Village Council - workshop

We're good to go.

Kyre.

Here.

Ryan. Here. Wendell. Here. Weinbrenner. Here.

Cole?

Here.

Koskalo? Brandon?

Here. We have a quorum. I'll entertain a motion to...

Excuse me.

Do I do a motion? Just excuse him?

You can just do it. You can just excuse him. It's just a workshop session.

Koskalo cannot be today.

Your mic's on.

OK. So good evening. Welcome. Thank you for having me here. And I'm sorry I'm talking a little bit to your backs, but we'll mostly be looking at the screen. And then when we get to Q&A, we might move things around if that's more comfortable. What we've done, and we can go to the next slide then, Just a recap of what this project was. We did build a 20-year model of all the village funds. It's an Excel spreadsheet that the village will have to use. We included the water and sewer rate analysis, which we'll talk a little bit about tonight as well. Looked into the inputs for cityhood and what that might look like, including the road miles, population trends, values, and whatnot, and then additional costs of what it might be to run as a city. We met with staff multiple times, reviewed a lot of data, and then ran quite a few different scenarios to see what might be options and viable. So bottom line is, unfortunately, there are no easy answers, no silver bullets, no, gee, we just overlooked something. There's a lot here.

I'm sorry. Before we continue, I'm having a hard time. I'm going to...

Move this closer. I don't know. Is that on?

And I can turn it up, too, as you're talking. Keep going. I'm going to adjust it.

Okay. I think the village needs some additional policy direction and revenue enhancements to really understand where things are going and what's viable. We didn't find any obvious signs of wasteful spending. In fact, you might be understaffed. This village operates quite lean. as far as the municipal government providing all the services that you do. I'm sure you know there are significant capital needs and infrastructure needs across all operations of the village. It makes it hard to know where to start and where to focus. There are some opportunities for improvement. They won't be easy. Funding is the challenge, so revenue to pay for things is the challenge. And I think there's opportunities that need to just start taking action now. So continuing to defer is not going to solve any problems. So I'll start with the general fund, the most important fund and handles the most in the village. Overall, you're still in a weak position. Without the public safety assessment, you would be about $700,000 worse off than you are now. In other words, you would be bankrupt. The model that we have currently includes about $230,000 a year in capital investments in the general fund. That's just a number that we put in there based on some rough estimates. We looked at other revenues, and they're going to increase a little bit, primarily property taxes and state shared revenue. Looked at the assumptions in terms of where things are going cost-wise. did our best to estimate future growth in costs, and that's primarily inflationary increases, no real additional increases in staffing or added services. Right now, with this forecast, you might be able to go another 10 years without true crisis in the general fund, but you are very close to the edge overall. If we reduce that capital spending from the $230,000 to $160,000, We get better stability, but it still doesn't solve all the problems because then you're not addressing needs. So that's the tradeoff. It's another way of deferring. Again, it goes back to revenue is the issue. How do we generate revenue to ensure some financial stability for the village? And the action that one could take here is seek some additional funding, voter approval, special millage, headly override, whatever that might take to address some of the general fund needs. So the top left forecast, you don't have to see all the detail there, but the trend line is that solid black line that's kind of hovering near the bottom of the chart is your fund balance, projected fund balance going forward. That very low point was last year. And what we're looking at, again, is that 10 years from now that fund balance goes negative. On the bottom right chart, if we change that $230,000 capital spending to $160,000, we get another 10 years with where things are going now. This assumes that the special assessment for public safety continues in all of those years. Major streets. Your revenues are fine for just maintaining basic operations plowing and whatnot. It does not have enough resources in that fund to fix the roads. There's all the data that we're working with. The last study 2016 pacer study identified about eight and a half million dollars in improvements over a 10 year period. Those have not been done. This is 10 years later. So now we're looking at how do we fund this. The $8.5 million from 10 years ago is definitely not $8.5 million today. One thing, the cost of materials has gone up substantially over the last 10 years, and at the same time, the condition of the streets has deteriorated further, which means every mile requires more work, whereas before we might have just been able to do some Mill and fill, as they say, you're now going to be required to actually go and replace some road base, which is a much more expensive option. So what the council could do is ask for voter approval of a street millage, a debt or special levy to fund improvements. And I have a note there about two and a half mills would fund a 15 year, eight and a half million dollar levy for street improvements on the major street side. On the local streets, and I know council's aware of this, but for the public that doesn't know, there are different classifications of roads in Michigan. And the village has what are called major streets, and then there are local streets. And the locals are more the neighborhood streets, the smaller side streets, whereas the major are the through streets. And the improvements on those are also quite high. Again, 10 years ago, it was $5 million. Not a lot has been done there. So if we're looking at a $5 million bond, that would be about 2.3 mills to fund that over 15 years. That does not fix all of the roads. I just want to make that very clear. You would have the debt for 15 years, but you would also have roads that are not improved. So additional funding is needed. You could get an infusion of cash with the bond and do some of the worst streets and make some improvements or preserve the ones that are still holding on. But beyond that, you're going to have to find additional revenue. And again, voter millage, debt, or special levy could work. Solid waste fund, nothing exciting here, except you're collecting a little bit less than what the actual costs are. So a small tweak in the garbage charge would be enough to fix that. That just means the general fund doesn't have to subsidize the solid waste fund. You can't have a negative fund balance.

Go ahead.

Water and sewer. Overall, the village has not been particularly aggressive in raising rates. In fact, they've been almost stagnant or gone down for the last 10 or 15 years. And there's a lot that needs to be done on the water and sewer infrastructure. Fortunately, you have some debt that's about to come off. Trying to figure out how to maintain rates as low as possible, we look for opportunities like debt that's being paid off as an opportunity to either issue more debt or just take that cash and start spending it on more improvements. What we've included in here on the water side, about $7.8 million in capital. and then about $8.1 million on the sewer side over the next five years. Pretty substantial investment. Some of that would be paid with cash. Some of that would be paid out of debt. Again, trying to keep the rates as low as possible. So the action there, I would suggest, is to actually put together a plan to identify where the village could spend that money specifically. We know it can work financially. but we need the projects identified so the engineers can start actually laying them out and planning for them. The other issue with the water and sewer is your customers that are outside of the village are paying the same as customers inside the village. And this is not a recommended approach. The agreements that were made with the developers for those areas outside of the village years and years ago said the village would charge the same rates for a certain number of years, that time has passed. So it's time to start looking at what the rates should be for customers outside of the village. The reason it makes sense is customers outside of the village carry zero of the risk of the utility system. So if something catastrophic were to happen and the judge came in and issued a judgment and said you have to raise taxes to pay for this, Only the village taxpayers would pay for that. Nobody in the township would be responsible for that. So part of the issue is you are taking on a substantial risk to service customers outside of the village. So that's a big part of what we're trying to do. You're investing it, you're issuing the debt, you're taking on the risk for that. If we were to do a complex cost of service utility study, we would look at that in more detail and identify the exact assets that are being served and what proportion is being served out there. Overall, they are getting a deal right now, and it's time to probably change that. Also, like I said before, rates have not increased. We are looking at, based on the numbers that I just shared, primarily on the capital side, Increases that would be steady year-over-year increases and I will point out that this chart assumes the status quo where customers outside the village pay the same as customers inside the village if we change that and apply a hundred and fifty percent surcharge to Customers outside so they pay one and a half times the rate that the village pays that first year there it would be for the typical residential, they'd see a slight decrease of about 2.9% in their bill. And that's just because now we're taking some of those costs and shifting them to outside customers and recovering more revenue from them. These also assume that the village would switch from a flat fee for your fixed or base charge to a meter-based base charge. So the customers that have a larger meter pay a higher base charge. Again, that is consistent with best practices in the industry. Larger customers put more demand on the system, and that fixed charge is recovering the system costs, the fixed asset costs, the maintenance costs, the capital investment for that system. So larger customers require a larger system, require everything to be working at a higher level, so more of the costs appropriately should be shared with them. Looking at the cash reserves. So what we try to do when we're looking at water and sewer rates is kind of balance what people are paying through their rates and the amount of cash that we're holding on hand. So here we're seeing that on the water side, we're pulling water or cash down gradually over time. On the sewer side, on the bottom right, even more. We're trying to keep that green bar close to that black line. And we're going to spend down the cash to smooth out the rates. On the sewer side, go even more aggressively to make that happen. We try to get cash down to a point that's at a reasonable level and then maintain it there. Every now and then, we might add a little more cash because we know there's a project coming up. Or we might use a little more cash because we know that we have a project to spend money on. It's a one-time deal. We'll spend the money. not raise rates as much and then the next year we'll start recouping some of that so we are trying to maintain cash at an appropriate level through the forecast this is just an illustration of the capital on the water side you can see there's a pretty substantial debt issue that's that orange bar and that would be to take on whatever projects were identified on that utility so that you can make a substantial investment all at once. The blue bars are cash capital. So on the sewer side, we're not anticipating any new debt, but just consistently spending cash on that. Again, back to the outside customers. They are currently paying a different rate. And there is this chart in here that It shows that 2.9% decrease for a typical residential customer if you go with 150%, and that was a number that I just used to test things. I think that's a conversation that the village should have and make a change as soon as possible so that village residents are somewhat protected and compensated for the risk that they're taking on to carry the system all the way out to the township. Then we looked at cityhood as an option. And I will say, and it's in here later as well, this is not a quick process. This takes years to go through. So what we're looking at right now is what is being contemplated is a pretty substantial annexation. This would be larger than any that I could find a record of in recent history if the proposed areas of annexation would be included. And that's obviously a lot to be determined yet. The population could increase by about 43% if you annex those areas of the township into a future city. Bless you. Taxable value would increase about 67%. So you have a substantially higher tax base. You'd have about 94% road miles to maintain. So that's another issue to consider. There is the question about whether some of those road segments would remain in county control. and that would have to be a conversation with the county. And then there are some private roads that might remain private as well. So if you were to change from village to city status, you would have some increase in costs. Your clerk treasurer, you'd probably have to have two separate positions for that to handle the added work. That position is already doing quite a bit. That's one area of understaffing that we identified. Fire, because you'd be servicing a larger area. That would increase staffing there. Public works, also, because you'd be maintaining a lot more area, primarily roads. And some of those roads are dirt roads, which requires additional equipment. So also assessing as a city, you would be responsible for assessing and elections. So there'd be some added costs there. The assessing contract would add... It's not a substantial amount, but we have to factor. The issues are actually identifying the exact boundaries that you're going to take to the boundary commission, understanding all the detail, complexities, legal and whatnot. If that committee is formed and they come back and say, we don't recommend cityhood, well, there you have an answer. If they come back and say, we think it could be done under these conditions, then you have a decision to make. But that response would not happen immediately. It would take a long time to do all that work. So again, taking action now and just starting the process doesn't commit anybody to anything other than actually starting to explore it formally. So next steps. I think we need a policy framework for identifying your infrastructure investments in other words a capital improvement plan. And from the council some direction on what are the priorities of the village and you're going to be starting to master plan process soon that can help with that to identify how important our parks relative to roads relative to police and fire stations etc. So you want to get all that laid out and identify your priorities, which will then help identify where you're going to spend money. There's also, once you have all that together, you can identify opportunities for maximizing your resources, leveraging dollars. In water and sewer and streets, for example, we never want to tear up a road to fix water, or we don't want to replace a road. and then two years later tear it up to replace the water and sewer under it. So having all that information coordinated helps a lot with saving money and getting things done. And then some direction from council on when should the village take on debt? When should it consider raising taxes or asking voters to raise taxes? These are important policy questions that will help the staff and then help the citizens understand where the village is trying to go. And again, that feeds into the capital improvement plan. We would suggest focusing on water, sewer, streets, and general fund. Those are your primary funds for capital items. The 2019 sanitary sewer assessment master plan or management plan, that was something that was provided as part of the SAW grant way back when. That's a good place to start. You have some actual projects. You have actual conditions of sewer segments, manholes. So that's a great place to start. And then move on to water and then streets as well. And then obviously adjusting water and sewer rates. The sooner you do that, the better. I tell everybody that I work with in this area that if you defer on raising rates, it just means the next year has to be even more. So there's really no point in kicking the can down the road when you know things have to be done. And then looking at rates that are different for the outside customers, those customers in the township area. Starting the cityhood exploration process, as I said, doesn't commit you to anything other than a better understanding of what your options are and what you're trying to get out of that. We have a framework started on the financial side that could be expanded as more information is gathered and more decisions are made. But right now we're still kind of guessing about boundaries and property values and everything like that. And again cityhood is not a guaranteed best option here. This is something to look at and consider and really understand it before deciding to move forward with it. And obviously Even if the council decides and the administration decides this is a good idea, it goes to the voters who finally decide. So whatever actions council is taking is really just moving things forward to eventually get the voters input through an actual vote. Consider looking at some special levies for the general fund, looking at road millage. Those are the key areas for potential taxation issues. These are not whimsical, you know, wish list type projects that we're looking at. As everybody knows, the roads are in pretty poor condition. I can tell you, if you didn't know, they won't get better on their own. Just you have to start spending the money to make them better. And unfortunately, it's a pretty big task to undertake. Improving financial transparency. I think that's critical. I've heard that... People really like governments that are transparent. And the tool that we put together helps with that. So showing all this information in a public setting helps people understand where things are going. There's nothing to hide here. It is complex, and it is difficult, and it is not pretty to look at. But difficult decisions have to be made sometimes. And that's what we're trying to do is provide you the information to make those decisions. And I would just say, don't let the number of challenges

That's okay.

Lead to decision paralysis. I think that's what I've seen here in talking to people. It's just we don't know what to do. It's hard to know where to go. You need to just start taking steps forward. I've outlined some possible action items right there that give you some direct, here's what you can do now. So with that, I will stop and be prepared to answer questions.

Council, if you feel more comfortable, probably at this time, we can move you behind the desk. And then at 6, we can get rid of the tables and everything. Yeah, let's do that. Yeah, so facts are on Facebook.

Okay, council, who's got questions?

If you want, I can start off with just going over some of the action items, kind of explain where we are in some of those steps currently, if that helps out at all. If I go back through the presentation at all, and I'm going to switch actually the camera from at home back to us now. Okay. Doing a few jobs tonight, too, so. In the last meeting, we did talk about doing a street millage, a road millage. I think that we decided if we were to have to get the language approved and all of that, it would have to be by today, by August 11th, to get it on the November ballot. We decided that was going to be, without having all the information, there was a lot of concern with doing a millage at two mills, although it's a start, but the expectations, we were worried that People would see that we had a road millage and expect everything to change, but as we saw that even with that the two mills, it was 8 million after 10 or 15 years, which is. That gets us a quarter of the projects we need done and the roads are still you know deteriorating that term during the time, so we wanted to look at a really comprehensive. a view of what was actually needed in order to do that. We talked about maybe doing that and then doing a special election perhaps for that. That's just kind of where we were last seated on the local and major roads millage discussion. The solid waste fund, we did increase slightly just to, we're trying to just get that exactly right. We're not trying to overcharge people. We're trying to get that number. We did increase it by a very little bit in this last budget cycle. We think it's pretty darn close right now, but we will still continue to fine tune that number. The water and sewer. So the finance committee has been meeting on this item many times over the last six months to a year. We started working with Plant Moran. We've now been working with most municipal analytics on this. We actually have a, based on the information that they have provided us, We've now drafted some resolutions. It's like this might be the recommendation we want to go with. There are a few recommendations to council. There are a few last items that the Finance Committee wants to see implemented in that that we're really having to hammer down getting the right thing. We're hoping that we can get a final thing done that's going to be presented to council at next month's meeting, at the September meeting. We've talked about if we do any rate changes or implementation, not to do it perhaps within the immediately, so it's not in the highest use season, getting people all mentally prepared and ready for it. And so perhaps having it like start on the February bills, which would be the January cycle. So start in the new calendar year. That's just one recommendation that we've been looking at perhaps doing in order to make it a little more palatable for people when it's in a lower use season and get them used to any changes. Yep, the same thing that we just discussed right there on that. And that also would include any of the recommendations based on the increasing to non-village residents. And we are looking at what that appropriate number would be. And it has to be justified by what that actual cost. And so that's what we're figuring out those numbers right now. The city, the actual action item on that is actually the exploratory committee is on the agenda tonight. There's one that we had previously looked at and the village president asked to put it back on the agenda to do exactly what we're talking about right here, with specific timelines and goals annotated on it. So yeah, let's go back to this policy framework. Yep, we're in the master plan. We need to redo our master plan this year. We've talked to Roe about it. I think we should probably because Roe has done our previous one. We might want to put that out for an RFP to maybe get a different outside look from so we can get maybe different eyes on our master plan. So that master plan and that CIP can actually inform what we do. I think the master plan when I first started here A year and a half ago, I asked a lot of questions about the master plan, about, you know, I've read the master plan, this, this, and I realized quickly that it was never used to inform our decisions. It was a check the block thing. And it really should be kind of our roadmap how we want to move forward when we're looking at future land use. It should actually inform how we actually want, there should be a goal to change our current land use into future land use. And those kind of things. So we are due for a new master plan this year. And so we are looking at who the appropriate contracting agency would be to take us forward with that. Capital improvement plan. So exactly what John was talking about, Danny and I have been looking at not only our 2016 PACER study, but also the SOL work that we had done. It didn't do the whole village for sanitary water sewer. And we're not going road by road, but segment of road by road and pairing up. All right, this infrastructure needs to be done here. Below the road, this is the road that needs to be done. And trying to rack and stack, prioritize all of the different roads within the community. And that's just for the roads project. And so that has been pretty time consuming just in that aspect of it. Not to mention, we are also looking at all of the things that we need to improve with our our wastewater treatment plant, our water treatment plant, all of these things to improve. When we had those major floods in April that we had so much infiltration into our system, if our system was closed, a perfect system would be closed, it wouldn't have really affected us much. Our system, we run about 650,000 gallons a day. We could push up to 2 million if needed. At that time, we were pushing 6 to 8 million gallons a day because there's so much infiltration into our system. And we're having to use our back tanks to fill up and kind of playing a shell game with all the excess water coming in in order to maintain the systems appropriately. And that's where we saw a lot of that damage. So we're actually looking right now to get some engineering done to determine what is the best way to do that. We're working with MWRMA, which is the Michigan Water Resource Association, something like that. They can help us with some of those things. We're already a member. So with smoke testing and those things to determine where that infiltration in the system is, also just system improvements overall. You're going to see that Danny has a lot of new business items today. Some of that's covering some of these things. Adjust water and sewer rates, we already talked about that. Cityhood exploration, we talked about that. We have not ever talked about a general fund special levy. We talked road millage. Financial transparency, you know if there's any other Recommendations that we we have from the public or councils how we can do this better We do our we post our our checkbook every month on our agenda literally every single item that we spend money on We have our budget we obviously have long budget work sessions that are available to the public as well as we do any of our investments and all that is public knowledge that we quarterly post and present And so that's kind of where we're sitting as a staff. And so now, if you guys have any questions for John.

Before we turn it over to council, I think I'd like to offer public comment one more time so that if council wants to address any of the public comments, we can do that. So public comment, any questions? Sherilyn.

I'll say thank you.

Well, that's not a question, but thank you.

Thank you. This has been a long time coming, and this is funny that I think we've invested very well, and thank you.

To the public, Sherrilyn Everly said thank you.

It was a question, though, so thank you. We're just questioning.

Is there any further public comment? Hearing none, seeing none. Council?

I know you kept referencing the 2.9, but realistically, like the numbers that you had on there, 2.9 plus 2.3 for local roads. So we're looking at probably like five mils that we want to raise for taxes.

That was illustration only. You have to figure out what you want to improve and then what the costs are.

And so when we've done just a brief analysis based on the 2018-2019 numbers, for roads alone, with inflation and all of the things that we've seen, obviously the prices have not just doubled in many ways. So we're looking at probably $20 million worth of road improvements that are needed in the village right now. And that doesn't include any future deterioration and all of that. If we were to just tackle the roads, the ADA improvements, those kinds of things that we'd have to do going in, that doesn't include the water sewer underneath.

That's correct, yes.

Just in follow-up, just one last question. I know you're talking about doing these different studies and stuff. Can we potentially use that study from 2023, from January, that we talked about in the Finance Committee where Roe, We were potentially trying to go for grants and stuff for the Michigan Clean Waters Act, but that fell through. Is that going to help kind of leverage some of our ideas, too, because we have already pinpointed those things in terms of a capital improvement?

Yeah, I've tried to collect all of the data I can for every different aspect. I've got next to my desk just a pile that's just related to capital improvements that we're going through. item by item, but it is just a laborious task because for a lot of this, I mean, on police fire side, it's a little easier, but Danny's side has so much, as you've seen how the water mains are breaking and things like, so much of that is, he has so much infrastructure that we need to look at right now.

Because that was, just so everybody's aware, that was about $20 million in repairs that we had for that study. And that was three years ago.

In the water and sewer findings thing, you mentioned add cash. How would we add cash to that?

Well, right now, your cash balances are actually quite good, which is why we're going to spend that cash down. So the way that the cash works is. Right now we're saying let's – I want to go back a couple slides. Let's see the cash balance. Yep, they just had it. Page 11. Yep, that one. That one, there we go. There's multiple different tabs. Okay. So you can see right now we are in fiscal 27. So your cash balance that ended 26 on the water side is quite good. And on the sewer side we're probably close to where we want to be. The issue here is to keep the rates down we spend the cash down. Also spending money on capital. your cash will go back up if you defer a project or if you get the engineering done and you put it out to bid and then, you know, you just don't get everything back in time, but your rates are going up, you're still going to cash, you're going to collect the money. It's going to sit in the bank until you actually move forward with that. So the cash is going to go up and down. The idea is to try to always project forward so we know that we're not building up too much cash. And if we start to gain excess cash, we say, okay, Should we kind of pull back on rates, or is there another project that we should just tick off the list and be done with it and spend that cash? So given how water and sewer works, if we have a dry summer, people use more water. That's just how it works. So we are anticipating a certain level or volume of water being sold. If you have a really dry, hot summer, people use more, your cash goes up. That just means that you've got a little bit next year that, again, you bring the rates down a little bit or not increase them as much, or you spend a little bit more on capital. If you have a wet year, you're going to get less revenue. So your cash is going to go down. It's all you're constantly balancing back and forth as you look at every year's budget, trying to understand where you're at. The forecasting tool helps with that. So we can say, even if things are wet and cold and people aren't using much on the water side, we're fine. You've got enough cash to get through. Suicide gets a little scary out in that last year. But again, this is a 20-year model. I'm just showing you five years here. So when you get beyond that, things start to pick up again. So we're looking farther out than what you're seeing here, trying to balance the cash and the rates and the capital investment all at the same time.

John where you also mentioned that I think what council member Wendell might be referencing is when you were talking about The bonds and then when the bonds fall off. Yes, you were talking about Our red are ready to serve Tim.

Can you make sure to use your mic? That is something I get a lot of feedback on especially for this Thank you.

All right and our on our ready to serve already a serve or our sewer bond debts that we used to call it ready to serve now and We, in the past, we were having to supplement into that. So to a tune of, what did we say, $150,000 at least a year that we would have to pay to cover those bond debts every single year. And so now that some of them are eventually falling off, we're getting closer to even on that. When more fall off, and we are now at potentially a surplus, what he was mentioning is rather than issuing new bonds... Or you know, we could use the cash and increased cash flow that we had in order to make some of these capital improvements Is that correct that that is a strategy?

Yes and then when should when do you think we should enact the changes into the township for The fees because they shouldn't be paying the same price we are Should we my opinion is as soon as possible?

Okay

I mean this has been going on for a long time and from somebody and and I have to understand I look at a lot of communities with water and sewer rates. I look at it objectively. I'm also a water sewer customer customer where I live and I I get it I get a bill and they go well I guess rates went up again. But the important thing is here we're trying to balance how things work and be equitable so Equity has to factor in where the risk is and who's putting the money into the system. And it's the village. And for so long, the folks in the township have just been getting a free ride. So the cash cow needs to stop. Well, I think it's time to really right-size the rates.

Can you walk us through what a levy would look like, Tim?

Well, I would... Are you talking about a general fund? To stabilize the general fund. I would ask John if he could explain what, when you're referencing a general fund levy, what would that look like?

So you have a couple of options. Your, I don't know how much people know. Headly rollbacks have happened consistently. So in the Michigan Constitution, for those of you that don't know, every year there's a calculation done in every taxing jurisdiction in the state, and there's a number produced. And if it shows that the taxable value in that community increased more than the rate of inflation, the state permanently reduces your charter levy. I mean, the charter levy is there, but you can no longer tax whatever percentage they've just shaved off. You have lost substantial value over the years because of that. And the Headley Amendment has been in effect since 1972 or something. So it's been a long time. And it just erodes away at the taxable capacity of every jurisdiction in the state. So the maximum you can tax with your general fund levy right now is a lot less than what your charter says you can tax. So two options are, one, you ask voters to override the Headlee rollback. And that is a legitimate process where you essentially ask voters to say, we are going to allow our village to tax us in excess of what the state has said the headly rollback is for a period of time to be determined by whatever ballot language there is. Another option is a special levy and that could be targeted towards capital improvements. You have the special assessment for public safety. A lot of communities have a tax of an ad valorem tax as opposed to a special assessment for public safety. It could be for parks. It could be for many different things, but it's defined in what it's for and for the term. So those are the options that you have for bringing more money into the general fund.

So it's similar to a special assessment, but it's project-defined and timed.

Well, it's also voter-approved. For example, now, okay, so the place and fire millages that were done across the state, a lot of them failed recently in Oakland County. Those are examples of some of those?

Yes, those are special levies.

We did talk about, obviously, this budget season, last budget season, we talked about what a Headley override would look like, how that process would work. Obviously, we have not adjusted our rates since 1982, since we incorporated as a home rule village. And so because of Headley and Pecote delay, we have not been able to adjust that rate back up.

Right.

Council? So in our charter, it says we should be taxing at, what, $20,000? 20 mils. 20 mils. That's the maximum. And this year we did 10.9857 or something, right?

Which is your headly limit.

Yes. Okay.

So even if we did a headly override and it said we could go back up to our maximum of 20, that doesn't mean that we should. It means that that would be the capacity at which we could go. We would look at the budget and what we need, and then you would establish your millage rate at that point.

Correct.

Verification yeah, that's correct.

Yeah, and then but then again as soon as that happens Hadley starts again to take those numbers down and Similarly another option is a debt levy which we've talked about briefly So if you ask voters to approve a debt levy you're asking them to approve as up to a certain amount of taxation to fund the debt service on whatever debt you're issuing and As your taxable value changes, it usually goes up, and your bond payments are usually pretty steady. That means that debt levy typically goes down year over year. Debt can be structured different ways, but the idea is they approve up to a certain amount, and then you can't tax them for any more than that, but you can only tax them enough to collect for the debt service.

Something that stuck out was timing. We just watched a lot of millages get denied. So if we do a road millage, the likelihood of that passing right now I think would be very slim. We'd have to do a lot of education and pick a prime time for after that education was released on as many medias and meetings as possible. I know we talked about maybe doing it in February and it kind of stinks to think that we'd have to pay that extra money for a special election, but I don't think it would have passed this November anyways. That's unfortunate. Was there a recommendation? What was the recommendation for the road millage? Was it two mills? 2.3 and 2.9?

Again, that was for illustration. If you're trying to generate enough to pay an $8.5 million bond or a $5 million bond. Over 15 years. And bonds are often 20 years. But for roads, they don't last 20 years in Michigan. So we don't want to bond for a project that's going to be out of service and still be paying debt service on it when it's no longer useful.

I think just to work there on mill rates too. As Shannon said, we're almost at 11 plus that four that we have for the special assessment, which brings us to 15. Then we're asking another five, which is going to be, it will be 20 mills.

Yeah. Almost like our treader said that we needed. Counsel, any further questions?

I just had one more to piggyback off my water rate one. If we increase the value or crease the payment from the outside residents, would that be able to bring down the bond amount for the residents inside the village?

So if all the rates go up, then the fixed charges and the variable charges adjust. So if you think of it as a pie that's being sliced into a hundred slices, If we now charge outside customers 150%, the number of slices has increased and more of them are allocated to the township. So the village customers pay less of that total pie.

Because I know a lot of our people inside the village complain and don't like the amount that we pay for that water bond fee thing. I don't like it either.

And we are, I mean, you're currently... that specific charge has been changed to the ready to serve charge. Uh, so in rate setting, we're trying to recover fixed costs from a fixed charge. Um, that's, that's generally how we do it.

So as we, and the whole intention when we were looking at cityhood and the ideas has always been to, I got to turn the mic on too. So the idea has always been to how can we actually lower the, like lower how much people are paying in taxes, but, but be able to maintain the level of service or increase. And so obviously the only way you can do that is increase your taxable value, and there's only a couple ways you can do that. And that's the reason that we were looking at cityhood pretty aggressively at the time.

This one's for Tim. Do you have an estimate of how much money is required to repair our water infrastructure as it is? Because we have this cash on hand, but that's pretty much already spoken for.

Yeah, so I we don't have a number specifically even our saw grant when we originally did it was supposed to give us that kind of estimate in 2019 About how much and it only did I think like a third of the village to give us that estimate got third I'm getting some engineers give me a head in north and south So yeah, I only did a third of the village. So we only have really an estimate on that I wouldn't even be able to ballpark it because I would have to look at the age of the other infrastructure and all of that just to determine But we're also looking at the other things that we're required to do. We are doing our lead line service replacement identification right now. We're right now in the identification process of that. But we are going to be required to replace any lead service line or galvanized steel service lines that could have ever been touched by lead. And so that is going to be on us to replace these lines. So these are all other considerations that we have to keep in mind that that was going to cut into this.

Right. Well, my main point was that it's probably unlikely the village residents would see a drop if we did tax township more right now because of our repairs.

My response would be in the initial year, there could be a slightly lower rate for township or for the village customers. But then after that, the rates just start, you know, ratcheting up six, 7% a year. And, and, Also to be clear six or seven percent a year is low. Those are small increases. A lot of communities I'm working with I was just presenting across the state village across the other side of the state last night 13 and a half percent for the next four or five years every year. I was just talking to another community not too far from here this afternoon we're looking at a 55 percent increase in the sewer rates. So these are real numbers. It is not just Holly. It is every municipality that I'm dealing with because they're all about the same age and they're all starting to fail at the exact same time when all of the prices are up. So that's the challenge.

Council if that's all we can take a

7-minute break for our council meeting are we good with are you wanting to continue this work session or Can we release John or does he have to stay for the presentation?

I think we can release him Gosh I wasn't even I wasn't even arrested. So thank you We can fix that. Okay. He's not done.

All right. That's a wrap. We'll see you guys at 6

Good evening and welcome to the August 11th, 2026 council meeting for the village of Holly.

Clerk, please call the roll.

Here.

Costola.

Ryan. Here. Wendell.

Here.

Here. Weinberger. Here.

Wren.

Here. We have a quorum. I will entertain a motion to excuse Lisa.

I'll make the motion to excuse our clerk, Lisa Bone.

As well as Jim Costola. I was going to do them one at a time. Do I have a second to excuse Lisa?

I will second it.

We've got a second by Weinbrenner. Motion by Wendell. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carried. I'll entertain a motion to excuse Councilman Koskella.

I'll make the motion to excuse Councilman Koskella.

I'll second.

We have a motion by Ryan. We have support by Kier. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carried. If you're willing and able, please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. This brings us to the approval of our consent agenda. All items listed under consent agenda are considered to be routine and non-controversial by the Village Council and will be approved by one motion. There will be no separate discussion if discussion is desired. That item will be removed from the consent agenda and discussed separately in new business. Do I hear a motion to approve the consent agenda?

I'll make a motion to approve the consent agenda.

I will support that. Motion by Weinbrenner. Second by Cole. Roll call, please.

Wendell.

Yes.

Weinbrenner. Yes. Ryan. Yes. Cole.

Yes.

Kyer.

Yes.

Brandon.

Yes. Motion carried. This brings us to reappointments and appointments to boards and commissions. Similar to consent agenda, all reappointments and appointments will be approved by one motion. If discussion is desired, that item will be removed from the consent agenda and discussed separately in new business. There are no reappointments today, but we do have one new appointment. And that is Risa Hamilton to the Historic District Commission term ending February, 2027. Do I hear a motion to approve this new appointment?

I will make the motion to approve raise a Hamilton to the historic district commission term ending February, 2027.

I'll second that motion.

We have a motion by Kier. We have a second by Weinbrenner. Clerk, please call the roll.

Kier.

Yes.

Ryan. Yes. Weinbrenner. Yes. Wendell?

Yes.

Cole?

Yes.

Brandon?

Yes. Motion carried. Let's see. We finished our work session. So, presentations. Let's see. Nope. Presentation. Continuate. Nope. We finished that. Sorry. Public hearing. At this time, can I hear a motion to open a public hearing regarding resolution 2026-037, for reprogramming of CDBG funding from code enforcement to water sewer improvements.

I will make the motion to open a public hearing regarding resolution 2026-037, the reprogramming of CDBG funding from code enforcement to water sewer improvements.

I'll second that motion.

We have a motion by Cole, we have a second by Weinbrenner. Okay, so we have entered our public hearing at this time. Would any of the members of public like to make any comments? As a reminder, at this time, comments should only be related to the public hearing. Mr. Love, come on up.

John Love, 200 North Saigon. I don't understand what is happening. They're taking money from the water. from code enforcement to water? How much is it? I don't know what's involved. Can you explain it?

Thank you, Mr. Love. Any further public comment? Okay, hearing none, seeing none. The floor is yours.

All right, so for this, so the... So for this, to answer John's question, just for some clarity, I'll probably have Danny back me up on this. So this is actually something that Lisa and Danny have been working on with CDBG, reprogramming some of the funding. The funding that we have is federal funding, the Community Development Block Grant funding. And the amount, was it 49,000? It's in the resolution. We had previously reprogrammed this to code enforcement. We've been using it slowly. We still have money left over in code enforcement. But it's going real slow on how we're spending that. We've identified that we're actually able to replace some of our fire hydrants that are not operating within the village. And we're going to reprogram some of this funding in order to replace those fire hydrants. Danny, what did I miss? Go ahead.

I think that pretty much covers it. They're all within the CBDG district, and so we're able to replace all of the hydrants that are out of service with this money. So that's the game plan without touching our water fund and our repairs and maintenance budget for the year.

So one of the things that also with CBDG, you have to be able to keep a ratio of spending that is, you can't have too much money from previous years. We've just spent 2019 money that we had. We're supposed to keep a one to eight ratio, I think something like that. And we've just, in the past, they hadn't spent it all down. And so we are trying to be good stewards of that money and utilize it in a manner that we're spending it down so it doesn't negatively impact our ability to ask for CDBG money in the future.

I think this is fabulous. Honestly, this has been a big community concern, and I appreciate that this is what we're doing.

So right now, and again, this is just the public hearing portion, we actually do the discussion when it becomes a new business item later in the meeting.

Okay. All right, well then, we will close this public hearing.

I will make a motion to close the public hearing. regarding resolution 2026-037 for approval of reprogramming of CDBG funding from code enforcement to water and sewer improvements.

That's a mouthful. We have a motion by Kier.

I second it.

We have a second by Wendell. Clerk, please call the roll.

Kier.

Yes. Cole. Yes.

Ryan. Yes. Weinbrenner. Yes. Wendell. Yes. Brandon.

Yes. Motion carried. Again, I think this is a wonderful idea that you're doing.

New business, wait for new business.

This brings us to public comment. Members of the audience may address council on any item that is not on the agenda. Those adjusting council will be limited to three minutes of speaking time. After each agenda item, there will be an additional two minute public comment period to speak to those items before council votes. Council will hear all comments for future consideration, but will not have a response at this time. Prior to addressing council, members of the public shall state their name and address for the record. So non-agenda items. Any public comment? Hearing none. Seeing none. Okay. This moves us to old business. Item A, reconsideration of resolution 2026-03, establishing the Village of Holly Cityhood Action Committee and directing implementation of the city incorporation process. Do I have a first to consider item A of old business? Yes.

All right, so it's come to my attention that I should disclose that I am married to the township treasurer, and this could affect different votes on the cityhood action stuff throughout the life cycle of it. I am also going to additionally disclose that I am on the Holly Township Zoning Board of Appeals, just in case that affects it as well.

Thank you for that disclosure.

And just a little follow-up on that is that in discussions with the attorney, because Councilmember Ryan wanted to make sure that he was in the right on everything. With the exploratory committee votes, we don't think there is any conflict. Again, because there's no, this is really just looking forward, he can participate in discussion. We can't tell him not to, regardless, but we'd encourage him to participate in discussion and vote on these particular items we're talking about tonight.

Okay. And now, do I have a first to consider item A of old business?

I will make the motion to consider item A of old business, reconsideration of resolution 2026-038, establishing a Village of Holly Cityhood Action Committee and direct implementation of the city incorporation process.

I'll second that motion.

We have a motion by Cole. We have a second by Kier. I think she wins that one. She wins that round. All right. This is an item.

I asked the village manager to add back on the agenda for reconsideration Okay first any public comment on this item, mr. Love John love I thought this cityhood thing was dead It's not I Don't understand what the point is Because it seems to me that's a waste of time and money Thank You mr. Love

Any further public comment?

Anthony Tracy, 110 Park Avenue. I sat through the last hour as well. Cityhood annexing is just another word for stealing someone else's land. We shouldn't let the township people pay for our mistakes. Thanks.

Thank you. Further public comment? Hearing none, seeing none. Council, discussion?

I just want to clarify with Tim, is this an action committee to pursue it, or is this exploratory? Because multiple things have been said.

TIMOTHY JORDAN- So I can read off. Again, this was from the previous one. I can read off my. my council action report that I had given last time. Also, I was remiss. I need to introduce Pat, who is our village attorney for the night. We've met, obviously you know Mike, we've met Chris, we've met Thomas, and Pat is from the firm that is representing tonight. So any questions he can also assist with. Hi, Pat. I just wanted to move. I can hire Mike better than law school.

He and I have been law partners for 15 years.

I've heard rumors of him wandering the halls, but this is the first time I've met him, so... So the purpose of the tattoo resolution is to establish the village village of holly cityhood action committee and Authorize it to advance the process of transitioning the village of holly from a home rural village to a home rural city This is not an exploratory committee to answer your point the village council has previously discussed the potential benefits and implications of cityhood and is now prepared to move on to the next phase of the process. The proposed committee will serve as the council's working body for coordinating the legal, administrative, financial, and public engagement activities necessary to pursue cityhood incorporation. The background under Michigan law, the incorporation of a home rule city requires a formal process that may include determining the proposed city boundaries, preparing and filing petitions, city charter conducting elections and Providing residents with clear and accurate information regarding the transition the city of process will require Sustained attention and coordination beyond what reasonably can be accomplished during regular village council meetings or by staff Establishing an action oriented committee will allow the village to organize this work identify required professional assistance and develop a realistic timeline to provide regular recommendations and progress towards the council The recommendation is that the Village Administration recommends that the Village Council adopt the attached resolution establishing the Village of Holly Cityhood Action Committee. Adoption will provide the organizational structure and clear directions necessary to begin advancing the cityhood process in a deliberate fashion. We have had exploratory committees in the past in fact a council member Ryan I think come council member Costco we're on it at the time. They did Recommend approving to take the next steps and it was postponed by council. I believe at that time correct me if I'm wrong That is correct.

And I believe I was the only one dissenting it at the time On the on as part of the committee.

Yeah, that's part of the committee. Yep

So this is a council subcommittee, not a citizen-led committee?

No. At the time, that was a citizen-led committee. Neither Council Member Koskala or Ryan were on council at the time. They were just part of this committee. That's right.

It was a council-led committee, though, that you guys voted for, and the village president at the time was the liaison.

Got it.

Okay. And at the time, again, they recommended moving forward the vote. I think they postponed. I think this was in November, I believe, that they decided to postpone it until a future date. And that's why when we began looking at cityhood again, we had the initial conversations. That is the information that we use as a starting point.

Now, since we've discussed this a bit in the past, should there be a council liaison or no?

Yes, I believe there should be a council liaison. I can't remember I would have to look at the actual resolution It was a few months ago that we wrote it. Okay? Yeah, okay Yeah, there should be council members as representatives on it.

You said there should be three Okay, so three council members and how many citizens is the recommended number?

I would have to go back again to the actual question. I think it was three citizens, possibly one from another board. Someone from staff, I believe, was going to be on it. Tim was going to be on it.

It's a long resolution in comparison to previous resolutions. Paychecks. Paychecks, okay. The membership should include three members of the village council, the village manager, at least one representative of the local business community, at least three village residents, a representative of a village board commission or authority, and other members possessing relevant professional government, financial, legal, communication planning, or community experience. So not fewer than seven, not more than 11 voting members is the recommendation in this resolution.

Seven to 11 voting members, and I'm assuming staff cannot vote?

In this, none of them are ex-officio, so they would all be able to vote.

Everyone votes, okay. So seven to 11 members, got it. Council, anything else?

Okay, go ahead. I just don't know where to begin yet. So if anyone has anything they want. All right, so for me, the biggest issue with this is the cost. I remember seeing a post online saying that we only have about a little under $2,000 carrying over. And there's a lot of costs inside this resolution that's going to come up. So how would we pay for it?

I don't believe the resolution authorizes any expenditures for it.

Well, there's staff time, there's printing, there's a bunch of stuff.

As far as staff time, that's being paid for and that's something that we have to decide whether or not it's something that you want staff to prioritize.

Attorney usage, that's also a cost that can easily eat up into our budget for that.

We would have to get those things authorized as part of it. There are specific guidance within the resolution about how that should get approved and any kind of cost. And again, this is a draft of the resolution that changes council's weight. It's up to council.

One thing that I would also like to see change if this is voted on, that the meetings be recorded for transparency. So that way, public that can't make it to one of the committee meetings or say committee meetings during the workday. Like you guys have a form of people during the workday that can get some action passed a little bit faster. Then that way we can have it recorded. Everyone has the option to go watch the video, get their input, and stuff like that just for transparency.

So section 13 does cover reporting. It says community shall provide a written or oral progress report at each regular village council meeting unless the village council directs otherwise. The support shall identify actions completed, current petitions or final status, upcoming deadlines, public engagement activities, decision requiring council action. Expenditures or contracts requiring approval and obstacles that could affect the city of timeline.

He said recording not report.

Oh, you want to be right?

I imagine most of the meetings will probably be in this room That's a pretty big committee. This is one of the bigger rooms we have for it Our conference rooms aren't gonna be able to entertain that many people and we have the recording software already in here That's just a suggestion

Would the new committee have access to any of the other committees or the past committee's work they already did?

I have probably four big boxes. to take from me looking through and analyzing.

And when we were on the committee, the MML did a great job providing timelines of everything that needed to be done, processes, all that stuff. And I actually think it comes in here that we're going to ratify all the work that has already been done. Can we define what that is, like all the work that's already been done that's going to be ratified, just so us as council knows what we already have done?

Yeah. And that's something that we would have to, We would have to do some more research and determine exactly what we need to. Because there is a ton of information on this. I mean, we've been doing this every few years since the 90s. And no one's brought it through the finish line for one reason or another.

So even though we're forming this committee, it's still going to come to us as counsel. To get approved later on?

Well, there's going to be action items that need to get approved by council, right? But the cityhood initiative eventually has to become a community-led initiative. It has to be a petition process. In fact, there is a point in which council and staff has, well, staff specifically has to step back and not, like, I can provide factual information, but I can't tell people how to vote on anything. I'm saying anything wrong, Patrick.

That would be the petition part, right?

Yeah. Once we get to the petition part, and that's what I've said all along. I love to do the research on this. I love to provide information. But at some point, it can't be my initiative. It has to be a community-led initiative. I can provide research and facts, but that's it.

So my suggestion would be for us to hold off on making a committee until a citizen-led petition is already completed. Because if we don't get enough signatures to begin that to start with, it's already dead in the water and we just wasted time and resources before we could even

Because for the petition to exist, you have to do the boundaries. You have to do all of those things. You have to draft up those things to create the petition process, is my understanding of it.

Right, but couldn't a petition just be started by a citizen to start that process as well?

It could, yeah. There's two main ways to do this, and the MML, in their presentation, I'm sure you have said, it can be either community-led or it can be a council-led initiative.

And for me, I'm more in favor of a community-led, because if the community gets behind it at the start, it's a lot easier to pass than if we're just throwing it out there. And that's been my position for the last few times it's been brought up.

Well, how could we non-officially put it out there that we need a vote on it? Not a vote, but a petition.

For my understanding, we are all citizens. So if one of us feels very strongly about it, we can go start the petition It just wouldn't be staff doing it Council anything else and then going off one of them said I'm Annexing the properties.

We're not Taking the people's property. We're just changing basically Whether there's a township or the village, correct?

I

So how it would look is you're not taking their property, obviously. They're just, it's how, yeah, it's.

Well, I just want to make sure we knew about it, so.

So what you would do is you would, they would propose a boundary. The boundary that we've been using for our recommendation has been where we provide water and sewer service from. And also to make sure that we don't have any islands and lands, which you can't do as a city. I'll lean into my mic so I don't get yelled at. And so. From that from that there will then they'll take that they'll have to get a certain number of signatures for the petition process and that you know the the Action Committee would help us define what those numbers are and specific to what we're trying to do and Then we would take that information and the petition to the State Boundary Commission the State Boundary Commission Would review all of the data make sure that there was sufficient that they would have a sufficiency hearing to make sure all the petitions Were appropriately done that they're they're correct that we have a certain number that are from the proposed annexed area as well. And then the next step of that, if the State Boundary Commission will then decide, all right, we agree with this boundary. You can take the next steps using this map. And then there would be a first vote. And the first vote would be, hey, we need to elect a charter change commission. So they have nine members that would be elected that would draft a new charter for the proposed city. They would have two years to do this, and they would have an opportunity to do two votes on it. So if we said no, the second, so once they have this charter written, they would put it up to the electors again to say, do you agree with this charter? Is this the charter? And this would include any proposed annex areas. If that gets approved, we would then become a city on the date that it says in that charter that we become a city. Or it could get denied, and then we remain in the village status. And so that's kind of the really brief explanation of how that process would look. They're not being, you know, they do have a vote in it, and it is, like, as we established, it is a large number of people that would have a deciding factor within that vote.

And, like, how long would we have to get adequate fire and police services in to cover it all?

So we would have to have an, we would, that's part of that, in that charter change, they would have to determine, because we wouldn't have to say, once it's approved, we start

that date it's whatever date we decide and we'd have to like determine what are our increased needs are all of those things so we can build up those capabilities thank you council I do think that we need to have more citizens on a come on this committee then council members this should be something that translates right into a citizen led initiative so You're looking at, what, three council members, a staff member, but 11 total that would be more community members outside of us. They can't spend money unless they come to the council. This isn't signing anything away. It's doing research on boundaries, correct, basically? Yeah, they can't.

Any expenditures that they're requesting, it has to go to council for approval. They have no authorization for expenditure, and I would not have any authorization to expend any kind of – do any kind of purchases in the name of them either.

Right. And we don't have the money for certain things and we're well aware we don't have the money for certain things.

And for now, would those committee members have to be village residents or could they be township from the proposed areas? I don't know how we would determine that since we wouldn't know what boundary would be approved anyway.

So the way it's written right now, they would be village residents. I mean, but again, it's for now. It's your committee to determine how you want it structured. This was just a recommendation based on past past examples of what this has looked like for other communities that have. But this isn't something that happens every day. Talking to a lot of the managers, they don't see this happen because once villages become cities, they don't go back. It's a process that happens once, and then they're done. There's 193 cities that are smaller than us. Again, we're the third largest village in the state. The only two bigger are Milford and Beverly Hills that have maintained their village status for one reason or another.

Council?

I do think we should have some people from the township on here that are going to be annexed into the area so we can get good or bad points for their end. Whether they're for it or against it, even if they're against it, they should be on the committee because that gives it a broad spectrum of, you know.

I think the hard part about that is, I mean, I think I agree, but if they have to, this committee is also supposed to help us determine what those boundaries are. And so if they're saying, if the committee decides we're using just the current village boundaries for it, well, it doesn't help it's of taxable value. There's all the reasons why we wouldn't want to do that. But then those other people that are in this group are not actually, they're basically working on something that isn't going to affect them at all. But I understand your point on that.

Council?

So back to, I think it was Shannon that said about having that many council members versus citizens. We could lower it down to like a council liaison and then the additional ones for the citizens.

I would say probably two council liaisons.

And this is a multi-year process. We want to add something in there that it is a council liaison and not council members that just stay on the committee until it's done. So that way, if someone decides not to run again and they're on the committee, it gets replaced by somebody else. So I think that should probably be defined.

I do like that definition. So my gut on this one is to, I'm still digesting municipal analytics presentation and would personally like to put this vote off for another month, but that's where I'm at. They had some valid points for cityhood and they had some things to think about as far as what might cost, what might not cost.

And it would also allow Tim to adjust this based on the recommendations we had up here as well.

This isn't committing us to anything besides for just forming the committee.

Before I would vote on making the committee, I'd like to know what our prospective boundaries are right now so that we know who we might be.

Well, I think Tim answered that, that we're looking at people that already have our infrastructure.

Yeah, that's what I meant. I'm just saying it's like, if we have a piece of paper that says blah, blah, blah, blah.

The problem is that this committee is supposed to develop that. The committee's purpose is to develop that information.

Yeah, that's part of their goals.

I have a recommendation.

I don't see any reason to keep kicking the can down the road. Cityhood is one of the viable options that could ease the tax burden on the residents. And the committee can't, they're not authorized to do any actions. Any of those would come before council. And it's going to take such an extremely long time. I don't see any purpose to keep putting it off or procrastinating.

So this is going to operate like the mill upon. Like the what? The mill upon. They're going to come to us if they need something. It's.

A little different just because there are specific, yes, in that matter, but there are specific timelines that they are supposed to meet within this. That one was a little more abstract. We wanted to make sure that it was... Like they had specific goals in mind and timelines that they're supposed to meet and how they're reporting. We kind of learned our lesson from other previous committees that we've had on how to structure it a little more officially and make sure we stay on task with accomplishing goals.

Council, anything else before we vote?

Mr. Love, we've already had public comment on this.

Mr. Love, it's not public comments anymore, but thank you.

I don't understand what this problem is.

Mr. Love, it is not public comment right now. Thank you. Clerk, please call the roll.

Are we going to make the changes that it's a liaison versus just a member so that after election those kind of things are... Let's see, who made this motion?

I made the motion. You made the motion. And who made the second? Me.

Okay, so... You two bad girls.

So I can amend my motion. Yeah. so that we can amend the resolution to have council liaisons. That way the council member does not stay on after whatever happens.

So are you saying one council liaison? No, she's saying two council liaisons. Two council liaisons.

But then to make the third one a citizen liaison. Yeah, so there's four citizens for it.

Okay. four citizens and one could be a council member but doesn't have to be?

Right, or in staff.

We're all talking about Jim here, right? Right. Because he's not going to be a council member here in a few months for sure. Okay. And then it was three staff?

No.

How many staff was it?

I thought it was just one staff. Was it one staff?

Yeah.

Okay. So the majority is citizen-led? They can have somebody who's going to respond, somebody who might have some factual information, but it is citizen-led. Thomas, did you say there was one board member as well?

No, it was just a possibility that we could have them. Like all these is like what it should consist of, but it's more than seven.

What would you guys think about if they were willing? Oh, no, this is good. Okay, so do you want to go ahead and amend your...

Can I recap what this, what you guys are looking for? So it would be membership should include, well, let me start again. The committee shall consist of not fewer than seven, but not more than 11 voting members appointed by village council. Two council liaison members, the village manager, at least one representative of the business community, at least four village residents. representative of village board commission or authority and other members possessing relevant professional government financial legal communication planning or community experience as determined Okay, and you will once again just like any other committee. We're gonna after this the next step would be Picking the names for this and putting it as an action item. These are the representatives of it.

Okay, and So you amended your motion to that? Yes And then you amend your second to that? Correct. Okay, so amended. Clerk, please call the roll.

Cole.

Yes.

Tire. Yes. Weinbrenner. Yes. Wendell.

Yes.

Ryan. No. Brandon.

Yes. Motion carried. New business. Let's see.

Time to wear two hats, Jeremy.

Do I have a first to consider? Item A of new business, which is consideration of the Village of Holly Fire Department special event application for September 11th, Day of Remembrance, to honor the 343 first responders.

I would like to make the motion to consider the Village of Holly Fire Department special event application for a September 11th day of remembrance to honor the 343 first responders.

I'll second the motion.

We have a motion by Cole. We have a second by Wendell. Chief Watson, would you like to?

Good evening, Madam President and members of council. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to present a proposal that I believe reflects the very best of our community. On September 11th, 2026 marks the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on our nation. While many anniversaries are important, 25 years represent an entire generation. Many of our students and young adults have never experienced emotions of that day. Yet the lessons of September 11th remain as relevant today as they were in 2001. The Village of Halifax department would like to host a community-wide remembrance ceremony dedicating dedicated to honoring the 343 members of the Fire Department of New York who made the ultimate sacrifice while rescuing others. This event is about more than remembering history. It's about preserving the legacy of courage, educating future generations, strengthening community relationships, and demonstrating our continued support for the men and women who serve today. On September 11, 2011, our nation witnessed an extraordinary tragedy. Nearly 3,000 innocent people lost their lives, including firefighters, police officers, emergency medical personnel, and civilians. Among those heroes were 343 FDNY firefighters who knowingly entered the World Trade Center towers to save complete strangers. They understood the danger, yet they answered the call because service to others was their mission. 25 years later, many young people only know the date of September 11th. They've never heard the many personal stories of courage, sacrifice, leadership, and unity that defined our country on that day. As firefighters, we believe we have a responsibility to ensure the sacrifices are never forgotten. The Holly Fire Department proposes a respectful and dignified remembrance ceremony that will serve as both a memorial and a community gathering. The ceremony will begin with a presentation of colors followed by the Holly High School band performing our national anthem. Immediately following the anthem, the American flag will be lowered to half staff as we observe a moment of silence. We will then begin reading the names of every one of the 343 fallen FDNY firefighters. As each name is spoken, a community leader, elected official, firefighter, veteran, citizen volunteer, We'll plant a single American flag in our front yard for remembrance. Each one of those flags will be identified with one of those members that went into the towers that day. As each name is spoken, a community leader, elected official, firefighter, will plant that single flag in remembrance. By the conclusion of the ceremony, 343 American flags will stand united together as a powerful visual memorial honoring each firefighter who gave his life saving others. Our goal is for every attendee to leave understanding the magnitude of that sacrifice. This event is designed to bring together every part of our community. Rather than having only firefighters participate, we hope to involve representatives throughout Holly and Oakland County and the state. We respectfully invite members of the Village of Holly Council, county officials, state legislators, veteran organizations, police officers, EMS providers, firefighters, school officials, clergy, local business leaders, civic organizations, and community volunteers. Each participant will read names and plan a remembrance flag, symbolizing that our entire community shares in honoring these heroes. One of the most exciting aspects of this event is the tremendous community support already being developed. Current partners include Henry Ford Hospital, Oakland County Health Division, 3D Eatery Food Truck, ServPro, Michigan Association of Firefighters, Frontline Strong, Versita, WOTA, and Tri-County Times, with additional others that we continue to invite additional organizations to share our mission of service and community engagement. Although the ceremony itself will remain respectful and solemn, we also want to encourage families to stay, interact with first responders, and learn more about public safety. Families will have the opportunity to meet local firefighters and emergency personnel, learn about emergency preparedness, visit fire apparatus, equipment displays, and demonstrations, participate in family-friendly activities, receive free health screenings, opportunity to give blood, visit informational booths, and enjoy refreshments from local vendors. Our objective is to create a welcoming environment that honors the past while investing in our future. One of the strongest and most proud parts of this proposal is that no taxpayer funding is being used for this event. The event is made totally possible through community sponsorships, donations, volunteer participation, and partner organizations. We believe this demonstrates both fiscal responsibility and the incredible generosity of our community. While this ceremony remembers those lost on September 11th, it also serves another important purpose. Everyday firefighters, EMS personnel, law enforcement officers, dispatchers, healthcare professionals, military members continue to answer different calls on the behalf of our community. This event provides an opportunity for Holly to publicly acknowledge those who continue to serve today while remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice 25 years ago. It reinforces to our first responders that this community recognizes, values, and supports their commitments. Tonight, I respectfully ask for more than your approval. I ask for your participation. We invite each member of council to stand beside us on September 11th By helping read the names of fallen firefighters and planting remembrance flags alongside fellow elected officials, veterans, first responders, students, and community leaders. Your participation will demonstrate that the village of Holly remembers together. 25 years ago, 343 firefighters ran into danger while thousands were running away. Their courage has become a symbol of the very best of public service. As firefighters, we inherit legacy every time we answer an alarm. As a community, we have an opportunity to ensure the legacy continues for future generations. The ceremony is about remembrance, it's about education, it's about community, and it's about supporting those who continue to serve. Most importantly, it's about ensuring that the names of those 343 firefighters are never forgotten. I'd like to thank you for your time, your continued support of the Holly Fire Department, and for considering this opportunity to bring our community together in remembrance of this historic anniversary. I respectfully ask for your support and participation in making this event a meaningful tribute worthy of those we honor. Thank you.

Thank you, Chief.

I'd be happy to answer any questions. I also handed out a flyer and a QR code if you'd like to give blood and also a challenge coin that was purchased by Servpro They purchased 300 of those challenge coins, so everybody that participates that day gets that same remembrance. So, thank you for that.

Thank you. Any public comment on this item? Hearing none. Seeing none. Council discussion?

Jeremy, I know that your front yard is not very big. So to hold 343 people on that piece of grass, I think would be kind of hard.

So the flags have been purchased by Henry Ford. They're four by six flags. So they're just a little flag, right? And Michigan engraving is symbolizing each one of those flags with a member of one of the fallen. So I was actually out there this morning, and we're going to have five rows of flags in a staggered format so that it will be very, very powerful when you drive by or you walk down the sidewalk. And we're looking to keep that up for about a week.

Pre-drill.

Yeah, they will be. So when you walk up, there will already be a spot for you to plant a flag. You won't have to think about it. You'll walk up, you'll plant that flag in the position that is marked for it. And we'll pay our respects to those men and women.

Okay. What I was meeting is, are you going to close off part of Saginaw at all?

Uh, so part of mine, uh, just for the actual planning of the flags, uh, I did re re receive approval from all the department heads, uh, that we would be closing the northbound lane of Saginaw using the turn lane as the northbound lane, uh, for about two hours while we perform that ceremony.

That's what I was curious about just for safety.

particularly most.

Are you utilizing some of the Dickens Festival space, too, or looking at it?

Yeah, so for parking, I've already, Walt has committed to shuttle people. We're going to use the VFW on airport for parking, along with the Dickens lot that is just north of the Dollar Tree. So people can park there and walk. And they can also park at the VF or the American VFW, I apologize, on airport and ride the water shuttle to the Dollar Tree, get on and off there. And that shuttle will be running continuously from 8am to 3pm that day for the entire entirety of the event.

And another thing, I know this is going to be a hard day for every firefighter. Is there going to be somebody handling the calls to the village, or are you guys still going to be handling them?

I have multiple volunteers that have stood up that day, and at this point right now, I have a double crew willing to handle not only the normal load, but any additional calls that we may gather.

Council? Clerk, please call the roll.

Wendell? Yes. Cole?

Yes.

Ryan? Yes. Kier?

Yes.

Weinbrenner? Yes. Brandon?

Yes. Motion carried. Thank you, Chief.

I hope to see all my fellow council members there.

It'll be my honor to be there.

Appreciate you all.

Item, where are we at? Item B. Do I have a first to consider item B of new business, consideration of approval of the purchase of the four ton road saver asphalt trailer from Spalding Inc. for the not to exceed amount of $32,950.

I will make the motion for the consideration of approval of the purchase of the four ton road saver asphalt trailer from Spalding Manufacturing Inc. for the not to exceed amount of $32,950.

I'll second that motion.

Motion by Kier, second by Wendell. Danny, take the floor.

Good evening, council. This is something that we had talked about kind of in length in our budget work session. So in front of you, I got three different quotes. Again, this will help us more efficiently patch the village, which is in desperate need of patch. As you can tell right now we can only grab about a half a ton at a time Before it gets too cold and we can't do anything with it So this would allow us to grab four tons at a time It'll also help keep it warm and we can more efficiently patch all of our local roads And it will also remove the need to rent one correct because that's what we have been doing No, we have not been renting one We've been using a dump truck and grabbing a half a ton at a time

But did we have one before and it broke down? I feel like this came up in budget session. Because we were, I think we asked what it would cost us if we had to rent that equipment to do this. And I think that this, yeah, came out to a better deal for us.

Yeah, that was the, I remember talking about the asphalt warmer in the budget session. So this is just, we now have the quotes. Just the official, yeah.

This is using local and major roads funding. It's not coming out of the general fund. Correct.

Okay.

Danny has, the next eight items are Danny's, so I'm going to just ask him to stay in the front row for answering any questions.

All right. Any public item? Let's try that again. Any public comment on this item? Hearing none. Seeing none. Council discussion.

Okay. I know that we've talked about it a couple times, Danny, anyways. And I've talked to a couple of workers when I've seen them out and about doing stuff. And it's a very smart idea to have. It would save us in the long run. It would probably pay for itself probably in three or four years. And the amount of hours and man time and gas and equipment usage and everything else. I don't know who you really want to go with. Sometimes I think the cheaper isn't the better I have no I'd haven't heard of that top company but all the equipment company I've have heard of and I have had a lot of friends who work for him and I know how they stand and warranty their stuff and I think if something was to happen it had to go in for warranty work. We could probably get one in loaner use I

Yes, so Spalding Manufacturing actually offers that as well. So as far as goes down, they get us a replacement while they repair ours. All of Genesee County actually uses Spalding Manufacturing for all of their hot boxes. Alta actually uses Falcon, which you can see there should be two quotes there from Falcon. They have a thinner construction box. That's what we actually had before. I've actually reconstructed our old patcher about six years ago. And it got burnt up because of their metal construction is thinner than what Spalding actually offers They have a thicker floor within their hot patcher. Okay.

Well, that's that's good And I see a two-year full machine warranty and a lifetime frame warranty.

Yes Thank You Council I hear someone over there mentioned about renting. Is this something we could possibly rent to other municipalities when we're not using it? Just to like recover any of the funds for it.

I

It's not anything I would be interested in. Sorry.

Hopefully, we're utilizing it enough that it pulled out of service

And that would maybe be a liability issue?

Like what happens if it breaks on their dollar? We have good agreements or a good relationship with other communities such as like Fenton Lake. When we have a water main break and we need a vac truck or something, they loan us the equipment. If there's an emergency, we like. And so we have a good like sharing agreement, not necessarily a rental agreement policy because, again, we can't afford all the equipment we need. Neither can they. So that's kind of how our relationship has been with our surrounding communities.

Please call the roll yes Yes Ryan yes Cole yes Wendell yes Brandon yes motion carried Thank You counsel Let's see item C consideration of approval of the purchase of two new snow plows from the Truck and Trailer Specialties, Inc., 1 Boss, DXT, 9x2, and the not-to-exceed amount of $8,333.72, and 1 Boss XT, and the not-to-exceed amount of $7,871.92. Do I have a first to consider this item? Consideration on the approval of the purchase of the

Two new snow plows from Truck and Trailer Specialists Incorporated. One Boss DXT 9'2", not to exceed in the amount of $8,333.72. And one Boss XT not to exceed in the amount of $7,871.92. We have a motion by Weinbrenner. I will second that. Support by Cole. Danny.

So I know we all love talking snow already, but in order to be mindful of costs and everything, the cheapest time to buy is now. So this is why I'm bringing this to you now. We do currently have two functioning plows. I have four that are basically non-functioning at this point. We've robbed motors, we've robbed headlights, we have broken springs, we have broken wings. So all of my backup plows at this point are beyond repair and beyond their lifetime. So at this point, what I would like to do is be able to have two backups, which are the existing plows that we own, And then we would have two new ones to continue on with our day-to-day functions. Truck and trailer, as you can see, came in with the lowest bid. They're the ones that build all of our plow trucks themselves, so like the big salt trucks and snow plow trucks. This is part of... I'm sorry. It's not source one, but it's the other thing that we bought, MI Deal. They're a part of MI Deal, and so this is the lowest funding that they can possibly offer us, as you can see from the quotes. And this is also being paid out of local and major winter funds, so not general fund.

Okay. All right, thank you, Danny. Any public comment on this item? Hearing none.

Mr. Love?

If you can approach the mic, please.

How wide is the other plow? You got one here at nine feet. What's the other one? Okay, thanks.

Thank you, Mr. Love. Any further public comment?

I will say with these long agenda items, I'm liking hearing you guys say them out. I'll incorporate tongue twisters in the future.

Hearing none and seeing none. Council discussion.

Are they V-blades or are they straight blades? These are V-blades. Both are V-blades. And then are they going to have separate wing attachments?

No. It makes them too big for the truck. So the DXT goes in front of our F550. If we go any larger than the 9-2, it needs to have a different plow mount. So currently, both of these plows will fit on our trucks without having to up-fit anything.

So we don't need to buy new brackets, nothing like that, wiring harness. Plug and play.

Do we get any kind of discount because we are buying two? I know sometimes you can get a discount if you're buying multiple.

Like I said, they're part of MI Deal, and so this is the lowest possible price that they can offer us.

Why is one a B and one not? They're both V-blades. It says B. It says MSC 1019-2B, and the other one doesn't have a B by it. The top one has no B by it. The second one has a B.

Are you talking about the quotes?

Yeah, on the quote and the number.

I don't have the quote in front of me specifically. I can certainly look at it. I'm just saying because it says it right.

The quote says they're both the same number, just one has a B. I didn't know what that meant. If it meant something different or not because it's a different price.

So these are literally the same two plows that we have currently. So we'll just be buying two new ones.

Council? Clerk, please call the roll.

Ryan. Yes. Wendell.

Yes.

Tire.

Yes.

Weinbrenner. Yes. Cole.

Yes.

Brandon.

Yes. Motion carried.

Thank you, council.

Thank you.

If you look at the truck and trailer one, it actually doesn't specify it as a V plow. I think you're looking at the Bostic one.

It does specify it as a V plow? Yeah, I see that.

Do I have a first to consider item D of new business, consideration of approval of the purchase of a hot DR 4900 and not to exceed amount of $9,934 for the wastewater treatment plant?

I would like to make a first to consider the approval of the purchase of a hatch DR 4900 and not to exceed amount of $9,934 for the wastewater treatment plant. I'll second that.

Motion by Cole, and second by Kier, who barely beat Weinbrenner this time. And we're all gonna pronounce it different, just so you know, ha, kotch, whatever. Danny, no, yes, Danny, the floor is yours.

So within the wastewater treatment plant lab, we are required to do three different tests daily, phosphorus, ammonia, and chlorine residual. Currently, we have different meters that do different tests. HAAC has come out with a meter, the DR4900, which does all three tests. The issue that we ran into is the phosphorus and ammonia meter are about 20 years old. And again, we can't find parts for them anymore. So it's time to upgrade and with new technology comes new meters and such where we're able to handle all three tests on one meter. So that's the skinny.

So this will save us money in the future?

Without having to purchase a bunch of different meters.

Parts for different meters. Okay. This is paid out of yes, the wastewater treatment plant sewer fund Thank You Danny any public comment on this item Hearing none and seeing none any discussion council Sir, please call the roll Cole yes Yes, yes Yes

Ryan. Yes. Brandon.

Yes, motion carried. Do I have a first to consider item E of new business, consideration of approval of the annual lift station pump maintenance program agreement with Kennedy Industries and then not to exceed amount of $83,079. That's a multiple.

I will make the motion for the consideration of the approval of the annual lift station pump maintenance program agreement with Kennedy Industries and then not to exceed amount of $83,000, or $83,079.00. I will second that. Motion by Kyer, second by Cole. Danny.

Yes, Council. So this is something that we have done annually for quite a few years now. We contract with Kennedy Industries for them to help service our lift stations. This covers an annual maintenance fee where they come in and they service each lift station once a year. They pull the pumps, they change the oil, they check the gaps on the impellers, make sure everything is functioning properly. They are the sole provider for the specific pumps that we have within our lift stations, and they are the expert in this field. So I would ask that you approve this contract. This is also being paid out of the sewer fund.

Thank you, Danny. Any public comments on the site? Hearing none, seeing none. Any discussion, council? How many lift stations do we currently have?

We have 13.

So this is doing the 13 lift stations?

Yes. You will see an increase next year if we can get the two other lift stations up to par with where we want to be.

Perfect.

So we have a total of 15 lift stations?

13.

13 altogether? Mm-hmm. Okay.

And this is not like general maintenance. You guys are able to do this as something special on top of it?

Correct. We perform our general maintenance. So we do monthly lift station checks. We check the floats. We check for grease. That's the basic functionality of the lift stations that we can provide where pulling a pump and changing the oil and knowing the proper gap for the impeller to pump properly is a little out of our scope of work.

Council? Clerk, please call the roll. Meyer? Yes. Cole? Yes.

Wendell?

Yes.

Weinbrenner? Yes. Ryan? Yes. Brandon?

Yes. Motion carried. Do I have a first to consider item F of new business, consideration of approval of Rowe Professional Services Company to complete engineering and oversight of Morrison Street Lift Station project in and not to exceed amount of $81,000.00.

I'll make consideration of the approval of Rowe Professional Service Company to complete engineering and oversight of the Morrison Street lift station and not to exceed an amount of $81,000.

I will second that. Motion by Weinbrenner. Second by Cole. Danny.

Before Danny begins, I just wanted to also introduce you to, if you haven't met him yet, Doug Scott. He is our village engineer from Rowe. He's worked with the community for a long time. And any of the specific technical questions that you want to ask, great time to ask him right here. He'd love it.

So as you know, currently we're working on replacing Apollo Street Lift Station. We've had a couple of delays there, but it is getting started here hopefully in the next week or two. So Morrison Street is very similar to that station. Unfortunately, it services less homes, but it is older than Apollo Street. We have put countless dollars into this lift station, and it's time that we work on replacement. And this would be the first step to it, is Rope Professional Services coming in and basically designing the station and making sure that placement is correct.

Thank you, Danny. Any public comment on this item? Hearing none, so council discussion.

Go ahead. So the $81,000, is that just for basically Having grow come out and then in design and blueprint and make the truck.

Yes, that is engineering services And then if you remember through our budget work session, we actually budgeted for the construction cost of this lift station this year I Will add it's also a seven Representation during construction as well.

Make sure it gets constructed, correct?

Will that be an additional charge for you?

No, that's included.

That's included? Yeah, there's a breakdown. That's why it says customer administration and observation? That's correct. Okay.

I know I had asked before that because this only services a certain amount of homes, it's a small number of homes, it's not something where we can make a larger lift station somewhere else. We do need, like whatever the engineering is out there, it has to have its own lift station.

Unfortunately, the lift station is right at the low point of the system. I mean, there's a possibility you could extend gravity sewer underneath the railroad, something like that, to bring it back through there, but the cost would greatly exceed what we're doing here.

Thank you. Council? Clerk, please call the roll.

Wendell? Yes.

Ryan? Yes.

Yes.

Weinbrenner? Yes. Cole?

Yes. Dyer? Yes.

Brandon?

Yes. Motion carried.

Thank you, council.

Do I have a first to consider item G of new business consideration? Council resolution 2026-039 authorizing Department of Public Works recommended budget amendments to the fiscal year 26-27 budget.

So I would like to make The motion to consider Council Resolution 2026-039, authorizing Department of Public Works recommended budget amendments for the fiscal year 26-27 budget.

Motion by Cole. Do I hear support? Second. Got a second by Kier. Danny.

Yes, so the First Amendment would need to be to one of the water funds. It was for the mailer that everybody in the village received for a monitoring violation and the public notice that had to go out. That cost us $2,500. So in our normal budgeting aspect, we wouldn't necessarily need to budget for $2,500 of expenditures for a mailer. I'm not looking to send out another public notice in my career ever again.

Danny, do you want to give them just a real brief, succinct overview of why that happened?

So the public notice happened because of a lead and copper monitoring violation. And what that was, that occurred in 2024. So it kind of all caught up to us at this point. There was not a public notice that was filed at that point, and that's what the violation was for. The violation also stated that we did not... Collect the appropriate amount of lead and copper samples were required to collect 20 samples throughout our entire system per year There are different tiers for different types of service lines and different types of material that the plumbing is inside of a customer's home It's not just the service line. It is also has to do with the type of plumbing inside the home So we actually tested 20 22 homes, I'm sorry, we tested 21 homes. One of them was taken from an incorrect faucet. So when we reach out to residents, we give them a bucket with a bottle in it, and basically there's instructions on how to take the test. It has to come from a stagnant kitchen sink for six hours. The water has to be stagnant six hours before that. Somebody took it from an outdoor spigot. So the state threw that one out. And then we tried to make up the difference with a secondary address on our sampling plan, but that address was not approved by the state. So then they threw that one out. We collected 19 of the 20 samples required, and we acquired a violation. So I have spent the past two weeks developing a new lead and copper sampling site plan. The state is now requiring us to have 40. We need to use 20, and they want us to have 20 back up. So I have been contacting residents. We have been going through records. We have been trying to figure out the best way to get all of these people. I submitted it yesterday, and it was approved by the state. So we're going to start our lead and copper testing tomorrow.

So just to clarify for, because there's some misinformation when that came out, it wasn't a violation of anything detected in our system. It was just a violation that we did not notice it properly.

And that is a violation of the state.

Did we receive fines for that?

Yes. It was a $400 fine. So anyways, in order to keep proper budgeting practices, I would like to see a budget amendment happen to this specific budget line item so that we can see it in the future, so we can keep track of these types of things. The second one, on here would be for memberships. And my apologies, this was missed through budget workshop session. I wasn't really aware of what kind of memberships we should be looking for as they were coming in. And it was previously paid out of a different account, water account, but it was simply paid out of like something different. And I would like it to see actually recorded properly within memberships. So that would be what the second budget amendment is for.

Thank you, Danny. Any public comment on this item? Hearing none. Seeing none. Any discussion? Council?

I appreciate your transparency on how you want to show memberships and mailers on the budget.

I also appreciate the fact that you identified the problem and now we've got policies in place to make sure that that doesn't happen again.

Please call the roll.

Kier.

Yes.

Wendell.

Yes.

Ryan. Yes. Weimrunner. Yes. Cole.

Yes.

Brandon.

Yes. Motion carried. Thank you, counsel. Do I have a first to consider? Item H of new business, consideration of approval of the contract with Dixon Engineering to provide inspection services for the village's police department water tower and then not to exceed amount of $5,250.

I will make the motion for the consideration of the approval of the contract with Dixon Engineering to provide inspection services for the Villages Police Department water tower and the not to exceed amount of $5,250. Motion by Kier.

Do I hear support?

I'll support.

Support by Wine Runner. Danny.

Yes, so Dixon is basically kind of a standalone provider for this type of inspection. They've been in the business for 40 years. I mean they are an engineering firm that helps build water towers and they also inspect them. The state suggests that we inspect our towers every three to five years. The last time we had an inspection on this tower was 2016. One of the first things that came across my plate when I became director was this quote. And being that we have our sanitary survey coming up with our district engineer from Eagle, they are going to want to see this inspection be done. And so in front of you today is the contract with them for them to do the inspection. This will be paid out of water fund.

Is this so specialized there's only one place to get a quote from. Thank you. Any public comment on this item? Mr. Love?

I'm just concerned about the inspection of the foundation cement.

Make sure they look at the cement. Thank you, Mr. Love. Any further public comment? Hearing none. I'm sorry. Nope. Hearing none. Seeing none. Council?

So When they inspect this tower it is literally up and down all the inner workings the interior the exterior They look at the coating last time this tower was painted was in 1999 It was it was constructed in 1917 and it's getting old so

They're gonna look at everything. They'll look at the coatings, they'll look at, I was asked about the antennas that are no longer in use on the tower. They're gonna look at the foundation. The workup will literally encompass everything there is to know about the tower.

So after their inspection, you'll be back in front of us asking for more money?

That is a possibility, yes. It's gonna be, it'll be an interesting conversation.

Thank you.

What about the rest of the towers in the village?

So the other towers, let's see, DPW had a repaint interior and exterior, and it had a one-year warranty inspection in 2024. And then Quick Road Water Tower had one in 2021 with a wash on the exterior.

I mean, do they all have to be inspected every so often?

Yes, it is a recommendation by the state every three to five years. Simply put, those two are fairly well. Actually, my lead water operator climbed almost all three towers today. He got pretty tired after two because we had to do a rooftop inspection for the sanitary survey. So he climbed Quick Road today, and he also climbed the police tower to complete those surveys. So those two are fairly in very good shape where the police tower is not. Questionable.

Danny, you referenced that we're going to have a conversation more about this later. Can you kind of explain what the police tower is being used for currently?

Yeah, so currently the police tower really services extra water in the air. So really fire prevention services is really what it's going to be servicing. I know that previously we have talked about taking that tower out of commission and the fire chief has expressed his concern with doing that and knowing how much water is in the air and making sure that we have appropriate fire protection with the two towers that we have. So again, that's gonna be a conversation at a later date of if we need to have some sort of study, if that was still a viable option, all of those types of things. I can tell you from the 2016 inspection that was done on this tower, this tower was going to cost $140,000 in order for them to fix everything that they identified in 2016 or 20, right, or 10 years later.

So the hard part of this is that, you know, although it is not supporting our drinking water, it did save our bacon.

It still does. I mean, it's still usable, but it's not necessarily giving us, it's really just capacity at this point.

It did save our bacon in 2022. Right.

quick question um so obviously we've identified that we haven't stayed on track with this have we implemented any policies going forward so that we make sure that we are inspecting this every five years or

Dixon's pretty good about getting to us and telling us that we're due for inspection. And so, I mean, I'll be honest, I rely on them to reach out to us, but again, it can go on a schedule of inspection. COVID really messed up a lot of EGLE and them coming out to us. And so we haven't done a sanitary survey since 2020. So it's been six years since they've come out and they're usually required every two to four years.

To further answer your question, one of the things that Danny and I are working on with our capital improvement plan is our asset management plan. And part of that is identifying when things need to be replaced or serviced and having it on a schedule like that. We don't really have a good inventory system. We have a CityWorks that has some capacity for that. We're looking at what's the best way besides for just an Excel spreadsheet. that color codes, is there other ways that we can manage that to the point, like I've seen it in other communities where it's to the point where we know when the filters need to get replaced in each of the buildings. We are not at that level yet, but that's where we want to get to eventually.

That's good, yeah, because I know I can get with you on some of that because we deal with inventory management where I work, and yeah, there's a bunch of different applications that you could use that for. It's definitely, it exists.

Okay.

Go ahead, Buster. I would like to hear the fire chief's input on this reference to if we had to lose that water tower, do we actually need the water tower?

Would you mind if I stay here?

Wherever you like.

I think the most important question is not whether we can operate with two towers on our normal day. The question is whether we can still protect our residents, business, and firefighters on our worst day. Once this tower is removed, the storage redundancy and flexibility it provides is gone. Before making irreversible decisions, I think we should be confident that the remaining system can provide Holly with the same reliability, fire protection, and emergency preparedness our community expects. and I would recommend that we develop a plan for eventually decommissioning of that downtown tower. But with that, we don't permanently remove it until an engineering and hydraulic evaluation demonstrates that Holly can safely and reliably operate without it.

And like Tim mentioned, this helped us out when we had that fire in Battle Alley, and we have an aging historic district, so I don't really see that this is an option, but to keep it in service.

2.1 million gallons of water I think we flowed that day and in about nine hours. So without that tower, as John Love stated, we probably would have lost more than what we lost, so.

Council's good, go ahead.

I just love how Chief had that answer already prepared.

he knows how we are i'm pretty passionate about uh protection and uh the downtown i was there that day uh i suffered extreme burns and 440 electrocution so i'm just happy to be able to still be sitting here from that day so uh you know if we if we i think obviously we need to look at replacement but i think we also have to look at How do we decommission that tower but still provide the same services, whether it's capital improvement for a new tower? I just think just to remove it because it's old and needs a lot of money isn't the answer that maybe we should be looking for. I think we maybe should look at... plan of replacement rather than just decommissioning it altogether without any court correspondence with that it's also there's a historic value to our skyline too which you know people

I would agree with both of their points, and I'm not insinuating that we directly just go for removal. I did talk to Dixon. The smallest tower you can get these days is 100,000 gallons. That's a 75,000-gallon tower, so a new tower would be just a little bit bigger than that one, and it would be anywhere from $2 to $3 million for a new tower. Is there grants available for that, Danny? Good question.

Now, can we make that specifically for – do you go to fire hydrants?

No.

No matter what, it'll still be tied into the water system?

It has to be drinking water. And it's something that Jeremy and I had talked about was decommissioning and then being able to fill it up if there was a fire. The issue with that is that you can't – In order to put a water tower back into proper functionality, you have to perform a back-T test similar to what we've all experienced with the past two boil waters. You have to have a certain percentage of chlorine inside of that tower for a certain amount of time and pass the back-T tests. So it's not like we could just fill it up if we needed to and use it, we would risk the safety of our water at that point.

Contaminating the whole system. Correct.

Clear? So. Please call the roll. Okay.

Warren Brenner? Yes. Cole?

Yes.

Ryan? Yes. Wendell?

Yes.

Dyer?

Yes. Brandon? Yes, motion carried.

Thank you, council.

Do I have a first to consider item I of new business, consideration of resolution 2026-037 for reprogramming of CDBG funding from code enforcement to water sewer improvements.

I would like to make a motion for consideration of resolution 2026-037 for reprogramming of CDBG funding from code enforcement to water sewer improvements. Motion by Cole.

Second. Second by Kyer. Tim, is there anything else regarding this item that we should know besides what was discussed in the public hearing?

We kind of already talked about it. We did the introduction then. I know that Councilmember Kyer has been anxious to talk about this since then. But I do want to say, just because she's not here, that Lisa put a lot of work into this. Lisa and Danny, just make sure that she and him are given credit to think of other strategies in order to fund some of these things that we need.

Yeah, I would like to say with the CDBG block grants, there are... all types of paperwork that people have to submit. It has to be in a certain district. There's certain parts that go with this. So Lisa and Danny, your research into how to replace our fire hydrants is much appreciated. Council?

Okay. We already had public comment on this earlier. So if there's no further council discussion, Please call the roll.

Ryan. Yes. Kyer.

Yes.

Cole.

Yes.

Wendell.

Yes. Weinbrenner. Yes. Brandon.

Yes. Motion carried. Do I have a first to consider item J of new business consideration by village council of approval of updated council rules and procedures. Um, yeah. Do I have a motion?

I'll make a motion consideration by the village council of approval of the update council rules and procedures Motion by Weinbrenner do I have support?

I Will support that second by Cole Tim we please introduce this item.

Absolutely at the last meeting When we were talking about this our new agenda format how we were working it out. I was asked to I update the council rules and procedures. And part of that was over the last year, I've gotten a lot of feedback from council members about, you know, I'd like us to improve on this and that. And so we updated this last August. And so after a year, I figured it was a good time to readdress it. There is one thing that I wanted to add on here that I forgot to add during the time. And I was hoping to maybe add that. Well as a council member Costco who can't be here. He sent his some comments that I gave you guys a paper copy I won't necessarily read those but I want you guys to have them just make sure that You understand these are his concerns or things that he likes about it But the thing that I would like to add which I also have in front of you as well is in regard to written correspondence of counsel Written and specifically I wanted to stay written correspondence counsel written correspondence submitted to the village council shall be provided to council members as correspondence and included with the appropriate meeting materials when practical. Letters, emails, or other written communication addressed to council shall not be read aloud during the meeting, including during public comment, unless otherwise directed by the council. Members of the public wishing to address the council verbally must do so in accordance with the council's established public comment procedures. This is standard across most communities. So someone doesn't submit a 12-page public comment, and then we read it, and it goes over the three minutes. Or we stop at three minutes, and they say, well, you should have read it faster. Typically, it just gets added to correspondence that council receives. If a council member decides that they feel passionate about reading it themselves, they can, but it won't be done just in course with public comment.

You mean council comment?

No, public comment.

So that'd be a courtesy of council. Okay. So first, any public comment on this item? No. Hearing none, Reagan.

Reagan Rockwell, 836 Hollybush Drive. Since we're discussing this, Ms. Brandon, I just wanted to bring to your attention at the July village council meeting, you addressed me approximately three times and it was stated that I needed to specifically address you after looking at these rules for the village council. It looks like section 4.2, the last section of section 4.2 says, prior to addressing the village council, members of the public shall state their name and address for the record. So, again, the sentence says prior to addressing village council, not the president. Section 4.2 in its entirety says when something... Sorry, it says members of the public of I'm sorry members of the public members of the public at the meeting shall not speak unless recognized by the chair Members of the public shall be limited to speaking for a maximum of three minutes during any public hearing or public comment The village council may extend by up to three minutes three minute limit by a majority vote of the village council members present after each agenda item there will be an additional public comment of two minutes to speak on that item. Again, prior to addressing the village council, members of the public shall state the name and address, their name and address for the record. I just wanted to bring that up for clarification to just make sure that we can always follow procedures and rules in the future. I actually felt like I was singled out just because nobody else was addressed the way that I was. And I just bring that to you respectfully tonight and thank you for your time. Have a great night.

Thank you, Mrs. Rockwell. I'd like to address this, actually, in section 4.2 on the second paragraph, because I certainly don't want any individual resident to feel singled out. It is my obligation and my responsibility to be equitable with all the residents and to keep this moving and to make sure everybody is heard. Speakers shall address counsel as a body through the chair. Remain within the allotted time. and avoid materially disrupting the meeting. So the process that I described last time and that Gildner verified is accurate, and I want to assure you, you're not being targeted. Any further public comment? Hillary.

Hillary Allgaier, 121 Valley Street. I read over the updated rules and I'm kind of concerned with the public comment portion of it just because In the proposed rules, the verbiage, there will be public comment as replaced with council may provide. So that's really not like a guaranteed opportunity for something that we already have in place. And then my other concern is the having to submit and writing ahead of the meeting just because you know the meetings kind of early and people rush to get here from work sometimes and I think that if there. It just limits their opportunity for their voice to be heard if they're coming here specifically to give public comment, but they missed out on submitting and writing prior to the meeting that they wanted to give public comment, so I just feel like it's really restricting the public more, so thank you.

Ms. Allgaier, before you leave, could you please tell me what those section numbers were just so we can put our eyes on it? 4.1. 4.1, okay, thank you. know there are there are lots of revisions and changes that have that are in this just for clarification we don't usually do this I think that public comments should be addressed with immediacy and that is why we're doing this kind of back and forth right now

Go ahead, sir. So it won't change the fact that we do public comment after everything. I mean, are we required? So OMA's only requirement is that we do at least one public comment per meeting. But we are still maintaining how many public comments we do. It's just that if you want to do public comment on something, it's very similar to the way Oakland County does it, many other communities. where you would sign up in advance. And the reason that we're doing that is because we've worried in the past about capacity issues. And the way that you can not have to worry about changing location and all of that is by, if we're streaming and we are signing up for public comment, that People can stream in their vehicles or outside or an alternate viewing area as long as that we can identify them when it's time to do public comment we can say all right, you know, it's Jeremy Watson's time to do public comment and get them In there and that's a way so that my building official doesn't keep hounding me about room capacity and those kinds of things So that was the reason that we recommended this change Can you describe?

Just what it would look like today we come in. Let's just say that this past as is and what would it look like for Hillary and Reagan to, what would they need to do to have a public comment?

Yep, there would be just a sign, and the other part of that is we also removed, in public comment, you no longer have to state your address, because I know that was something that Councilman Ryan and some other people had brought up to me that, you know, that is kind of an archaic thing, and so we just, now you just state whether you're a resident or not. So what municipality you're a resident of, you have to actually state your address. That there would be a sign-up sheet, or in the back of the room that would state all the different opportunities, whether it's general public comment or whether there's specific agenda items that you would like to talk on, and then you would just sign your name below that. You write your name. It also allows the clerk to identify who it is easier and state their name for them when they're coming up.

And then Ms. Allgaier mentioned having to send something in ahead of time. Is that for...

Just at the beginning of the meeting.

Okay, just at the beginning of the meeting.

Usually how it works, at least with, I believe the way the Oakland County does it, is that you basically can sign up up until the public comment period. Once the public comment period starts, then it gets taken by the clerk and the clerk would do that. So they would have the first, you know, not only the time before the meeting, but they would have first 15 minutes or whatnot, depending on how busy the agenda is.

Okay, thank you for that. Any further public comment? Okay, hearing none and seeing none. Council, discussion.

I would not recommend doing that because let's say during public comment, Jeremy Watson, oh, I never thought about that. I want to mention something about that too. It restricts people who haven't thought about it to be able to give their opinion about the same thing that person is giving. It could be something that deals with the road. It could be something that deals with a park. It could be anything. And the other thing is that I don't even know what the capacity of this room is. I think it should have a placard somewhere that says the legal capacity of this room. 49 And again, I'm not sure I mean I see a fire extinguisher restroom sign light switch for mom.

I don't see a sign I'll make sure it's posted by the next council meeting.

I'm just But I mean this I mean cuz it's hard also with public comment from agenda items that person might not understand what the agenda item really is until it's brought up and because maybe they don't understand the verbiage as it's written, but once it's explained, then they understand it. So now we've restricted them from being able to comment.

Um, could I suggest like middle ground for that? Like if we come to that capacity issue, then we do a sign in sheet for it because that capacity issue happens sometimes, but it's not like a regular occurrence. So we maintain what we're doing, but capacity comes an issue. We let people sign up so that way they can get brought back in here for it.

I like that when we are at such large limits in here sometimes it's hard to see who raises their hands so having a sign up when we are at capacity is one way to not overlook a person now this does not say you have to pre put your public comment you don't have to like write down what you're gonna do we just want a name so we're not missing someone I can agree with that I have a question about the appeal are we gonna stick with Public comment, or can I go on?

I was going to say, I agree with Danielle and Thomas and you. Yeah, I think.