City Council - workshop

7.30, we're going to go ahead and get started. I'd like to call this meeting to order. This is a duly noticed workshop meeting of Hudson City Council held in accordance with the Sunshine Laws of the State of Ohio, Section 121.22, and the City of Hudson Charter, Article 3, Section 3.02, for Tuesday, May 26, 2026. It is 7.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. PER ORDINANCE 220.031 TITLE WORKSHOP MEETINGS IN ITEM C. I WOULD NOW LIKE TO TURN THE MEETING OVER TO COUNCIL PRESIDENT BIRD SO AS IT CONTINUES THROUGH THE REMAINING WORKSHOP AGENDA ITEMS. COUNCIL PRESIDENT BIRD, THE WORKSHOP AND MEETING IS YOURS.

THANK YOU, MAYOR. ONE CORRECTION, I THINK IT'S EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME. ANYWAYS, OKAY. THANK YOU. NUMBER TWO, CORRESPONDENTS AND COUNCIL COMMENTS. comments or correspondence that anyone would like to share, get my attention.

Patricia.

It was a nice Memorial Day parade.

I want to thank all the city staff for organizing it and having a wonderful day, and also for the Veterans Commission.

The peace at the cemetery was quite moving and effective, and so we thank them, too.

Just a handful of things from myself on a few things here this week and moving forward. I just want to formally thank the fourth grade class at Eastwoods Intermediate School who welcomed me this afternoon to talk about Hudson, our history, and our local government. The students had some great questions and they were extremely engaged. And then I will also, once again, be visiting the Hudson Middle School later this week to recognize some additional students for track and field school records. And with that, please also note that the last day of school will be this Friday, May 29th. A couple of community notes. The first Farmer's Market of the season will open next Saturday, June 6th, on the Downtown Greens from 9 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. I do also want to remind the community that the Ice Cream Social as coordinated by the Hudson League for Service, will take place on the downtown greens this year on Friday, June 12th. So that's right around the bend, and that is from 5.30 p.m. to 8 o'clock p.m. Advanced tickets will be available at the Hudson Visitor Center here on the first floor of Town Hall, as well as, I believe, the Learned Owl. And tickets remain only $5 this year. And just a point of note there, the first ice cream social here in Hudson was held in 1941. A couple other quick things. The Home and Garden Tour will also be on that Friday, June 12th, as well as the first screen on the green showing, down on the first and main green. And last note, next month also has several outdoor concerts and musical performances. If you go to the city's website or the calendars that are out there, you can look at all of those different opportunities. And as I told the students in fourth grade earlier today, this coming month of June is the month that David Hudson and his small group of pioneers first stepped foot into Hudson, also known as Range 10, Town 4 of the Connecticut Western Reserve, back on the 17th of June in 1799. Thank you. Councilor Goetz, yes. Did I make a mistake?

No. I talked with people at the Hudson League of Women who do the ice cream social. League for service? League of service. People need to know that they lost their donors. Hershey's is not donating this year, nor is Republic doing the cleanup. And so they are looking for donations to help them cover those costs.

I believe they have that on their socials and their website as well, so correct.

I'll just echo Patricia's comments. The parade, the service, everybody was fantastic. It was a very moving ceremony. And then Middleton Park, there's a neighborhood feedback this Thursday, May 28th. I have on my calendar it's at 6, but is it 5.30 or 6? Can we just verify that before the night's done? I thought I saw 5.30 somewhere, but maybe it's one of those.

I have it listed as 6.

6, okay. 6 o'clock, Middleton Park for the neighborhood, kind of sharing your ideas and getting input from the neighbors about what they like in that park. Okay. Moving on, 3A26-0041, Tinker Creek's Water Study Model and Final Draft Report. Brad.

Good evening, Council. This presentation is a follow-up from two previous public presentations we had. Tonight I have with us on our screen is Chad Boyer with MS Consultants. We may also have Anil with MS Consultants with us tonight if there's any questions or comments. Chad was our project manager on this watershed study, and this was conducted after our August 8, 2024 rain event that caused a 500 to 2,000-year flood event in town that really focused on that northeast part of town, which is the Tinkers Creek watershed. We'll go over the who, what, where, when, and why. You can see the agenda there on our screen. I gave everybody copies in case you wanted to take notes during the presentation. We'll go quickly through this presentation, and then we'll leave it up to council for questions and comments at the end. And with that, Chad, go ahead.

Thank you, Brad. Thank you everyone in the Council Chambers as well for joining us this evening. As Brad mentioned, my name is Chad Boyer. I'm with MS Consultants. I'm the project manager for the study here. Joining me tonight is Neal Tangarello, our project director for this one. So we'll be kind of tag teaming any questions that come up as we get through here. So, as you can tell, the agenda is fairly short here, but we do have a few things to cover. So I'm going to jump straight into this. So, as Brad mentioned, where are we at with this study? So, this project covers the upper portions of the Tickers Creek watershed, mainly focusing on the areas north of I-80 and south of the Township line there with Twinsburg Township. And then a little bit south of I-80 kind of headed down toward 303 headed through Hudson. So, study background here, Ms consultants was brought into the program here by Brad, and he's seen after the August 8 2024 flood event. The. Dropped 6.97 inches of rainfall on portions of the city of Hudson with 5 and a quarter inches of that falling in 2 hours. So, to give you all a frame of reference. Five and a quarter inches, if it had fallen over 24 hours, would be similar to a 100-year event. So when that amount of rainfall falls in two hours, it's a much higher frequency event in that 2,000-year time frame. So this is an unprecedented amount of rainfall anywhere in the state of Ohio. Even the past couple of days here just in Columbus, we got three or four inches over three or four days, and it seemed like it rained forever. The amount of rainfall that happened on August 8th, again, was just something the engineers wouldn't even account for in our wildest dreams. The area in that Tinker's Creek watershed was the hardest hit in the city, and we worked with Brad and his team to develop some high-level concepts, which we'll go over here tonight. One couple of things we do want to make sure we hit on here prior to August 8th event There was very little roadway or structural flooding reported in this watershed Maybe a couple of times over the past years But this was definitely a bigger issue The residential area in this area was developed along a natural watercourse in a valley situation where on the north and south ends and along I-80 and then up along the township. Those are much higher. And then that main channel does sit in a valley. So as you can imagine, all of that runoff kind of congregates along that channel that runs through Darrow Road Park and on down past the high school. Compared to modern design standards, if we were to develop this neighborhood area today, the regulations that the city of Hudson would have put in place would have required a much more extensive stormwater management system to be put in place here. And we ran some calculations that even to bring what's out there up to current design standards, we would have to install enough stormwater management in storage to fill the footprint of a football field that is nine stories tall. So that gives you a frame of reference for the amount of stormwater that we're looking at attempting to capture here and mitigate. The team started by building a digital twin of the watershed. Basically, we worked with the information we had and accompanied with information that Brad's team provided to us to build out a stormwater network and runoff capabilities so that we can see, as the picture on the right shows, where that runoff is happening. And then using photographs and data that was measured by city staff, by residents to verify those intersections as far as the flooding amount goes, that's part of our kind of standard practice as we're moving through these. So this is the intersection of Hudson Park Drive and Hudson Aurora Road. You can see that vehicle is trapped in the water there up to the wheel wells at least. And we're seeing a very similar flooding depth of two to three feet in our stormwater models as we start that off with the existing conditions. So where was the worst flooding? It's really in what we called sub-watershed two, from Darrow Road Park on down to the Teekers Creek Confluence, passing under Hudson Aurora and Stowe Road, and then past Hudson Park Estates, Woods of the Western Reserve, and then Darrow Road Park itself. So what we're looking at here is basically a map of the inundation limits of that and then some homes that we really wanted to focus on solutions for that were kind of centered in those inundation limits from our models. So as you can imagine, with a watershed study of this size, the engineering options can get kind of daunting. So when we start something like this, there's typically two things that we start with. We start with the ability to store rainfall somewhere, and we start with the ability to pass water downstream faster. So typically that takes the form of additional detention or upsizing hydraulic structures, so bridges and culverts, relieving storm sewer flows to different locations or downstream via storm networks, and then some natural floodplain restoration and benching, kind of taking out some of those high points and creating more available conveyance in the channels. The one thing I want to stress on is that we can't just store the water somewhere or pass it downstream faster. It's a balance between the two in every situation that we're looking at for these types of floodplain and stormwater mitigation studies. So from a big picture standpoint, the options that we considered here from our preliminary looks into sort of a maximum feasible benefit solution is if we could do everything practical, what would happen? And then kind of toning those down to a more conceptual package of alternatives that we'll talk through here as well. So big picture, upstream collection, can we store that? runoff somewhere in the upper portions of the watershed? Can we use smart controls or computerized controls on the existing stormwater detention features that are in the area? Can we do some strategic rerouting and redirect stormwater flows where the storm system is currently overwhelmed into areas that have capacity to handle that kind of volume? And then looking at roadway culverts and bridge upgrades to reduce hydraulic constrictions in the area, as well as then restoring some natural floodplain where there is room to do so without a massive undertaking of home acquisitions. Fortunately, in this particular watershed, we have the option to do all five of those things. So we'll touch on those here as we work down through the watershed. We're going to start at the upstream reaches of the watershed here in Darrow Road Park. There is currently a project up for consideration to install some stormwater detention features in Darrow Road Park. This would be done by others, and I believe that's on your agenda for this evening. However, One of the other concepts that was investigated was to actually put a berm and controlled outlet structure at the eastern end of Darrow Road Park, west of La Scala Drive to better utilize some of the natural topography that is in Darrow Road Park. It would not be a detriment to the natural wetlands that are there or the work that friends of the parks have been doing. It could also be incorporated along with the other project that is looking to take place in Darrow Road Park. What this really lets us do is capture that stormwater runoff into Darrow Road Park and hold it there until well after the peak of the storm event and then control that release out of the parks. We also have a series of culvert improvements at La Scala Drive and Leeway Drive, where those culverts could use some additional capacity to help relieve some of the ponding around the homes in those areas. Moving on downstream, La Scala and Leeway here, the Woods of the Western Reserve pond that is in place, as well as the Hudson Park Estates stormwater retention pond, Both of those we would propose to install smart controls on so that prior to a storm event, those could be lowered a couple of feet to provide additional capacity. And then as the storm comes through, those would fill back up. 99% of the year, they would look just like they do right now. the city would have the option then ahead of the storms, either via human controls or radar-based controls to release some of the water from those and gain some additional capacity ahead of the storm events. So for sake of comparison, we knew the storms last weekend were coming. Those ponds could have been lowered ahead of those storms, capturing the flow there and allowing that water to be stored. The next piece here is some stormwater redirection. So looking at Woodacre Drive and Jonathan Drive, both of those areas saw flooding during the August 8th event. And both of them have the ability to have stormwater relief sewers that could be installed there directing back into Darrow Road Park and then using that additional storage in Darrow Road Park to relieve the areas along Leeway Drive and the surrounding neighborhoods there between Leeway and La Scala. Those really have a large benefit as well as the area southwest of Herrick Park Drive. Those have a great effect on lowering the water surface in those particular areas for those events. One of the other areas that Brad and his team really asked us to take a look at is Hudson Aurora Road and trying to protect the ingress and egress for the high school, as well as some of the homes on the northwest side of Hudson Aurora Road that back up to the stream channel there. This would namely take a runoff from some of the detention features in front of the high school and allow that a faster path down to the downstream side of the Hudson Aurora Stowe intersection in Colbert and passing that flow downstream. Some of the last pieces here are some other hydraulic upgrades. The culverts at Hudson Park Drive, Blue Heron Drive, the one at Hudson Aurora Road and Huntington Road serve as hydraulic constrictions right now. So there's not quite enough capacity to handle the larger storm events there. So we're getting some ponding upstream of those. Those could be upgraded as we move down through the line and through the phasing for these as budget allows. So wrapping things up here and kind of looking at all of that, how to improve resiliency for these larger events, it really comes down to making sure that we have some place for the stormwater to go. So ways that the city here as part of the program can look at doing that. is incorporating more low impact development or green infrastructure practices into the stormwater management, using that dispersed throughout the city to kind of manage the runoff there. Using continuous monitoring and adaptive controls, that's kind of the technical term for what we call a smart control. Those computer controlled ponds that I was talking about would fall under this. If there are any repetitive loss properties along these watersheds, taking a look at those, does it make sense for an acquisition here or there? And then also working for these last three in developing some special flood hazard areas and creating flood overlay districts for flood plurin areas like this that don't currently have them. Tinker's Creek proper has it, but this upper tributary does not. Increasing and maintaining the level of service for the storm infrastructure. So that really boils down to making sure the culverts have capacity to pass them, making sure the storm networks are properly maintained. And then developing a flood warning system for the flood prone watersheds in the city. So this would be both Takers Creek and Brandywine Creek could use this recommendation so that when we get these high intensity events that are coming and we know they're coming to kind of let let the public know that they're coming and it could be an issue. So breaking down kind of the capital plan for the study here, we worked with Brad's team to kind of lay this out to give you all a time frame of what we're thinking of. The first one to five years, phase one of the project would be the Darrow Road Park improvements. And then the relief sewers, both at Woodacre and Jonathan, and the Hudson Aurora Road relief sewers, spacing those out as able to. The next part here in phase two, over five to 10 years, we'll be focusing on those two detention ponds and working with the local homeowners associations and property owners to be able to implement those. And then following on that, 10 years and beyond would be some floodplain improvements along the channel near Hudson Park Estates. And then the culvert and roadway crossing improvements could space out as able to as we move down through that timeline. So with that, that brings us to questions and comments. I know you all have a packet of four drawings there. So I'm going to swap over to those as well. And we can take a look at those to address comments or questions if you all have any based on those packets of information as well.

Thanks, Chad. I appreciate a good presentation. I did not print off. that map it is on your agenda it's a link on your agenda but that does represent um all those slides one one project that we did not talk about is up with the northerly uh boundary of the town uh kind of by there you go thank you chad by the country club is that is that diversion in opportunities for storage uh possibly on the golf course that's just west of that kind of renette and salem and uh brunswick uh neighborhood up in there So that would be an interceptor storm sewer system and then bypass. The yellow line there is the township line or the corp line of the city. So the black blob up there would be some storage opportunity. That's a little unconventional as it's outside of city limits. where there was a slide with a different phasing on it, the capital plan schedule slide. One thing that MS and the city took into consideration is building projects within city-owned land, whether that's something like Darrow Park or other city land, or public right-of-way was preferred over private property impact. So that affected some of that ranking first. We've had some conversations with HOAs that they're open to working with the city on solutions, but still, it's gonna be a lot easier to build some of these facilities if they're city-owned right off the bat versus coming up with some sort of cost or maintenance share plan with private property owners. So yeah, with that, I'll open it up for questions.

So just before we open up, that piece that you just mentioned, it's not clear whether that we haven't decided what phase that ends up in.

No, I would probably put that at the end of the first phase in that first five years. We'll need some time to coordinate with the country club. They have initially said they're open to talking to the city about stormwater solutions, but we haven't shown them this specific footprint of the project there yet.

And then my other question is, It seems like the ponds are already built. Woods of Western Reserve, Hudson Park Estates Pond. So it seems like that's a, is that like a lower lift than some of these others?

Yeah, the two kind of gray hatched ones on the screen. Is that what you're mentioning, Dr. Byrd?

Yes. And so why wouldn't they be sooner rather than later since they're kind of, it sounds like it would be an easier fix.

The Hudson Park Estates is private property. We've got to work with them. We'd have to work with the owner. I think the Hudson Circle Pond, we've worked with the adjacent landowners there. I think they would be receptive to improvements, and if they are, then we could absolutely move that up.

All right. Questions or comments for Brad or the consultants? Kyle.

Thank you. If I recall correctly from the storm event, did we have incidences of sewage backup in households? And I don't think anything was touched on Storm the stormwater event and how it interacts with and causes those sewage backups. Was there anything in this study?

Addressing that no this this study focused strictly on storm sewer backups. They didn't it didn't model or attempt to model the county sanitary sewer system How those two interact is when you have overland flooding you can have? inflow and infiltration into a sanitary sewer system, which is what happened during that August event and So if we looked at a map of the sanitary sewer system, you would see largely the pipes get larger along that valley there. And that's largely because the sanitary sewer works on gravity as well. So it's going to run along the lowest part of the land where we had inundation. So you might have had storm water flows entering the sanitary sewer system via manhole lids or fissures in manholes themselves or pipes. But this study did not study the county's sanitary sewer system.

just it seems to me that areas with largest risk for that egress should have factored into the prioritization you know capital plan schedule you know if there's certain projects that are likely to have a bigger effect to prevent egress I mean to me that would the higher priority.

So studying a sanitary sewer system would be a much different approach than the one we took for this project? Are you just simply saying that the projects should get a score? You should get a point or three, whatever it is, if it's helping a sanitary sewer system.

Yeah, I guess I'm not clear on how... how much insight we have into that, right? How much insight do we have into what areas seem the most susceptible to egress, if you're saying that this study didn't cover that and we just don't know that, then how can we score it? But that's just something I didn't hear anything on. To me, flooding is, we're gonna do our best. We live in this three watershed city and there's going to be flooding occasionally, especially if it's a 2,000 year event. when flooding causes sewage backup. Now it's, in my opinion, exponentially bigger problem than just storm water damage.

The projects that we do have proposed, they are going to lower that kind of yellow, I'm sorry, the blue footprint of flood water. So if we're lowering that flood elevation, you're not going to have inundation on top of those lower level manholes. So we, tangentially, you will see a benefit to the sanitary sewer system I'm simply saying we didn't model that. You can see Mr. Boyer has up on the screen now. It's tough to see at this level. Thanks, Chad. The green there is flood reduction in feet or fractions of a foot there. So there you go. So the darker the green, the more flood reduction depth we have. So you can see down there, kind of closer to the high school.

Do we have the slide in here?

No, it was on the packet. You can see down by Hudson Aurora Road, we have some of those darker greens. We're seeing a foot to two feet of flood reduction. Now that's after our projects are constructed. But if we're not seeing inundation, I know there's a manhole in one of those backyards there that was under feet of water at the time. So if... To answer your sanitary sewer question, we are going to see a benefit there. Now, is it going to resolve sanitary sewer flooding? I don't know. We didn't take into that level of analysis.

Okay. That's a good reminder that one of the conversations, and I've been to a number of these over the last couple of months, but even though the sanitary is... some counties responsibility there is some things that we can do and I think I think Tom was supportive of us playing a role in determining that all the manhole covers have the inflow dish inflow dishes on so so I think I think it'd be important to memorialize that somewhere in this Project as far as you know phase one or phase 0.5 We are going to be working on making sure that every single manhole covers is got one of those dishes It sounds like the smart Controls yeah, they sound like they would be really important and

I also assume they're pretty expensive. Have you looked at... I didn't hear anything about cost of any of this. Is that going to be Jeff's thing next?

No, I can... I was going to say, I can... We call this the... the final draft study. We're waiting for your comments until we finalize the study, but cost estimates for all of the projects here are listed between 30 and 35 million. So we have, that's why I asked them to phase this over 10 years. Smart controls, I'm not going to say they're inexpensive. Earth moving is expensive. Running large diameter pipes down a roadway, because we're into pavement impacts. The actual outlet control structures and then the smart valves, I think we did one at Barlow Community Center, and that valve with the structure was probably in the $20,000 to $25,000 range. So in the grand scheme of cost, It's not that much. Don't get me wrong, $25,000 is a lot of money. But in the grand scheme of our capital improvement budgets or these projects, that would not be that much of a cost. Plus.

Phase one, what do you see?

Chad, do you have it broken down by phase?

I do. You'll have to give me one moment to pull that up. So bear with me for just a minute.

While Chad's doing that, another cost for the smart signals, I'm sorry, for the smart valves would be offset because we are running the new fiber network through the city. So where there's opportunities, we could connect that to our fiber system So an indirect cost, it doesn't show up anywhere here in the numbers I just mentioned, but we'll be using that fiber backbone. Further, I met with, and Chad, you give me the go sign when you're ready, but further, I was speaking to our signal manufacturer, and they have some technology that's out there, our new preemption system, so the EMS and fire preemption system. It has add-ons that we can do. It can have Flood alerts put into it amongst a bunch of other things, but I thought that was intriguing we have a fiber system We can attach it to our emergency signal network, and then we could do some of our flood emergency Notifications so like for that for example if the high school entrance was flooded again. We could get a notification that We put a sensor out there. We can get notifications on our phones. It would alert drivers to avoid that area. It would alert our fire and EMS to avoid that area, too. So I think there's some tangential benefits coming out of the adaptive signal network and the preemption system upgrades that we did last year. So, Chad?

Yeah. So with the railroad park improvements, the Jonathan drive improvements, the wood acre drive improvements and the Hudson Aurora road improvements, those right now, preliminary estimates are in the $10 million range. but the bulk of that improvement cost is in the storm sewer redirects, Brad, as you had mentioned. We start getting into pipe installation costs, pavement restoration costs, utility redirection costs, if we need to do any of that. So those are going to carry the vast majority of that cost is in those storm sewer redirections, more so than the improvements in that particular grouping.

Are there any grants?

Maybe. I had the opportunity to talk to a member of the Tinkers Creek Watershed Partners. They were eager to see the floodplain restoration project that excited them, so to speak. There was some planning we would have to do to get that eligible. or funding, but Ohio EPA 319 grant, something like that might be plausible for that. There's some work to get to that grant funding, but yeah. Yeah.

Just with the phase one to five years, like how was it prioritized? I assume you prioritized what does make the most sense first, or cost, or?

Easiest to achieve first. We get the biggest benefit out of Darrow Park. It's a large open space that we can store within. So we want to utilize that. And actually, one of the model iterations, we didn't touch on it too much during the presentation, but one of our model iterations was simply, what if we just closed Darrow Road Park and it could never outlet ever again? It actually, it works good. We didn't store that much water in it. And one of the issues we have is there's still all these other pipe networks that are still feeding into the channel downstream. So there's a lot of capacity in Darrow Road Park. And that's why we went from store in Darrow Park and then re-divert, and you can see that Jonathan Drive diversion and that Woodacre diversion. So we can intercept flows, get it into locations where we have storage, and we see immediate benefit. Some of that green is as a result of just those three initial projects right there. So that's why we want to do those first.

If I can piggyback on that, Brad, if we start making improvements to, say, Hudson Park Drive culverts or the Blue Heron Drive culverts without doing that piece in Darrow Park, like I'd mentioned earlier in the presentation, we're only really tackling one side of that engineering coin in opening up those hydraulic restrictions and letting that water downstream faster. So, we're just going to create a problem downstream if we don't have a way to store that. So that's really 1 of the other pieces is getting railroad park online. 1st, lets us come through over the next 10 years and handle the rest of those areas as well.

Other questions or comments as far as the phasing goes. I think it's reasonable. I would add the. The somewhere in the document, the winterberry. Divergent piece north of Middleton.

Yep. Yeah, agreed. Um, we had an internal meeting today to talk about. Hey. We also have our brandywine creek study is coming right behind this 1 and that's gonna be another set of capital projects. So. As a whole, council and staff is going to have to generate this balance of what projects can we do and which ones maybe need to get strung out over time. And I think one of our kickoff topics for our budget cycle is we talk about capital improvements. at the front, so we may take an opportunity as part of that discussion to dive a little bit further into this phasing, specific projects, because not only do we have this Tinkers Creek watershed study and the Brandywine Creek watershed study forthcoming, we already have a programmed five-year capital build-out for stormwater projects, so they're all going to have to get mixed in together and kind of strung out over the next five years or more.

So you'll share some of the, I guess, the metrics you're going to use to rate some of these things prior to this? Like, is it so many houses decrease in so many inches of whatever?

Yeah, that is in the study, the gory detailed report, which I did not publish yet, so, yeah.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Chad Boyer.

Thank you all.

Okay. Next up is three B two six dash zero zero four two update on an opt in natural gas program and discussion regarding options to move to an opt out program.

seem to be having some technical difficulties, so I'll just go ahead and get started with the presentation. Thank you for having me. What we're here to talk about on this topic is natural gas aggregation. Since 2014, we have provided a service to the residents where we work with our energy broker, which is Buckeye Energy Brokers. We work with them to find the best natural gas rates on an aggregation basis for our residents. This has no benefit to the actual city itself. This is a benefit solely for the residents. We try to find the best price for them so they don't have to go look for different prices themselves. They can lock into a price. It's an opt-in program. For many years, we were with Constellation. Constellation was our gas aggregate broker for 10 years. for roughly 10 years. They decided to get out of the residential energy market. They decided to get out of the opt-in programs. From there, we ended up going with Eastern P&G. We had them for a year. We ended up having problems with them where they basically broke their contract towards the end of the winter season due to some uncertainties in the natural gas market. We came back to you guys last year. We had found another broker, another provider to go with, which was Major Energy. We had problems getting Major Energy to sign off on a contract. So therefore, we didn't have a natural gas aggregation through the 25-26 winter. So with that being said, we're still looking for another provider to provide an opt-in program. But in preparation for what if we can't find one, we wanted to bring you guys information on what another type of program would look like, and this would be an opt-out program. This would essentially put residents into the program, and they could opt out at no cost to them. They would just need to make that effort and make that call. It would get us back into offering a lower cost to the residents to help them out as far as shopping for natural gas options. So with all that information, I'd like to introduce Thomas Belish. He is the president of Buckeye Energy Brokers, who we've been with for many years.

Good evening, Council. In the past, we've had a lot of excitement and interest in the program. We've had between two and 3,000 accounts in there, which is a really good hit rate for opt-in. Considering it's opt-in, it's been a really good hit rate. Throughout the city of Hudson, about 90% of houses do have natural gas, so it really does affect almost everybody in town. So we are continuously looking for opt-in suppliers to keep it going like that, but we haven't found anybody yet. We do have interest from opt-out suppliers, though, so we wanted to pass that along that we would be getting bids for an opt-out program. So, really, a program like that would have a 21-day opt-out period. Enbridge would also send another letter. They'd have another seven days to opt out. So, there's a lot of safeguards built into the program. You know, we really only want to have customers that want to be, you know, in the program. So, you know, we always have no switching fees as well. Once it's up and running, there's no switching fees, which we've always had in the past as well. So we would send opt-out letters just to Hudson residents. We would scrub the list for the data and just send to Hudson. So the ones that would be eligible is those just with Enbridge and not under contract with anybody else. So if you do have a supplier up and running, you wouldn't get a letter, wouldn't be affected. But those customers could opt in, though, at a later date. Really, all the billing remains the same. You still have budget billing, and the payment is all through Enbridge Gas Ohio, so none of that changes. One of the differences between opt-in and opt-out, if you do an opt-in program, the supplier basically has control of that customer for the next renewal. So if you... You switch suppliers, that supplier can continue to serve that customer. So opt out, the city controls the destiny of the customer. So if you switch suppliers, it's a seamless transition from one to the next. And I think residents would appreciate that. from switching seamlessly from one supplier to the next over the years with a long-term view of this. Buckeye Energy does have a toll-free number. We could take calls from anybody in town. On page eight, I have a schedule of how it could be implemented and how it works. So it would be a November ballot. If it does pass, there's two public hearings, and then there's filing for certification with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. We're looking for like a March start for an opt-out program. But, again, we are continuously looking for opt-in suppliers.

Yeah, and just to kind of recap on the timetable here, the reason we're bringing this to you now is because there are some deadlines that would need to be met. This would need to go through council, and we need to get this over to the Board of Elections. If you guys were to decide you wanted to go with an opt-out program, that would need to be to the Board of Elections by the August 5th date. So that way that gives you guys time to talk about it. And I'm not looking for a decision tonight. I just want to get this in front of you so you guys can start thinking about it and then direct us as to which way you'd like to go with this program. We could either continue, which we are doing now, looking for an opt-in program. But if we can't find an opt-in program, if there's a date that's maybe in your guys' mind, you'd like us to get back to you guys and let you know we haven't found one. And then you guys can decide if you want to move towards an opt-out program. And like I said, the August 5th is the deadline to get it to the Board of Elections, and then it would be on the November 3rd election. It would be a ballot issue. The residents knew we could put information out to give them basically, here's what this means, the pros, cons of it. The pro is it's going to lock us into a rate for that 12-month period, and then we could renew that on an annual basis whenever we get revised rates. The con to it, there's really not a con. Right now, the con is we don't have a program for an opt-in. In Public Works, we've received a number of calls with people requesting, what program do we have? And we don't have one at this point. So I guess the whole point of this discussion is just to give you an idea as to where we are, where we started from back in 2014, how it's progressed to the situation that we're currently in today. and then to give you guys an option if you guys wanted to change this program from an opt-in to an opt-out program. Then once we get direction from council, we'll move forward accordingly.

Do you have data about what is the delta between what we think we can get versus what I can get or the citizens can get going to apples and apples and finding the best rate.

Most of that difference is really on the renewal. So most suppliers may offer $4 or $5 per MCF, but the renewal could be $6, $7, $8 per MCF. And that starts billing before the residents know that new rate. And then by the time they switch, they've already paid two or three months at a very high rate and really lost their savings. So, you know, there's There is savings from those offers, but the real savings is on the renewal.

Big savings. That would be a program that, you know, as we have in the past, we would monitor that. And then come time for the renewal, we'd already have that in place. Then the resident wouldn't get stuck in something if they're not paying attention to their gas rates into a month or two or three of higher rates. We've looked at other programs as well. To me, the whole purpose of providing this for the residents is to save them money. We're not looking for extracurricular-type activities and programs and stuff from other providers. We're looking to save dollars for the residents. And you can do it yourself. You can go to the standard choice offer, which is what Enbridge offers. That gives you a standard rate. And I'm assuming we would be lower than that if we went with this program. Some of the other programs, a lot of times, are higher than the standard choice offer if you go with them. And the other thing is going to the Apples to Apples. That's one of the things we had referred a lot of residents to. The thing is trying to explain to them what each different program or the details of it, because when you go to Apples to Apples, there are tens and there's a lot of options on there. If you don't read all the fine details, there's cancellation fees, there's minimum terms of contracts, there's auto renewals, there's all kinds of things that Some of our residents don't pay attention to it sometimes, and then we're trying to help them get out of those contracts.

Mr. Other comments, questions?

Thank you. My first question, this theoretical program schedule has us starting in March, and so I assume that would kind of put us on an annual schedule where whichever provider we go with, we sign around March. In your experience as a broker, Does the time of year which a city generally signs a contract with the provider generally affect the rates to any degree?

there's some advantages and disadvantages of a spring start. So suppliers love that because they have the customer and then they're putting gas in storage during the summer to use the upcoming winter. They like it, they may bid more aggressively. What I like to do is bid start in the fall and so it's a little more riskier on their end. They're selling, they're pricing for customers that they don't have yet And they don't have storage, don't have gas and storage for these customers either. And so it's a little harder that way. The pricing is really based on the market at the time. So whatever's on the New York Mercantile Exchange is really what we're going off of. And just in my my experience is the residents prefer the false start so they know what it's going on for Not trying to buy gas so far in advance That can be difficult buying gas nine months in advance versus one or two months in advance So that first term could be 18 months and then we would do one or two years. So we can go up to two years without sending an opt-out letter. So then at that point go one or two. And if the first one was 18 months, we would get on a fall track, which is more.

So, I mean, your recommendation from a standards point of view is most residents prefer fall, but you don't see any sort of annual trends of when the prices are generally better for the customers?

Yeah, if we have a mild winter, and this was three, four, five years ago, those were good times. But then if you have a fall start, you can buy gas as well, though. You're buying it six months in advance, but you can take advantage of that low price anyway. Whereas if you have a cold winter, like we had, and we but NYMEX went as high as $8 for February. Then you're stuck trying to buy last minute in a high market. If you haven't bought yet, then you're kind of stuck buying at a high rate. That can be tricky. With the fall start, you kind of have more time to strike.

So, theoretically, if we did an 18-month first term and we got ourselves on a fall schedule, you mentioned we can do up to two years. Are you able to lock in a lower rate if you're locking yourself in for two years?

Generally, it's slightly higher. Interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, I just got some quotes. this morning, so about 4.30 for one year, and it was like 4.45 for two years. Maybe an extra 15 cents, but the market's just dropped in the last few days, so it's a great time to buy. But yeah, so just for an extra few cents, I think that'd be well worth it.

My other question centers around We talked about when we were in the opt-in program and whichever broker, sorry, not broker, provider that it was broke the contract essentially on us. What leverage, what options do we even have, be it our current model of opt-in or this opt-out model? What options do we even have when the supplier breaks a contract like that?

There's really nothing in these contracts that's binding that creates a penalty to either side. So that's where, if you recall back when the Eastern P&G, when they broke their contract, there was nothing legally we could do to hold them to it. The problem they had was they didn't have enough gas and storage. to supply all the customers. And they were multiple areas that they were providing natural gas to. And then they were getting charged with an elevated rate to make up their difference in capacity. So then it was costing them, you know, millions of dollars. So that's why they started cutting customers.

Okay. Sorry, I guess I do have one more question. Can you paint for me a picture of the resident and or voter whom would be against this program? You know, it's hard for me to conceptualize why we wouldn't want to go with this. You know, I know myself personally, I don't enjoy going on apples to apples every year and finding the best price if I can just go into this you know, aggregation program, that's going to generally give me a pretty darn competitive price, and I can say that out of mind. I'd love to.

Right, right, yeah. Yeah, it usually passes very easily. Two to one, we've seen 11 to one. Yeah, I don't think we've had any fail, so... 26 years. I've seen it on the electric side in southern Ohio, but yeah, we have excellent passage rates on the . That's all from me. Thank you.

Other comments? Jeffrey.

Mr. Belich, good to see you again. Thank you. Yes, good to see you. You answered my question about the 12-month and a little bit discussion on the 18 and 24, so that would be the standard you'd be looking at. If this went through and the voters pass this, we would move to 12-month. I want to clarify something you said earlier. So the last couple of years I've been with Ohio Gas and Electric, so I have that agreement. So you're saying if this... went into place, it would not affect me because I have that agreement already? Was that what you said?

That's correct.

You would not get a letter to opt out. I would just continue with my own contract that I've done on my own?

Yeah, that's correct.

What happens when that contract is up? Would I then have to go

So it's all about the mailing. So if you do go back to Enbridge, then you'd be on the eligibility list and you'd get a letter the next time, probably that fall, maybe around Labor Day, early fall, because it's the 21-day opt-out period. Next time we renew our contract.

So if we went with a two-year contract, that could be your contract could end a week before we are into our new contract. So it could be two years. But we would have all this information on our city website and everything else to provide to residents.

You opt in, to opt in.

Okay.

But if I, as a customer of Ohio Gas and Electric, if I know my contract date is August or something, and I went in there in the beginning of August and had discussions with them, can I continue a contract with them, or am I... I'm trying to understand do I have the unlimited freedom as long as I make sure I don't cross a deadline Current contract to continue that Yeah, you really do if you're with with that supplier you can sign up with another supplier and keep doing that as long as my contract doesn't lapse which may then Get me depending on time and get me into the cycle of getting a letter Once you leave, Ohio

gas, then that contract's over. And then you would be under the city program.

I would go back to Enbridge, I guess. Go back to Enbridge. That would put my name on the list of saying, okay, Stranzivino's got to get the letter the next time those go out.

Right, right. And have the option to opt in as well. Okay. And if we did do a two-year program, we could do a supplemental mailing at year one as well.

question thank you and at one point you mentioned no switching fees right right so so I could I could be brought into this program and then I can just decide to move to somebody else in the middle correct

Just back to the schedule. Assuming we would put this on a three-reading, August 5th is really tight. We'd have to make a decision with this council soon to put legislation on there to have three readings before the August 5th deadline, and then we'd have to have time to prepare all of that. So in my opinion, with a three-reading process to get something and the paperwork then filed after, we'd have to pass that with – we'd have to have all that done. So that's pretty tight, given the fact that we're almost June.

So right now you're looking for providers for the opt-in for the city? And it's likely that you will get one or the time frame on that is we don't know.

We're not having, we're not very successful at this point at finding a, another provider. There's currently two, I think you had mentioned that are providing the service and we've had bad outcomes with both of them. So the one would just, they walked away from their contract. That was Eastern P and G then major energy wouldn't agree to a various legal language in the contract.

So we're just agreeing that we're hoping that we will find someone essentially.

We're up against the clock for the August 5th.

So we said, yes, we want to do this, but it doesn't mean that we will find a vendor for the opt-in.

We can find opt-outs. Right, but for opt-in. We're not successful at this point, and that's

Yeah, we kind of, at the point of no return to meet August 5th or not, I guess kind of today's the day really to start it, I guess, moving forward if there was interest.

And to me, Jeff, the mayor mentioned the deadline. I think from this conversation, I'd like to see if we have majority agreement to put this on the ballot. I mean, no matter what, the voters get to make the decision. I don't see any reason not to give them the ability to make the decision. So I'd like to give direction to get legislation.

And it also takes several readings and months. So I think we can move forward. NOW AND WE STILL HAVE TIME TO EVALUATE THINGS. ANY OTHER QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS?

JUST LOOKING AT WE'VE GOT TWO

If you want to take it through three readings, the emergency language may come into play. We can put it on next week. That would be great.

Council, I'm just asking the question, would you be okay with the emergency language? Because if we don't have it for the second minute, it's on for June 16th. July 14th and July 21st will be the three meetings. If we have the emergency language, it will affect immediately. To doubt it, we would not need the deadline.

Sure.

Any suggestions?

That qualifies.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Okay.

Well, we have a meeting on Thursday that we'll talk about it. All right. Thank you. All right, next is CTMP-8672, resolution authorizing city manager to enter in a contract with American Municipal Power to participate in a community energy savings smart thermostat program.

All right.

I have Erin Miller here with me. Erin is the VP of?

Programs and Sustainability.

Programs and Sustainability. I had it here, but I couldn't read it without my glasses on. So what we're here to talk about tonight is give you a little bit of introduction to AMP. I know we've got some new faces. And by the end of this week, I'm going to have an email out to you guys for a public power certification program that AMP offers. It's for elected officials. And it just gives you an idea of what AMP does. And it works through all their offerings and stuff. And then at the end of it, you get a certification showing that you went through the program. One thing that Aaron's gonna talk about in addition to AMP is a thermostat, a smart thermostat program that they offer. This is, it would be sponsored by Hudson. They would provide all the promotional information. And what it does, it allows, it gives the Hudson Public Power, this is only for Hudson Public Power customers, It allows them the ability to participate in a thermostat program that, by having certain thermostats, and they have a list of supported providers, it allows the administrator of the program to control temperatures of their house at certain times, and this is going to be during peak peaking events and in return what the city gets out of this is it starts to lower our our capacity and transmission costs and with the rise of Capacity costs and transmission soon to follow this helps us control our costs and it saves everybody money So I'll turn it over to Erin and she can explain a little bit about the amp I'll give you some more information on them and then talk about the program

Thank you so much, Kevin. Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for having me here today. Really appreciate it. I handed out some of the presentations so you have it in paper copy as well in case you wanted to take notes. But it's also up on the screen. So American Municipal Power, if you're not familiar, so we go by AMP. And it started in 1971 and actually started as AMP Ohio because the public power entities in Ohio got together and it was really based in advocacy, so fighting for the right to have public power. throughout the state and also looking at jointly combining together to have their own generation projects. And so in 1972, Hudson joined. So you were one of our founding members way back way back in the day when the organization formed. And then in 2009, we spread out a little bit, and now we serve nine states, and not just municipal electric systems in Ohio, but also Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Kentucky. I've got a map that can show you all of them. But collectively, we all serve 665,000 customers. So with that power of joint action, we're able to not only build generation projects, but also offer energy services and energy programs that individually as communities you wouldn't necessarily be able to do. But through joint action and everyone coming together, it reduces the cost, so it makes it affordable. So, we have a diverse generation portfolio, and you're a participant in almost every project that we have. So, you have a diverse portfolio as well, which is great. So, just like diversification in like your retirement, for example, or any savings accounts you might have with stocks and bonds, the same thing goes with generation portfolio. The more diverse it is, the more insulated you are from risk. And so, we want to make sure that we have that diversity on our side so that each of our members can pick and choose what makes sense for them as a community. So you've chosen to be also very diverse and have a lot of different generation assets as part of your portfolio as well, which is great. We have a 22-member board of trustees that leads our organization, and they are made up of communities. So we have village administrators and electric superintendents as well as elected officials on our board. And Kevin participates in the board committees as well. So he's a regular at our meetings and is a great representative of your community. That's a little bit about who AMP is. The next slide shows you our mission, vision, and values. So our mission is to serve you. So we are an extension of your staff. All of us. I've been at AMP for nine years, and it's really about how to best serve you. And it is a service organization. We're a not-for-profit, and our whole goal is to provide you with innovative solutions to meet your needs and also cost-effective management of power supply and energy services. So that's the whole reason why we exist. The next slide shows you kind of the challenge that not only your community, but all communities throughout this region are facing right now. So there's three parts of your bill that you receive. for power. So there's an energy transmission and capacity. And the transmission and capacity charges are just passed through. So they're on the AMP bill, but it's a pass-through cost that comes from PJM and from the So those costs have been rising year over year. And especially in 2024, we saw a huge jump as capacity costs really rose very high. So since 2022, capacity has increased 173% and transmission 77%. And we don't see these costs going down anytime soon.

Just like to note real quick, the reason that the capacity charges are capped off around that $10 threshold because some governors stepped in to negotiate with PGM, and then they put a capacity ceiling on that, and as well, they put a capacity floor on that as well. So that if those caps hadn't been put in, those numbers would be even higher.

That's two auctions that PGM had for capacity. It would have gone over both those auctions. But there are things that you can do, and on the next slide you'll see, there are things that you can do to help reduce those transmission and capacity charges. And really that opportunity is called peak shaving. And so through this community energy savings program, this is like one for peak shaving. And it's a great way to engage with your customers as well. As Kevin had said, the transmission and capacity costs will be reduced by reducing the retail customer load through the management of connected technologies. And when I say connected technologies, those are like Wi-Fi connected technologies that are in the home. And our program is focused on thermostats, which control the air conditioning load. But in the future, we could expand it to batteries. If you had, you know, home storage batteries in your heaters that are wi-fi connected so platform that you can add different technologies to but right now we're we're initially just focused our program on on thermostats and getting that air conditioning load reduced so on the slide you can see that gray line the curved line is the baseline um load for the air conditioning unit. And you can see we ran an event, which was that gray box there. It's like a two-hour event. We pre-cooled the home. So you'll see that green spike in load is where we pre-cooled the home. When we do cycle down the air conditioning load, which is where the drastic drop there happens in the green line, then it's more comfortable for the homeowners. And then as the load you see going up, that's when the air conditioning is cycling back on. And that little box, the blue box, is actually the coincident peak. So during that one hour, we were able to shed 150 kilowatts of electricity through this one event. So just to give you an example of kind of how the load shape works for the electric load through the program. I'll go into more detail as to how it works on the customer side as well and their experience. So the next slide just gives you a summary of the program. So really, we've designed this to combat transmission and capacity charges by reducing our total system peak through the management of this Wi-Fi connected thermostats. Our program started in 2023, and it goes until. So if you were to enter into the program, you would benefit from seven summer and And then if we decide to continue the program, then you would have the ability at that time to re-enter a new contract. So this contract would be for two years. We've been able to reduce equipment load, so that air conditioning load, over 1kW per thermostat per event. And we've saved over $280,000 for our members so far in transmission and capacity charges through it. So it's really easy for you to participate. We've designed it that way. It's really easy for your customers to participate. And our partner is Energy Hub. And they're the number one vendor in the space. And they do a customer survey every year. And the customer survey, I have the results that I can show you. But it's been very positive. So customers really enjoy the program. And we've had no issues at all from the customer side at all. So enrollment growth has been steady as well. So it's been a really good program since 2023 when we started it. So this is what the estimates are for your community. So we would anticipate about a 1.5 to 2% of your residential customers. Small business customers can also enroll in the program if they have a Wi-Fi connected thermostat. But we would expect about 1.5% to 2% of your residential meter count to enroll. And your estimated savings per thermostat would be $181. The cost is $80 per thermostat, so your net savings would be $101. So it's 126% return on your investment. So your residential meters are around $6,000. And so you get about 93 to 123 customers signed up. You might get more or less, but that's just an estimate based on the current participants that we have and their enrollment figures. So the total cost estimates there to Hudson is between $7,000 to $9,000. The transmission capacity savings are between $16,000 and $22,000. So your net savings there are on that last line. And then your customers that participate in the program. So this is completely voluntary. Your customers decide to participate or not. And those who participate will receive a $55 incentive for participation. And if they stay enrolled throughout the summer, they'll be entered for a chance to win a $250 incentive payment. It's an e-gift card, like a Visa prepaid gift card. The next slide just shows you how easy it is for you to participate. So we would verify enrollees and improve incentive payments. So all you would have to do is provide us your customer list on a secure file transfer and then we can go in there and verify your customers that sign up. The thermostat vendors will advertise to their customers in your zip code. So we'll verify and make sure that they're actually Hudson Power customers before enrolling them into the program and then they get that incentive payment. Energy Hub provides the platform, the partnerships with all the thermostat vendors. They send the notifications and the gift cards to the participating customers. And then they also have a customer line to respond to any program inquiries as well. And we'll provide you your community's branded marketing materials. So you can put it on your website or flyers that you can print out and put at coffee house or community centers here at City Hall. So we'll dispatch the thermostats for you using our system and then bill you the $80 per thermostat on your power supply bill.

So you won't even have a separate bill. It'll just be for your power supply bill.

And then we'll provide you the end of season results. So at the end of the season, you'll know how many customers enrolled in the program and what the power reduction was from those customers participating. So in 2025, we had 16 communities participating. And now we have 21 participating. So we've gained an additional five this year. We did 24 events throughout the summer, and each thermostat produced 1.23 kilowatt in reduction. We had really good participation, so about 60% of folks participated in the events. If you're a customer and you're in the program, you'll see a little leaf on your thermostat that shows that there's an event going on. You also get a notification that there's an event. And if you have something going on, like your home, or you're having people over, you can just adjust your thermostat either manually or on your phone, and it'll opt you out of the event automatically just by adjusting the temperature to say. But not many people do that, so only 25% of folks did that last year. And we have the prominent thermostat vendors are Nest, Ecobee, Honeywell, but we also have Lux and Sensei and Amazon and alarm.com as well. The next two slides are just showing you the customer survey responses. So it's a really great way to engage with your customers and have them help be part of the solution. So customer responses have been very positive. They're highly satisfied with the program. And a lot of them, 83%, expect to participate for as long as the program is offered. The next slide is just showing you the marketing materials that we provide to you. So this is a sample from Grafton, who's one of our participants. So it will have your logo, your information, local images from your community advertising the program. And then we also provide a website, so your customers could go to this website and enroll here. And if they don't have a thermostat already, they can purchase one through the thermostat vendors themselves, or they can buy one at the local hardware store or anywhere. And as soon as they install it, they'll get a notification about the program, and they can sign up right then. So that's the next slide, is how do customers find out about it? They'll either have a thermostat already, and they'll get notified by the thermostat vendor. So they'll get a notification from Google Nest talking about the program and offering it. Or they won't have a thermostat, and they can buy one, and then they'll get notified that way. And then once they get notification of the program and decide to belong to it, they can just apply and they'll receive a confirmation that their application is being reviewed. We'll review their application alongside your customer list to make sure that we're approving your customers to be in the program. And then they'll receive that $55 gift card. So during an event, Typical event, like I said, we'll pre-cool the home about two to three degrees down to make it comfortable and then adjust the thermostat three to four degrees above the normal temperature set point. So if you have your air conditioning set at 70, it'll be set to 73 or 74. And then as soon as the event's over, it'll return back to your original set point at that 70 degree. And then those are all the thermostat vendors there and kind of what it looks like on the Nest thermostat when there's an event. I think the last slide is just talking about next steps. So do we have any questions for you?

One of the things I wanted to bring up is we're always looking at ways to optimize the electric system. Years back, we used to be able to feed from a higher voltage substation, which created savings. That went away. As we find ways to optimize the system, we thought this might be a good fit for us. How does this peak shaving really impact us? The peaks are measured off of our zone. and what our zone sees as the peak, and then they look at what percentage of Hudson's peak happened at that same time, quintessential peak. So, the one CP affects the capacity, the five CP affects the transmission. And based on what the ACI zone sees for their peak during that time and what our percentage of that feed was, our usage, that dictates how much of that charge we pay. And it's not just paid for those peak times. This is a year-long cost for us. So the more that we can shave off of our peak usage times, the same time that the ACI zone is seeing their peak, the more we can save all year long. So it seems like a minimal amount, having a few people, but anything we can save saves us all year long, and it saves everybody that's a Hudson Public Power customer. So as we find more of these types of programs, I want to bring them forward to you guys and just inform you about it, and if you guys would like to move forward with it, we will. If not, no harm, no foul.

Daniel? Do you run any incentive programs on purchasing the smart thermostats? Customers don't have them.

Yeah, so we have a separate program called Efficiency Smart that is an energy efficiency program, and that does offer rebates, like $100 rebates off the cost of a thermostat. But right now, Hudson's not a participant in it yet.

We were years back. We were obligated to be part of that program. That obligation expired, but we're going to look at that program again, and I'll bring that to you guys as well.

Okay, yeah, we should look into that as well, too. Do you have any confusion with the Gen 1 and 2 Google nests? Because I know they're no longer eligible for these programs, so customers get confused.

Yes, yeah. So we do have information on our website about the individual for nests, like which thermostats are eligible. We had Gen 1 and 2 thermostats enrolled, and then we worked with those customers to get them onto new thermostats. So you're right.

And then you mentioned water heaters, like heat pump water heaters and stuff, connected items. Is that going to be like a 2028 thing where you're looking into those programs?

Yeah, I think it's going to be at least 2028. Because for each of these, so when we started this program, like AMP had to put money into all of the, so all the thermostat vendors like charge fees to get started. So AMP kind of front loaded all of that. So it's like $100,000 to get the program started. And that was for thermostats. And then if we did battery storage, it would be $100,000. If we did electric vehicles, $100,000. So it depends on what the interest is from our members and how much penetration of those technologies are in the community to see if the economics makes sense. Thermostats, a lot of people have these smart thermostats, so that was a good entry point for us.

There's a lot of Teslas around here, too.

Yeah, that's true. I have a heat problem.

So does that Have a smart thermostat I would assume the heat pump would work as well because it's using energy using the electric energy Yeah, I think you answered my questions around I

If I'm really hot, I don't have to participate in that event at that time. And then, is there any resources for folks that might need help installing these thermostats? Or is there a... Have you found that that's an issue or not? I know they're pretty straightforward, but...

I think if somebody I guess could have like an electrician or HVAC contractor come out and do it if they're having problems or when they go to install a thermostat, there's a helpline. I know that we had to call it because our furnace was old and it didn't have the number of wires that we needed. Somebody else would call and they're like, oh, just use the red wire and connect that in.

Any other comments or questions?

I'll also see this is on the agenda for next week if you guys want to proceed and move forward with it. It's TMP 8672. Okay.

Just I mean from this documentation. It doesn't appear. There's any cost to the city for this series of costs Okay, it's $80 per participant. Oh, that's what that yeah, and that's where you get the hundred and sticks back So I think and I guess my follow-up to that is where does the $55 incentive payment come from is that from a MP I Okay, okay, so we anticipate that and I see I understand the math now. Okay.

Thank you All right, thank you, thank you very much And next is 3d 26-0 0 4 3 Clinton crossing project discussion

Good evening, everyone. We thought with the public engagement coming up soon, we thought now was a good time to come back to council and update you guys and answer any questions you may have on the public engagement. Another important topic we wanted to cover was kind of the foundation of the whole project. I think everyone's aware by now that the comp plan, this first graph, was the comp plan layout, the map that they put in there for Clinton Crossing. We made some modifications to that map because there's some wetland up here, so we moved some things around. The acreage stayed pretty much the same. But because we did that, we got together, I think it was May 15th, with Jesse, who was nice enough, Jesse Obert, who was nice enough to join us tonight. and Rebecca Leiter, we wanted to get their feedback to make sure that they were okay with us changing the map a little bit, adjusting it to cover some of those wetlands. So we want to make sure we had a good foundation before we went into the public engagement, because this will be something that, as we do the charrettes, people are looking at as kind of bonkers. So I don't want to speak for Jessie, since she's here. I'll let her say something. But it was... a very productive meeting. I think we're all on the same page that these minor modifications make sense. And it was more of just the comp plan wasn't specific on that. It was kind of a general map. So, Jessie, if you want.

Sure. So when we met and staff presented the changes to the map, we discussed what the implications were of the comprehensive plan. And again, this particular map was about percentages that were being designated for their purpose. That percentage didn't change with the locations adjustments, so both Rebecca and I felt that it was fair and reasonable so that the project could move forward without having more limitations. If we left the map as evidenced in the comprehensive plan, it would limit the amount of residential that could go there because of the wetlands and the topography that existed.

when you just for everybody's reference when you look at this kind of adjusted map owen brown runs right here so the cut off now is owen brown and then morse runs over here so it it's more of a natural cut off now that wasn't if you see it was kind of on both sides it makes it a little easier not at jesse's point to kind of develop having that natural If anybody has any questions on this piece of it all, we can answer them now, otherwise I'll move on to the public engagement. So, as you see on here, the 1st thing is kind of general. Public engagement, these are ability for people to walk the land, do self guided tours. We are in the process of putting up a few signs that show the acreage on both sides of the road and another sign that will give some information on where to go. If you want to find out about public engagement, those should be great. Pretty soon. I think they should be going right now. 1st of next week. Okay. And then we'll also have some staff office hours that people can come in and talk if they want to talk. Those are just kind of informal type things that people can do. The formal engagement kicks off on June 10th, and that is the Charette that we're going to be doing with the community boards and organizations. The Charette's a three-hour design process. It's a pretty... detailed process. We invited 64 people between community boards and organizations. I did check with Emily Fernandez today. The invitations, I believe, went out last Wednesday. We already have 20 who have accepted out of the 64 who have accepted. So we are getting those in. That'll be the first engagement. And then we are going to also do a residential charrette, actually two of them, on the same day, June 17th. There's an afternoon charrette from, I think, 12 to 3, and then a nighttime one from 6 to 9. You can pick which one you want to join based on your schedule. That is currently out on Let's Talk Hudson and on the website. And we are planning on sending out a postcard to all residents. It should go out probably early next week. Hopefully they get it by the end of the week. alerting them to this so that if they want to sign up, they can go sign up. We will have to watch if we get, you can only do, the charrette can only be so big. It can't be thousands of people. So if we really get a huge turnout, we might have to maybe do more or something along that. I think probably the max we can do in each charrette is about 100. But it is, again, it's a three-hour time commitment. So that's not going to be for everyone. There's other things. People can come into the, while the charrette's going on, there'll be tables that they can look at, give suggestions on what they think should be there. So that allows them to still give public opinion on not having to do the full charrette. After the charrettes are done, then there'll be a series of open houses, as you can see on here. Basically, each open house brings in the project. The first open house will show all the different selections from the charrette. You'll get feedback. Next open house will bring it down to three. And then eventually you get to that last open house, which is kind of the last design. It'll be a lot more detailed. You'll see some watercolor renderings, 3D stuff that people will be able to look at with the goal eventually to get to planning commission in September of this year. So I won't take a whole lot of time because I don't know if anybody has any questions on the process.

um in the shreds no in your office hours okay um so if you would let us know if i can just well if council is considering any other questions one other orientation piece is that as this community led council plan comes together we would then need to We anticipate potentially coming back to council in late July. At that time, we will at least have some sense of the type of projects that are of interest to the community, and then start to look at a potential schedule, which would take several months to look at that developer with the intent that as planning commission is completing their review,

I like the full transparency of everything and all the different options for residents to come so Picking the developer that will be something Correct if Anticipating that we would come back in late July.

We could work with council to see if

a method that you would like to consider for the developer selection?

A committee, a process for how they would submit information so we could give you a first consideration of that in late July?

I mean, I think it's an aggressive timeline, but I think we can do it. I'm assuming that throughout this whole process, in addition to let's talk Hudson, but there'll be online options for everybody all the time, the entire process for people that can't make the events.

There is. There's ongoing considerations with Let's Talk Hudson. So that will help.

And as Brian mentioned, maybe it'd be helpful on the memo.

I know it gives a quick shot. Actually, for these key sessions, June will be these As we've been talking and engaging with previous comprehensive planning committee members, we want to stay very intentional in just staying at the mindset that we're implementing in comprehensive planning.

You've been unusually quiet during this item.

It's loud.

Okay. All right. Okay, thank you very much. Jessie, thank you for coming in. All right, next up is E26-0044, Hudson Innovation Park Overview. Good evening. Good evening.

Thanks for having me. It sounded like it may be helpful just to do a bit more of an overview on the site itself, go over the history and kind of where we got from, how we got to being at a shovel-ready development site, so that as we have opportunities to make decisions in the coming weeks, months, years, that context is established. So if you'll bear with me for one second, I'm just going to pull up. Okay, so our site is at 996 Hines Hill Road, which is in the northwest quadrant. And I'm going to walk us through this history document briefly, and then of course stop me and ask questions as it's helpful. So we're going to start back to early 2000s. So from 1903 to the early 2000s, this site was operated and owned by Cuyahoga County and went through a series of names during that time, but most predominantly called the Youth Development Center. It was a reform program for troubled young men. The idea was you take them out of a more urban environment or somewhere they're struggling, you put them into a different environment and hope for a different result. So for that use this site had classrooms and dormitories and you can see down here this is like there's a baseball field and football field and soccer field as part of this use. In the early 2000s Cuyahoga County decided they were going to walk away from this type of a strategy and they'd be closing the facility and it ultimately closed in 2008. At that time, the city of Hudson, Western Reserve Land Conservancy, Summit County Metro Parks, and the Hudson Parks came together to form a capital stack to buy this property that was going to be listed for sale. There were a few strategic reasons for Hudson to consider that. If this land, which was at the time zoned residential, became a large housing development, it would have overwhelmed the schools and been problematic for the community. And my understanding was there was also discussion of being able to hold such a large piece of acreage for future income tax base growth for the community. For reference, the city put in $2.4 million, Hudson Parks $2 million, Western Reserve Land Conservancy around another two, and the Metro Parks was $500,000 for a total of $6.9 million is what we're into the site for. We currently have just under $2 million, $1,870,000 of outstanding debt, so we are still paying for this as a community.

which I think is important.

As part of the YDC purchase agreement, Youth Development Center, there was a specific clause that outlined the property needed to be used for public purposes for five years upon closing of the sale, which rolled off in September of 2014. So fast forward, we now own the property. Between 2010 and 2011, city council at that time formed a YDC utilization subcommittee. And the objective was to identify and evaluate potential users for the site with a prioritization for non-tax funded sources. So things that could be financially viable without being subsidized by the local government. This committee issued a request for interest in May of 2010. They received 15 responses. Four of them were found to have enough merit to explore further and study. Unfortunately, only one of those four was found to be financially valuable. And with only one smaller tenant for this whole site, it wasn't going to support the maintenance that was needed to preserve these historic structures and continue the maintenance. So at that time, The decision, they also discussed with a contractor and a specialist that found it was not going to be economically feasible for the city to continue to maintain those structures. In 2011, 293 acres of the site were placed officially into the conservation easement. So if I come up here, that's the acreage north of Heinzel Road. There's a little, here we go, this small parcel here which feeds into the pond and then everything on the west side. So this main parcel in the middle is outside of the conservation easement. In November of 2012, walking our map along with us, in a city council workshop there was a discussion of the future land uses of the property. knowing that the public use restriction was going to roll off in September of 2014 and wanting to be prepared for that moment. There was general alignment at that time that the south side would be attractive for commercial development, particularly for office users. City Council at that time highlighted their desire to develop the property in the highest and best use for the income tax base. And consultants, again, continue to remember, recommend that the city bear the risk and cost of demolishing the existing structures to make the site more attractive. That was the November 27th meeting. And at this time, now we're into meetings where there's video recordings too. So if you'd like to go back and hear the full discussion, you're obviously able to do so. So then in 2013, at City Council's direction, all of the existing structures were demolished. So now all of our buildings come down. You can see the existing drives are still there, but the structures are gone. In 2016, the 2015 Comprehensive Plan was formally adopted And that plan included two sites that were designated as flex. Flex meant that the future land use should be open to determination as the city's operational and community and market forces developed over time. This site was part of that consideration. And then beginning in 2018, city council had reviewed legislation which was actually formally adopted on March 5th of 2019 to rezone The parcels for this site, from District 2, Rural Residential Conservation, to District 6, Western Hudson Gateway, to allow for those commercial and industrial development that the community desired, reaffirming that we were looking for some commercial development in this space. In 2023, with the support of leadership, I submitted the site to the JobsOhio SiteOhio program, and that was the program that takes sites through an authentication process and confirms that they are shovel-ready for development. In 2024, the comprehensive plan included this site as one of its three focus areas, and the vision that came from that plan says the area should be maintained as passive open space with connections to adjoining parks and open spaces until a transformative income-generating user is identified for the site. Also in 2024, JobsOhio, and their consultants in-site came to do a site visit and review it for authentication and confirmed that it was an appropriate site for commercial office development and officially accepted it into the pipeline. We continued to invest in the site and do all the due diligence studies required, and in 2025, we completed SiteOhio authentication. We now do formally have that designation from SiteOhio, and we've already started getting developer interest on the site from them. As part of that effort, we rebranded the site Hudson Innovation Park. Council reviewed several logos and names, and we landed on this one. I think most of you have seen at this point. And so that's where we are today. Are there questions, other areas of interest that you'd further like to explore related to the site? So that's still we're still working through a few different layouts of where that could be that one serves the function of a salt barn best and then two disturbs the least amount of function of the rest of the site for an office park development. So with engineering's assistance they've really We've pressure tested a lot of sites, I think, at this point, but I think we have a couple that are possibilities. It's right in the smack dab of the flattest and most desirable land right now, so that's the issue with where it's currently located. And then just as a reminder, so things that we've done, we've completed the wetlands delineation, so we know where all the current wetlands are. We have that map updated with the Army Corps's We did an environmental study, a geotechnical study to make sure that we understand that the soil support development, moderate loaded two-story buildings would be supported at this site. Cultural resources study, which is where you have a consultant come out and review for historically significant items here so that you don't get a surprise later of, oh gosh, we really shouldn't be digging here and then what happens to a project. Endangered species study, we did an appraisal to make sure that we have a list price that's appropriate. We completed a lot split to clear off some of the wetlands, the environmental conservation, and the portion of the land that's zoned residential.

So there's been a lot of work from councils.

Yeah. The salt dome, is that still in process? I think the last time we talked, you just needed direction.

Yes. So we are down to a couple of sites. Yeah, we're still looking at a couple sites to determine what we think might make the most sense, and that would be coming to you all.

We think we have enough time to get that handled.

At this time, I think we're going to be looking at moving it in 2027. Yes. So we have talked to the timeline at some length. We don't currently have an offer in hand, and even if we did for somebody to want to break ground on a project, I mean, to go through, they'd have to draw their project, they'd have to take it through planning commission, it would be a significant undertaking. It just doesn't feel like that's gonna happen before the spring of 2027. In the same way that we couldn't get a simple salt dome plan in that amount of time, there's no way they're gonna get a full industrial plan. So we've talked, we really would like to be ready as soon as we can in the spring of 27 when it's appropriate, but I don't think there's a benefit to us rushing the process when I don't think we're in a developer's way. I would very strongly like to be able to tell a developer we have a clear plan, right? It's a lot easier to say, we know it's going here, it's going at this time, we can give that to you in writing. It's a lot harder to say, well, we've got a couple sites, right? And we're getting close on that process, but we will need to make a decision there.

Coming out of that meeting, we had one other topic I forget

It was like a designation or something that we needed to... Yeah, so some other things that could be considered for this site are do we want to look at some sort of tax abatement zone or district for this? So I've put some additional questions out to the county that we can follow back up when I get some responses from them. And then we had talked about how do we want to list the site and broker or not, and so there will be additional conversations coming about those things as well. But if there's any specific questions you'd like me to incorporate into that research or have prepared, I'm happy to.

And then just can you briefly, again, describe the zoning and what's in and what's out?

Yes, absolutely. So it's District 6, which is the same district that Hudson Crossings is in. We've used that as, I think, a pretty successful model for what this could be, right? It's a similar... distance from a highway, and we were able to model lot sizes that are similar. So it's light industrial, medical, research and development, distribution, those kinds of uses are permissible, no residential. There's some amount of recreation uses, but not large sports complex facilities. I've got a write-up of what's in six that I could, like a one-pager that I could send if that would be a helpful, like, quick cheat sheet.

And you included some sort of conceptual maps. Is that... I mean, there's nothing that we need to decide about that. You were just kind of giving some examples.

Correct. But, yes, those maps were just internally created. Those are meant to be marketing materials... just give someone an idea of what's possible at the site, but not with any strong precision. We were mindful of what lens and where the grade change was significant when we were illustrating this, but these are nowhere near final, nor is it suggested that this is exactly what's built. It's just meant to be an illustration for somebody considering the property. So there's two examples here. This is if you were to develop smaller sites. These lot sizes, like I said, this is what's built based upon Hudson Crossings. And the last one, the second option, is if you were to really max out a really large user on the west side, which is where you've got more of the flat developable space. If you were really trying to max it out, that's a max. But we think something like that's probably more likely.

and no retail to support, zoning-wise, it doesn't include any retail.

It has the same floor area ratio concept, so if you were to put an office building in, you could have a small coffee shop down in one of the corners sort of thing, yeah.

Any other comments or questions? Kyle.

Is there any reasoning you mentioned that a larger sports complex is not in this zoning? Is that just because it's not identified as income generating high enough for the space?

I think that was probably the logic for not being in six. Six prioritizes those income generating uses.

Okay. Okay. Katie, thank you very much.

Yeah, appreciate it.

Okay, moving on. Next one is 3F26-78, Ordinance Amending Chapter 876, Short Term Rental Operations.

Good evening again, everyone. Sorry, I know we've talked about this a lot, so we'll try and stay short. I think at the last workshop, we were pretty close on everything. I'll start with the ones that I think we had general agreement on. Somebody stop me if I'm wrong. The first one was a bed tax, 3% bed tax. I think we were all pretty good on that. We talked about having a separate permit fee or having the owners go through a process to get it inspected. Greg talked to Kelly's Island they use a separate inspector because they have so many and they don't have a large staff so as we looked at it if we stayed a small number we can actually do the inspection ourselves increase our revenue and it would go to us we wouldn't be they would they'd be paying us instead of paying a separate inspector so we talked about instead of using 150 going up to 500 for the permit fee and that would include the inspection and then we would basically take that money and split it between our general fund and our fire fund so it would serve the same purpose. It would increase the fee, but we would be keeping the money as opposed to third parties who do the inspections.

So this is for the fire inspection?

At Kelly's Island, I think Dr. Getz brought it up, they had a special inspection that each one had to have just to be part of the short-term rental process.

It's as if when you buy a new house, you get an inspector to come in and look at everything? Every year. not every year when you buy a new house, but it'd be whether we would do this every year or every two years, I guess.

The thought was, I think we had it written up as we would do it every year. So there would be, if we would take the fee, the permit fee from us from 100 to 500. And then we would do, we do the inspection anyway. We would just be doing the inspection ourselves because we have the staffing. We can do it as we're Kelly's Island. They just don't have the staffing and they have, I think it was what, 130, something like 130 people. short-term rentals. We're nowhere near that. We can handle the inspections ourselves and keep the money.

Our cost is $500?

We put that to better capture the full staff time taken, and we currently have both zoning and fire go out on annual inspections. So I also had a call with the fire chief just to walk through to make sure that we cover similar things to what Kelly's Islands does. So we actually do Water heater checks, HVA checks, electrical checks, in addition to base life safety issues.

Female Speaker 2 Do you look at if the house is falling apart?

Male Speaker 2 We do property maintenance, exterior property maintenance.

Female Speaker 2 Not interior though.

Male Speaker 2 And the third we had was the noise, the required noise detectors. So, we included that in here. I think Greg did a little investigation. Their monthly service charge is between $5 and $20 a month, so we figured we would roll that in as well, require each one to have the noise detector.

I took away there was consensus on that.

If I was wrong on that from the last meeting, let me know. We can certainly take that out, but I thought we had leaned towards putting the noise detectors in there. Last item we wanted to talk about was we talked about doing a buffer in between basically each rental type. We talked about zoning district. We talked about Ward. Greg and Bo Chumley from our GIS, they spent quite a bit of time Looking at this, we looked at it basically by lot width and then a 1,000-foot buffer and a 1,500-foot buffer and then used the 16. So basically made it the same, comparable by zoning district and ward. And we have. These are the maps.

That's zoning.

So that's by zoning district. And then this is by ward. What we saw when we looked at these was it's difficult. It's difficult to administer that. It doesn't go across parcels perfectly. Some parcels are in it. It goes between zoning districts. So then which buffer do you use? So we kind of went back. From an administrative purpose. If council wants us to, again, we can do it. It would be a little more difficult. We thought an easier way to do it was instead of doing it by that, was just doing a total number per ward. And we had settled on, we thought the number would probably be six, about six per ward. So that's kind of where we settled as a staff. If we want to change that, if council wants to change that and go to the buffer.

Yeah. I don't think Ward's appropriate. Ward is a political subdivision. They are required by law to change every census. You can have a short-term rental that's in Ward 1 today, and next census it's suddenly in Ward 4. I think it's inappropriate, but I think you have legal problems with it too. There's a reason we have a land development. that covers property uses. I think these need to be zoning district-based. I also, I don't know that I agree with staff's assessment that it's difficult to implement. I don't think it's any different than any other setback we have that's in the land development code. You know, you cited things like What happens if it touches a small part of a parcel? Well, every other setback in our land development code says point of use to point of use. It says nothing about parcel. It's from the corner of this building to the corner of that building. I don't see why that pattern couldn't be followed here. The other complaint you had was what happens if it's something that's on a border of a zoning district that interacts with another zoning district? I don't see that as a valid argument. That's like saying the guy who lives right on the border of rural residential and suburban is upset because his rural residential neighbor gets to build a barn and he doesn't. It's all based on the zoning district that your property is in. If your property is in R2, you have the R2 rules. If your property is in R4, you have the R4 rules. It doesn't seem difficult to implement.

Just a brief note, I certainly appreciate that. And I think one of the things that caught us was looking at that one on Connecticut Woods, and that shows that 16 versus 25 thresholds of setback. And it takes up a good chunk of the Ashbrook neighborhood, which is zoning district one, which is setback. So I certainly appreciate the note, but that's the type of thing that caught our eye.

Right, but what you're saying is that You're implying that there are different zoning districts, right? Right. So a property applying in Ashbrook, it has no bearing what this other parcel is. The property in Ashbrook's rules draw a circle around that property, and if you happen to hit another short-term rental, it can't be a short-term rental. It doesn't matter that some other short-term rental, which has a bigger buffer in another district, exists. It's what's the circle around the applicant property? That's the only thing that matters. And that's how you handle every other land development application. I just don't see how this is any different.

No, I appreciate that. We just, looking at this and seeing, you know, I think it was 2,500 or 3,000 foot setback on the larger impacts a good chunk of ashbrook's district one where maybe only a thousand foot was required so it's just correct we can still do the setbacks but just observing some of those dynamics is it possible just to do zone zone one through five that's how how how we gave it to you in in the districts is is giving two tiers, a moderate setback in the orange or a larger setback in the red. And it's largely focused on those residential districts. So it's already in three tiers based on the zoning districts.

So, Sam.

I just, I know we've talked about this endlessly, but I do think we got away from what the point of this was. and it was to maybe limit, not make it way more difficult and add all these more expenses. So, I just don't think that we need to increase to the 3 percent and then increase their permit fee. I think we just need to focus more on, you know, the setbacks and how many more can come. I just don't know if it's, it doesn't seem like overly fair to keep hiking up all these fees to, I think, to feel like we're just pushing people out that do have short-term rentals.

Um, yeah. So I don't know if everyone got the email that I received, but, um, you know, I, I think we need to step back a little bit on this. I, I talked to one Airbnb owner and we got a lot of information from her. And I think that we, there's this sense of urgency that, we don't need to have and I think we should take a couple months to Really understand this a little bit better talk to stakeholders talk to next-door neighbors of Airbnb residents and really find out what what problems there are there are there if any and What are some of the some solutions that? the Airbnb customers and the Airbnb owners might suggest for us.

There was a problem this past week on Elm Street. The police came and there was underage drinking at an Airbnb. I don't know if that got reported anywhere, but the neighbors told me about it and they were very upset. They were a bit rowdy. It wasn't super loud. But again, we don't want that in a neighborhood. I think looking at making a sunset clause for people who have Airbnbs now, like maybe five years, and then got to start over again at the beginning would make it more fair. Because I think how many have Over the past couple years, seven out of six.

Out of the last six years, seven have gone away. One a year is pretty much what it averages.

So there is some turnover. But I think, again, the opposite side is how to preserve our neighborhoods. And the neighborhood people in my ward have talked a lot about wanting a decreased number. So I don't know if we went to... zoning, would there be the same 12? Because there's historic district and I'm just also, I mean, I think I understand let's take more time, but I think that, you know,

purpose of this was how to try to decrease it.

And again, we didn't have this problem, but an Airbnb last November in Bath, there was a shooting and an individual was killed. And interestingly enough in Bath, they prohibit them only in the commercial districts because they say it's a commercial enterprise. And so even though this Airbnb was on Airbnb, stated that it was one of their products, they technically weren't supposed to be there. But it was advertised, and I guess nobody in Bath was checking as you all check. So there have been some problems around the area. That's why I think we really need to maybe take more time and be serious about this. And there may be more issues that happen that the neighborhoods don't report.

like to hear from the owners because they they don't want problems either most of them have put a lot of work into their like the place that they rent they are advocates for the community they are helping people that are coming in from out of town to attend a reunion or whatever or wedding so they don't want to be in trouble they don't want to have their guests act inappropriately but let's let's bring them into this conversation and hear from many are out of town errs that only therapy I can see if I can pull that out beautiful amount but Hudson residents

So it'll be harder to get ahold of them.

But they all have a property manager.

But it'll be harder to get ahold of them. That's the concern again. If they're not part of the Hudson community, do they really care about our neighborhoods?

The people that I've talked to were previous Hudson residents and really care about the community and find the worth in it. And I think that's why we do need to take more time because I think we're being super restrictive and just need to... Be mindful of it. We have a need for it just because we don't have, like, any hotels in the area.

I thought it was something like six or seven.

I thought it was seven, but I'm not sure that that... That's the number I had in my head.

Correct, seven, seven of 18. Or Hudson Road Zone. Maybe just to summarize this then, gotten feedback regarding not looking at wards for caps, and if we do caps, look at it on zoning districts. So maybe some interest for setbacks and to take some urgency off of this hold for a few months and do some engagement with the short-term rental owners before we look at... And neighbors. ...their changes. And the neighbors? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we can look at some type of engagement for that.

It is on for third reading, so I guess it would probably have to be postponed.

Yeah. And that... Just a comment about the event that happened. Do we have in our list of violations or whatever, I know that some communities have, you know, two calls and you're out or three calls and you're out or something like that.

It is a tiered process of... We had that too. Yeah, up to the ability to pull the permit. Okay. So I'll follow up with the police department to understand what occurred over the weekend.

I don't know if it was over the weekend or if it was around graduation. I don't know which school.

Okay. Any other comments or questions? And I'll And I'll send it to staff as well, too Okay moving on Velocity yes. Oh, yes

I'll kind of tee this up a little bit. So we've got Paul and Will are getting set up, and they have some handouts for you. We're going to go through the progress we've made to date, where we've been, and where we're going over the next 12 months. This is an annual update. We can certainly bring more updates as requested. We're also going to cover the take rate on the areas that we've passed, touch on some of the staffing that we're looking to grow a little bit, and then also some of the challenges that we're facing with the cost increases. A lot of the products that we're acquiring are petroleum-based. We're also experiencing some delays in obtaining products because they are high in demand right now, especially with the data centers, the pieces, parts that we need to build out the network are in demand, and so that is causing some challenges there. And the one thing I'll mention and Paul will get into a little bit, Paul has been, over the last few weeks, developing an app that tracks a lot of, it's really a really nice app that he has put together that tracks a lot of the data for the fiber to the home network, showing where the customers are, we're tracking costs, at what our actual spend is versus what we estimated at the beginning. So that's very important to make sure we're on track there. And then also another component You have time to look at it, we can see where by neighborhood who has received what marketing pieces that they receive and also to make us more precise in our marketing efforts. If someone has already signed up, we have an address that's already being served. This gives us.

Thank you Good evening council As Paul's bringing up the program. I do want to highlight that it will certainly be passing this link out to everyone So you guys will have the ability to see what we see. I'm pretty much live. So What we've been just to kind of highlight where we are today is While he's getting going, obviously the pilot has been done for a little while now. I know we've been providing updates in our monthly reports for that. Customer feedback has been very positive. We're sitting just shy of a 50% take rate. We still have a couple customers coming online. We actually had a resident who was out of town for six months who's just coming on now, actually, this week. In the current areas that construction is occurring, which is going to be the Nicholson Drive area, Stratford, Atterbury Brentwood neighborhoods. Most of the underground construction is complete. They're still wrapping up some components, hand holes and some pipe on Atterbury. We expect fiber to be pulled in the next week or two, and then splice closures. So ideally, we're going to start seeing customers come online about mid-June, late June for that area. One thing we've taken back from the pilot is how do we get customers connected faster? that area that we're working in right now we've actually already started the customer drops typically that's done after the whole construction is complete for that neighborhood but we're taking a step ahead and bringing those online or at least getting the conduit in the ground the fiber to the house and under in the ground now before the neighborhood is actually ready to get service that way as we go through we do splicing we can bring those customers online incrementally as we go through We'll continue to refine that process. We couldn't do it in that neighborhood, but in like Hudson Park Estates, which we're going to, just started construction this week, as well as other neighborhoods, we're gonna start putting in essentially breakpoints in that fiber network where we can say, okay, once construction gets to a 50% point, we can bring our guys and pull that fiber network, pull the fiber into that distance and start bringing half of that network on. So we'll start seeing that happen more in the July-August timeline, but we should see a significant improvement in Hudson Park Estates from time when we start construction to first customer connection. So kind of with that, I mean, we've just been really gearing up with construction. We're deep into it. As I mentioned, Hudson Park Estates, we now have, I believe, when I drove through the neighborhoods earlier today, there's three drills. So, we have two still working on Brentwood-Atterbury and at least one drill that is now up at Hudson Park Estates. With all of this, by the way, we do provide a decent amount of communication to residents. I know Hudson Park Estates has received a lot of concern and construction issues from Kinetic as they have been going through. Again, we've been trying to reach out to residents when we field those calls, make sure they're aware of, hey, it's us for them, so that way we're getting those calls routed appropriately. and issues solved.

Yeah, because the challenge is going to be that they're tearing the yard up and you guys are going to get blamed for it. Yes. Or vice versa or whatever. So I don't know how you're going to figure that out.

So kind of on that note, in fact, I saw a bunch of them for Hudson Park Estates come in a little bit ago. We do keep track of all the OUPS tickets that come in. So that helps us know, all right, this contractor is pulling a ticket for this section of road. to do construction. All of our contractors are required to. Their contractors are required to. So, we at least know where people are within a certain time period. So, that does help us provide with our team's guidance that says, hey, if a customer, if a resident calls from this street, Stratford, our guys are already out of there. We saw OUPS come in four days ago, so we know it's this contractor that's working in that area, or highly likely that it's that contractor. We'll continue to refine some of that communication as we go through this process. You know, even in the Stratford-Nicholson area, we identified, even in the last week, some areas that we could improve on communication. So, we'll kick out some more marketing materials just to keep those residents informed of where the project is. That neighborhood, because it was such a longer stretch of area versus more condensed, like a Hudson Park Estates, crews would start on the south end of the neighborhood Once they got to the north end, residents on the south side hadn't seen them for a couple weeks, so they wanted to know, when are they getting connected? We've got a ways to go, but so we'll introduce some more incremental marketing communication to better alleviate that concern from residents as well. So kind of with that, and please stop us, ask any questions if you have while we're going through this. I do want to highlight, so Paul has brought up the tool that he's really building, The nice thing about this is it really is kind of an all-inclusive dashboard, as well as what we've done is we've taken our financial model and have been building it into this platform, so that way it's not just something that lives in Excel. Much more dynamic. It gives us a better picture, gives council a better picture of what does the project look like. So as we're looking at the pilot, for example, you can see we have total passing of 87 potential customers. Right now, 42 of those are active. All of this data comes directly from our billing system, so it's not like someone's sitting in the background just plugging data in. It's all automatically pulled. But you can really see where the density of customers, in this case the green dots, have taken service. The yellow is indicating people that have expressed interest but have not signed up yet. So, for example, we'll leverage those. We'll take those and really kind of push on them with additional marketing. Why haven't you signed up? Again, to drive that take rate. So looking down at the Nicholson and Stratford area, we don't have service there yet, but the minute we enter an area and even before, we always start signing people up. Because we want people to be engaged. We want them to sign up early. We don't want to build it and then start saying, hey, today's the day you can sign up. So from there, again, we've got about 530 passing. 127 have already signed contracts. So sitting right around 26%, 28%. We do have 15 contracts out, so we're just waiting for those residents to sign up. And then even though we don't show the value here on the back end, we're probably sitting about 100 that have expressed interest. They just haven't fully come into the system yet. So we saw the same thing in the pilot area. And once services started getting connected and word of mouth spread, we saw a lot of those finally come over with signed contracts. So, right now, take rate is reasonably good in that neighborhood. So, we're looking forward to seeing that continue to grow.

And just to add a little bit to this, one thing we were missing with this and knowing how helpful it's been to council for, I guess, for the whole commercial enterprise that we built was, it was really the data. The data was, We kind of have it in these different buckets, but there was no way to kind of tie it all together. So, by building this, we're able to see all the requests as they come in. We're able to see on this as well, we're able to do batches for marketing, so we can start to see trends in terms of which time do people sign up as we send these different things in. So, by kind of integrating all these systems together, we're able to build a simple little map to show all this stuff. So it's really helpful and it's up to date. So if you guys, once you can start to look at this and you want to gauge how things are going in certain neighborhoods, we can show this. Another thing that would be helpful too is another component of this, which would be helpful for residents, would be some kind of way that we could actually verify that we are in that neighborhood, that we do have construction happening. We haven't built that map in piece yet, but, We're all ears in terms of things we can build, because building these things is pretty straightforward nowadays with a lot of the technology we can use. Mr. Dr. Yates? Dr.

There have been some residents who've been on velocity for a number of years, and you don't account for that. Like, I live in the historic district, and I'm on velocity. So, how many residents, you know, along the pipeline for the commercial are on velocity? I think that would be good to know.

Yes, yes. So the way this thing is focused right now for the, we can jump to this real quick.

It just looks like, say, in Ward 1, there's a big open space. It doesn't look like anybody has it there when actually people

And so, yeah, that is, I mean, initially our focus was the fiber to the home project. We are bringing that additional data in, so that way we do get that full picture. The other component to that, as we've been building out this last couple months, we have been hearing a lot more from residents that are in what we noted as wind stream areas or kinetic areas with fiber. They have fiber on the poles. They've got the closures. Wind stream is essentially not providing service. We've had verified contact with those residents where they have reached out to Windstream asking for service, and Windstream has not provided that. Bradley Drive is a good example of that. Actually, just this afternoon, I was looking at a locate. There's a small cluster of homes on Ravenna Street that is the same way. Again, everything, all the infrastructure is there, but it has not been connected. We're tracking those as well to see When we get near an area like that, we want to make sure we include it or verify again that Windstream has actually made the connection so we don't have that extra spend.

Male Speaker 1 I think to answer your question though, the folks that you're talking about as it relates to this website and this app that we built, they're not the focus of this at this point. This is really just the project that was to kind of go ahead and provide service to everybody that's not served. In the cases like you're talking about, they were existing served folks. So, as this project progresses and we want to do a full comprehensive application that can show where everybody is, if there's a reason to see those things, we can build that into this application as well. But the primary purpose of this is really just to ensure that we're monitoring the expenditures because we obviously have a financial system that we're tracking everything spend with the money that we set aside at the beginning of the year. And with this, we're able to allocate all the costs to the individual sections of the project that we're going through just to ensure that we're keeping on target in terms of financials. So, we have a dashboard that we're looking at here that is kind of the very high level of what the estimated spend was. As Will had mentioned, these numbers have increased slightly for a lot of the situations like Will has mentioned. where we assume that people aren't served, and then we have to go verify due to the maps that are put out there by Windstream that say that they are served. We go verify and see that they're not, so we add them to this map. But we have to go through quite an extensive process to ensure that that is the case or that isn't the case. So, as we go down to this project cost summary, this kind of starts to show how we're tracking the expenditures for This progresses as we go year after year. Jeff, you can speak to this. This is more your category. But we have expenditures that we've got for the number of addresses, the estimated cost that we had, which was built in our original model. For each of these areas, we determined a cost dependent on the street and the nature of how the construction process went, and then what it actually did cost. And we can go in here, we can see from this page, we can go and actually see the costs, how they were broken down, how it was spent in each of these, is one of the examples. And then if we wanted to jump to something such as this map, this can take you into a map that will show you the variance of the expenditures for each of the installations of all the different areas. So you'll see in here, it's kind of hard to show you on this map because the resolution is not great, but we've got cost of passing broken down on here. So you can see a relation to this neighborhood in the pilot versus the more rural areas, how they differ.

That's one of the challenges. The more rural, as you can imagine, when you have fewer households, it's going to cost more per passing per household. That's what's created some of the costs over on the pilot program.

And even on the pilot, that cost over one was anticipated. We had some additional engineering costs. That was also a smaller project to be bid out, so we lost some values. With that said, as we build out additional areas in Heinz Hill and the northern section north of the pilot area along Wolters Road, we'll recover some of those costs because we already have the engineering covered. We've already got materials and so forth ready. But we continue to kind of look at how do we balance, you know, from this cost, it applies 20% to this area and 50% to this area, so we continue to refine that.

So. Can you clarify for me what served represents here?

So for all, there is actually a cost associated with those all the way down here. So obviously we're not doing this as part of this project, but just because there are households that have been calculated costs for each of the streets that they're on, that's where this comes out in the model. So the model, what was nice is to bring the model and actually put it into a, an application that was active and it was tied to the data so you can actually start to monitor those things. And this will continue to develop and evolve with other things that you guys may want to see. It's going to be kind of a more, I guess, function. It's going to have a lot more function than the dashboard that we have in the commercial sense because this is something that you can dig a little deeper just by the way it's put together.

Critically important, I think we would all agree that we are very mindful of what the cost of these are. And it's not just pay grade, it's the expense side, just to manage our costs. And this is what the information that's being pulled, the actual spend that's being pulled from our finance system that's being pulled from SSI. So it's real-time data. into that and we can very quickly see how we're doing how do we think we're going to do versus how we're actually doing in terms of cost and it was critically important that we monitor this very closely and so this is in my opinion it's an excellent tool that's been built and as Paul said it captures a lot of information it's kind of a one stop shop if you will in terms of the information not just financial but again the tape rate the number of functions and it'll continue to evolve and grow and as you mentioned that there's things that you would like to see or you know modifications that we need to make we're certainly open to that so sorry just to kind of notice after 10 o'clock and you guys have been here for a while so yeah we don't want to keep talking but we do want to just kind of let you guys know that we're happy to spend any time that you guys want to come and we can show you under this a little more a couple things a couple of other things that we do want to touch on real briefly

is that we do have an org chart. We can't show it on the screen, unfortunately, because we were going to run off this machine. But do you want to speak to that a little bit, Will?

Right. So, I mean, last time we were here, obviously, we mentioned that we were bringing on additional staff. We did bring on two fiber technicians. They're a really great addition to our team. They're actually helping us reduce costs because they're able to do more work in the field than we've been able to in the past with our internal staffing. So when we look at a cost per passing of $1,500 to $2,500, if we do internal with our guys, we're closer to the $700 to $800 range. So significant savings there. And as we do those, we'll certainly be updating those costs to reflect actual values. With that said, as we're going into the next six to 12 months, we are looking to bring on a technical support rep. Um, we're also looking, we did have a broadband technician leave the organization. So we're backfilling that it's not a new position. Uh, it's just a backfill. Um, and then probably in the early late 26, early 27, we'll look at additional customer service rep as well. Um, any questions? So, um, one note on cost as well, uh, and it's an agenda or it's a legislative item. Um, Through this whole process, what we've been doing is we've been going out and acquiring materials separate from construction. So instead of the more historical way where we'll go out to bid and we'll ask that contractor to provide labor and materials, we've separated that. Right off the bat from what we saw in January when we did that, we saw about a 20% savings by going out, selecting that material or bidding for that material separately. We'd like to continue doing that process. Costs with material have continued to go up. We fortunately, again, even though with our more recent bids, with that higher material cost, we're still paying January prices. So there's a significant savings there over time. So we'd like to continue that. We're also, just with the way the market is, and this is with data centers coming online, this is with international impact, you know, we're seeing volatility in our material supply so in january we could order fiber it would be delivered six to ten weeks some of our suppliers are now out forty four weeks so um unfortunately we've seen this in the past uh we saw it in covid we saw it in twenty six twenty seventeen uh similar data center kind of build up and other issues in the market so um With that, we're just looking, we're asking for additional flexibility with our, and what we do is we just seek out additional vendors. So instead of saying we want this very specific type of fiber, we can go to vendors and say, okay, we can take a broader spectrum of fiber. Get us the best cost, best lead times, and we can be flexible. So that, overall, that helps us manage those costs and make sure we're delivering on the value, on the, Estimated cost that we came up with But those those are a couple legislative items we have for one for the material bid as well as the ability for us to spend above the 24,000 So That is it any questions, yeah, I know it's late Oh

As we go with this next push to kind of roll out internet into some of the newer neighborhoods, one of the things that we have found is that it's competitive. We are finding that kinetics are in some of these areas. And with some discussions with folks, one of the things that we're looking to do is to work with the fire department to actually just kind of let people know that we As a service that we provide throughout the city, it's not just part of what we would do with Velocity, but because it is a city service, it's an opportunity to kind of bring these things to the forefront. The fire department's offered that when we start to do installations that would provide the offer of a fire inspection, a safety inspection in households. They'd be interested just that this is something just to kind of remind folks that this is a the city service and you know these are things that we do provide as part of the city so it's it's a good opportunity to uh to see if we can increase increase um fire safety and households as well as we do these things so it's something that we've been putting together with the fire department um it's it's not quite ready yet but it's it's it's ready it will be ready as we start to kind of roll out some of these installs which i think is a good

Thank you. First off, awesome. Thank you very much for this. This is the exact type of thing I've been looking for to really be able to keep my pulse on this. Fantastic job. Very excited for that. On this, I see you signed in for this, so I assume this isn't fully publicly available. Okay, fantastic. On the topic of Windstream, I know you mentioned, I can't remember what the acronym was, but you can kind of see where contractors are. How much visibility do we have into where Windstream is actively building, planning to build?

We have limited visibility. So Windstream, Kinetic, they will certainly apply for permits to build out areas. They've been doing it for years. And they just never built anything.

Sure.

Permits would expire after a year and so forth As long as they have an active permit We will and they we will essentially only know they're supposed to notify the city Before they start construction otherwise we'll get notified they pull their OEPS tickets and about 48 hours before they could start construction.

Eight hours, okay. One of the issues we talked about earlier today, there are neighborhoods that we had every intention of going into, and Windstream, Connecticut, they're going in there. Do we build to that neighborhood? It's a challenge. The whole intent of this project But they weren't on this map. Right.

going into some of those neighborhoods before we bid we will always go out and triple check just to make sure that they either haven't come or so right now we're in the situation where hudson park estates for example we're maybe building alongside of them yes as we go further and further into this project we might get to the situation where they beat us to the punch somewhere So in that situation, I know we've talked about this before, that we do currently have some limited areas where we serve where Windstream also serves. Yes. How large is that sample, and what is the take rate of those areas compared to areas where it's just us?

Sample is around 250, 300 passing, and we're at a 60, 62% take rate. Okay, 60 to 60%.

take rate, where Kinetic exists in those 250 to 300 units.

Yes. Now, those are older neighborhoods, you know, so we've been there for a while.

We were there first and Windstream came after?

I'll have to go back and verify. At least one of those neighborhoods, that is true, or one of those streets, another one of the street, we actually came in, similar to Hudson Park Estates, we came in at the same time. Okay, okay. And so, yes.

Okay, so this... This represents a situation where either we went in simultaneously or we were there first. We don't have a situation where Windstream was there first and we came after.

I will, let me verify that. If we do, there's one neighborhood I just need to find, I need to dig into it.

My, this is just me, my personal opinion is we, We published this map. This is something we have sent to the residents and said, this is the plan and this is what we're going to do. So my general stance at this moment is even if we do hit a situation, as I said, where Windstream beats us to the punch, that we'd still go ahead. Now, I reserve the right to say, let's dig deep into that take rate. Let's see where the financials are. If it's going to be hugely irresponsible, maybe we have another discussion. But that's my general stance. You know, we very well might be in that situation with my neighborhood.

I got this in my mailbox today from Windstream There was flags all up my street today So I don't know if you know, there's a OU PS being put in right now for my neighborhood They put flags and yes, we would have seen that ticket come in I will just to kind of give an example of a neighborhood or a section of town where We're gonna be in a questionable state. So Lake Forest Sussex Road specifically I have family there, so I know it too well. Windstream did half the street. The other half of the street is technically overhead, but they never built anything. They still haven't put any fiber in, but they haven't been back since January. Yeah. So, you know, that's one, again, we've got on the map. We plan to build it. Whenever we get ready to bid that, if they have not put fiber into their conduit, if they still have Sussex half with conduit, half without, and we can pretty quickly tell because they put new pedestals on any of their underground, which is nice to see. For us, technically, we would still move forward with that. I mean, I think we would gauge take rate a little early just to verify that there is demand there. That's what we've done historically before the fiber to the home project. Neighborhoods, we would more or less say If you can see, if we can see a 35%, 40% take rate in the neighborhood, we will come. You know, it's not a, we come and hope they, hope the customers sign up, but.

Can I bring your names on the street?

Yep. Yeah, okay. I think it's something that we need to see how it evolves, though, because, I mean, if, you know, if they do look at the neighborhoods that are further out, if they do, if, if, Windstream does go into those areas. And they, you know, they build out and construct and they're providing service. It's still, you know, that really does take it off the board in terms of the purpose and the intent of this project, which was to ensure that we had fiber service to every household. Now, that's not to say that they're completely off the table with what happens at the end of this project. And then it becomes a slightly different way about how we go about doing it. And obviously, it's Council's decision on how we proceed at that point. But I think if there are neighborhoods that are completely lit and anybody in that neighborhood can go and get fiber service, it doesn't make sense really for us to build to that area because we've got other areas that we can go build and it tightens the overall budget of the build to ensure that we do it on budget, on time, all those types of things.

Are you suggesting that if we were to get to a neighborhood, let me just, for example, say a year two neighborhood such as Ashbrook, right? It's a bit more rural, a bit more spread out. Windstream already expanded there, beat us to the punch. We say, okay, Ashbrook, you know what? We are actually going to go with a year four neighborhood that's a bit denser, maybe Crown Colony during this time. And we'll kind of put you to the end and we'll reassess. Is that what you're saying?

I think we have to have that discussion, yeah, because, I mean, as the original group kind of guided us, and it was a good intent in terms of how the overall objective of this project was. If everywhere is fibered, that was the whole idea of this project. And there are going to be funds and revenues, if it's built properly, that then we can use to build out the rest of the city. And we know if that's what Council intends to do with the revenues of this project, creates, we'll do that. But I think that knowing on the more rural areas, as we've shown with some of these maps, we have this project map, you can start to see how these ones in the red are pricey. They're pricey, that means wind stream is most likely not going there. Mr. Sure, right, yeah. They're going to focus on your Hudson Park Estates. Yes, yes, absolutely. Mr. So, this is a good gauge to kind of understand. And we'll see where it goes. But I think that as things evolve, we'll bring these to you and we'll talk through them. Because the difference in the Hudson Park Estates one was this was bid, we had a contractor, we'd gone through the design and all those things. It's different. If we have another neighborhood which is an expensive neighborhood, we had those different circumstances. We'd have to consider if that was the right path forward.

We can have those discussions if and when we get there. I think I already kind of made my position.

Okay. Thank you. Anything else? Anybody else? Thank you very much. Yes.

Oh, yes. If you don't mind us jumping to those.

Sure. Okay. Yeah, we'll come back to 4A. So we want to do 4B, C, and D, TMP 8662. Resolution authorizing City Manager to advertise for bids and enter into a contract for fiber construction material and procurement services for fiber to the home second year build-out project with the lowest and best bidders. And declaring emergency.

And the only reason we did add the emergency language is just because of the volatility of the

I don't have a question on this, but I have one more question that came up in my mind here. Where are we as far as year one right now?

Year one, so we'll start connecting folks in Woods Williamsburg in mid-June, later June. The same thing with Stratford, Village West, Brentwood Estates. The contractors started bringing in additional equipment as they've been freeing up labor, so I expect Hudson Park Estates to go quickly.

Um, and then we don't have to go through every item. Let me rephrase. Are we on track to complete year one here in 2026? Are we okay? Yes. Estimate completion of, of the full list.

Um, ballpark, I would say we're going to see year one get near completion. August. I I'd have to go back. We did put in timelines. I believe August was on the last I'm not gonna hold you to it Yep, so in year two, we've already we actually are opening year two bid tomorrow So we'll be planning to see year two start up this year as well. Cool.

So So see TMP dash eight six six zero resolution authorizing city manager enter to an amended contract with Zayo and dedicated internet service and increasing bandwidth This is just one of our upstream providers.

We've been with them for many iterations.

They are now Zeo All of our renewals seem to happen this year That's fine D TMP dash eight six six three resolution authorized resolution amending resolution 25 dash 183 and authorizing city manager to purchase equipment material supplies and services for the city BBB operations during the year 2026 and declaring an emergency.

So before the start of the year, Council was presented with a legislative item from Public Works that highlights overspend or the opportunity to spend over for various items. We originally had earmarked $105,000, so we're just asking for that increase to, again, give us that flexibility to buy from suppliers repeatedly as they have material available.

All right, do you guys have any others in consent? No? Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

So let's go back to 4A on page 3, TMP-8692, a motion to concur with the city manager's appointment of Marshall M. Pitchford as the acting city solicitor and special counsel. This is to make up the cover until June 20th when this contract would go into effect.

As you'll recall from the last council meeting, there was a split vote. It was four to three votes to approve the contract, but because of that split vote, it didn't allow for emergency language, so we have to wait 30 days. So this is to fill that gap.

All right, we just did B, C, and D. E, TMP-8668, resolution authorizing the city manager to enter in a professional service contract with Chagrin Valley Engineering for the design of the Darrell Road Park stormwater management pond, phase one. I think, can you just yell it from there?

You're going to hurt our rating from whatever our auditor is. Are we talking into the mics? Oh, right. Sorry.

Come on. This was a project that was noted in the first presentation this evening. This is the first phase of stormwater storage in Darrow Park. This would be a project that needs to be constructed ahead of some culvert work on Edgeview Drive. So this would help folks down at Tamarisk and La Scala. This is kind of like a, an upper elevation inside the park itself, there is a sketch in the packet that kind of shows you the project location.

And this is the design?

This is the design, yes. Construction is hopefully still this year, pending Army Corps permits.

Okay. Thank you. Next is FTMP-8669. Resolution authorizing the city manager to enter into an amended agreement with the Ohio Rail Development Commission for the Hines Hill Road grade separation project through the Ohio grade crossing elimination program.

Yes, so this is our... Hines Hill Road Bridge project. The project was originally going to be construction managed by ODOT. Because of the federal funds we received, all of the project needs to be administered by the city and concluding construction. So what this extra funding does is provide contingency funds. So this doesn't offset our obligation, but contingency funds for construction by the Ohio Rail Development Commission In case there are unforeseen conditions during construction, we need to. So they're just setting aside funds on their side if we would need those extra costs, whether it be a construction management or in construction costs.

If we don't spend them, we don't get to move them to somewhere else? No.

No.

Okay. Next is GTMP-8678, resolution amending resolution number 26-8 to increase funding for the Franklin Street Water Line project and declaring an emergency.

Yeah, so this is a waterline project that's been on the books. The intent was to build this waterline project along with this small sidewalk project. We bid the project. It came in over budget. So we separated the two sets of work into a separate waterline project and a separate sidewalk project, thinking that concrete guys don't want to do waterline work and waterline work doesn't want to get done by concrete guys. So we did get a low bid contractor within the 10% engineers estimate so we can award, but staff would like a little extra contingency going into the project. The goal would be to expedite construction. The emergency clause is to expedite construction ahead of school being back in session on August 18th.

Awesome. Okay. Thank you.

So, Kyle, to be clear, is this specifically for the water line? Are we also doing the concrete afterwards?

No. The concrete project is not going to happen this year. There's just not enough time. We rebid it under the concrete program. Didn't get any bidders for that. Concrete is going to be a third time, but there just won't be enough time to award and construct the sidewalk. We'll move that project to next year.

Okay, thank you, Brad. HTMP-8664, resolution affirming acceptance by the city manager of the greatest American cleanup grant by Keep American Beautiful. This was a grant that we got for $5,000 to make the town more beautiful. I, TMP-8672, resolution authorizing city manager to enter into a contract with the AMP to participate in community energy saving smart thermostat program. That's what we just heard about tonight. Okay, next. Moving on to 5A, proposed legislation for June 2nd, 2026. A is 26-78, ordinance amending chapters seven six short-term rental operations we discussed that this evening and considering postponing it for a period of time to do some more information gathering have a discussion 5B is 26-79, resolution authorizing senior manager to enter into agreement with Hudson Community Foundation regarding a senior transportation program and accepting a donation for a passenger van. C is 26-85, ordinance amending section 206.07 of the codified ordinances for the purpose of updating specific information That was kind of that Administrative one around Cleaning up the website and phone numbers and making sure people knew who to contact and hosting of meetings and that kind of stuff D is 26-86 resolution authorizing city manager to advertise for bids and to enter into a contract for the installation of hydrants and along Middleton Road and Stowe Road. That is a second reading next week.

Okay.

ETMP-8691, resolution authorizing the city manager to enter into a lease agreement for the North Star Towers to LLC. That is the first reading. That's the cell phone towers that we've discussed in previous meetings.

Near the Caberna property, near the cell phone bus garage.

And fix some of the dead zone. Yes.

For that part of town, it should also benefit the businesses like on Georgetown Road.

And then next is... Item 6. Oh, Kyle, sorry.

Do we have any idea on the timeline that Lone Star, North Star, expects to build?

They have up to three years to build it. I don't know. Did they mention it? I don't know that we have a time frame. But, yeah, the first, there's a 12-month period where they can do engineering, testing, permitting, and then up to 12 months.

Okay. Anything else? Okay. And then six finally is items to be added to future agendas. Uh, Patricia has an ordinance that she would like to offer for next week.

Right. I'm on a explain it first. Um, I'm bringing this ordinance forward because I believe the city would be better served both financially and operationally by appointing a full time solicitor. The solicitor would provide daily support to the city staff, attend council meetings, help with ordinances, attend BCBA and planning commission meetings, ensuring critical continuity. The current ordinance, which I am proposing, will amend and appoint Ducato, Pitchford, and Yoder for solicitor, assistant city solicitor, and special counsel. This arrangement will involve multiple, right now, what we have passed, This arrangement will involve multiple attorneys serving city staff four days a week and with Mr. Pitchford covering city council needs. This arrangement would cost the city close to $300,000, not including any additional special council fees. A full-time solicitor would be more cost-effective for Hudson. I do not believe every avenue was fully explored to find a full-time solicitor. professional legal recruiting agency such as bacon legal recruiting would be able to hunt for an in-house professional broadening our search additionally professional organizations were not fully tapped and these groups could yield stronger prospects notably the council did not form was there was no subcommittee for the search As there had been in the past, back in 2023, there had been a council subcommittee. In this motion, in this ordinance, there would be an interim arrangement with Ducato, Pitchford, and Yoder for the next six months with the current solicitor and assistant solicitors. We would continue to have a special council need So in the motion, I would recommend that Mr. Pitchford remain the special counsel for the next two years. So that kind of summarizes and why I'm bringing this forward as an amendment and would like it on and it would be an emergency and would like it on the council agenda next week. Do I have anybody to second it? Second.

Discussion or do you want to wait till next week?

Second so the motion, you know, it'll go to legislation now as it has been seconded correct, okay Yeah, yeah multiple

These two council members have a objective.

They'd like to discuss. I don't know that I'm prepared.

Have that discussion next week.

My only comment slash concern is where based on the agenda because you'll have two competing proposals.

Correct with the first item in the stop gap.

You know need for the stopgap This would go with emergency language, but you could write it as if So repeal It has a section 6 which says it renders anything else that

or sorry, five, section five, prior resolutions and ordinances related or conflict are repealed or rescinded. So I guess theoretically as long as this is second on the agenda in the hypothetical that it passes, it addresses that problem. But I think if you flip them,

I think you're in a legal sticky situation.

Councilor Sutton, back to your question then. Your question was where does it fall from an order standpoint or from a consent or a legislative position? Or was your concern both or question both?

My original question was order, but now that you've asked that, I do have that question of is it consent or is it standard legislation? I think the way I'm reading this and the fact that it begins on June 1st and declares an emergency, it would almost be silly to put it on legislation because we'd have to immediately suspend the rules.

Based on the date timing, yes.

Is that to me? Can I answer? I think the question, if I'm understanding it, is what happens if we want to choose one over the other? And yes, I think we would have to. Somebody has to move to kick one of them off of the consent agenda. In theory, if they both were on consent agenda and they both passed, this one, as I read it, would trump the first one.

That's how I see it. Section 5 that you said was on there. Correct.

They have to vote beyond consent.

Otherwise, the stopgap on consent could pass, go into effect. This is on legislation. Then we have three readings. The dates don't match based on the timing. We have to amend the legislation from a data standpoint if it was on legislation for three readings.

Yes, so it should be on consent.

And my only question there is, does it qualify for consent? Consent agenda, I'm trying to remember the section out there. Consent agenda, it's got certain rules to it.

Is this a Robert's Rules, or is this a charter?

Oh, it's been so long since I looked at that. We don't usually have this issue.

So this is just a very quick Google search. And this does mesh with my understanding of the purpose of Consent Agenda is for non-controversial routine items. I don't know that we can sit here with a straight face and say that we find these to be straightforward, non-controversial items.

Again, I don't have it on the top of my head, but I believe the wording in whatever rule I'm thinking of is to preserve public safety and something else is a criteria for things that need to be

I think you're thinking of the emergency language.

Am I? Okay.

I don't believe our rules specify any restriction on putting something on consent, but there is a restriction on when you can use emergency.

Maybe that's what I'm getting confused.

I would argue this qualifies for emergency. It's one of the reasons is to protect the city's interests. Emergency language, I would agree. Yes.

But if there is nothing that governs what can go on consent, then consent would be fine.

Okay.

And then you will get an electronic copy, Patricia. You'll get an electronic copy to APARNA.

Sure.

Please. Okay.

Do you? This is the UK. This was just a quick.

I think it's. The current plan is the current plan. Yes. The one that's currently.

Yes. Yes.

We good with that, okay Hudson days June 13th Is that a so celebration of Hudson's Day is on June 13th Give a proclamation about it next week in advance

And actually, I think Parna and I were talking about this briefly. It's going to be the 12th and the 13th for the Ice Cream Social and those other events, the Garden Club, Home and Garden Tour. Those things are all wrapped into Hudson Days over that weekend. So the correction has been made on the date, I believe, and that has already been reviewed.

If there's nothing else, can we have a motion to adjourn? All in favor? Aye. Adjourned at 2241.