City Council - Regular Meeting

the the other agenda, but you may want to go ahead and do the treat like a regular city meeting. Okay. Uh well, if you'll join me in the pledge and invitation, we'll get started. I a gamble, but somebody broke it. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Heavenly Father, thank you for today. Um just pray you be with us as we start on this process of building our budget for this next year. Help us to be good stewards of the resources that you provide for us. It's in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen. Okay. Okay. Well, first of all, thank you for coming out early tonight for our meeting and thank you staff. I know this is riveting information for you all and I appreciate you taking the extra time to come and be part of this tonight. But um the me the purpose of this meeting and this is different than we did last year. Um this is a meeting to just kind of give you a very high level um synopsis of how the budget season goes. Um how there's a few financial metrics that it's really pretty early to give you a whole lot of financial details at this point in the game, but just kind of something to set the stage for the budget season. um this is a good time um to talk about any changes that you would like to have that we like we did last year from this year and so on so forth and I just this is one of those meetings where you know we wanted to be transparent to the to the community that we are doing you know the best we can to show them everything that we're doing behind the scenes with the budget and this is just another one of those attributes to that. So the purpose of this meeting like I said is just to kind of give you the overview. Um and again I want to emphasize very highle numbers. There's very few numbers in this in this um presentation tonight. There is no formal action as well. So again we're not voting on anything. This is just kind of a direction setting meeting. The first thing that I want to talk about is our budget calendar. Um, some

of some of this is new to some of you, but you will have in your packet or at least in front of you the most current um, budget calendar. This is something that I will be giving probably in every council packet going forward. It changes almost daily. It's on our budget hub. That's kind of new. So, everybody in Gddard and the whole wide world can actually see the meetings we're having behind the scenes, who's involved in those, and what's been completed. So, it's very it's pretty cool to show you that we have already completed um everything for February and I even clicked off tonight's meeting on here. So, it looks like there we're we're really doing great. Um let's see, council work sessions. You're going to notice on this sheet that there's a series of council work sessions and I will also send you calendar invites for those as they get closer. I kind of wait just a little bit in case any of the dates change. That way your calendar isn't changing every 5 seconds on on those items. Council citizens are welcome to come to any meetings that they would like to come to. Um it tells on here where they are, who's involved, and what topics we'll be talking about. Um and then the roles and responsibilities of the city council and staff. City staff's roles and responsibilities are to gather the data for you. Um prepare everything. We meet behind the scenes. We research um we organize all the data for you to process in each one of our work session meetings when we start talking at the fund level. So you will get to see all that information as you saw last year. But just so you know us staff are really working um behind the scenes all hands every staff member has a hand in the budget. It isn't just me sitting there trying to work some magic. I asked for a lot of buy in. We had our first budget

meeting last um on the 20th, I believe, February 20th, and we we went through um the processes, the expectations. Each department head got a a folder with all of their departments, all of their line items, all their GL, so they can start researching those. They also received all of their um packet, all their forms for requests for personnel, equipment, software, capital projects. So they can go back to their team and start line iting those items for us um to work on. So like I said, it takes it takes the whole team to put this together. It isn't just, you know, a few of us. um our responsibility is to keep you updated and keep the transparency live and up and running. So even right now this presentation is on the budget hub that we've talked about. Um the calendar's been updated and we're we're really trying to do a really good job of making sure all documents are there. Danny's doing a great job trying to promote this every so often so the community can see that. Um, any questions on on this so far?

Rick, I might just make a quick add that the citizen I think something last year, I can't remember if we did this or not, but at each of our council work sessions, I think we want to make sure we have a citizen comment period uh ahead of the council workshop. So, um I don't remember if we did that last year. If not, I definitely want to do that this year based on some of the feedback I've gotten from the council. um and some of our citizens. So

um some of the things just to remember um we do I mean we are working in March here right now and this is kind of a lot of prep works is happening behind the scenes. There is really isn't a whole lot to discuss in April. We're still you know finalizing a lot of things but we do have um a new event that's going to happen in in the month of April and the date is to be determined and I wanted to talk about that tonight. Um, this is going to be an open forum for the public and kind of what we've got in mind for this this event will be there will be no two-way dialogue, but citizens that want to come in and give give council some feedback, some information, their feelings, kind of like what we do at the budget hearing, but I I would prefer everybody to get in a little bit earlier so we can make a changes not at the last minute. So this is their opportunities to come in and start giving council their ideas. We we have it kind of pegged and this can change just a little bit but this is just high level um you know that citizens could get five minutes for their public speaking or you know their public forum session and then at the end um we'll be making notes of questions that that was asked throughout this and we can probably try to answer a lot of those questions together um at the final close of that meeting. Also, I would like to create a list of all the questions that are created through this process and we can also put those as answers to those either on Facebook. We've talked about doing a panel um a staff so we can answer those and also on the budget hub answer those questions and keep those keep those going. So, um that's really the first going to be the first opportunity that we do with our citizens. But like Craig said, if you're wanting to add those in at each of our budget meetings, we can do those as well. So I guess we need to discuss um and and maybe I can talk about it later

just the date, but we're looking at April 14th, 15th, or 16th. So we're going to be reaching out to you guys to see what date would work best. And that's going to be probably a six o'clock time period again. So try to let us know by the end of this week if you guys could look at your calendars. So that way we can update the uh calendar on the budget hub and start Tuesday, Wednesday or middle of the week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. We we always try to avoid Mondays and no one wants to do city business on a Friday night. I mean I I probably wouldn't mind but um most wouldn't. So but let us know what anything going on. I do it.

Yeah. So any questions with that? looks really

I might add one other thing on that. Just one of the real unfortunate aspects of the state uh budget law that we have to follow um is the revenue neutral rate. And the issue that I'm speaking of as it relates to that is the the timing of it. As Brooke mentioned, we have our hearing basically either the same night that we adopt the budget or maybe two weeks before. that's nowhere near enough time to be able to really implement any changes that we may want to make based on that feedback. So, I think that's one of the reasons why Brooke is suggesting um putting this forum on earlier in the year in April. That way we if if there's some big asks that the council wants to tackle um you know, we can implement those with several more months of preparation based on the citizen feedback. So, some important dates that are coming up like I mentioned um our public engagement opportunity in April. Um I won't go through this list completely but May is really kind of um a work a work process. Um we get a lot of our data done. I'm working on budget worksheets, presentations, but if we need to have some special meetings to talk about direction again, there's going to be in May that we can we can set aside in there, but nothing form will be said at this time. We get into June and July, we really start working on our funds. So, we will start having meetings, you know, back to back based on those funds. One of the changes I want to make this year is I put streets way last year, but I'm going to put it with the general funds since the general fund supports almost all of the street funds. So, um it makes more sense to put those together. for transferring out over to the street fund. We can make those discussions at that time. So, with

that being said, we'll we'll just blow through this calendar. Like I said, this is this is likely to change, but um aiming for September 8th, the RNR and budget hearing and budget adoption. So, that's right on the same timeline as we had last year. I think it's a day different. So, um any questions with that? Like I said, this may change, but that's just kind of a high level what you can expect coming in into the future. You're making the year go by really fast.

I have a hard time believing we're in March. I totally So, the next section here I want to talk about, and again, I want to emphasize this is very high level. Um, it's too early to do projections with only two months of data. I get through March, I'll start being able to annualize a little bit better. the auditors come um will probably do their presentation presentation in April and then I will have exact fund balances which I that helps with the roll forward and everything. So about then I can really start kicking a new gear and and getting all the spreadsheets created and and done. Um but for now this is just kind of give you some direction of kind of where we plan to go. So, I'm going to talk about the general fund revenue, enterprise fund revenues, kind of where we are and what what I plan to do, unless I hear differently and you guys want me to go different directions. Um, then I'm going to talk about our overall expenditure pressures. These are the things that are the big ticket items, things that are high focus, high dollar items that we probably need to think about. Um, and then we'll talk about our fund balance levels and reserves. So, right now, um, it's kind of been expressed to me and through word of mouth and just general feeling that maybe we don't want to increase the mill levy next year. So, we may want to try to just kind of leave it leave it where it is. And I kind of wanted to look and see what that meant for us. And so if we make no change to the current mill levy, just leaving it exactly where it is and not increasing it to like we had planned to do into our projections, um that impact results in around $200,000 of less revenue than our prior projections. So that is mill levy dollars only. That doesn't include our growth. So if we start looking into the assessed valuation um growth, I would plan to exceed RNR so we

can keep up and take advantage and reinvest our valuation growth. Um that's kind of a give or take. We don't raise the mill, but we plan to utilize the increase in valuation to bring in those extra dollars. In 2026, we budgeted our assessed valuation at 13%. 2027, we've kind of leveled that off for 11%. I'm going to leave that like that. So, as long as we don't have any state legislators making our lives miserable, um this this is a pretty good scenario. And I think in that the percentage is decreasing but because of the growth the actual dollars are probably from from that 13% into 2027 the actual dollar growth will be about the same. So there's a little bit of mathematical.

Yeah. As the numbers get larger, the percentage those percentage changes. I mean, if we end up going from basically what mills worth this year,

90 next year, it's probably going to hit close to 100. And that still creates a in terms of hard dollars, the the growth is still pretty significant. Mayor, one of the uh other impacts of not increasing the mill levy to 41.299 mills as previously discussed is that the sales tax distribution that we received from the county is tied to the mill levy. That's part of the funding formula. So, we would not receive additional sales tax revenue as a part of our the distribution that we get um if we don't increase the mill levy. So, it's a smaller impact, but one still worth noting.

With us taking advantage of the RN, we still are able to utilize 377 approximately $377,000 of additional revenue um to help fund the 55 street program, our essential personnel and services, and our CIP project. So just just to keep that in mind. Um overall though our tax revenue and trends and and this when I say overall tax revenues this is I I did an analysis on our property tax sales comp use franchise and alcohol and this doesn't take into consideration what Craig just mentioned. I'm not sure how to calculate that. I'll show you.

Okay. Um so we can in 2025 we actually had a 24.74% growth in those that tax group. Um that's actual budgeted. Um I've kind of put some numbers in there for 2026. And again these are high levels. It's kind of based on annualization of the past four or five years and growth trends that I'm seeing. And I I can predict that we probably have about a 10% increase this year in our overall taxes resulting in about $69,000 of increase in revenue. And in 2027, doing the same drill and kind of projecting out 8.65% growth in the that tax group resulting in 543,000 of additional revenue. So with those things in mind, um again, if if we want to raise the mill, I can run scenarios that way. If we don't want to raise the mill, I'm going to pret I'm going to do the scenarios that way. Um other things to consider, our general fund also has other earnings that are significant. Um, we have interest earnings, um, permit and fees, and administration fees, which our admin fees will be down just a little bit in 2027, um, in 2026, but in 2027, they're going to go up pretty substantially based on our tenants that are maturing at that point in time. sound.

I wanted to mention one of the things we're trying to discern tonight is a little direction because this is a change based on things we've heard over the last few months as far as adding the net two additional mills or not. Obviously, that changes our projections a little bit if we don't. Um, Brooke has done a fantastic job of kind of working out a scenario where we just hold the mill levy. And another comment I'd make is while the $69,000 in additional revenue received if holding the mill levy, that revenue received mostly comes from the new rooftops, the new construction happening in Gddard. While $69,000 seems like a lot, when you look at that number by itself. When you put that next to the $10 million in 10year capital improvement projects we have, it's not a lot. Um, and so I I think it's important to put it in that context. By itself, $610,000 is a lot of money. When you think about we have $110 million worth of of projects to complete over the next 10 years, which by the way won't happen. It'll probably be 20 years. Uh, that money doesn't really go that far. Um, one of the big ticket items that was expressed to us, I think at the last council meeting, maybe the one previous, was starting the preliminary design on the police station.

Budgeting for onethird of that is $600,000. Um, and that's could be scheduled in 2027 if that's what the council indeed wants to move forward with. So, just adding a little color and context to the numbers you're seeing there. And when you decided and when you voted and decided to raise the mill, I believe in 24 for the five and five program, we projected that we were going to raise it 10 mills over a certain period of time to get a million dollars of revenue coming in. We're probably only now, if we're going to raise it eight mills, we're we're closer to, you know, $800,000. And so we're going to have to make up those costs um somewhere as well. So keep that in mind. Did you have something to say? Sorry. The sales tax that you were talking about, is that the grocery tax?

No. So, we have a compensating use tax that is t sales tax collected countywide and then it's redistributed to cities based on a formula. The formula looks at things like uh the size of the community, the community's assessed valuation, and the city's mill levy. Those are the three main things that go into the formula. And uh when you reduce your mill levy because that's one of the factors that decides how much of the money is redistributed to each city in effect it reduces the amount amount of compensating use sales tax revenue we receive. Um it's it's not a huge amount but it is consequential. Um so by my point is is that that's one item that we have to factor in in the projections by not increasing the two mills as we hit plan. So, um, that's an item that is undergoing some legislative scrutiny right now. Um, there's municipalities that, specifically, counties are lobbying to make it so you don't get punished by losing sales tax when you lower your mill levy. The thought is that you're disincentivizing lowering property taxes when you hit get a double whammy. It also lowers your sales tax. Um, so there's actually a hearing on a bill today that addresses that. The problem is the bill that they're looking at is very punitive to cities and very lucrative to counties. And so we're having a bit of a power struggle on coming to some compromise with that. So based on the hearing today, it sounds like for at least another year, we're we're fairly safe that the law is not going to change. But as it is, when you reduce the mill levy or you hold it the same instead of increasing it as you projected you would, you're also taking in less compensating used sales tax.

But that's potentially in relationship to the other. So there would be some adjustment if other cities lower their mill and we stayed the same. I mean there's a lot of offset and probably not a big uh difference. So I I think that um just based on the the political environment um with the amount of interest income that we're able to generate, I think we can go a year and then reassess after the next year. Um the uh it's hard to I think at this point uh you'll have a little better idea how the economy is going to continue to uh improve. I mean, I don't go on my soap box about the interest rate scenario we're in, but history does follow trends and the trend line that we're on, I think, is rather significant. I've talked to a couple realtors in the last week, and the activity that they're seeing in their work has increased this year over last year. So the the number of people looking at buying and needing places to live in Gddard, uh that activity's picked up. So uh that bodess well for lower interest rates going into the rest of the year. So $200,000 based on our interest earnings. I think I think we we've got enough wiggle room to sit tight for a year and not um I just think after last year I mean the push back we got from going up six mills was nothing compared to the push back last year from going up two.

But I I think part of that is just the uh the environment and the frustration people are experienced with the increase in valuations of their property and their their taxes. So, I think if uh if we could just hold where we are, um I think that would be good. And hopefully if the county and and uh the school district, if they tweak back a little bit, the net result for our citizens of their overall tax rate next year uh could go down like I mean it's kind of what happened this year. I mean the net our increase of two wasn't creating a net increase. I think about one and 1.6. So

when I do my projections, I still go out five years and I will probably just leave it in control until I start seeing a dip in our reserve funds or our reserve balances. We do have a pretty healthy um CIP and I'm going to show that to you in a minute, what what we plan to spend in 2027. So, you know, we're going to want to we're just going to have to run the numbers and see that we everything's going to work the way we want to. There may be there may become a discussion where we need to not do something and at that point we'll we'll make that call.

Well, and that makes the whole comprehensive, you know, or our CIP or capital improvement plan is a living document and uh I mean we could we could have more growth than what we got projected there too. I think conservative here and I and and I think if you looked at what you budgeted in 2025 that that actual 24% I think you budgeted for maybe 14 or Yeah.

Yeah. So so I I think there's a good possibility that that that trend line will continue too that our our net revenues by the end of the year will exceed uh your conservative budget numbers which is a good place to be. Mayor, I I would add that interest earnings that you keep referring to, one is a testament of Brook's really hard work of going out and shopping to find the most competitive rates. We always have several institutions that want want those deposits. And then secondly, it's a direct result of our growth.

Uh most of our interest earnings are coming off of the temporary note debt that we've issued that sits in an account. um and we pay out of that to build the the the infrastructure projects that the developers are financing. But those interest majority of those interest earnings are coming off of debt that would not exist if it were not for all the development of the community. So there are so many positive impacts of a that a growing community has that really helps hedge against other risks that that we face and other communities face.

These charts are pretty much um repetitive. We just we just talked about it, but you can see um just kind of a trend line of our assessed valuation growth. Again, we we were sitting at 15% back in um 2024. And you know, we're just kind of budgeting conservatively into 2030, just, you know, some of that new development kind of tapering off just a bit, but still still remaining pretty strong. Um the mil levy allocation, just as a reminder to you all, I'm sure you know this, but everybody out there. Um, our mill levy is composed of three components. The general fund, debt service, and library. And so, um, again, I'm unless I'm told otherwise, I'm going to plan to just leave the mill levy the same all the way across for all three of those.

If you're on the bench, we go in agreement with um moving forward into our enterprise fund revenue analysis and then then we'll get into our expenses um the pressure our expense pressure. So right now just kind of want to give you an overview of the water utility operations. In 2025 we had a positive net income about $430,000 which is really really good. um that helped build up our reserves, um build up our fund balance. You know, that had pretty much tanked quite a bit. So, you know, we're studying really, really well. In 2026, we're estimated to have positive net income right now at 283 if everything comes in like I expect. And then, um any excesses in 2026 and 7, I'm be looking at those because I want to move them to our reserves to start preparing. Again, I've mentioned as we're preparing for our debt service that's going to be happening um when our tent notes become um mature. Siri utility operations in 2025, I'm estimating um a negative 16k um loss. We kind of planned on that already. Um our sewer reserves and sewer balance fund balance is very very healthy. So, we used up some of our our cash there for that. Um, in 2026, we're hoping to be positive 69K. That That's when I when I do the budgeting, I I prefer to try to make sure everything's in the black. Um, I wouldn't budget for a 16k loss, but that's just kind of the way it worked out there. Storm water utilities, very healthy. Um, positive net income of 128K in 25 and estimated again positive 35K. That's it. We spend everything that we bring in. And so we're kind of, you

remember, that's a new fund. We were kind of just kind of letting that build up and utilizing it um when we had projects happening in need. 2027 equipment schedule. Something to think about. Jason and I have already met and reviewed um the public works equipment and vehicle schedule and we we looked at all the items on there and made some adjustments, moved some things around and Jason is tracking down some costs to put into those buckets for 2027 just to kind of see how they will shake out. If you recall, all of um the equipment schedule um all the vehicles there is split a third, a third, a third, water, sewer, and street. So each of those funds bear the burden of those costs. Um Jason's been able to really I want to say capitalize on leases because we've been able to get some really good equipment for very cheap costs over a period of time with options to purchase it or buy get brand new equipment in into the future. So that's really helped the cash flow on those items so we can actually public works can have the equipment that they need. So that's been pretty good. So, um, so we'll continue with with the leased equipment, the mini excavator, skid steer loader, and our wheel loader, but we are considering um a lease possibly for a back truck, a plow attachment, which we probably purchased, and then two and a half ton trucks and estimated about 40k each and then replacing the 2013 Ford 3 F350. So, the these are things we are considering. They're not marked in stone yet, but they're in our planning right now for 2027.

Jason, if Ricky, I'll let Jason share uh kind of what that back truck is, what its use is. It'd be a new add to a fleet that we don't currently have, and they are very expensive, but very helpful to have.

Yeah. So, the the back truck is uh considered combination trucks used for sewer is mainly what they're used for. So they act like our vac trailer. Um and they can clean sewer lines. So what mayor's been doing for us, um if we get a back truck, there's some of that that we can be doing in house now. Um as well as some of our hydro excavation that we've been doing with the back trailer, a back truck will give us u more ability to be more efficient with those hydro excavations. So, not only you saving money with reducing some of the contracts with mayor, um you're also increasing our efficiency out in the field when it comes to uh potholeing for utilities uh like we did just here on Kellogg uh for the fiber companies um just like uh what we do for uh water leaks. We also hydroxate for that as well. So, um, they are very expensive, but they do come with a lot of benefits in having having that at our disposal. Um, and there's also the ability in the middle of the night, um, if we have a sewer backup and a main line, then we don't have to call emergency services with mayor to come do that. We'd be able to go out and take care of that sewer man ourselves.

He's trying to find the best deal. So, just find as good a deal as you found out on a dump truck. We'll we'll see if we can I know back really high. Yes. Yes. Back trucks are very expensive. So, we'll see what we can do. Any questions on those?

Okay. So, our overall expenditure pressures and this this ranges citywide, not just general fund. Um this touches all departments funds and so on and so forth. But um our you know some of our highest costs that we're looking at are our personnel costs, health insurance, police vehicles and equipment, technology. These are these are items that you know change every year and we have to have to really work on those. But you know right now in our budget we're going to we're going to factor in colon merit raises to be anywhere from 3 to 5%. We will run scenarios of everything and just see kind of how it shakes out. new positions that we're considering. Um, a director of human resources, which we could possibly be bringing to you really soon. I think it's in Christ.

That'll that'll advertise this week. That that's not new for next year. That'll be replacing a position we budgeted for this year. We're doing a some rep prioritization.

Um, a building inspector also will probably be adding in 2026. And then we'll be looking at hiring a city planner, a senior center director, and this there's been discussions of hiring a full-time director versus a part-time. So, that's going to be something that we'll need to discuss. Um, two police two additional police officers and two additional public work employees. I know I just got your sheet. I didn't know if there was anything more on there than that. Okay. Um, so this is high level. This may change when I get everybody's sheets in, but these are things that I'm putting into the plans right now. If something changes, it it may change between now and next time we meet, but um lots going into this. Just just for reference, in 2025, um I have to run an analysis of what we budget versus what we actually spend because you got to remember if we're hiring people, we don't know who's coming in. you have to budget a full salary, full family benefits just to make sure you're not missing something. And maybe you don't hire somebody with full family benefits and you you're just you do a little bit better. But in 2025, um we spent 89% of the budgeted funds. So we usually average anywhere from 90 looks like 89 to 95% of the budget budgeted funds in in the personnel um category. Um in 2026 with the changes that we've kind of talked about, I'm estimating we're probably going to spend about 95% of the budgeted funds if if it comes in in good 2027. I don't know yet. But um any questions on personnel? Any changes or directions you'd like to see there? Things you like, don't like?

I was curious. Do you budget any for like turnover? If there's any because typically turnover increases cost, bring somebody new on, right? It's a good point. Typically, we kind of have a zero sum or actually a net positive because the positions are open for an amount of time where the cost we save by not having someone in that role compared to the cost of advertising, interviewing, etc. Does that make sense? Yeah. It gets absorbed into that talking brain. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we budget 100% like that person's here,

right? 2080 20,80 hours a year regardless and there may not be. And so that's where you end up not using utilizing all of your budget or you have open positions we're not we haven't been able to fill or a good example would be right now we have three vacancies in one department. Um so and that that could be that way for a couple of months because that particular department it that hiring process does it's not quick. you interview someone and they're on it takes a lot of onboarding and background and things of that nature. So, and as Brook said, if you budget like it's going to be a family of seven, maybe the employee

highest cost employee person and put it in there just so I'm that gives some leeway in there versus if it's a single person that's younger, they're probably making an entry level salary and their health insurance costs are way less to the city. So worst case scenarios where we try to budget on that

health insurance cost. Um I met briefly with Havly today at Freedom Claims and he's he's seen on average around 16% increase but he thinks we are doing so well that we we can probably budget for 12 and be able to lower that just a bit with our savings and our freedoms claims account. So, I will probably budget with a 10% increase knowing that we will absorb um some of our freedom claims account. Right now, we're sitting at 200k in that account. So, that'll get us by for quite a while. Um Hadley also mentioned that once we get past 50 or 51 employees, then our insurance rates will change and could possibly go down because it's just some sort of larger group. You get a different deal. Um and I told him, "We're right there. Um we're we're right at the cusp of of being able to take advantage of that." So, we have some different changes in that category. Um police vehicles and equipment. Um we will probably need to purchase vehicles um and additional equipment for any new hires that we have. So, we've got to kind of keep that in rotation. Technology increases. Um this is basically our contracted it. I'm going to budget at least 5%. We met with um Ryan and I did um them the other day and they they broke out the budget for us for 2027 and I think they increased everything 5%. So that's probably what I'm going to use to um put that in there. Inflationary adjustments. I might be able I'm going to look at some trends, but I might be able to start decreasing it down since inflation's a lot better than it used to be. I was always 5% on utilities and internet and all that stuff that kind of has a inflationary increase each year. I might be able to get us down to 3% there if if I'm seeing

better numbers. So, um capital projects the 2027 CIP, these are all the items um that we have booked for 2027. We got $2.6 6 million worth of big projects to take care of in 2027. So, these these will be what I try to aim for first um before maybe somebody brings me a want or a wish list unless it's an emergency. We may need to re-evaluate the CIP. But, you know, since we adopted this and this is our direction, this is what I'm going to try to figure out how to how to purchase 2027. So, um, this may require us to use up some fund balance, um, juggle some money here and there. Um, you know, whatever it takes, but, um, this will be a big part of our budget discussions as we start mapping these projects out and and what what's needed and so on. Any questions?

Brook, I want to share with them what a couple of those projects that they may not be familiar with. the um wastewater treatment plant capital improvement. That's to do basically like a 5 to 10 year I'll just call it its own like CIP uh bringing in an engineering firm that um specializes in mechanical treatment wastewater plants. Got those words in the wrong order. U but to help us map out what investments we might need to make, what repairs we might need to make. Jason has shared with me through his staff that some of the original stuff in the plant that's has is starting to reach the end of its useful life. So, we just want to make sure we're strategically investing in extending the useful life of uh the plant. Um there was one other one. Oh, the 183rd Street roundabout. So, uh Sedu County approached us a couple of weeks ago with a cost share agreement proposal to um sharing some costs and paving 183rd Street between Maple and Central. Um, so we're that amount that Brooke has there is uh I think onethird of the cost for the uh preliminary engineering to start designing. Um for us it'd be primarily the roundabout, but there's a short stretch between Maple and the upridge entrance that we'd be responsible for paving. So um the plan would be preliminary engineering. That's our contribution in 2027. um probably wouldn't be cost participating as a capital project for construction until 29 2030. Um and that's going to be a couple million dollars. So, and I mentioned, you know, it's nice that we bringing in some additional cash from our growth that's going to go quick. That that might be the first Capital Street project we have on the other side of the five and five program, but you guys may have something else in mind. uh the way the contract structure with the county still offers some flexibility in case one of us has a variable that forces the project to be

moved a year or two. So, and maybe someday we'll get some money out of the Witchaw area metric home planning organization and maybe that might be a nice project to have them write a check to pay for that. I know the vice chair I've heard is not very reliable.

He's great. We did. I I'm glad you mentioned that, mayor, because we uh have submitted that project to WAMPO for funding, and they score the projects based on things such as is there multiple agencies that are working together to fund it. So, this should score higher because of our partnership with the county. It should score higher because the engineering will be done in 2027. So, uh, it is a pretty good possibility that we could get WMPO to fund a good part of this project in 29 or 2030 based on its merits. I want add it to your long-term prayer list.

It's on my prayer list for sure. I wanted to make mention of a couple of these personnel items real quick, Mayor, if you don't mind. Couple of these are ones that'll in some ways help pay for themselves. that building inspector. You guys probably know this. We have an interlocal agreement with Sed County Metropolitan Area Building Construction Department. MABCD. Mayor, you don't have a quip for a government acronym? Not that one. Okay. Um,

so we share 50% of the uh building permit revenue with them. Just the building permit piece. When you buy a building permit, you've got impact fees, water tap fees, sear tap fees, etc. But I don't know what, a third of it is the building permit piece, and half of that goes to the county because they're doing all the inspection. When we hire this staff person, any permits, they will self- select. Let's say we do 200 permits in a year, they'll self- select as many of those as they can to do the inspections themselves. That way, we're not sharing half of that building permit fee revenue with the county. So, um, and then on the the HR position, we spend a lot of money when you have 45 employees. Sometimes you have personnel matters you have to work through that can be complex. We we expend quite a bit of money on uh utilizing consultants to help us through those issues so we don't uh step on any hot coals as we're working through them. Having a professionally trained HR person um who is solely focused on HR, not splitting with other duties will allow us to utilize them primarily and really just the legal people for a quick review and comment, not the sausage making.

I don't make any comments about sausage. I try to use that only once a meeting. Okay. Well, we have another meeting so you can't use it. Okay. Okay. Real quickly, um fund balance and reserve discussion. This was our fund balance um reserve

balance that we were as of 1231 2025. So, it's a little bit dated. This will be updated for you with the first quarter um financial report that that I'll provide. But you know this we we are studying pretty pretty good over our current reserve levels of 25% which is our policy and several of those funds. So it would probably be okay to take that down just a little bit as long as we were planning for those funds to be used for debt service into the future. So as we're trying to map out some of these projects that we want to do, we may consider taking this down just a little bit and not below the 25. that there may be a time where you all are I don't want to go below 50% or where you know wherever we are in each one of these um levels some of these um general funds could probably we could use some money there water and sewer might want to kind of keep those there because we're planning some large expenses into the future um special highways really I wouldn't mess with that one either just kind of stay there so anyway these are just never Okay. Reserve money. Sorry.

So, you don't you don't want to get you don't want to give the impression that you're being a miser. There is a purpose behind building these fund balances. We're building them up because we're going to use a significant amount of our cash to pay down temporary note debt when we go to permanent finance. And we will use a significant amount of it to start designing projects such as some of our arterial roads that are going to need to be reconstructed. the important intersections, the police station as I've mentioned. So, right now we are in a fund balance building phase. There are intentions to utilize that those funds for these projects that will be here quickly in our two-year CIP

and we'll be setting cash to pay for that. So, I mean that's good to have there. So, something to think about as we're working in the budget season, you know, if you guys want to make modifications. I mean this is we'll discuss this later because I will always show you a fund balance projection um for each fund when we start talking about those out to 2030. Um wrapping up pretty quickly here. Um budget trade-offs and scenario planning. So you know tonight we've talked about the mill levy and RNR.

Um right now unless I hear anything different and just you can change your mind after after we're done here and let me know later. But we're going to leave the mill every the same. We're going to plan to exceed and utilize the RNR. Um it's possible we might use some fund balance and and utilize some of that cash on hand to fund things in our CIP and other projects that we're working on currently. Um are there any additions to the budget that you know any projects outside of what we've talked about? Um, anything that I'm not aware of that you know we saw I don't know I haven't had a mayor want not this mayor tell me not you

want redo the swimming pool this year we need a new swimming pool and I just want a corporate jet the corporate jet you're not getting that it's on my list um

the other thing I think it's good to point out is that there's possibilities of changes in Topeka hopefully none of it comes to fruition. But the way this is set up, we can I mean almost in the end of August, we can if we have to adjust to a new a new environment and a new new rules to play under that we've got plenty of time to do that. I know Craig's monitoring what's going on at PA closely and uh so I just need to keep in mind that if they don't change the change the rules on us that we've got time to adjust, you know, going forward. Y they'll be glad to have reserves if they do. Yep. Yeah, that's for sure.

Finally, I just want to talk about our public engagement piece that I just want to keep mentioning. I did provide you all the latest survey um results. We have had 19 people take our community survey. Um what? 19 people.

19 people. So, we probably need to get those numbers up a little bit, but I will give those to you periodically so you can kind of see the directions um on those surveys. So, we'll we'll try to get Danny to send some more stuff out about the survey, you know, periodically to keep keep that live. But again, all this stuff is on our website, all all the calendars, all the meetings, all the information. Um, if there's something that you'd like to see on the website that isn't there or you're hearing or people need to see it in a different avenue, just let me know. So, it's pretty much all I have tonight. Um, any questions or comments or not our next budget meeting will probably be in April um to hear what the community has to say about things. So,

very good. I'll make a motion to close our budget uh meeting. We have a second on that. Second. Just a second. All those in favor say I. I. We got about 11 minutes till the 7:00 meeting. Thank you.