if we're talking about reallocating the $50,000, as we've talked about without the traffic comment, the conversation would be $150,000 towards preserving homes right now before we had the traffic.

So we're saying 150, progressive.

150 now, yes.

We've got the traffic coming. Thank you, thank you. Can't find another 50 that we've got.

I'll make it real simple. 175 for traffic coming, 175 for proper serving order. There you go. Bang, you're done.

Say that again.

175 for each. 25 for traffic coming, added it in there, you've got 175.

From traffic common, how much how much is allocated?

200,000 has been in 200,000 for traffic common has been allocated annually. We started doing that in FY this current fiscal year in order to address traffic calming.

I do want to note that 200 or 100 of the 200 is actually paid for by bond funds. 100 is cash, so only $100,000 would be able available to reallocate outside of. the transportation bond program.

For traffic. Yeah, so it's kind of earmarked for that. But I think we're getting the idea of general ideas.

What it may be helpful, if council wants to do $200,000 for preserving home, just give us the direction, and then staff can look at where we can best do that, if that's a direction that council would like to go.

And you're saying leaving the traffic calming piece separate and focusing on funding.

I'm not hearing consensus among council members on that piece of it, so we would look at potentially other places to cut or reallocate.

Yes, we're saying we would like to see us invest $200,000 with preserving homes, and we'll leave up to staff to find the best place. And maybe in our continuing discussions that we identify other ideas of reducing some expenses. Mr. Dellinger.

Yeah. And just for like clarity, I mean, I don't think we need consensus on everything, but we do need a majority. So I think that's the direction that we need to take from council. I appreciate the consensus, but sometimes it's not there. My sort of feeling on the traffic calming was just making sure it's not going to be disruptive to the amount of need that is out there. And there's been outlined to be out there. I think that there are sort of efficiencies that have been built into the resurfacing stuff, but there are also traffic calming measures that probably fall outside of that, that are probably more expensive. And so I kind of wanted just public, any kind of public feedback from staff on traffic calming and where it stands as regards to funding versus actual need over the next year or two.

I'll ask Ms. Harrison. Yes, thank you.

Good evening. Feels weird to be in the middle. Okay, so traffic calming. You are right. There are different levels of traffic calming that we can do. So I will say until this past fiscal year, we did not have dedicated funding for traffic calming. So at this point, anything that we have feels like we're able to do something. Okay. I think when we start having less funding, what it impacts is those potential larger projects. So most of the projects that we've been doing are relatively low cost. That's usually our first goal. If we can add a stop sign or slightly higher costs and speed tables, those are not very high cost items. We do have some streets, like a good example is Lakeside that has sort of a chronic speeding issue because it's so wide. And we've talked a lot about using that as a location where we could do something different, a larger project for traffic calming. And so that would take us accumulating some of that annual funding into a larger bucket to be able to do a bigger project. But in general, I would say traffic calming is a very scalable program. We are able to look at more low cost options when we need to and having more funding gives us more variety. But we have been able to stretch those dollars pretty well.

And I guess I think also keeping the priority of keeping, I know we have a program and a process for requesting and this kind of thing. I just want to make sure there's enough funding there to sort of meet the different geographic parts of Garner that may be asking for them. And even if it's not lakeside, it's, you know, raised tables. I think the demo that you did during the mock council meeting, like those being relatively impactful, but also low cost. Right. So I just want to make sure we're not cutting off those impactful low cost projects. And if we're missing out a couple of big ticket different. Funding, but also less impactful that we're not doing that.

We are going in the right direction for helping the most people is that kind of yeah, I think with you know that with the 100 to $150,000 annual range. We would be able to keep up with the demand for those smaller projects. The Arbor Green area is the next one. I think you know, something that is not specifically budget related, but really goes along with this is where we're doing a lot of work on our program itself. Um, and a lot of that is to go to what you said about, um, making sure that we're doing these equitably. And, um, you know, we've found that some of the sort of hoops that you have to jump through to get to the point of getting traffic calming in your neighborhood could maybe be prohibitive to some neighborhoods more than others. So fortunately, we also added an engineering technician last fiscal year, and that is an employee who can focus on traffic calming. And so that has allowed us some capacity to make some of those process changes as well. So I appreciate whatever funding we can get for traffic calming. We can always use it, but I think we're in a good place also to use what we have along with the efficiencies we've created to keep it moving.

Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions?

The one example you had in the civics class, if those were implemented, did I hear the number like $39,000 or was I wrong? Maybe I heard something else.

That sounds reasonable. So that is the traffic calming for Arbor Green that we did at the mock council meeting, which was a real project, just a fake meeting. But that is a raised crosswalk similar to what we did on Fifth Avenue and then a series of speed tables along Verde Glen. And so generally, yeah, the raised crosswalk was between $10,000 and $20,000 with all the signage and striping and everything. Speed tables are a little bit less, around $10,000 usually.

And what was that cost figure again?

Around $20,000 for the raised crosswalk and then around $10,000, $9,000 to $10,000 per asphalt speed table, depending on width of the street and everything.

So a total cost of $30,000?

around $40,000 for the Arbor Green project.

Yeah, that's a very effective one, but it's not inexpensive. Yeah, people like traffic calming. They want to see the traffic calm down. So I think that's good input that we've gotten. Other questions from Ms. Anderson? Thank you. So again, we're building some direction without getting too specific on exactly where it's coming from. So far, we like preserving home. We like traffic calming. We're not looking to cut much there. I think it's kind of the feel. And I think we made a round there and everybody voiced some interest in their opinion on preserving home. If we're taking a little round robin, we still have a chance to hear from Mr. Matthews about what your topic of the hour might be. Would you like to suggest a topic?

A lot of people got more than I got. I will yield back to to you, Mr. Mayor. Let somebody else bring up a topic.

Well, the next one that is eligible to submit a topic for the item of the hour is Mr. Vance.

I'll yield to Mr. Dillinger.

You're okay where we are. Okay, Mr. Dillinger, back to you. Another good topic?

Yeah, I think we need to have some conversation about the crime center, the data center. It is happier funded, but I think we need more specificity on the details, one, of the plan for the outreach, of the timeline for the outreach, and then also in tandem with that, actually preceding that, is sort of more information that will be shared on the sharing of the data, what we have control over, what we don't, because I think that's of significant concern to folks once they start hearing about it. So, again, just to get more information on it,

be helpful happy to sir good evening everybody uh i'll answer that last one first we control our data um our all of all of all of our vendors allow us to control our own data nothing's released without our permission our express permission there are some access to some of our cameras that's granted to other municipalities uh per request mostly local municipalities, no federal municipalities, no federal entities. So we take that very seriously. That is our information and data, and we're entrusted with that. So to answer your question about the rollout, I think this being a half-year project is very valuable, and having that opportunity to plan for that and have a very robust opportunity for community engagement and public input through social media, through public forums. We certainly want people to feel a level of trust about all of our products. We've worked very hard to establish that trust. We have a very high approval rating, and that's something that we take seriously and we don't want to jeopardize. So we're certainly planning to do that.

Mr. Talon's comments, questions on the information center.

Thank you for sharing with us. I know we talked during the break about there's a level of misinformation going on in the community around there being a huge amount of flock cameras that will be installed if we put in the budget the real-time crime center. So I definitely do think there is some outreach to be done to let individuals know, no, this is just a centralized location in which a lot of information will be stored that will help the police department do what they need to do on a day-to-day basis because that is a common sentiment that if this is put in the budget, then there will be ample amounts of other flat cameras installed, which in reality, that's not the case.

That's correct, sir. This will not expand upon any of our camera systems. The Arctic is a great opportunity for us to establish even a higher level of oversight. This would have a supervisor dedicated to the center, along with other command staff members that would, of course, have oversight over the system. It really provides that added security to the products we already have that are right now a little bit siloed. One captain may be over our AOPR system. Another may be over our Axon system. So this is really creating a hub or a one-stop shop to have increased supervision and oversight and increased guardrails in the way this technology is used going forward. But there's no expansion on any of our flock cameras with this problem.

I'm generally supportive of the real-time crime center. And like I said, there's misinformation, but I don't think it's intentional. I think that people are, you know, Rightfully so, skeptical of growing technology and being surveilled and everything going around with third-party data sharing. So it's definitely great to hear that you control your data and there won't be any more flock cameras installed right now with the real-time crime center.

That's right, sir. And to expand on that, none of our systems are for surveillance unless there's somebody who's committed a crime or suspected of a crime. We have no interest and we wouldn't have time if we did to surveil the public generally. We have to focus on people who have committed crimes, and that's what these systems are for, as well as missing persons and things of the like. I'd like to point you to our statistics. We've recovered 87% of our missing person cases over the last four years with this technology. I wish I had an opportunity to bring every one of those family members here to talk about that, because those are things, along with the alerts on stolen vehicles and warrants and things of that nature, we would have no idea if we didn't have these systems. So, thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Singleton. Yes, Chief. This position, this crime, FTE is a crime analyst supervisor, so this moves forward, what does that mean in the future about additional crime analysts? I mean, we talked about at the budget meeting, this is not a 24-hour man or person meeting there all the time, but is that what may happen in the long term? There'll be additional people and the number of hours that somebody may be in there may increase for whatever staff you have, whether it's eight hours, 16 hours, 12 hours, whatever. Is that a long-term goal once this thing gets up and running?

It certainly is, sir. I think there's a room for tremendous growth to where we could potentially at some point staff it around the clock. Initially, we'll be staffing it during peak hours unless there's an event or something going on that we have a specific focus on. But we want to expand this over time as long as we do it the right way, keep people engaged, listen to our citizens and their thoughts on the subject, what council wants to do. But yes, there's definitely room for growth, and we'd like to, if possible, if all those things align, create even more opportunity for this to help our citizens.

Okay. I just was interested in what the long-term goal of this is.

Yes, sir. To expand it. Yes, sir.

Okay.

All right. Thank you.

Mr. Matthews.

We are growing. Growing comes good guys and bad guys. Back to the flux thing. A lot of people are misconstrued. All that does is a license tag reader. They don't take pictures of anybody. And if If you're a good guy, nothing happens. But if you're a bad guy, you're notified immediately. I know at the park, y'all caught a lot of bad guys. I'll just use that term generically. And a lot of other places with the flux cameras. And that's my understanding. And that's a great thing because the police car don't have to sit out at the park all day reading tags. The camera will alert if something comes through that you're looking for. And so, you know... Realistically, I think everybody would support the flux cameras for what the purpose of it is. It is a license tag reader only. And I've seen the numbers that you put out. You've caught a lot of bad people with those cameras, and they're not on the street anymore.

That's right, sir, and that's a great point. Just within the last week, we have some stats I can tell you about that aren't even reflected on what you see and the material that you have. But for one thing, For the last four years, we've had 719 alerts with 459 successes, so 64% success rate. And just in the last week, we've apprehended yesterday in one of our parks, we had an alert of a subject with six felony warrants for secret peeping. And we were able to safely apprehend that subject who was walking in our parks around families and children. and we're able to make that arrest and get that person taken into custody and keep our citizens safe. I'd also like to point you to the sheet, the data privacy one-pager that you have, and it talks about what's collected, license plate text, date, time, camera location, and basic vehicle attributes. What's not collected are names, addresses, phone numbers, driver identity, biometric identifiers, or other confidential personal information. So there's no collection of that data. Like you said, these are alerts that we get based on criminal activity or missing persons. That's what we're interested in.

Thank you for that clarification. You hear a lot about it.

Yes, sir.

You've sat through the meetings, but thank you for clarifying.

And we have to do a better job of having that transparency and clarity and showing people this is what we This is what it's about, and this is what it's doing. These are our successes. I'm willing to talk to anybody who wants to talk about it and sit down, but we need to have a public forum. We need to push out more information on social media, and we'll do that before our implementation with the half year.

Yes, sir. If I may, if I'm supportive, like any citizen who's concerned, and that concern is typically cleared up by communications and by having an outreach and You have your barbershop sessions. We can have those conversations with the community to let them know what's going on and to gain that trust. And I'm also all for guardrails as well because we want to make sure that we have everything in place to protect ourselves internally as well from any misuse of any information. Not saying that it'll happen, but be prepared for it. But that's what I have to say on that.

I agree, sir. And we have to have those guardrails. When we lose that trust, It's almost impossible to get it back. So our plan is not to lose it. Thank you.

And really to echo Councilman Vance, when we're doing engaging the public to stare directly into those misuses and tell people how it has been misused in other places, this is how we will not misuse it here. So don't shy away because they're going to ask the question anyway, right? That's right. So just they will know, well, how is that not going to happen here? So. Agreed, sir.

Yeah, that's an excellent point. What will we do to prevent these that have happened to other places? Some of it, perhaps in other places, was the result of a vendor who was not as scrupulous or as exacting as we might be. At the end of the day, all these things are tools, and tools are only as good as the person who uses the tool, and that's the safeguard that we cannot forget here. No matter what information comes to your team, your team doesn't take it for granted. Your team double checks. Your team has a long history of being very cautious, very careful, and doing a good thorough job all the way through. So that is one of the built-in safeguards that we in Garner have. At the end of the day, it has to be a human being, a police officer who goes out and take action, and we have the best and the most community-oriented and the most cautious. So that's another good thing. Council, excuse me, Town Manager Miller, any other observations or comments?

I just want to thank Chief Adams and his team for putting together the information. Also working with our communications team on a strategy for informing and educating the community, our practices, our policies, the successes we've had, understanding the concerns and issues in the community. We want to make sure we're responsive and providing the right information, but we also want to make sure we have all the tools that we can possibly have so that we can keep our community safe. And so appreciate Chief Adams and his team for pulling the information together and willingness to work on the education piece of it as well.

Can I follow up with what Ms. Fiddle said? Talk about policies. And I remember when we got into body cams about 10 or 12 years ago. And that was when we were in the training center. That was before Town Hall was built. And we had a lot of discussion about policy and the policies and what other towns had done and some had made mistakes already and this, that, and the other. I think that's the policy being you need to let people know what the policy is. Of course, you've got to follow the policy.

That's right.

But the policy is the key. This is what Garner does. This is what we can do with body cams. This is what we can do with this. That's important because it took a couple of tweaking on the body cam policy. You remember. Did this, did that. But that's important. And people have gotten used to that. And it serves both sides. It serves law enforcement and it serves conservative citizens. any critical event that may have taken place. So that's getting it, addressing the policy and letting people know what the policy is going to be. And then policy guidelines are so important because that's what, you know, when body cams come out, people did not trust them. Now it's, well, how come they don't have one on?

That's right.

They get upset if there's an incident and there's no body cam. But I think that's important is to let people know what the guidelines are and work with communications and have some information sessions.

That's right, sir. We're going to follow state law. We're going to follow our policies. We're going to be transparent in showing people what our policies are. All our policies are posted online. And we want public input into what those policies are now and going forward.

Excellent. And it was an excellent suggestion, Mr. Dellinger, to talk about the real-time crime information center. Excellent. Thank you very much. There'll be more discussion, more information, education, more input all along. Thank you very much. Did you have a suggestion, Mr. Stallings? Mr. Singleton, did you have a suggestion for a topic of the hour?

Just not right this second, no, sir. Not right this second, Al. Okay.

I want you right back to the other end down there. We've got a roll going here.

Okay. Well, we've had a pretty good roll. Mr. Vance, any ideas?

We're getting them out there. That's the main thing.

Not this moment, sir.

Not at this moment. Not at this moment. Mr. Dellinger, I know you have a good list. Come on, give us another one.

I do. I do. No, actually, one of the things that I think we want to focus on is budget-related, but I think it's also more of a policy conversation, and I think there's some analysis that staff can do on the impacts of it, but I think looking at our capital a debt service 8.5 cents, and reexamining, getting us a one-pager on that, what the policies are that are governing that 8.5 cents. I think we had some conversation at the last meeting about reinvestment of the interest from that fund back into that fund, and also doing sort of a true-up at the end of the year. It was sort of a couple of things that were, I think, part of the revenue savings plan that maybe didn't get carried over not for any particular reason, they just didn't. But I think we need to kind of do some analysis on what the impact of those two things are, one on our actual debt capacity over time, and then the other being what impact does that have on the general fund and fund balance with regards to just the availability of fund balance, since that's been a revenue stream for fund balance. So I put those out there. Again, they're sort of related to the budget because they sort of will have, at least for me, a little bit of influence on the tax rate discussion for debt service because that really changes the model significantly over time. And also another thing that is not an overnight thing, but something I think we should really work on to be done by end of next year is having a separate CIP document. Similarly, we have a budget document to have just a full CIP document. I've seen other municipalities kind of have their own. Granted, some of them are larger than us, but I think it's good at capturing all those revenue flows, all those projects that are funded through bonds. And I think it becomes a dedicated exercise for our CIP. I want to say capital projects. I don't want to intermix the two. There's a CIP and capital projects. They're not necessarily the same thing. But our capital projects. And I think ultimately they do need to be the same thing. And so I think that conscious exercise of reducing them into an annual document would be helpful. I know we get the quarterly reports on it, but those are during council meetings. They're You can't go through every single capital project. Anyway, that's just a recommendation outside of budget. The attorney is probably going to say, I can't do that. It's budget related. That's all I have for you. I'll pass it on.

No, I'd like to double down on that. It is related. If it has to do with money, it has to do with the budget or vice versa. Those are important things. The council here, you have a very proactive council who wants to be involved, who wants to understand, who wants to make good decisions. And I still struggle with what is a one-time expenditure from this fund? What is the capital improvement fund? What is the savings account? What's the advantages? Mr. Dellinger has made the comment at a previous meeting, said maybe we should be putting two cents of tax revenue into the debt service fund, the long-term savings fund. It saves us so much money when we come up with a project, the more we have to pay as a down payment, the less we have to borrow for fire stations or boathouses or whatever. And also, the more money we have in reserve, it improves our financial status and reduces the rate we have to pay when we do borrow money. It's a win-win-win. So, are we in a position to save a half a cent, a whole cent, a cent and a half, two cents? We don't know, but it helps us to learn about this. And now that our attorney Jones has clarified that we are allowed to talk in small groups, small group discussions, we are able to sit down and learn about these things. And I would advocate Mr. Dellinger to spend a little one-on-one time or two-on-one time with any of the finance staff to help clarify exactly the issues you're talking about. Those are very important issues we all want to learn. I'm not sure that all of us want to learn quite to the depth that you might or quite to the depth of accuracy that Mr. Singleton.

You do.

You do. I do. All of us do. Yeah, it's really important stuff, and we want to cover it. And if you come back and another council member comes back and two staff members say, yes, we spent an hour or two going through this, and now we're all in agreement that this means this, and this is the priority. We're going to believe it. We don't have to hear it. We don't have to spend our two hours. So thank you for bringing that up. Very important. And this is a time to talk about it. Let's see. Do we have any other nominations for topic of the hour? Mr. Matthews.

Well, we dealt with two of these, and that was the FTEs, and I think we've clarified with the police department there, as well as the Grants administrator slash whatever, that left four other positions, the fire analyst, stormwater supervisor, executive assistant, paralegal. I guess my question is, I don't particularly have any questions on these other four positions, but as a subject to discuss, I'm wondering, does any other board members or is those four FTEs got a question or concern so we can either check this off the block and move on to another subject matter? This just happens to be right here in front of us, and that was a very important one everybody wanted to know about. And so my question is, does any board member have any questions or concerns about those other four positions?

And would you read those four positions? Yes, sir.

It's on page six here in case you need to see it in the handout. And those positions are fire analyst, stormwater supervisor, executive assistant, and paralegal. I don't have any questions on them, but I don't know if anybody else did. So we could have a topic of discussion, move this block on if everybody's satisfied.

Well, you've brought up a good topic related to FTEs. Let's run around and come back to Mr. Vance for any comments or questions related to one of our missions that we need to get done by June 30th at the latest, hopefully earlier, is to identify the number of FTEs we will be adding. And we've seen that list of nine. You've narrowed it down to a list of four or five.

There were four left that we hadn't talked about.

That we hadn't talked about. Would you care to weigh in on any of these recommended full-time positions?

No.

Okay. Mr. Dellinger?

Not at this time. I think I'll take your recommendation and have some conversation.

Okay. Okay. Mr. Dellinger, full-time equivalents? We talked about the grant. Is it one or two? I'm trying to figure some things out.

Yeah I'll re-clarify. I would love to see the grant administrator become a compliance whatever we decide to name it. We already talked about a real-time crime center. Already had a conversation with the attorney about the paralegal so I'm I'm supportive of the paralegal. I have no questions about the FTEs right now. I'm interested in a broader conversation about the budget in general but I'll pass on my time.

right now. Okay, on that topic. Mr. Singleton?

Not right now, no sir.

Okay, we've had a lot of good discussion. We've covered a lot of ground. If nothing else, we have learned, I've learned one thing, we can conceivably target June 23rd to get these detailed directions to staff and going to help us do an even better job of that Attorney Jones has clarified that we are allowed to have small group discussions about the budget. Obviously, council cannot take action in small groups. They cannot take action in closed sessions related to the budget. That's forbidden. But we can learn in small groups, and we can get additional information and come back and convey that, the condensed version, to council and to all the people present. so that we maintain transparency and openness. So that's a big takeaway so far.

Mayor, would you provide clarification on June 23rd? I'm not sure I'm clear on that date.

Okay. I'm not clear either. That's why I threw it out there to say. I'm going to go back to the town attorney and say, what target dates do we need to have? The council has to provide these definitive dates guidances and directive so that we can not have to be in here on June the 30th approving a budget. Just give us a little clarity on some target dates we should have for completing tasks.

Yes, there was a discussion amongst me, the mayor, and Councilman Singleton as if the If the budget's not going to be adopted at the regular meeting on the 16th, that we would perhaps need a special meeting in between the 16th and the 30th, and a suggestion was made that because there's an extra Tuesday in June, that it be June 23rd.

Is that helping?

Well, it sounds like if Council's not ready to adopt the budget on the 16th, it looks like the 23rd would be an option if Council wanted to call a special meeting. We would need, from a staff perspective, clear direction from Council on the three items we've talked about, the tax rates, the FTEs, as well as the fee schedule in order to prepare the budget ordinance for adoption.

My question is, what action does Council need to take by what date to get your job done? I'm still a little vague on that. I'd like to hear it addressed from any Council members. What is What can we do by the 16th? What could we reasonably expect to do by the 16th? What can we reasonably expect to get accomplished by the 23rd? I was hoping to do it all tonight, but, you know, to give you the clear directives. The mayor was more to it. So I'm taking your input. What are the target dates and what are the key items that we need to have done by those dates?

Mr. Mayor? I think some general conversation on, we've talked about some cuts, we've talked about positions, but I think also some additional guidance on the threshold for the tax increase or not, we should probably have so that we're properly gauging for staff what council is comfortable with or not comfortable with. I think that would be helpful.

Do we have a target date or do we have a target process? Can we have some small group discussions toward these things?

I mean, I think we maybe could, but I think having some going down the line and having some open discussion about comfort levels would be helpful and move that forward a little bit. Okay. Iteratively.

Tonight, you mean? Okay, okay. Well, hey, you started, you spit one out. Come on.

Just for me personally, and having looked at the budget, I think that I'm kind of at a one and a half maximum with a one cent to debt service. That could shift based on some more analysis, and either staff does or I do on these policy changes, but I'm not near the two and a half, and I can't really see doing two. That's kind of my first pass. Well, not first. After multiple passes, that's kind of where I'm landing on tolerance-wise.

Okay, thank you. This is what we're looking for, and let me just let you say it again. You're talking about a total tax rate increase of one and a half cents. At the most. Okay.

If I could go lower, I'll go lower, but I think that's about as much as I could justify based on my analysis so far.

Okay, and again, we debated until we decided all the things we want to do and then figure out what the tax rate takes to do that, or we set a tax rate that's attainable, and then go back and whittle down or add on appropriately. And Mr. Dillon, did you make a comment out of that one and a half? Did you specify an amount that you thought should go into the debt service slash saving part?

I did, and at this moment, and it could change, it'd be one cent.

One cent towards the savings. and a half cent toward the operations and FTEs. Okay, yeah, that's reasonable. That's what we're looking for is an idea of where we are. We might find out that we're all pretty unanimous on this, or we may find that we're miles apart. So that was a good topic for the hour. Mr. Stallings, would you weigh in on a tentative tax rate that we might be shooting at?

I'd say tentatively right now I would say one and a half cents. I wouldn't break it down for operational savings but I will say what I'm generally supportive of looking at this screen and it's the police real-time crime center whatever the grants position ends up being compliance position ends up being and a paralegal and then I'll just obviously the youth council and the civic academy but that's pretty much

Okay, good. That's what we're trying to do, just find out kind of where we are. You're not signing it in blood. You're not going to have to pay for this. We're just trying to get an idea. Mr. Singleton, your idea of the tax rate?

One cent, possibly one and a half, but one cent more of what I'm leaning on.

Okay, thank you. Very helpful. Mr. Matthews?

Well, we've got a lot on the platter here. As I mentioned earlier, we're growing. and we're growing, comes a lot of things we're going to have to need. So as we come up with these numbers, the lower it is, the less you're going to get. I don't like tax increases any more than anybody else, but we're asking a lot out of our town, our staff, our different departments to provide the resources we need to do it and the resources to operate these parks, emergency services, everything we need. and this is where the rubber meets the road is all I can say to my fellow council members. I'm okay with a two or two and a half, but that's just the way it is. It's a business call for me, and people are going to want all these things, and you can't, you ain't going to be able to do it on one cent. Let's go ahead and tell you that right now. You can wish all you want, but I'm fine with a two to two and a half. I'm in that window. That's just speaking for me.

Thank you. Yeah. Mr. Vance?

Well, I would say for the nine positions, I am in favor of the nine positions that are being presented to us and also with a tax rate of 2%. I'm there as well. I'm inclined to look at also the growth and providing the necessary revenue for the town to function and to keep up with what is currently happening within the town in the growth area. So yeah, 2% is how I want to go.

Okay, yeah, very thoughtful. That's what we're looking at, knowing that we can't do everything, but we have to prioritize. And we don't want to make the mistake that some other governmental entities, municipalities, and counties have made of raiding their savings account to get through this year. Poor old Benson down there, they had been under-collecting utility fees for several years and got kind of behind They pulled it out of their operating budget, and now they feel like they're on the edge of bankruptcy. We can't use our savings to get through. If we can't afford it, we can't buy it. We have to be paying close attention as we go. Does that address your question somewhat, Ms. Miller?

On the tax rate?

Yeah.

Well, it seems like we've got a range of between one cents and potentially two and a half. And so... think additional guidance is needed it sounds like we had several council members who were interested in one and a half cents a few council members who who would be open to above that but no more than two and a half cent and so further information and clarification needs to come in terms of council priorities for the budget at your budget work session We were asked to reallocate the $2.50 to kind of see where we could move some things around, maybe delay some things, look at timing for projects. That's what you have before you. We were able to address about $522,000 in order to keep it at $2.50 but move a half cent over to the debt service, looking at increased income from our interest, and then also looking at the timing of perform in reducing that next year as well as our capital IT as well. So if we went with two cents, we would need to cut another half cent off and figure out where are we going to cut from that or not do. And then if we went with a cent and a half, we need to come up with a penny where we reduce by at least one cent and where are we going to stop doing things or cut back on doing things or not do things for next fiscal year.

Yeah, that's the real question. What do we give up when we back it off from two and a half to two or from two to one and a half? And a large part of the recommended budget so far had been to put one cent or one and a half cent in savings, you know, in savings. Savings, you don't see the value of it today because you didn't get a new car or a new boat out of it. But five years from now, when you get a new house because of the money you saved, you're glad you just saved So we have, Mr. Dillinger, I think you were thoughtful when you said it is important. What percentage of that one and a half cents or whatever it is, how much of that is earmarked for savings? And then how much do we tighten the belt and not have traffic common devices or some of the other things that we wanted or a little less contribution to preserving homes? Are we willing to give up an FTE? I didn't hear much willingness to give up an FTE. Maybe we don't share as generously with some of our other partners, like Reserve and Home. Maybe we put more into our savings account to pay off for us later. These are the questions we have to resolve. And the more clear guidance you can give us, town manager and staff, at two and a half cents Increase. We've seen what we can do. What would we what would be the first to go if we go to 2 cents and it's either going to be savings or some other service? What if we squeeze it down to one and a half? What's the maximum savings we could get out of that? Or do we have to trade off an FTE or support of another community park? The more examples you can give us, the more clear you can make it, the more we can try to speak for the citizens. We're trying to channel what they want and what they can tolerate all at the same time. We want lots of things. We don't want to spend lots of money. You ever heard that? It happens a lot. Any other comments?

Yes, sir. This is a tough decision for all of us. That's granted. We've all been down this road. Most of us have before. It's tough. Somebody said, that's what you get paid the big bucks for. Well, there ain't no big bucks made on this position up here. We do it for our town and trying to do things right. But I think to give town council, and I would encourage my colleagues to, if you don't want to go to two and a half, if we went consistently with a two and just took that half off the savings on the item number three, that would be the simple half a cent to remove. That would make everything else pretty much stay like it is if I'm reading this thing correctly. If we went straight 2%, is that pretty close to correct assumption?

Yes, the reallocated two and a half cents was based on Council's discussion at your budget work session on the 15th. There was an interest in potentially looking at more for debt service in terms of building that future capacity for our capital projects. But certainly the recommended budget included only adding an additional cent to our debt service fund for capital projects and so. A way to reduce it down to at least a $0.02 increase would be just stick with the recommended budget approach to $0.01 increase to debt service for next year's budget.

That would be the simple thing to do if everybody can live with that. Everybody's got to speak for themselves. But if we go under that, we're going to give them a difficult task and something will have to go, like it or not. There's a cost to it. But by going straight 2%, I would encourage my colleagues to run that route. and just take that half a cent off that savings portion on item three. It's just clear cut and everything else would run forward as scheduled. That would be clear guidance, I'm thinking, for what they've got to do over here. So I think if we can give them clarity on that, that would be an excellent idea. But you've got to vote your conscience, but we've got to run a town at the same time.

Yeah, we're getting good feedback now, and I think we're approaching our closure here. I'll run... back this way just for any closing comments or observations. Let's start with Mr. Singleton.

I would still go back to cutting a million dollars. We're increasing the budget to $8 million. We need to cut a million dollars. I'm just pretending like it is. Our citizens have to cut. It's nice. We've got to do this and look after our staff and do this and that. We've got to look after our citizens. They're the bosses. We've got 46,000 plus people out there that we have to look after, too. And that's the bottom line, is that position, is that we represent them. And I'm standing by that. Cut a million dollars, and we've cut 322. That's where I'm standing. I'm sorry. They've got to cut. We've got to cut. They're already getting a tax increase from the county. We have to remember that.

Thank you. Good observations. Further observations. Mr. Stallings.

I think. I think what I'm struggling with and I think what's making this process difficult is when we say, what do we think the tax rate should be? And then we're presented in this format. There's certain things for different council members that they would want to be added and certain things that they would want to be subtracted. And I think it's hard to get a consensus of council or to see what the majority's vision on council is if we're not doing what we did tonight and going line by line, item by item, and hearing what each council member would want to see actually in whatever budget we end up with, whatever tax rate we end up with. Because if we have a wholesale approach and say, yeah, we're going to do two cents and this is going to be included, somebody may vote for it. They may not vote for it because of some of the things added. And I think that makes it very, very difficult for staff to do their jobs. I think it's our job to sit up here and hash this out as long as we need to hash this out. That's what we do get paid the big bucks for. But ultimately, everywhere I go, I have not heard a citizen yet that have said, I want a tax increase. What I have heard is they say, I'm getting two cent from Wake County and I'm about to get 2.5 from y'all. what can y'all do about this? And we're going through the budget process and we're up here and we need to figure out what we're going to do about it.

That's our job, isn't it? It is. Mr. Dellinger, comments, kind of closing remarks?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I've been on council long enough to, everybody knows I'm not afraid of a tax increase. I was going for 10 cent tax increase a year. I was getting reelected because that's what we needed to do to advance and propel and make up for what we hadn't done. We did I think 7.49 that year. And then we have reval and then doing another big tax increase the next year. So it's not about tax increases and not tax increases. I think where we are now is really to what Mr. Councilman Stallings is saying is really to make bigger decisions on the bigger budget, rent large. And understanding that we're not just making a decision on what new revenues are coming in. There's some process fundamental process changes we need to consider. And to be the best fiscal stewards, not to say we're not good fiscal stewards, but to be the best fiscal stewards we can be, there's some improvements and things we need to do. And so I think, you know, while I'm saying one and a half or one, and Mr. Matthews is making a good case down there for, you know, we do need to keep up with our growth. I think there's a unsureness for me on where are we going and what exactly do we need to do that relates to a tax decision this year. So I need to, for me, do some more work on, again, some of these policy changes that are going to have potential policy changes that may have impacts on how we're allocating our funds on the capital and operations side. But I think that this is the work we're elected to do. It is not glamorous. It is not, I mean, maybe fun to some people, but I'm sure it's not fun to staff to sit here all night and watch us go through this, but everyone needs to understand we take it seriously from, and not from, we just take it seriously in that it's about not just this budget, but four, five, six budgets to come. What are we handing off to the next, generation of Garner folks to the next council, to the next people who are going to be in your job when you retire, right? And I think we can, the last statement on that is the budget is part of the job. The other part of the job are adjustments we need to make on our land use decision making. That's the other part of the equation on this is being very, very laser-like focused on net revenue and maximizing net revenue per acre for what we are approving. And because what we put in the ground is going to be there for the next half century. And whoever's sitting in these seats in 10 years is going to reap the benefits or consequences of the decisions we make, which means our residents are going to reap those same benefits or consequences. So, it's a good time now to look really long and hard, line by line, process by process, and make, we have a few weeks to make a decision. We'll make a decision. But this was obviously some stuff that will spill over into the next fiscal year. So again, I respect my, all my council members feedback. We're going to pass a budget. We're going to pass something. But I think this is, the budget is part of the process. The land use is the other. And like staff also needs to take that to heart. I'll point to the planning department, which I think is doing a great job now. But even pushing harder on, I mean, I'm on a mayor's soapbox, but we don't have to go through every development phase that other communities went through. We have the ability to leapfrog some of that. We don't have to go through a phase of three-story apartment buildings to get to six-story apartment buildings. That's just it. We need to really think about do we ever want to look back at something we approved and say, hey, we could have gone a little bit better with that because that is a direct correlation to the budget, a direct correlation to the finances of the town, how we're shifting the tax burden from residents to commercial property. So again, I'm seeing things from there down to this and trying to connect those dots in a way that we're setting a budget this year It is a foundation for a way of thinking our budget next year, which then becomes one for the year after. So I say we have more discussion to have. The decisions we make are very important, and there's a gravity to them that goes beyond just getting a budget passed. So I'll leave it at that. I'll leave it at that.

Excellent comments. Thank you.

Yes, sir. I remember years ago when I first learned about the budget and being naive to a number of things, I'll be frank with you, and then looking at what was necessary to get the job done relative to the staff and to meet the needs of a growing municipality. And in talking with the staff, there are needs there to try to get things done. And there were staff who were doing a tremendous amount of work in different areas in order to get the job done. And having the conversations, I enjoy talking to everyone when it comes to trying to figure out the problem itself, to find out that they were really needing the support, needing the staff in order to achieve the goals that we were trying to achieve was imperative because we would be overworking folks in various positions. And that was coupled with the conversations that we had typically during our Triangle Community Coalition meetings and find out where the gap is there and just the issue of trying to get responses from the staff at that time. That was years ago. That was years ago. And to see how far the staff has come with the increases that we provided, which had gone to help to provide additional staff to take up that load and also to provide the necessary pay increases, which helped to hold on to key staff to make us a place of of where people want to come to work. So I can see where the benefits are working themselves out all the way around, slowly but surely, where the communications are much better because we have more staff, responsiveness is much, much better. And Mr. Dillon just said with the planning department, I've heard from even from the developers, responses are just coming much better now because of the ability to have the flexibility and filling positions that are needed in order to get those responses back and forth. there is a dividend in making that investment in the staff and also in the various other areas where funding is needed. So that is an area where I will say that we have been responsive and I respect the staff. I respect the staff, I respect my council as well because I'm learning from my council also as to the needs and what the community is saying because who talks to certain council members, may not talk to me, but yet still I can learn about the residents through them and to hear their concerns. I don't want to get taxed, but also I want the service to be there when you call. I want to be sponsored to be there. So there has to be a balance in that. And I believe that with our current tax rate that we have reduced and we're sensitive to the needs of our citizens and also what's going on around us and in our county and also in our country as a whole. So with that, I'm saying that the adjustments that we're making, and I go back to my original conversations when the mayor was talking about the schedules, that we're getting there. We are slowly but surely whittling it down. Obviously, we're doing much better than we have in the past, really, in trying to pull things together. It's frustrating, yes, I know. If I was a staff member, I want to know what we want right now clearly. Are we going to get there? I think we're much further than what we were. Uh, and with that, I will say that as in reference to the reallocation of the expenses, we are looking at 2.5 and, uh, and I know that whatever adjustments we make, uh, the staff will work with what we provide. They will do that and then try to accomplish those goals. Uh, so I will say that, uh, again, I will hold fast on the, uh, the FTEs and also, uh, I'm willing to look at the reduction in the debt front funds service, uh, as to how much that is that's yet, that's yet to be determined. And I'm still holding steady on a 2% increase and see how we can make that adjustment.

Well, thank you. We've had excellent input here. Excellent discussion. We focused a lot on expenditures and where do we want to spend it? Where can we cut back? How can we spend it more effectively? We didn't talk much about revenue. We know our single largest part, most predictable revenue is property tax. And we also know that we depend on what I'm going to call the financial fountains. These are primarily businesses who pay more property tax than it costs to serve them. Towns are not in the business to make money. We're a nonprofit business. But we want to do a lot of good things, whether it's parks, whether it's transportation, whether it's housing. We want to do these good things. Where do we get the revenue to do it? We get some grants. We get some partnerships. That's all good. But at the end of the day, it comes from our property tax. How do we increase our property tax? As Mr. Dellinger pointed out, it's not about the gross revenue, the revenue per acre. That's what developers use. All they want to know is, am I making $10 on every house? If they make $10 on every house, they're making $10. But they forget that it costs us more than $10 to service that house. We have to get more. We have to aim higher. We have to have more fountains than we do drains. We're not going to go tear down the old drains, the houses that use a little more than they give, but we have to stop adding more drains. We have to aim higher. We have to get businesses. We have to get higher-value properties that will actually be financial fountains as well. And my pledge over the next week is to sit down with each one of the council members for a one-on-one discussion on all of these things to help me understand where you're coming from, what questions should we all be asking the staff. And I'm also going to ask every council member, if you have a detailed question, a technical question, please talk to the staff. We just found out it's legal to do that. You can have a discussion with any staff member. And I don't think there's any staff member here who wouldn't be glad to sit down with any council member one or two at a time and give us a little tutorial, help us find submissive decimals. So please reach out and get your questions answered. And with that, that's about all I got to say. Let's kick it back to Ms. Miller.

So where are we in terms of sort of finishing up our conversation this evening? And it sounds like there's interest in having a special meeting on the 23rd to continue this discussion. What is the expectation of council in terms of your discussion on the 23rd?

Can I, my recommendation was that adoption be on the 23rd, because if we aren't able to adopt, then we have to get into adopting an interim appropriation resolution to govern any expenditures that would occur in July.

So with adoption on June 23rd, what is the expectation of council in terms of what other information is needed, further discussion? in order to get us to a place where we're able to prepare the budget ordinance and adopt it on the 23rd.

Okay. Who wants to answer?

I guess my question would be, what would be more helpful to you currently to proceed after tonight's conversation? I know we had a lot of conversation and we talked about a couple of different items and we throughout a variance of different tax rates. What would be more helpful?

So clear direction would be helpful in terms of if Council wants to see a two cent tax rate, then what would we look at cutting back on or not doing for next year? If Council wants to see one and a half, then what do we come back and say we're not doing or we're cutting back on for next year? So that we know in terms of How to look at the budget and prepare something that's going to meet council's expectations. We know how to prepare the budget. So having a sense as to where council is on the tax rate helps us then provide some options to council for how we get there in terms of what we would need to cut or not do.

Because I know, like, I'll start. I said 1.5. So 1.5 cents is where I would currently be. In terms of, and I'm the new guy on council, so in terms of the past, how has council went about in this situation determining is that something that we say we're at 1.5, we're at 1 cent, provide us options of what that looks like? For the individuals who have been on council for extended periods of time, what does that process look like? because I do think that we probably could give the manager a slight bit more guidance to prepare something for us.

In regards to what you're saying there, I'd hate to be in their shoes in the morning. We've done a lot tonight, and I'm looking at this rate. You can run all these numbers at one and a half. You can run them at two. You can run them at one. That could be weeks pulling all that data up, trying to give us something. That's why I'm I said what I did earlier, you know, if we tell them it's one and a half, they're going to start pulling, period. And I can read numbers and consensus here. That's why I tossed that two out and just eliminate that half on the backside there so everything would run forward. At least that would give them a good baseline to start working on. In that regard, it wouldn't be but one item. It was that half a cent. That's why I tossed that out. paying toward debt service or future debt service. If that one half went away, you got to even two and pretty much everything would move forward other than finite tweaking and what have you, which we will do. But at least that'll give them a start point that they can work with. I'd hate to be in their shoes tomorrow morning. Based on all the hard work we put in tonight, they still haven't got a real good guidance on what we need to do.

And I think that's what I'm trying to do right now is I think we should shoot for adoption on the 23rd. I don't think that needs to be a lingering question. I think that we all can have conversations around. We had a great conversation tonight about what we support. I do think that we probably should be more candid and I'm being realistic I could see a 1.5 cent tax increase for me. What do my other council members see so they can start preparing something so we can have more conversation as we get towards the 23rd date.

If I might, I think there just need to be more conversations because I think it's too reductionist to say, put it this way. We said, oh, we're going to do four cents. That doesn't preclude the exercise of cutting a million dollars out of the budget. And I think that's where we're, it's getting reduced. There's a reductionist approach to this that is sort of trying to figure and thread that needle. We can give the same direction to cut a million and still raise taxes for specific things, right? Those are two different exercises. And so I think we need more conversation around there's a conservatism, a fiscal conservatism that I think we need to implement because I think the statement's been made appropriately. We can have budget amendments throughout the year. We're not eliminating any of the money we have. We're not throwing it in the trash. We're just not allocating it. So there's a shift in the mentality, I think, between, I think, all of us and the staff that we need to adjust to because we all, it's a little uncertain. So I think that that's kind of where there's something different going on here than we've had normally had where we were pretty much behind every year on our revenue and taxes to keep up with the growth of the town. And so I think there are multiple conversations of we want to cut, we want to increase, we're increasing for this, we're cutting this because of X, Y, and Z. What does that mean for service delivery? If anything, what could be moved around? And that's a different type of conversation than historically we've had because I think you're right. Typically it's provide us three scenarios and we have needs all over the place. We will find a place to invest this money towards the growth of the town. But I think there are other conversations we're having now around fiscal conservatism and right-sizing our budget a little bit. And I think also there are some conversations, there are some sort of structural unsustainabilities in some of our projections that we need to also be talking about with staff. So I think there's a lot going on. It's not as clear cut as just I'm not saying you were trying to say it was clear-cut, but it's not just one direction. I think we're trying to do a couple of different things to have a couple of different approaches and outcomes to them. So, again, kind of figuring it out on the fly as he's talking about it.

Yeah, this is a little different. And I guess what Ms. Miller is asking in a way, not to get ahead of you, but could we possibly, could council possibly, by the 23rd, come back with answers to these three questions. The fee schedule, and I think we said we're all good with that. I think we're just that close to agreeing that it's nine FTEs. So that's two-thirds. If we can come back with confirmation on that next week, and then if we say we've just got to make this work at 1.5 cents or 1.75 cents or whatever it is, and give them the directive so that the following week, we can put the final approval on that and get this done before the last minute. Can we do our best to answer these three questions? We'll talk among ourselves. You can consult with staff. You can go through the details. We'll have small group discussions. We'll not make any decisions. We'll just learn and talk so that a week from tonight, we'll be able to come down and say pretty much, and if somebody mentioned it doesn't have to be unanimous, it has to be a majority.

So Mayor, if I could just provide a little clarity on process. So in order to adopt the budget ordinance on the 23rd, we would need to prepare the budget ordinance ahead of time. So we would need to go out the Thursday before with the agenda packet. So in order to prepare it appropriately, we would need to have answers to these particular three areas so that we could prepare that budget ordinance appropriately. As we've learned through the budget process, Because this is an ordinance, it's challenging to amend at the date of the meeting. You have to put it in writing. We have to be able to demonstrate that and show it to the community. It's not amended easily on the date of approval, and there's a process that we have to go through. So we would need to look at the timing if we're looking at approving on the 23rd. What does the timing then look like in terms of final guidance? And is there an expectation from council that you would discuss the budget again on June 16th? And if so, what items do you want to discuss that's going to provide the clarity that we need in order to prepare the budget ordinance for June 23rd?

Yes, so to say that in different words, we need to be able to give you answers to these three things that you've asked, these three items that you've asked for by next Tuesday. so that you can prepare the ordinance for approval on the 23rd, which would have to be a special meeting. But we can't come in on the 23rd and have this same two hours of discussion. We've got to come in to sign the paperwork, pretty much. Am I translating it or oversimplifying?

In order to approve the budget ordinance on the 23rd, we have to prepare the agenda item that has to go out ahead of time. If Council decides to amend the budget ordinance during the meeting on the 23rd, there is a process which requires that any amendments be included in writing. And so we would need to recess the meeting, work with Council members on that amendment, talk with Council members in terms of what the amendment would look like, and take votes on that amendment as proposed, as well as the budget.

I'm not sure I'm speaking for Council, but I don't want to have to go through amendments on the 23rd. I want us to be able... to come back together a week from tonight and say, here's the answer to the three directives you were looking for. Here's the tax rate that we believe the majority of us can go by and let's vote on. Here's the FTE count we believe the majority can go with. Let's vote on it or whatever we need to do. Or here's what we can all agree to vote on on the 16th so that you can get your ordinance ready for signature and final approval on the 23rd. not a bunch of last-minute amendments. We've been working on this long enough. We shouldn't have to go again. We have a week to do a lot of work between now and next week, and then it should be less work the following week. We can't keep talking. We've got to make decisions.

Right, and Ms. Miller needs to have it by the 18th at the latest so it can come out because that's the day the agenda is printed out. Next slide. Tuesday the 16th, eight days from today.

So we actually need it on Wednesday the 17th, because that's when we put the packets together. It's posted on Thursday.

So we have to make a decision on the 16th. We have to make a decision on the 16th.

Well, I would say we don't. Two things. One, these are sort of the standout items. Council adopts the budget at the departmental level. That's what we do. So there's actually another level of feedback that provided other than these three items. The other is we can get very close to a final budget. And I think if we ended up in that 23rd meeting and needed an amendment, the attorney, correct me if I'm wrong, the attorney does not want to make amendments or draft amendments in that meeting. We would not.

Amendments have to be in writing. So it would be ideal if there, staff can put together a budget ordinance. And then we have, unfortunately, we have a holiday on the 19th. We would have Monday and Tuesday to work up alternative ordinances if certain council members wanted to provide alternatives. But we also have to make sure that it balances the budget, which means that takes some amount of time to be done correctly.

Understood.

Let's shoot for next Tuesday. Let's see how much we can get together so that we could conceivably make the decision that doesn't have to be amended again within the next week. Don't forget, we got 12 months to make adjustments as we go. As we did this past year, this is not carved in stone. It's a starting point. It's a good place to go. Let's answer these three questions, and we will all sit down individually, sit down with the staff people that you want to get more details from, call each other, We can have discussions. We can't make decisions. We won't be getting together in groups that constitute a quorum, but we can talk about this and learn about this and help us be prepared to make our individual decisions on the 13th, which will turn in to being the council's decision. Let's shoot for the 13th. Let's have lots of facts finding and figuring in between now and then.

You mean 23rd for adoption?

Yeah, but the 23rd would be the final sign-off, but we'll be giving the clear, and I'm going to say probably final, direction next week. This is what we can do. Prepare the ordinance with this in mind. We're going to do our best not to have the last-minute amendments to it. like we did last year.

You said the 13th is a Saturday.

My bad.

That's why I'm trying to figure out exactly.

No, my bad. Next Tuesday, that'll be the 16th.

16th, okay.

Yes, 16th, yeah. My bad, 16th.

So, Mayor and Council, for clarity, we're working on and preparing the June 16th agenda. We'll be finalizing it on Wednesday. It'll be posted on Thursday. Okay. What is the expectation for council in terms of discussing the budget on the 16th so we can prepare the agenda item, if any?

What's your expectation?

Continue budget discussion because we're basically going to have to come in and take a vote on, okay, we're going to increase it one and a half cent and this much is for capital and this much is for operations, whatever the amount may be. I guess we had to do that.

So we can certainly set up as a continued budget discussion.

Yes.

What information is needed from staff or council to prepare the information for that action to be taken?

We know right now.

I'm going to leave it open and individual council members can make individual inquiries. and individual conferences with each other and with staff to get the information we need to make our individual decisions by June 16th at our regular meeting so that we can give you the information you need to prepare the budget ordinance. You'll know what you're doing the following week if we have to have a special meeting on the 23rd to sign off on it, but let's not come in here and have another four hours of conversation about it. Not on the 23rd. If we have an hour of discussion a week from tomorrow, that's okay, but not two hours of discussion on the 23rd. The special meeting will be for signing it only so we can get it out and approved in plenty of time for distribution, plenty of time for implementation before July 1st. Any other questions, comments? We'll figure some of this out in the coming week. But we're pushing ahead. We made great progress tonight. We learned a lot of things. We came dangerously close to answering the questions, and we can do it next week. We'll get together in small group discussions. No decision will be made. We'll confer with staff in small groups, and we'll be ready to give some clear guidance on the ordinance on the 16th. If we have questions in the meantime, we'll see staff. If there's no other business, no other questions tonight, I would be willing to accept a motion to adjourn.

So moved. Second.

Okay, there's a motion and a second. Is there any discussion about adjournment? Hearing none, I'll ask for a voice vote. All those in favor of adjournment, please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Anybody opposed by nay? Hearing none, we are adjourned. Thank you.