City Commission - workshop

All right.

Madam Mayor, it is 936. And we are live.

Thank you very much, Madam Clerk. Good morning, everyone. And welcome to the July 9 2026. All day festive budget meeting. Can I have the roll call, please?

Mayor Betty Rush?

Here.

Vice Mayor Mimi May? Present. Commissioner Sara Maliga? Alive and well. Commissioner Christopher McVoy is absent. Commissioner Anthony Segrich?

Present. Is Mr. McVoy coming today? Do you know?

I had not heard that he would not be present.

Okay, thank you. Well, now's the moment where we turn it over to staff.

Hey, good morning. Can you hear me? Is that loud and clear?

Speak more directly into the mic for me.

Hello, hello, it's live. Testing, mic check, one, two.

That's better. Yes, okay.

Okay, good morning, Madam Mayor and City Commissioners, and welcome to Budget Workshop number two. As we continue our review of the proposed fiscal year 2027 budget. My name is Candace Dale. I am sorry.

For the record, Mr. McVoy is here.

Yes, ma'am.

My name is Candace Dale. I am the Senior Budget Analyst here in the Finance Department. Before we get started, I'll once again like to acknowledge the budget team and staff for their hard work and contribution in bringing this budget together. And first, I'll briefly like to review today's agenda. And I'll refer you, you should have it in front of your agenda. Yep, there you go. Okay, so I will begin with an overview of the significant changes made since budget workshop number one, and where the budget currently stands following those updates. Following my overview, each department will present their budget. They have about 10 minutes to present an overview of their fund and or department. And then after each presentation, Commission is then going to be able to ask their questions and conduct a more in-depth discussion of each department's budget before we move on to the next presentation. We will break for lunch from 1230 to 115, reconvene, continue with the rest of the department presentation. We have a 15-minute break from 4 to 415. And then after that, Stantec will come on with their financial analysis and forecast update, followed by any discussion questions that commission may have. We're hoping to do a preliminary review of the fiscal year 2027 schedule of fees and CIP. If time permits, if we don't get there, you guys already have a copy of the book. So that just gives you more time to review. And that will be what the first thing that we address in workshop number three for on August 11th.

I have a question. Yes. Do we are we voting today to approve the budget or is this just this is just to keep going? That's what I thought. Thank you.

Correct. Okay. Before I begin, I'd like to highlight several enhancements that were made to the budget book that you have in front of you. Many of those enhancements were made in response to the feedback and requests received during workshop number one. Those enhances include projected fund balances. You will see that when you tab over to each fund. And please just keep in mind that the fund balance that you see for fiscal year 26 and 27 are only projected based off the budget. They are not actuals. We also included a budget variance analysis, so you can see the changes from budget workshop one to budget workshop number two. And we also included outstanding bond balances and their respective maturity dates within the notes for each fund. You're welcome. Staff also made a new formatting enhancement. We added alternating row shading, so it's easier to follow along the lines where we're going through the budget book. Okay, so let's begin with the recap of budget workshop number one. Yes. Commission approved approximately 6.1 million in supplemental requests, all of which have been incorporated into the proposed budget we brought forth to you today. The slide in front of you provides a breakdown of those approved supplementals by funds. Other significant changes you'll see reflected throughout the book are reductions in administrative fee allocations and reductions in property and liability allocations. And we'll begin with the general funds. General fund revenues increased by a net total of approximately 100,000. And the primary driver behind that is we added 1 million in projected property tax revenues based on updates that we received from the Palm Beach County property appraiser assess property values. And that, yes.

I have a quick question. Is that including, let's just say in November, the property tax bill passes? And did you guys back out that 25% that we have that is homesteaded?

I think that's a general question for the budget. That's what I'm asking. All day, yeah.

That's what I'm asking. I was looking at the general fund rate and decreased it. So if this passes in November, it takes effect January 1.

Correct. And that will impact fiscal year 28, not 27. So this is fiscal year 27.

OK. Yes. OK, so you're not. My concern is, too, should we be conservative

in the coming years because in this coming year because the next year otherwise whoever's sitting up here is gonna have to do some masterful mathematics correct yes we have we have that plan already uh which i will present i have some slides that shows the the impact in fiscal year 28 and fiscal year 29 when it's correct yes mr uh which is a question

Along those same lines, we have a very interesting shift in the numbers this year because of the pensions going away and so forth, which we're very fortunate. We have some very large ticket items that hopefully we'll be able to start. I personally would like to see us try to start planning for the inevitable that's going to be happening next year and look at not just how does it impact 2028, but I think we should be looking at things in 2027 so that 2028 is not just kind of a drop the hammer. We can always come back if it doesn't pass and we can, it's a lot easier to add than it is to cut, I guess, is what I'm saying. So I think during this session, we need to be looking at 2027 as it would be impacted. That way we can kind of ease into 2028 and it won't be as big of a jump.

Isn't that, I'm not disagreeing with you, but this is geared to what we have now, right? so i mean if we said instead of doing these numbers do a number percentage-wise what it would be if it passes um these numbers will change i mean it would be a whole different or not it won't change this fiscal year would change in fiscal year 27. this is what you're saying he wants to see if i'm wrong if i'm interpreting him correctly he would like to see the changes let's pretend that we that we have the changes correct you're correct yes there's a whole new there's a whole number of municipalities that are are taking um actions and and being proactive on it and i think that we should and we're looking at that but in terms of this year we we know the numbers that we have this year correct yes and we are i'm assuming as a staff looking at doing exactly what mr segrich says is which is looking at it you know okay this is what it is and how much could it go down

is that one of the things i could say during this start of the budget session are tasked with going through their budget and trying to find and cut those items that they need they've been doing about you know the coming fiscal year so they put a lot of time and effort into that budget they did that or a lot of that has been done now we understand that what we have done but we did start the process already so hopefully as we get into this budget session we can try and make those additional recommendations however Also, when we put up the food supplements, we want you to know when you have a balanced budget, when you start cooking these supplements, impact on the entire budget. So we started that entire process from day one, and the department spent a lot of time on it.

And I can appreciate that. But when looking at the just broad, high-level numbers, roughly the impact of the um the pensions coming back this is what it's roughly about five million dollars yes or five point five point three somewhere in that range and then we had the um self insurance fund recapturing that 1.2 something so that's 6.8 million of what we're showing as savings right off the top that actually really isn't departments going through and trimming the fat and looking at the overall numbers beyond that we haven't reduced much I mean there's some little things here and there but so if if I was to look at it overall and if we had trimmed the the fat I would be looking for a five or six percent reduction beyond that seven million is what I'm saying

You're correct. As a city manager mentioned, when we approved the supplemental, that offset whatever reduction that we had anticipated. They did some reduction, but to your point, Commissioner, not to the extent of the five or six percent. they are all well aware all the department directors are well aware that uh coming next year that they will have to have significant cuts and not just on one-time expenses but on reoccurring expenses to make up for what i got now um i love the word fat i mean i i challenge anyone in any department to say they have a lot of fat but we'll guess i will find out mr boyce question then mr

yes thank you um with all due respect for my fellow commissioner um segrege uh i see the world a little differently i see a proposal that has come out of tallahassee that we were informed was decided in one day by legislators that don't deal with municipalities. Definitely would be a proposal that harms municipalities and seeks to weaken them. And what that means is it seeks to decrease the services that municipalities provide to their residents. And it is an extremely ill-guided ill-thought-out process there was no consideration there was no fiscal analysis of what this would do there was no backup plan of how this would be backfilled and i think it would be extremely unfortunate for us or any municipality to react to such nonsense coming out of Tallahassee by saying, why don't we voluntarily cut services to our residents before we even have to? Yes, it sounds very thoughtful to plan ahead for this disaster that they've aimed at us. It's not inevitable that it will pass. It is certainly possible and it would certainly have a big effect. And it sounds very thoughtful to plan ahead for it. But what it really is doing is stiffing residents when you don't need to yet. so um i i i hear the logic i disagree with it and particularly based on where it's coming from i also take some umbrage at the term fat it is very easy and it has come out of tallahassee they have a financial officer who wanders around the state saying that different municipalities and counties have ridiculous fat and waste of government funds and whatnot And when they're challenged on how they did their numbers, it doesn't hold up. So there's a lot of political hand-waving here. And I am not in favor of cutting services to residents when we do not yet have in place a cut to our income.

Thank you. Ms. May?

I think both are true at the same time. I think that what Mr. McVoy is saying is very true, that when we had a presentation, he basically just recapped from Tuesday night. And I think what Mr. Segrich is saying is also true. We would be naive to think that it doesn't have a very high possibility of passing, although it would be all of the things that Mr. McVoy just said. so i think we need to be mindful i don't think anybody said anything about cutting services i think we were saying let's just be mindful of adding anything we want to look at wants versus needs and i think we want to really stick with needs right now and be very wary of wants and that's kind of what i think we should go through this with with that kind of a lens um i am thinking about all of the like um um extending education things that we passed and those are the types of things that unfortunately if we do have to make cuts those are going to be cut because the city can't afford to send people to school when we have to make sure that we're making that the parks are clean and that the garbage is getting picked up so i think we do have to be a little bit careful this year regarding what what are we is it a want or is it a need but also we're not cutting services At this point at all.

If you cut funds, you cut services.

Mr. Segrich, we've got a whole day and a lot of people.

I know, but this is important. We were able to cut 2.3% of our budget by correcting one line item. When I use the term fat, I would consider that to be fat. We saved 2.3% of our budget by fixing one line item. anyone who's worked in large organizations knows there are other mine items hiding in there somewhere that don't have to cut services that we can find for that um and that that's basically all i'm asking for is a a recheck if we're able to easily find 2.3 percent man I would hope we could find five and maybe we can't but we need to have that as a goal and it would be naive of us not to look to the future um and try to forward plan versus react at the last minute which I think the staff has done okay let's get going let's let this their show today

Okay, continuing on general fund expenditures increased by 253,000. And that increase reflects approved supplementals from budget workshop one. Okay, now we're moving on to the building fund.

Okay.

Building fund revenues increased by approximately $65,000, and that increase reflects the use of available fund balance used to balance the funds. Expenditures increased by a total of $107,000, and that's primarily due to an increase in administrative fee allocation and approved supplementals. Now we're moving on to the co-remediation fund. No changes to the co-remediation fund since budget workshop number one. And we will now move on to the Beach Fund. Beach Fund's revenues and expenditures decreased by approximately $242,000. And as expenditures were reduced, the amount of the fund balance needed to balance the fund decreased as well. It went from $880,000 to approximately $639,000. Continuing with the Golf Fund. There were no changes to the golf fund revenues from workshop. 1 revenues remain at approximately 2.2M. Expenditures increased by approximately 34,000.

Thank you, Mayor. Just looking back at the beach fund, I was thinking about the funds just in general, and this is not like. for next year, where's Yannick, for next year, do you think it would be prudent for us to put the beach fund in with the general fund since it's not an enterprise fund? Like it doesn't make money. It doesn't. So it doesn't make sense to have it in its own, in my opinion, it doesn't make sense to have it in its own fund.

It goes back to that conversation that we had in the first budget workshop for transparency, where you want certain bucket of revenues and expenses to be separated. uh from the general fund so the beach fund is not is not self sufficient um so so is the cemetery or if you would like to you know so it's really entirely up to you i it would be preferable if it's at the general fund so we so that we do not continue to show a deficit in the fund but it's entirely up to the diets if you want to have that transparency separate and i believe that i will separate in the past uh that was the whole purpose of having a beach fund as a separate fund i think they had plans to develop the area and it's not really a beach fund it's a beach parking spot correct because that's where that's right that's where the money goes right all the all the leasing and but the bulk of the money comes from the parking

And I think it is easier to understand, you know, instead of having under this giant umbrella to have it set. So for us, for our purposes, to understand a little bit more transparency, a little bit more of what's going on, I think.

Right. But to your point, we could always, we could always say, like, if we were to move it to the general fund, for instance, we will have separate set of account numbers for it. Right. Revenues and expenses. and we can always separate those for you guys as you wish.

Okay, thank you. Mr. Sigrich.

I think there's also a distinction between looking at a departmental budget versus a fund per se. One of the challenges in reviewing this is some of our departments are scattered across five different funds. And sometimes we do that to allocate monies. Sometimes we do it because there's not enough coming in. I think about where Mr. Waters is scattered across seven different universes to pay for his time. um from my standpoint along the lines maybe with what you're saying in the future i think it would be useful to look at the departmental budget um i know it translates into these funds and for our documentation we need to have it in the fund format But in order to understand whether or not a department is functioning properly, you have to understand what's its total budget. And for me, I don't care which fund it comes out of. That's just accounting. There's a lot of accounting things I got to live with because of government accounting rules and so on. But understanding is the department operating efficiently? And I think that might be a little bit where your question comes into that I think would be important in future budgets. these are getting better every single time and we're getting more and more understanding. but, um, uh, I'd be more of a fan of less funds. And then just looking at departmental because in some cases, it's like, oh, the cemetery fund, well, that's kind of a departmental breakout, the beach fund is kind of a little bit of departmental breakout. But you know, if I want to understand how our parking divisions doing that, man, I've got to travel through through multiple different funds. Anyway,

Okay, so continuing with the golf fund, as I stated earlier, no changes were made to golf fund revenues from workshop one, they remain at approximately 2.2 million and expenditures increased by approximately 34,000. Now we're on to the Information Technology Fund, which remains relatively unchanged. Revenues remain at approximately $3.1 million, and expenditures increased by $49,000, totaling $3 million. Now we're on to the Garage Fund. There were no changes in Garage Fund revenues from workshop number one. They remain at approximately $1.6 million, and expenditures decreased by $4,000.

Madam Mayor, just for people who are listening, Garage Fund is not the garage we're building. This is our internal garage.

Okay. Now we're on to the self-insurance funds. The self-insurance fund revenues decreased by approximately $1.4 million, and expenditures also decreased by approximately $1.2 million. Now we're on to the benefit fund. Benefit fund revenues remain relatively unchanged with only a minor increase. Revenues are still at approximately 5.6 million. Expenditures also remain relatively unchanged at 5.6 million as well. The debt service fund experienced a slight increase in revenues of 85,000. However, both revenues and expenditures remain consistent at approximately 2.1 million. Now we're on to the electric fund. Revenues remain unchanged at approximately $80 million. Expenditures increased by approximately $8.5 million, totaling around $73 million. And that's primarily due to the PCA, along with supplemental requests approved from budget workshop number one. The electric utility storm funds. There were no changes made. Revenues remained at approximately 1.6 million.

And as of what date was this? Yeah, for the storm fund. Because it's something I'm sorry, I should turn my light on, but that's something that we collect monthly. So I just didn't know if this was what month this was updated.

What part? Are you referring to the actual?

What's the balances now?

It's about 3 million, 3 million, some change. It's about 3.1. As of what day? As of what day? As of today or? As of the second quarter, I would say end of March.

Okay.

Yes. but it keeps growing so update on that on the next budget workshop absolutely more up-to-date number do you have can you pull the uh never open up yes we're going to get better paper that's automatically changed yeah yeah

It's like the internet.

So we currently have about 3.2 million as of today. Yeah.

And it's not fun. Okay. And then the reserve deficit. Explain the reserve deficit.

That's with the electric fund. That's the previous slide. Electric fund. Right. So per our fund balance policy, the electric fund is supposed to have 160 days, 180 days worth of reserves, which is half of their expenses. So they're getting better. They're getting much better, by the way. Cool.

Thank you.

Okay, so now we're on to the Water Fund. There were no changes to the Water Fund revenues, which remain at approximately 21 million. Expenditures decreased by approximately 318,000, and that's primarily due to reductions in administrative fees allocations and property and liability costs. Looking at the local sewer fund, revenues remain unchanged at approximately $14 million. Expenditures increased by a total of $279,000, and that's primarily reflecting supplemental requests approved in workshop one. Right now, the regional sewer fund, we are still waiting on updates until they can provide the budget. So that will be presented in workshop three. Stormwater Fund revenues are at $3 million. That's an increase of $138,000 from workshop one. Expenditures are at roughly $3 million, a decrease of $58,000.

And the special assessment that we're showing online for fiscal year 2027, that's the bond under special assessment.

For this? No, that's the that's the rate, the rate increase that was approved for.

So that I wish it was sort of special assessment, it would show rate increase or change in rates. So that's what we're gonna that's the one that we just approved the last session. Okay, thank you.

You're welcome. Now we're moving on to the refuse funds. Total revenues are approximately $8 million, and that's just a minor decrease from workshop one. Expenditures are at approximately $8 million as well, and that is a decrease of $217,000. Lastly, we have the tree beautification fund, and no changes have been made since workshop one. And that concludes my overview. Do you have any questions?

Seeing none.

Okay, we can now move on to the department's presentations.

Morning Commission. Good morning, Mr. Kelly. This year we try something different this year to try to address some of the commission's concerns. So talking about each department, their mission achievements and also emerging issues that each department will face over the next few years and also to incorporate those performance measures. So this year what we did were they city commission we put together um a summary for the commission's office based on those strategic uh priorities that you guys established a couple months ago try to take a little bit of each one and put together um some of the achievements that the commission oversaw you know obviously see obviously but those certain areas that you focus on doing it throughout the fiscal year and our achievements. Also some of the emerging issues that each, that the commission faces this year, actually, you know, hiring a city manager, infrastructure and budget and legislative demands. Some of the challenges that you see coordinating infrastructure and road improvements, improving customer service and ordinances, talk about opportunities. Most of the commission agreed they wanted to improve service standards in the city's appearance, also increasing public service and enhancing the city's identity. So when putting together budgets, these are some of the areas that we were going to focus on going forward. In addition, when we start talking about performance measures, what we're going to try to measure going forward as well, residential, by conducting residential.

Hold on one second. We're on slide 26. I mean, 27. Yeah.

And service response implementing a process to track and take time to respond to residents requires most of the Commission agreed that they wanted to, you know, respond to the citizens request a lot sooner with some follow up and we'll provide that information and we'll put a tracking mechanism in place to capture that data.

as well as confidence as residents we want to ask the residents how they feel about the city and how we're doing at staff how's the commission going against as far as addressing their concerns mr mcboy has a question i'm sorry my question is on slide 26 that mentions challenges coordinating infrastructure and road improvements um i'd just like to point one issue a little more specifically on that we know that in at least some cases and maybe a significant number of cases degradation of the roads involves leakage of the sewer lines underneath and i know that we at this point have a good gis coverage and pci pavement condition index of the roads My understanding, although I haven't fully pursued it, is that we do not have a matching GIS coverage as a GIS coverage of the sewer and the needs for lining. I would think it would be very wise for us to move ourselves toward having the two coverages so that we can more efficiently coordinate lining and road work with a GIS base on both of them.

And what I'll do is I'll get the utility and hopefully they can incorporate that in as well.

And that would come under infrastructure.

Right.

Yes, ma'am. How about now? All right. All right. And so that was for the City Commission. Do you have any questions about that or concerns or anything you'd like me to add to it?

Mr. Segrich.

Thank you. So I know that you've been working with the department heads to establish performance measures and go for that. When can we expect some sort of periodic reporting on those performance measures by department?

We were going to do it. We were considered to two ways of doing it. Maybe we're going to have like a monthly report, but maybe every quarter we'll provide the city commission with almost measures of how we're doing in as metrics and trying to determine how well we're doing in meeting our goals. So we look at more of a quarterly type of reporting mechanism.

Okay. And then given that service response is such a high priority, and I think up here we've said that it is a very big priority, I was a little disheartened to see in the answers to our workshop on the supplemental questions where IT came back and said, basically, we're too busy to look at customer service software. gave us a litany of the ERP implementations that are going on, and I understand that those are complex and so on, but the question wasn't Are you willing to do it? The question was, what's the plan to do it? And I do have some concerns with our large scale implementations that we seem to have a lack of project planning in certain departments that they have their own PMO office and they have very rich project planning And in other departments, we lack that. And I think it's unfair to expect current staff and current resources to magically snap their fingers and all of a sudden become project planners. But I do see as the city commission and the city manager's office, um i for one would like to see us um and maybe it coordinates with the internal auditor or or something have some sort of pmo um person or presence or or people getting trained in that because you know my immediate question for i.t is great you're telling me you're so busy you can't do customer service show me your project plans and i want to see the timelines and when these other projects are going to be completed so that i can set expectation for the residents on this is when we're going to be ready i don't think we have those answers so um you know i think project planning as a function of city management and the the city commission office is important to achieving these goals um that that we have otherwise i see a lot of things just getting moved down the road um just because it's a fact of life everyone's busy um but without an overarching you know line in the sand um it is very hard to achieve these

James Moore- In your comments are well taken. We staff shares the same concerns, but one of the things I think we need to do going forward anytime we have a project, bring a project before the Commission, maybe we need to outline exactly how that's going to take place as well. But what staff can do, we'll go back and take a look at this and come up with a plan on bringing it to the commission to consider. But I think going forward, when we approve a plan, we should have a plan that says how this project is going to be managed or who's going to manage it, whatever the case might be. But we'll do that. We'll go back and take a look at that and bring that back to the commission.

Thank you. Ms. Malega? Thank you, Madam Mayor. What I'd like to see on page slide 26 is hiring a city manager, hiring an internal auditor and executive assistant. Those three job, those those three positions we've been trying to fill for quite some time, and that needs to be a priority for this office. I mean, Shona's doing a great job, but not having an internal auditor or somebody who's in the finance world has been freaking me out. I mean, not that I don't trust our finance department. Let me say that. But for checks and balances, I think that that's very imperative and that needs to be a top priority for this for this department, in my opinion.

And I think that in terms of the internal auditor, we have from our previous amazing internal auditor, he did a whole procedure thing about... And I don't see that we've really... I don't feel like we've been told this is how we've implemented it because he had some great ideas. Because he always did the follow-up and then reported back to us because he works for us.

But I think that you're right. It's a conduit that's missing.

I would like to see...

not just you know it's my point is it's not just the fiscal stuff it's the procedural stuff he's done as well yes hi good morning can you hear me okay just a quick i was going to send you guys an email we have the finalist for the internal auditor my my um susie sanchez who is my recruiter has them and she's going to be working with shona to set interviews with you guys okay so three are local One's out of state, so she'll be working, you know, trying to coordinate your calendars where, you know, I don't know if we're going to do it one day, but so that'll be coming to you before the end of the day tomorrow.

And what about the ombudsman or executive assistant?

Those interviews are also being organized, so we've got the finalists.

Okay, thank you for the update, but yeah, if we could add that just as a priority.

Do anything else to you guys this week during budget week? But yeah, the intern auditor interviews are coming, and so is the legislative assistant. Thank you very much.

Okay. The City Manager's Office. Real quick, we'll talk about the mission and the achievements. Also some of the emerging issues that we face. Recognize that economic uncertainty is one of the legislative outcomes. Challenges, aging infrastructure, budgetary constraints. Some of the opportunities, partnership with the business community, I think Commissioner Segrist pushed that a lot while working with other public agencies. The use of technology to improve efficiency, definitely going to work on that. Getting employment training and professional development. key to our success going forward. In terms of our performance measures, we have a department of performance measures review. We're going to target, if it needs to be done poorly, making sure that they're all in line and turned in and reviewed by the Managed Office. Provided initial acknowledgment to citizen concerns. Sometimes we have citizens complain that no one's calling back our target is going to be 25 at least i didn't say give them an answer i said well he's calling back and recognize the fact that we received your complaint and we'll be working on it and ensuring a timely evaluation department directs by the day the completion of commissioner action director based on the agreed upon timeline so when you give us a project that will be upon a timeline then we'll meet that timeline

i would like to add um or just that we consider this somewhere in the you know the uh stagnant downtown downtown stagnant downtown the um vacancies downtown and i think maybe time to look outside the box a little bit okay thank you i would say challenge it's it's been emerging it's been defined not emerging it's come out

Thank you. Is there anything else?

Yeah, I think people need to know that we're aware and that we're trying to figure out something to do. Listen. What? No muttering. So I don't listen to you.

Thank you. On your supplementals, page two. I don't have that. As a consensus, you wanted to know about the Healthier Lake Worth Beach and some of the great work they were doing last year and whether or not you wanted to include that funding for this year going forward. So we did provide a supplement form inside the supplement book for you to take a look at and consider. Last year, we appropriated $75,000 to work with our code enforcement department. As a matter of fact, in a couple of weeks, actually, there'll be an agenda. They're gonna be providing a report of how well they've done.

Okay. Mr. Segrich has a question. Oh, thank you. Okay.

And number five, the grant and strategic improvement. What we're trying to do is establish one grant writer. So city manager's office can finance one of the pool So we're asking the commissioner to consider that going forward.

I just wanted to find out, so we previously had, God rest his soul, Mr. Jerry here, Kelly. Wasn't that spot already funded and shouldn't have already still been open? So he was part-time, but he worked full-time. So is this the difference in that pay structure from his position that is now vacant?

So, finance also had a vacancy and grant analyst, so we, we thought it would be best if we just combine our vacancy with with the city managers vacancy so that we could afford to hire a new grant person account numbers.

We don't know. So I was looking at these that reference those 2 positions are already vacant at the time.

Right? That clarified my question.

Any questions for the city manager's office?

Going back to the healthier Lake Worth, the purpose of that 75,000 is to help those individuals that are financially unable to basically come up to speed with code compliance and so on. Is that a function that the CRA can fulfill as well?

No, because it would only have to be within the CRA boundaries. And the majority of the work that Healthier Lake Worth Beach does is well with outside of the boundaries of the CRA. And you'll see that in the presentation. I did ask them to bring a map showing not with addresses and people's information, but just the overall city landscape and where the funds have really been effective. And it's 90% of it's outside of the CRA. okay and so are are we voting on these supplementals today or like for this one are we going to wait till we see the report for their budgeting they would like us to try to make a decision today because they're trying to get their budget done as well um and they have to report that back to community partners who's their overall umbrella so i think that i don't know if yolanda's here but um while you while you can vote to say whether or not you want to fund it going forward

But the entire budget won't be obviously until late September. So we just want to make sure that it's what you're aware of it. And if you were to go ahead and have staff to start maybe setting aside the funding going forward, hopefully we can get that to the state. But like I said, they will be making a presentation in August that would provide you an overview of what they've accomplished for the last years.

Mr. McCoy.

Yeah, I know that the or I'm very supportive of the idea that we find a way to help residents deal with code compliance and bring things, their properties into better service. situation um i'm i i believe i expressed it when this first came up a few years ago or a year ago i'm a little bit uncomfortable that we are essentially contracting for a service with taxpayer money but the way we went about it was not our typical procurement method where you say hey this is what we need done um anybody interested in applying put in a bid a competitive bid and we'll evaluate them it's a little bit weird because it's a non-profit that is doing it but non-profits apply for grant things and and you know they can be part of our normal procurement process i have a little bit of a level of discomfort that we just said well you know they said they'll do it why don't we give them 75 000 there are many other non-profits in the community who provide all sorts of different services to the community we're never given the opportunity to say hey um we do this in the community can you give us fifty thousand dollars um and so i i have a little bit of discomfort in in the procedure there that it it seems like we have a quite robust procurement procedure that that is well regarded

um and that helps ensure competitive and fair allocation of things this seems like it's kind of a side run around that so i don't know what to do with that but i just want to thank you very much so for somebody who's been involved with healthier labor beach for 14 years before its inception of healthy labor beach they have pumped over 400 000 into this city with this program and last year was the first year they asked for the city to come forward because I don't know if we keep up with the federal government, but grants and funds have been cut from most nonprofits. And this program used to be called Neighbors Helping Neighbors, and it's been funded for many, many, many years through community partners, fundraising and sponsorships. Last year was the first year I said for the work that's being done and the time that's put in through volunteers, this is not these people do this work for free. This is the materials that we're covering, right? So painting. fixing fences. And again, they're going to do a presentation, but it was my idea to come forward last year and say, it's time that the city put our money where our mouth is. And unfortunately, there's a lot of people who will spew that they support stuff, but they never put their money behind it. Healthier Lake Worth Beach has helped mostly seniors, mostly people who are in the impoverished area of finances, not the impoverished area of the community, but financially. And they don't have the wherewithal or the need, the the abilities to bring these things to fruition. And because we want people to have code compliance, it's a way of saying we want you to be compliant. The city supports Healthier Lake Worth Beach, and we thank you for your effort of taking this on because we don't have the staff. So that's the backstory. You guys can all vote on it and make your decision based on what you feel. I will continue to support just like I do at every cleanup and Healthier Lake Worth Beach and their initiative because they have really moved the needle in this city. That's all I have on this. Ms. Ming.

And I really don't see the difference between that and the $50,000 to nest for trees. To what?

Nest. What? The tree fund. Nest, the trees, the trees. Okay, moving on. Oh, Mr. Segrich.

So taking the merits of the programs completely out of it, right? I do think Mr. McVoy does make a good point in terms of process and structure. I think the nest grant could have been done differently. I think This could benefit from a more structured grant-like program. Well, I'm sure they apply to community partners to receive their funding. I'm sure they apply for lots of grants to receive their funding. And I'm not saying that they wouldn't receive this. having this sit in the city commission budget to me seems odd these seems to be code remediation work so just like we go out and do board ups and and clean up lots and and so forth that um aren't getting done um just from a financial aspect i think that maybe these funds be allocated into there and when we get to that fund i have other comments about how revenue is getting brought back into that um where you know i think there could be the opportunity to expand on this and actually do more good um but personally i would not be opposed to it being a a grant application I don't think in this year we have any sort of timeline where that could be achieved. So I have no problem continuing in this because they do do great work and they touch a lot of lives in our city. And I think that's very important to support them. But I think as we grow as a city in terms of the maturity of how we handle our finances, These things are going to get scrutinized. We're already seeing that happen with some of the laws that have come into being this year. I would hate to see us get knocked for not following a process. if this fell afoul of a state law with a special interest group or a procurement issue or another group complained and so on. So I am in support of this. I also think over the next year, we might want to look at where this is allocated and whether or not we can make sure that this process we've dotted our i's and crossed our t's and that this is bulletproof so that we don't have an issue of challenge and and so forth because i could see other organizations with within the city who are very active what about me and i could also see some of them getting litigious because we already have that going on in our city so um i think it would protect the program if we were to formalize it a little bit

The difference is with the lot clearing and the board ups, we get reimbursed for that. That's a lien against the property. It's not a giveaway. So I think there's just a distinction that needs to be made between that. And as far as process, I know there's a lot of conflict, but I think the whole... grant to the different schools, which I completely disagreed with the way it was done. You've got so many processes, it sort of defeats some of the enthusiasm. But I just want to make the point that those are paid back. Mr. McVoy.

yeah i i just would reiterate it's it's not necessarily there's that there's a concern about the work that this organization is doing or or the organization it's that if we are going to as a elected body decide that we are giving money out to certain nonprofit organizations I would agree with Commissioner Segrist's assertion that it probably would be good to have a very clear formal procedure. Look, the city commission budgets $200,000 or some number that we agree on to do for nonprofits, to do things in the community. It can be a range of things. We specify the range that it does include, doesn't include services for seniors, services for this, for that, you know, any number of things. And here's the deadline to apply and here are the criteria that'll be used. And it goes through either our procurement process or something analogous so that you know it's clear that this is a very open competitive thing because otherwise i do think there is some we're open a little bit to critique And we're open to other nonprofits and say, well, yeah, we do great things in the community. How come we didn't get the opportunity to even ask for money?

I think one of the points that Ms. Malega made is that we need to move on. But I think an important point that she made is that this group has actually contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the city in value.

Just because they're awesome doesn't mean they don't have to follow processes. them financially they've they've actually helped us i understand that mayor but you know we've criticized before and and and so on just because the group is awesome they've done so much i can't say enough good things about them it doesn't mean process shouldn't be followed now do we have to make a motion to like approve these or are we doing consensus yes we need a consensus as we did so i would like to make a motion to approve both of these supplementals

thank you all uh motion second second it's not a motion as it's a workshop it's just consensus okay consensus to approve both of these supplementals yes consensus with the that we take into account this concern in the future not for this year but in the future of how we what our process is for this and I agree but like the mayor said nest should be following the same it should go for everybody in the city I agree fine

Next up. Okay, next up. Where's the city clerk?

Good morning.

Good morning. What page are we on? Slide 35.

I'm waiting to see it because I didn't memorize it. So the city clerk's office works with every department in the city, with the city commission, city managers on various things, obviously the agenda with contracts, ordinances, public records, a plethora of things throughout the city. So some of our achievements this fiscal year were the time stamping of all items on the agenda so that when you when the public goes to youtube to view the meeting after after the meeting they don't have to look at the agenda to see where to advance they could just click on each heading and go to each item so that's really improved things yes that's been really great and by the way most cities don't even offer that option Ah, well, there's a lot we do that a lot of cities don't do, but yes. So I think that was a great enhancement. We administered the referendum election along with the town halls. And we get a lot of calls in our office that are obviously from different departments, but from residents. And we handle all of the calls professionally. We really go out of our way to help people. And a lot of times people call and it is not even something the city does. It might be the county or a different department. We try to give them as much information as possible. We will Google information for people. We really go the extra mile for customer service in our department.

There's generally really good feedback about that customer. I know people call it something, but it's not in the city, it's out of the county, but you'll give them the phone number, that sort of thing, which in terms of our general perception is a great thing.

Yeah. And like, that's the same with public records requests. We get a lot of requests that are also not city related. I'll send them a link to, you know, here's where you need to contact just to make things easier for people. And, you know, for the city to just to go that extra mile, because I know we really are trying to have good customer service. Um, so starting in January, everything on the website has to be ADA compliant. So that's something we're working toward muni code meetings, which is where we do our agendas that will be changing so that everything, um, is, uh, and I know that will be, there are some challenges with that because some documents they're very hard to make them ADA compliant, but we're working on that. Um, So we're working on also digitizing all our records. I'd like as much as possible to be available on the website. Obviously, we're not going to have every contract on there, but I would love ordinances on there. Now, you can go to MuniCode and look up ordinances on there, but just for people who want to see the signed ordinance, that's not in MuniCode. So we're working toward that as well. I think that would be a great thing.

A question for this community sustainability. When a document is scanned in, do we then destroy the paper?

So it depends on what the document is. So for things, the only things we keep hard copies of in our office are the minutes, the ordinances, and the resolutions. We print them on good paper and we bind them in books. But anything else, once you scan it in, that is a document of record. You do not need to keep a hard copy. And even the courts accept scanned documents. So we're trying. We literally have documents going back to the dawn of time. And we're working very hard to have everything scanned in or things that have met their retention. And that's determined by the state. We don't need to scan them in.

Right. Yeah, I'm going to have the same question for community sustainable, like the old property files. If you scan it in, do you throw it out? Okay, Mr. Stigrich and then Mr. McVoy. Okay.

When we're scanning them in, are we utilizing a software that kind of stamps them and certifies them as this is the original scan, or are we just running it through a printer scanner and dropping it in a file somewhere?

So they're all OCR'd, so they're searchable, but no, there's no way to timestamp them that I know of, and it's not necessary either. So once you scan it, I mean, no, we don't timestamp them, no.

Neither does the clerk's office to the county.

So the concern there is with if we're destroying the originals, there's no guarantee that that document has been tampered with. And that can present a problem. When you scan in a PDF, you can actually change it after, but there's software out there that when you're scanning for records keeping purposes, it digitally locks the PDF for best evidence. so that it cannot be tampered with. And I think if we're destroying our paper copies, we need to be able to do that. So I know for like SOX compliance and Sarbanes-Oxley and all of that, and I would assume with government record keeping, There are some digital requirements. I would be shocked if there wasn't. You just can't go up to the scanner in the corner, scan it in and say, this is the documented record.

Sounds like it's worth looking into.

Yeah, for sure. I could look in. We can look into that for sure.

And there might not be, right? You never know with government and their rules and so on. But I know in almost every other industry, whether it's medical, financial, and so on, if you are... So we have record retention. We have to keep years of communications with Medicare. Yes. If you destroy that hard copy, you better have a best evidence sealed electronic copy of it. Otherwise, it doesn't meet the requirement of retaining that record.

Okay. The other thing is a lot of the documents that have signatures, you can't edit them once they... It doesn't allow you.

When they're e-signed, yeah, there's an amount of locking that goes on with that that's very similar. It's more or less like whatever reason this had to be preserved, we scan it in unless it had an e-sign on it and so on like that. There's no digital lock on it.

Okay. I will definitely look into that and... That could be a good enhancement for all of our records.

It protects the city.

Yeah, I understand.

I really appreciate the agenda timestamps on the videos. That is very helpful to everybody. on number two and number three, I don't know that it correctly lands at the city clerk's office, but there was a lot of community concern about how that election was done the language of it the um informational town hall meetings very big concerns about that so i would not put that as an achievement uh yes we ran the election but that's not the clerks that all of that other stuff was not right i'm not saying that i prepared the backup for the town halls i'm saying that we

That's why I say I don't know, but it's listed here, so it comes in.

The other one is that I regularly get feedback that some of the folks that do reporting on our community find the city very unresponsive about getting back to them. And that concerns me. It seems to me that anybody who is making an effort to do whatever form of journalism needs to be responded to fulsomely and quickly. And I've repeatedly heard that that's not happening now i it it can be coming from various places but i really i think we we've all said that we're very committed to transparency to openness in government if there are journalism type inquiries please please try to be fulsome and quick some quick that's a new word you didn't have that one until today i will write it down um yes i regarding all public

I will digitally lock it and timestamp it. Regarding public records requests, and a lot of them come in the form of public records requests, we handle them like all of ours. And our goal is to respond immediately, as immediately as possible. Like, for instance, if we get one today, am I going to respond? Probably not today. But within 24 hours, there's definitely response, not necessarily the answer, because we might need clarification or whatnot. But regarding... The two reporters that I have had dealings with, we have always responded in a very timely fashion.

Mr. Stegman, this is a quick question for the financials of it. Looks like you've done an impressive number of lien searches and also the cemetery work. yeah we're like way ahead although that's also outside of our control how many there are and and that's a lot of work and and and so but i believe in our fee schedule we charge for for lean searches we do right and obviously there's fees collected for for the cemetery is the city clerk's office getting compensated from those other funds that are collecting those fees or those fees remaining in the other funds?

So the lien searches are split between three funds. And one is the general fund, which we would fall under. The cemetery, that's a good question because I don't know. Okay. So that goes into the general fund. So that would be also Public Works who does the burials and whatnot. But it's outside of our control how many lien searches we get. But when I saw that just, so these numbers are just through the end of April, April 30th, because we thought this was going to be for the first budget workshop. So we did 403 last year. We're up you know a lot and the same with the cemetery that last fiscal year the entire fiscal year we did just under 131 000 and this year through april 30th we're at 129 000 so um that's that's plots and that's everything with the cemetery plots and burials miss phillips

Thank you, Madam Mayor. So I was told a couple of weeks ago by somebody who doesn't reside within our city. Number one, how amazing our cemeteries look. And number two, that they had to lay their mother to rest and they had called all surrounding cemeteries. and said that our non-resident rate was like 300% cheaper than anything else they could find in any other city municipal cemetery that do have pots left and other surrounding. So I think that we could still revisit that non-resident rate because we are still the least expensive. And now with all of our upgrades and the improvements to the properties, I think that there's a good justification there, especially when this person told me, you know, what all the research he had done. And he was he literally said, I was glad to write the check because I could not believe how inexpensive it was and how beautiful the cemetery looks. So I know that Jamie's going to come here and tell me that we don't want to outprice ourselves. No, but I know, I know, I got it. You know, that that is something that we need to consider because I heard it firsthand from somebody who was elected.

So, Madam Commissioner, actually, when we get to the fee schedule, you will see that we are suggesting an increase in the rates for the cemetery and also a slight increase in the liens because we asked the other departments because we're trying to actually cover our costs. So it's not a huge jump because the liens I've been here ten years. So the liens went up a couple of years ago, and that's the first time in like eight years they went up. So they're just going up minimally to be able to cover what it actually costs the different departments to get the information and whatnot. And the cemetery is also I talked to Jamie and Nina

before the first budget hearing actually about raising some of the fees and whatnot so you'll see that the non-resident um i want to talk about the residents because obviously that this is a city-owned cemetery and a lot of residents already have family plots there um but i do think that it's a good conversation to have and thank you jamie for supporting it because usually it's enough to battle it you know now are the causes the the cost of everything is going up and the cemeteries do look absolutely beautiful and it's really changed the landscape of the community

And I have to say that Wanda is our point person for the cemetery, and you couldn't find a more compassionate person to deal with people who are grieving. So we feel very fortunate.

And the fence is more convenient.

Thank you. And then we have no further, I think the next one is our, yeah, we have no further supplementary requests, supplemental requests.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Madam Mayor, if I may. Sure. This is the time, like, if you guys have any questions on their budget, you can ask. So I just wanted to reiterate that. So.

We didn't speak now forever. Hold on.

I think I'm not forever, but. In your budget, it's in the budget book.

We did try to cut wherever we could, and we're very mindful of being fiscally responsible. And we also have a very small budget compared to other departments, obviously.

What page are you on? Thank you.

Thank you.

The clerk's office is pretty consistent. I mean, you've had the same fee. You don't have any openings. You don't have any vacancies.

We have no vacancies. We have four people who have been here. So Shayla will be here five years in October, and Wanda's been here eight years, be nine years, and I'm 10 years. We did have to increase our budget for batteries, though.

Batteries? What does the clerk's office do with batteries?

For the lights on the dais. Ah. We'll have to fund it.

Well, and also. You've got to get funded by the commission.

Books and tabs for the books. Yeah, that's stuff. That I can see.

And I order my stuff from my office. It's like what paper has gone up to.

I know. It would be so great to be paperless.

No, it's not going to happen.

I know it's not. I've been talking about it for 10 years.

Maybe next year. 101, 102, what? Yeah.

You're looking for the page numbers for the city clerk?

Yeah.

Okay. So it's start on page 47. Oh, so what page am I looking at?

Because in here, it's different. Yeah. Thanks.

Oh, okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Any other questions? All right. Thank you. Thank you very much. We are 10 minutes ahead of schedule. Tell us where to start, what pages and all that.

So finance starts on page 52. Okay.

But it's the same book, right? Mr. Segrich?

I just had one just one kind of book formatting and I don't know if it works to do it. But when looking at these finance starts on page 52 and then we have to jump forward seven pages or so to get to the summary detail. Then we got to jump forward 12 pages or so to get to the detail that has the explanations on the line items. makes it next to impossible. When you have a question, you're flipping all the way back, especially with the general fund. If we had it broken out in the way that we review it, which is basically we do the overall, but then now we're talking about finance. If the pages for finance were finance summaries, finance overview, detail, finance detail with the notes, and then we could put a tab on it, we'd be able to kind of go through that. yeah so you yeah so like finance comes up again on page like 68 and then again on page 115 um just no no okay

So you like to have like finance department and right after that, after the atomization.

Yeah.

Right next door. Okay.

Gotcha. So, so when, when you're looking at it, you kind of just went through it all at once.

I completely understand.

You know, I think looking at the numbers in aggregate is good, but it's not effective for trying to actually look at your presentation and say, Hey, what are, what are we doing financially with your particular presentation?

Okay.

I have a question. We don't take cash, do we?

At the customer service for electric payments, yeah, I believe we do.

Onward car service, if we don't take cash.

We do take cash. For some of the parking, et cetera.

So it's the parking department and the other divisions that bring the cash to the finance department.

Now, they don't bring the cash to the finance department. The armored services will go to those departments to pick up the cash.

Okay, so you're putting that on the financial expenditures, even though it's expenditures from each department individually. So parking collecting revenue, shouldn't that come out of park? And this is just, it's an $8,000 item. This is just because things like that drive me nuts not knowing. I thought you guys upstairs were taking cash. I'm like, what could they possibly be taking cash for in the armored car service? Let's speak on it. Huh?

Good morning.

That's my confusion is if where's the cash coming from, why would we distribute that cost amongst those divisions?

So that is the answer for Yannick, but I will explain. This is for the car. We have the armored vehicle to pick up basically the coins that have collected in a parking meters. We have very old parking meters. So that's the only service. Yes.

Where do we still have parking?

Where do we still have coin?

Yeah. At the beach.

Yes. Yeah, so you can still... Yeah, we did vote to get rid of that. But there's also... So I do know, I mean, if somebody's coming to pay for the cemetery, can they pay cash for that? Or do they have to write a check or use a credit card if they came to buy a cemetery plot?

Um... We will take money order or check. We're trying to get away from cash.

Well, that's what I thought. Last year we talked about going cashless everywhere.

The only thing where we cannot not take cash is for the junior lifeguard services because we're trying to find a way how, you know, it's water so we cannot put the machine. And so this is the one thing that we're looking into getting a better way to process those payments.

So my question is how much cash do we take in and just $8,000 of an armored car service offset that? I mean, it seems that I just, I mean, if we're only collecting three, 300 or $3,000, why am I spending $8,000 on an armored car? When literally finance, you could go make the deposit.

We'll get back to you with that answer.

Back to what Commissioner Segrich started this with, is where can we trim? And to me, it's only $8,000, but at $8,000, if there's not a return on our investment, I'd like us to figure out a better way. But Mayor May will drive it.

Yes, we'll do some digging and get back to you. But definitely safety and security, we don't want to. I understand.

We're taking 300.

My staff takes money to the bank every day, and I don't think an armored car service is something to need.

We'll pay you that one more time.

not only that but they're picking this stuff out of the h107 out of the machines in their car and then going and i'm sure they're not coming every day so i don't see the risk yeah it was towards the bottom of 107 and again it was just another

Good morning, Madam Mayor, Commissioners. I'll start off with our mission for the financial services. Our mission is to safeguard the city's financial resources through transparency, accountability, and sound financial management. This includes providing timely and accurate financial information to support informed decision-making while also ensuring compliance with applicable laws and regulations. As for the achievement for this year, we're proud that we have three significant achievements. Our Moody's upgraded the city's credit rating from A1 to AA3, recognizing our strong financial management and stability. We also received both the GFOA Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting and the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award, reflecting our commitment to financial transparency.

Just for the record, I just wanted other government finance.

Government Finance Officers Associations.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you. Now, going for our emerging issues, looking ahead. As mentioned, there's no surprise we continue to face several external challenges, including state legislative changes that could or will reduce municipal revenues and I'll also continue the inflationary pressures with the high cost. So our main focus is one of the challenges to preserve that credit rating, which will be impacted, obviously, if that bill goes through. That means less revenues for the general fund and ultimately reduce our credit rating in the long run.

I would say cost of services. Are you including salaries in that?

Yes. This overall increase in cost services. And also, another challenge is also reducing our reliance on revenues vulnerable to state action, such as utility transfers, for instance. That bill keeps coming back, if not every year, every other year, although it keeps dying. But should that bill go through any, you know, we're talking about a larger hit than our current property taxes issues. And the last challenge that we have is also balancing major capital improvements while maintaining responsible debt levels. But at the same time, we also see opportunities to improve operating efficiencies, as mentioned earlier, where we could cut back on some of the cost. We've been working pretty well with the other departments and also maximizing grant funding, state and federal funding, as well as optimizing our central square ERP to improve our efficiency.

You know, we have federal and state grant funds. What about private grants? What about private funding?

I believe the only one that I'm aware of is with Lowe's. Is it with Lowe's? Lowe's? Yes.

I believe Lowe's would do that.

Yes. Alicia is working on some of those grants. Yes.

Yes, sir. Oh.

ERP Enterprise something or other program. What's the R? Resource? It's our main computer system.

I'd have to refer to Nelly for that one. Sorry. I know it, but I just forgot the R. Electronic resource? Okay. We'll get back to you. No. As far as performance measures, obviously timely completion of our auditor financial statements and annual budget as well. Also providing quarterly budget to actual analysis along with the capital improvement updates. As you know, we have so many of those. And also maintaining our certificate from the GFOA for both our financials and our budget.

Questions.

Thank you. Just to repeat, the process that you guys have put together here is getting better and better and better and better. And we really appreciate it. And I think the city really appreciates it. And the transparency, it's getting a lot easier to look at stuff. um the one one of the the issues that i've ran across in talking to some of the residents is they look at our our budget revenue numbers and they come in well the city's taking in 220 million dollars And that's actually not true because we recognize transfer of fund balance and internal transfers as revenue. And I was looking at the GFOA best practices and what I read, I understand that that is actually not a best practice to recognize transfer of fund balance and internal transfers between funds as revenue. I understand there are limitations in our accounting software and so on, but in having those conversations with people, I'm like, well, actually, no, because it's not like $220 million is coming in because the 17 million is coming from the electric into the general fund that's actually not revenue it's recognizing the revenue twice um and and also when looking at like the year over year one could easily make i'm not saying you guys would do this but one could easily make our revenue numbers look as good or as bad as we wanted to simply by transferring fund balance So if we wanted to make it seem like the general fund had a great amount of revenue, we could just transfer 5 million from fund balance into it. And it looks like we're actually bringing that in versus spending money that's not coming in. So I'm just wondering, is there a mechanism to not lump fund balance transfer under the revenue column as well as internal transfer, basically a third

You mean like if your house and you have your paycheck coming in and you're spending your money from your paycheck, but you have to supplement from your savings account because you're spending more than you get? Correct.

Yes.

And then you don't call the savings account revenue because you're not making it?

Correct. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. It would be like, I'm making $50,000 a year, but- I'm spending 75. I borrowed $25,000. No, no. I made 75. I see that that's pretty much exactly how we're presenting it. And for me, that creates confusion in just understanding the overall things. Once you get into the actual fund itself, it's... All right.

So you do make a very good point, Commissioner. We could... I'm not sure if the software is capable of doing that, but... We could do it in Excel, like the appropriation summary that you have on your books. That's an Excel worksheet. We could definitely eliminate the Intel fund transfers and any usage of fund balance so we could actually show what we actually generated.

Given the financial headwinds that we potentially face. Correct. People are looking at our general fund saying, and there's been a lot of public comment on this, oh, you guys, you're just rolling in the money. You got $53 million coming in. And the actual answer is, no, we don't. We are very fortunate to receive a lot of support from our electric utility and other things like that that are also facing financial headwinds in the next series of legislative sessions. It would be good for, I just think for clarity's sake, it would be good to try to figure that out. And it would bring us closer to GFOA practices as well.

Not a problem. We could definitely incorporate that in the budget workshop three. Hey, I do not have any supplemental. However, I would like to quickly go over our general fund analysis and potential property tax reductions impact, if you'll allow me. So this is the, what you have in front of you, that's the schedule that we have prepared for the general fund. It has the expenses for each individual department, and also the funding source that we were able to allocate to each department. Now, this is just a rough draft. This is not final. We believe we do need to dig a little deeper and work with the departments to make sure that we are allocating the appropriate revenues to their respective expenses. But as you can see, the funding source, the property tax support, all of it goes to our police services. Then our next pool of funds is the utility service taxes. That helps fund the departments. We also have the state revenue sharing that also helps mostly with the public services. Our admin fee allocation also helps with the departments. And then the last big pool, which is the franchise fee, the utilities transfers, those also help with public services and leisure services as well. And that shows at the very bottom, you see where we have the excess funds, which is the 4.2. Now that 4.2, that might change, as you know, because maybe not this year, but next year, since we no longer have the penny sales tax that ended, The funding for road improvements will have to come from the general fund unless we have new revenue funds from somewhere.

I have a question. The difference between the police, the $16 million, and then the fire is $183,000. Why is there such a difference?

So the police are curious.

Yeah, okay, gentlemen, thank you.

Right, so the police.

Yeah, that explains it. Okay. My question is the $75,000 department-specific revenue on the police, where does that revenue come from?

I believe that's the, what? Tickets and fines that they collect.

$75,000 a year? Okay. Um, and then we get the money, I'm sorry, we get the money from that.

We get the money for that. Right?

Okay.

And then my additional, I just lost my other 1.

Yeah, this is not 100%, but that's, I just want to show you guys where we're heading because earlier, I believe the commissioner sandwich mentioned that we needed to. Look at each individual department and see how they're being funded. So this is a picture of where we're going to be.

We haven't had since December.

Right. How about we budget for it? That includes benefits. I'm sorry.

Can everyone speak into their mic?

I am. So $213,000, that's just for one auditor.

That was his last salary plus benefits. Yes, which include taxes, insurance, and et cetera. Yes. And other operating expenses, like, if he goes to any conferences, et cetera. Yes. Thank you for the clarification and we have a breakdown for his for his department also in the budget book.

Yeah.

uh just to clarify it is very helpful by the way um public services and leisure services public services is what we sometimes call public works correct yes they have several divisions within um and both of those get a big chunk from franchise fees pilot can payment in lieu of taxes can you clarify i'm i'm a little puzzled what those that's the eight percent that we that the general fund charges the um enterprise funds the transfers the electric the water right sort of eight percent of their budget right minus the pca um why does that

eight percent from water and electric goes specifically to public works or leisure services no this is the first time i'm i'm preparing this so i i was just going by each department and whatever money i had left over like the first pool that i looked into department-specific revenues, then we looked at the property taxes, then we looked at the utility service taxes, and the state-shared revenues, the admin fee, and then the last chunk was the utility transfer, the 8%. So it's not in any specific comes out of that because we never, this was never like approve any commissioners or anything. And this is just, this is just what I just did to see exactly. So. Yeah, the press was approved by our own in stouts, but this particular. Funding source where it goes to, I think we. As for the property taxes, we all knew it goes to our priorities, which is police services and fire. The public services, we need to break it down because that includes grounds, transportation. We'll definitely come back and give you a more detailed one.

One last question, the CRA bottom, the last one. Yes. 4 million, is that what the CRA gets from the property taxes?

Yes, that's what we collect on their behalf, yes.

Thank you.

This is just a rough draft. The next slide goes into property tax reduction impact. Again, these are the same expenses that we currently have of 47 million. Now, with the builders coming up, our non-homestead cap will go down from 10 percent to 5 percent. That will have a 467,000 impact. negative impact. So the non-homestead cap, which is usually at 10%, that will go down to 5% now. So meaning that it will impact our revenues by approximately 468,000. That would be the first year. And also in the first year, and when I say the first year, that's fiscal year 28, if it passes. So, and then the increase in the homestead exemption to 150 will have an impact of about $2 million. The 150,000, yes, increased. And then the increase of 250 homestead will have an overall impact of 3.4 million or 3.5 million.

okay graphic wise i'm gonna pull a mcboy here okay if you look at the graphic could you do you think you could change the graphic so that it it goes instead of going up it goes down like make it red going down so you can show that it's a decrease the zero on top and the thousands or the millions going down okay flip the graph upside down

Yeah, because it's more visual.

I mean, this looks like we're getting more right. If you make that and put it upside down, then it's like, oh, my God. Thank you.

That's a great observation. Thank you.

So.

So the combination of both the non-homestead and homestead bill that's coming up for the first fiscal year 2028, the impact will be approximately 8%, 8.37. And for the fiscal year 2029, when the exemption goes up to 250, that impact will be in total 12, 13%. So if we have to make cuts, we're looking at either for those two years, 6.5, 6.5, or if that's at the very minimum.

Thank you.

And thank you for putting these together. They help bring clarity for the residents and so on. One thing, though, is I understand it because I know that we have the 5% cap on non-homesteaded properties, and that's one reduction, and then there's the 150K, which comes in year one, and then 250 in year two, and then there's other things on top of that. For your average homeowner or your average resident or voter, it would be nice to see this in a format where it's 2027, 2028. This is the impact. And you can break it out by the, you know, because I think the non-homestead cap is a hidden one that people don't think about. And it's good not to lump that in, but maybe group these by the year and give the total for the year. That'll be helpful because I know in a week or so, I'm going to get a whole bunch of questions and I would love to be able to use your slides to answer that.

Okay.

But I wouldn't get rid of this page.

Just to clarify, you would like us to, as a header, the combination, just put fiscal year 28 impact, and then the last one fiscal year 28? We could definitely do that and update the graphs, and then we'll probably present it to you.

Yeah, like fiscal impact for dummies. I've been saying that. Okay.

I didn't say that.

I said it. And it's because I'd like to be able to see it. It needs to be very obvious. This is what's going to happen. Because if you look at this, you have to think more than I want to. And she's good at math.

She's the math girl.

Well, what we were talking about yesterday at the League of Cities is that you have about a 10 second attention span of somebody to explain this. And it takes more than 10 seconds to say, oh, but we need it to be like, you look at this graph and you go, oh, my God, I can't vote for that. or i can vote for that i'm sorry i'm not gonna say either way but it needs to be very obvious what the consequences of actions would be could you let tallahassee know that 13 is a unlucky number

My next slide, I think we already covered. So we will work on modifying the graphs for the property tax reduction. But the pie chart there just shows you where the bulk of the revenues are coming from, which is mainly property taxes, as you know, and franchise fees and admin fees, as well as the state revenue share.

39%. Yep.

Any questions for my department's budget?

I just want to say

we're still working on implementing a put together program that will educate our residents about legislative so we're still you know working on it uh what they are um along those same lines we're having a uh Palm Beach County League of Cities board meeting to sort of organize how we're going to how the cities are going to present um the property tax education correct In addition to whatever each city is doing, we're working on a combined effort as well.

Our communications department is monitoring all the different media out there, so that's almost being incorporated in our program as well.

Thank you.

There are no additional questions. This concludes my presentation. Thank you.

Up next is human resources, and you will find them You will find them located on page 54 and page 110 in your budget book. Yes.

Since we're 15 minutes early, can we take a five-minute break?

I have no problem. I was going to excuse myself for a second. We're going to take a brief comfort break.

if we take a five minute break

I know we do.

you know

Thank you.

logs so you never know what you're going to get and mine apparently will all paper trend are we ready to reconvene madam mayor what are we ready to reconvene

Are you annoying me to get that?

Everybody's hungry.

They want their sandwiches.

Madam Mayor, it is 1131 and we have reconvened.

Thank you for your attention. We're all settling down. Okay.

Are we live?

We're live.

Okay. Okay. In the spirit of our mission, which is providing strategic leadership and workforce development, employee engagement, organizational culture, and human resources services to support operational excellence and high quality public service. I think it's vital to start bringing up our next level of leaders. So, Jani, the Assistant Director of Human Resources is going to lead this, and I'm going to tag team and support her.

Take it away, Jani.

All right. Good morning. Jani Michie Kalabowski, Assistant Director of Human Resources. So for human resources under the general fund, Lauren already went through our mission. Some of our achievements will be, we completed a citywide rollout of customer service training. We actually have an ongoing, we have one more training, I believe tomorrow, and then we have one more training next week for the customer service. And that way we would have covered most of the departments and employees. We've established strategic recruitment partnerships, resulting in 30 new hires within seven months. And we've done that through a resource. Oh, really? Okay.

Yeah, I'm so tall.

So for the recruitment partnerships resulting in 30 new hires, within the seven months, we've been working closely with CareerSource and a veteran-centered organization that's local. So we're working on that. And then we do have three HR members selected as advisory committee or board members for the Public Sector Human Resources Association or PESHRA committees. I'm one of them. And then we have two other HR managers that are members of the board.

I think it's important to remember that the importance of that sort of, you know, we all work here day to day, but I think it's really important to recognize the importance of the big, like Florida League of Cities, these different, you know, that you are part of a group, you're doing this thing. So thank you for doing that.

Yes, thank you. And we do get quite a bit of information. We gather a lot of information from those. Some of our emerging issues, challenges, and opportunities. The emerging issues is increased demand for efficiency. So the legacy systems and manual processes that limit productivity, delay decision making, and that can create possible inefficiencies. evolving workforce expectations, increased employee expectations for career development, recognition and a positive workplace culture. Some of our challenges is enhancing administrative efficiencies, fragmented information systems and manual workflows present processing inefficiencies, maintaining employee engagement, providing meaningful recognition and engagement opportunities while balancing budget constraints and operational priorities. Some of the opportunities is the implementation of an information system to centralize all personnel action requests to improve efficiency, accuracy, tracking, and completion of requests. We are working with a system called Build right now that will be closely, that pretty much...

It'll be integrated.

It integrates with ADP. So that will help, you know, get us more.

Now they're in different systems. So, yes, it does. It does. So we're going through Navaline and ADP. And then we have another system, DocuSign, where we're doing the personal action requests. So this will actually integrate with the systems and streamline it so they're easier to track, find, and just it will speed up the process immensely.

Thank you. Another opportunity is expanding professional development, leadership training, and cost-effective employee recognition to strengthen retention, engagement, and organizational performance. We do have a Lean Six Sigma training that's coming up next week. Some of our leadership team will be attending that, including myself. That's a whole day training for the Lean Six Sigma that will be held at the village of Palm Springs. And we're looking to bring them here too.

And that's process efficiency. That's what this Lean Six Sigma is. Ms. Shumrilega?

Thank you. We had talked to, and I brought it up a couple times, for i think it's imperative that the hr department have something some kind of onboarding for elected officials um a lot of people run for this seat and have no idea what this job entails um it was up to um myself and our previous executive assistant last time when i for the first time when i got elected to make my appointments with public works and go tour the water and i really think that it's imperative for whoever's up here to have an onboarding through HR and have you work with the directors and say, all right, director, what do you want elected officials to know? and make sure that that there is a workbook or something that has to be completed because you know i always say i only have a couple more months here but that is a big frustration is when you have electeds who think they know what they're supposed to be doing they don't go to the league of cities trainings they have no idea what it is to run a municipal government or what even they need to know to make the right decisions and i think that that would be a great starting point if hr would say okay Before your first meeting, here's some of the things that we would like you to do. Spend an hour with each director. Here's the checks and balances of what you need to know and some kind of onboard training that should be, I think, in my opinion, mandatory because we don't have a job description. We get public funds to be up here and serve the public, and there is no attendance record. So to me, how do we hold the next round of people accountable to make sure that they're working on behalf of the residents? And I mean, that's something that I personally, I think would be a benefit. I don't know how the rest of the commission feels, but I think that it would give the next electeds for the future of the city of Lake Ridge Beach a leg up to know what they're supposed to know.

Agreed. And I did talk to the League of Cities and I looked into some of their training opportunities. And the HR team was just talking about this yesterday on our team meeting, because there's Citizenship Academy that's being developed. And we're thinking, well, this is a perfect opportunity to use that syllabus for incoming elected officials, especially on the HR side. I think there's some confusion about how personnel policies are applied and how we come to certain decisions. And I think that is an excellent, excellent suggestion. And we're going to run with it.

thank you i have to organize yeah oh okay i'm sorry um and i would just like to say that that let's as us uh i don't think it relates necessarily funding or might a little but let's not forget how important the human resources department is in terms of this is ultimately where a lot of hiring decisions which builds the flavor of our workforce hopefully for long periods if we can do well at keeping them and it does exactly that part of retention and finding ways within the constraints of budget to keep people as happy as possible um it's a pretty important it's it's kind of like you know it's not something you see on the billboards all that often but i think it's it's pretty important to how the city functions how residents perceive the city so i appreciate the work and let's value it yeah i agree with you thank you let's build on that for a second i see you adam sir which but um you know a lot of the attitude of i know when i'm when i have a case

And there's somebody watching over me to, you know, to like, did you make a mistake? You don't function as well. You're not happy in your job. You're not as efficient because you're always back thinking, you know, did I do it right? So I think part of the, um, I think that Commissioner Mulligan brought it up the other day in a meeting. There's more to happy employees than money. Agreed. I think a lot of that comes from this diet. I think it's very important for our staff to feel supported. I think if there's a criticism or a question, I think it's best not dealt in public. And I think that we have a big part in how, and I'm getting feedback from people about the current situation. And I just think it's important for us to be in support, especially in public. You don't deal with your family stuff the way a family doesn't.

uh thank you i i would support uh commissioner malega's idea for what kind of academy or training um coming into it um it it would be i think it would be very helpful to have some structure to that um great for people might be able to help you know what do we need to know i think we can help hr absolutely absolutely absolutely and we would appreciate your input and that's a great suggestion you know the the brain dump from from those individuals who who've been here for for six years eight years some sometimes even longer would be helpful as well because there's wisdom there that gets lost um

I would, as the aged person here, I would be willing to help with that too.

In terms of the mayor's comment, sometimes things do have to be discussed in public. I don't think you can operate in a public organization without talking about things that are being done right, as well as things that are being done wrong and try to improve. So I disagree a little bit philosophically. And for transparency and trust of the public, I think it's in the public's interest to see some of that discussion. In terms of the fragmented information systems, manual workflows and so on. Is that particular to your department or are you looking at it basically organization wide?

Well, my department hits organization-wide. So what we do does go across the city. So for instance, our personal actions requests, they go from, they start with the department, they come to HR, they go to finance, they come back to HR, they go to the city manager's office. So they touch everybody. So, and that's why it's so hard to track it. Right now, we still have paper personnel files. We just implemented a payroll system a few years ago, ADP, but it Right now we have to take files and actually manually put them into NaviLine and finance has to do, yeah, it's a nightmare. So we're trying to figure out ways to streamline those things and make them easier for everybody. And so part of the recruiting process is people don't understand is it's so important to do things like security background checks and those take longer than you think. It used to be like this and now it seems like it's taking longer.

So you're guys in this system called Built that's going to integrate with ADP and so on. Yes. Is that kind of like an all-in-one HR platform, you know, handling your onboarding documents and requests, time off requests, time?

ADP handles a lot of that. The build system is more of a thing for things like position control. So everyone says position control, but it's not a position count. It is telling you everything about a position. It tells you what funds it comes out of. It tells you what its EEOC status is, what its FLSA status is, what its workers comp rating is. Those things are all built in there.

Kind of the org chart on steroids.

Yes. It'd also be an org chart. Yeah. And also, you approve a certain number of positions so we can lock those down. Right now, it's a manual spreadsheet. How many do we have? Are these positions open? This will allow us to lock that down.

so that we don't have to do those manual counts we can make sure that we're within the bounds that you that the commission gave us direction for and that we're in compliance so you know i'm i'm a huge fan of automation and technology and and bringing us into the modern error with with what we have um do you feel as a department you have enough support financially or resources that you're getting these things done in a timely fashion or are you hitting roadblocks and having constraints where it's like you know i really wish we could bring in this application but we just don't have the budget for it are there things like that that we're missing um i'm actually going to address that because we were just talking about this yesterday

um when it comes to the programs the the financial constraints not okay because we're okay with that it's just the time because a lot of these programs we need assistance from other departments and other departments may be dealing with some other programming issues so it delays us um so i'll say more or less the the the issue that we're having is is is the timing and trying to get everyone to kind of jump in and get involved because the systems that we use it touches everybody's department so we need at least somebody from each department to be involved so we have delays in that like with the build would have been built six months ago. But we're going through a budget process right now. Finance is preoccupied with a new ERP system and everything. So it kind of delays us. And that's the main problem that we have right now. But financially, we're okay with it.

And are you getting any kind of outside consulting help in doing that implementation? Or you guys, you know, I know you're training up on Six Sigma, which is fantastic. Are you leading the charge and trying to act as the business analyst to all the different organizations, all the different departments?

Well, actually, the system itself has a project manager to help us with implementation. So we're working with Build and we're working with Navaline. And I cannot ever thank Nelly Peralta enough in the IT department for their tremendous support. I would not ever even think about touching anything without Nelly. And that team has been great.

So it sounds like I guess my question is, would an extra resource dedicated to helping these implementations expedite this?

I think in this case, we're fine. Because luckily, I have a team that is up and coming. They're new. They're energetic. They have so many great creative ideas. So they're actually leading the charge. So Susie Sanchez, who is in charge of our recruiting, and actually, I think we talked about her promotion here. Um, she has really, she's so creative and I sent her to conferences. She comes back with all these ideas and she's been wonderful. So I'm really proud of her. She's, you know, I understand that people make mistakes. I let them make mistakes. I encourage them to make mistakes because that's how you learn.

so she's gonna you know we all fall sometimes um but we you know we get back up stronger and smarter and that's what she's just been amazing and so i i can't be prouder my last question on it is is do we have a a published project plan for the implementation of this built system and the adp stuff so that maybe city manager can help push people along or get resources allocated for you or is it kind of we're going along at the pace it's going

Well, no, the consultants from BILT have a project plan that they follow. So they know the steps. They work with ADP closely. They're partners and they're built in. So they have a project plan. They say, okay, here's your first steps. So we're following that project plan with their project. When do they expect to be completed?

What do you think? Six months?

Six months. Okay, great.

For the general fund, under our performance measures, we measure the participation rates in employee training and professional development programs. We use surveys for that, reduce average processing time for power approvals and position recruitment, and monitor employee engagement survey participation and workforce feedback trends.

Just a little one. As an environmental scientist, I can't read PAR without thinking photosynthetically active radiation. And I'm pretty sure that's not what that is.

Personal action requests.

Oh, personnel action requests. I'm sorry. Right now, we're using DocuSign, which is a very... DocuSign. It's a very... What? it's a very manual process um and it goes through so where it comes from the department head the department head if let's say they're requesting of there's a vacancy for a position um it goes to the department head the department head sends it over to hr hr it goes to fine it touches it goes to the city manager it goes through this whole approval process but it's very very manual and um with built this will you know assist us in you know personnel personnel action request Okay, for the benefit fund, our mission is to provide innovative and sustainable employee benefit programs that support workforce wellness, financial security, employee retention, and long-term organizational success.

Before you go on, Mr. Sikrich has a question.

Sorry, just really quick.

On your performance measures, do you guys have these in a report that you're providing the city manager?

we and do you track them over time we we can start providing that to the city manager okay yeah we could do that it's a report that we put we can pull the reports from adp so you've got you've got this stuff in there at kind of a click of a button for you yes that's awesome yes great Some of the achievements that we have from the Benefits Fund, thanks to Yannick, our HR manager, is our 2026 Silver Well Workplace Award from Wellness Alliance. We have a 2026 Platinum Bell Seal Award from Mental Health America, which is one of the highest designations. We have a 2025 Cigna Healthy Workforce Gold designation, which is also our highest designation. and we were also featured in the um the city was featured in the pshra which is the public sector human resources association public eye magazine in september and october 2025 edition yeah i know that you do a lot i mean we get the email the biometrics is coming are you having enough people to sign up for it open enrollment how is our participation for the biometrics

We're going to make it, you think? We're going to make the 40? And that's for anybody who has city health care?

Yes. I don't have the city health care, but we are able to. Absolutely.

Oh, it's not everybody needs to be there. No, I understand that. I thought it was a program within the health care for wellness.

Yeah.

Oh, you're talking about. Okay. So we have the biometrics. That's an open enrollment. So it's open enrollment. It's an open enrollment window.

Right.

Mm hmm.

I've taken advantage of these two. You need them once a week. That's our most popular event always.

Touching on the emerging issues, there's an increased demand for competitive total rewards package by employees, evaluating employers on comprehensive benefits, workplace flexibility and wellness offerings. Like I mentioned, we do have the open enrollment coming up in August and we did our annual wellness event that was back in March, in April. Thank you. increasing healthcare costs affecting employees, dependents, and employer-sponsored health plans, emphasizing the importance of preventative care and cost containment. Can I touch on medical insurance at all?

That's the next one. Yeah.

Some of the challenges is providing a comprehensive benefits package that supports recruitment and retention while managing rising health care costs and protecting the long term sustainability of the city's benefit programs. Rising healthcare utilization and costs require proactive strategies that improve employee health outcomes, while maintaining fiscal responsibility. Some of the opportunities under the benefits fund is the increased access to preventative care, wellness resources and health education to improve employee health outcomes and help manage long term healthcare costs. enhance the city's value proposition by offering competitive benefits, wellness programs and employee support resources that attract and retain a high performing workforce. The performance measures that we use under the benefits funds is a wellness program participation and employee engagement metrics. We have the open enrollment participation and benefits enrollment trends, and we have the motivate me program participation and completion metrics. Self insurance fund.

So I am on page 294 of the big budget book for the benefits fund. So I understand we've basically recategorized some stuff between 26 and now. Most importantly, it was the life and health insurance premiums. So we took those out from under salaries and benefits and move that to operating expenditure. And when we did that, we basically called our life and health insurance PPOEE. other contractual services and i'm wondering why we did that because that seems like it's making it more confusing to understand what that line item is then less clear that was finance driven so bianic uh page 294 um fourth one down from operating expenditures and second one down from the top it was a recategorization uh one 5.3 just moves from here to there.

So that was because of the nature of the fund. So it's a benefit at the department level, but because this is a benefit fund as its own fund, it's a contractual service for that fund.

I understand it. I agree that it would be an operating expense in there. I guess my question is, and it could be limitation of the software and how, because we don't have the fund numbers to compare. Would it have been possible just to change the category of life health insurance and PPOEE to be an operating expense for this fund? versus calling it other contractual services.

Well, that particular fund, some salaries are allocated directly to that fund. So that's why we still need that section of benefits.

Yeah, but I'm saying removing the life and health insurance okay so right so now i understand what yes yes okay so if we had to give it a new name essentially um i just i just think for clarity to me other contractual services it it immediately the bells go off because in other departments that instantly means consultant all right and that's what you're saying at first read when i was going through and just Hey, let me look at the big numbers. I looked at that. I'm like, $5 million in consultants for the benefits fund. I'm like, I want that job. But then I figured it out. So I don't know if you're able to do that. I think you can add clarity.

Sure. Hector, I think we could give it a separate line item. professional services medical, we could move it down to its own separate line so that it's not part of the contractual services. We could definitely, that should be an easy fix.

Okay.

Yes.

Yeah, picky.

I've got some 1,000.

Oh, 5 million.

And before we move on to the self-insurance fund, can you guys hear me? Is this working? We are going to be coming forward to you with a separate workshop for a program that we'll be proposing called Care ATC. And what that is, it would be a medical clinic that employees can access for free. So a lot of things that keep people from going to the doctors are the costs. The co-pays, the testing, those things are exorbitantly expensive, even with insurance. And insurance isn't ever going to get cheaper. But what causes premiums to rise? Claims. If people don't go to the doctor, if they ignore things, they ignore symptoms because they can't afford it, then they get worse and then things become catastrophic. We'll be coming forward to you with this, with a separate workshop with all the details to give you more detail. I just want you to know that that's coming and we're excited. It will be absolutely a decision on your part, but I think that you'll like it when you see it.

I have a question. First of all, thank you to HR for all you guys do for bringing things like the mobile mammograms and quest diagnostics, because a lot of times for the working individuals that we have here, having that time to take the time to go to the doctor or squeeze it in doesn't really happen. So thank you for putting the health of our staff first. Do we pay for that? Or is it a service that you've negotiated when they come here and they do those things? Like when we had the dermatology guy here? And is that something that we pay for or is that something that the insurance covers? How does that work?

um both so it depends on the organization yeah well yeah it depends on the organizations for instance the derma van the city pays for the the employees copay okay okay so the rest is covered by insurance but we pay for the copay because what keeps people from going there is the cost okay so trying to especially in south florida a lot of our employees work outside right skin cancer is prevalent we want them to go okay so it's about their copay for that visit yeah people do show up and go have their

their annual screenings.

Exactly. And we coordinate that with the Guerin Group, which is our insurance broker, and also with Cigna, our insurance provider. So it's a collaborative team effort.

Okay. And again, thank you guys for doing that. I think it's magnificent that we make sure that we put the health of our employees first.

I think we need to thank Ms. Unique. Yes. Thank you.

I appreciate it.

The point that you're making is excellent. The cost is just getting off work to do stuff. No, you pointed that out and I just want to reiterate that that's a big help because it's not easy to take time off if you're a nine to five person.

But if you can grab a time slot and say, okay, I'm going to go do this, this and this on that day. And I'm on the clock and obviously we know they're going there. I think that that's a huge celebration. And again, we were talking about keeping employees and offering above and beyond. And to me, that's an above and beyond.

Thank you.

OK, the Self-Insurance Fund, the mission is to promote workplace safety, accountability, and employee well-being through proactive risk management, training, incident prevention, and operational safety initiatives. Some of our achievements is a strengthened workplace safety and risk management through enhanced safety committee meetings and engagement. We do have quarterly safety committee meetings with members from different departments. We've developed updated vehicle and golf cart safety policies, enhanced reporting procedures and guidelines for claims and incident management processes. Some of the emerging issues, challenges, and opportunities is delays and inconsistencies in reporting workplace incidents can affect investigations, claims management, and organizational responsiveness. Organizations are relying more heavily on claims and incident data to identify trends, reduce risk exposure, and inform strategic decision making. Some of the challenges is achieving timely, accurate and standardized reporting requires ongoing process improvements, employee training and accountability across all departments. Effectively identifying and addressing workplace risks before they result in claims or operational disruptions requires reliable data, consistent reporting and continuous monitoring. Some of the opportunities is standardized reporting procedures and provide targeted training to improve accuracy, accountability and operational efficiency. Utilize claims and incident trends to identify risk patterns, prioritize preventative actions and support informed operational and strategic decisions. The performance measures that we use for the self-insurance fund include reduced workplace claims through proactive safety initiatives, training, and risk mitigation efforts, reduced lost time days associated with workplace injuries to support operational continuity and workforce productivity, and monitor and analyze top injury types to identify trends, strengthen preventative measures, and reduce recurring workplace incidents. um a lot of these are also done throughout safety committee um therese who's our hr risk manager um manages our and and handles our safety community and they also do um they do walk around so like i think Last month. Yeah. Yes. Last month they did a day in a life of a lifeguard. So kind of going through some of the things that are happening at the beach, at the beach area. And she rotates that she did. She does ride alongs with the public works department to kind of get a feel of what's going on out there and to, you know, if there are any issues, she can go ahead and address those.

i think we get an award last year because of yes and she's gonna she's gonna kill me because she's here but again i could not be prouder yeah she's amazing she is and hopefully she will still speak to us after this mr savage

Thank you, Madam Mayor. For our workers' comp, are we self-insuring for workers' comp or are we utilizing a third-party carrier or a hybrid?

We are self-insured, but we have a TPA that we work with to administer the claims.

Okay. And is our TPA handling Section 111 reporting?

Yes. That's done through our TPA and also through the Ben Few and Associates, our risk manager. So he works with, again, it's a collaborative effort between the city, Ben Few, and our TPA.

Okay. And have we audited that in the last year to make sure that we are in 100% compliance?

Yes. Yes. Ben audits every year.

okay um the reason why i'm asking that is with section 111 reporting if there's a claim that's late by one day in reporting it's a thousand dollars a day per claim fine and they're going to be implementing fines starting actually they already started but it's for the last year no one knows it better than hr and therese i promise um that's very good to hear um i had some particular questions page 271 um Between going from 2025 to 2026 slash 27, our operating expenditures jumped by about a million dollars. What are you guys exhibiting that to?

Yeah, Nick? Well, I got a big raise. I'm sorry.

That would have been the salary and benefits. Yeah.

That trip to Tahiti was great. Thank you very much.

Did we see a big jump in workers' comp, like premium or something?

You say jumped or it went up?

Went up. Will anyone? Page 271 under expenditures, operating expenditures. In 25, we're at 2.5, and then we jump up to 5 million, so almost a $2.5 million jump.

seeing a decrease.

And then we went back down when we corrected the premium adjustment on the insurance, but that still leaves about a million dollar jump.

That has to do with actual versus budget. Remember, we had to go back and look at what was actually being charged.

Okay. So you're comparing 25 and 26, right?

Or 27. Because 26, 27 are virtually the same.

Okay. I would have to dig in deeper and see what the variance is.

I wasn't able to find any one thing. I did see our workers comp increased and so on. My just one concern. Just like we had the $1.25 million overage in the other premium, I didn't know if something like that existed or if that was an actual true increase. So if we can look into that. I'll look into it.

I'll get back to you.

And then... The other question was, and forgive me, it doesn't have to be answered now. I don't remember ever getting the list of assets that were insured. It may have been sent and I may have missed it.

I believe we sent you what we currently have, but we're getting that updated with the departments. So hopefully soon we'll have that ready because we have to send it to the insurance companies to give us a new estimate.

Okay. Yes. My favorite sheet from Yannick, the 11 by 17 one. The self insurance fund lists about 12,000 in physical capital assets. What would that be?

That's a percentage based on our fund balance policy. that are you looking at the column that has capital projects allocated um net investment in capital assets oh so that's uh basically their capital assets i want i want to say it's a vehicle I'm not sure what the capital asset is, but less any related debt. That's what the formula is. So I would have to go back to our capital asset listing to see what that capital asset item is.

So we have a vehicle or something for this fund?

I won't say a vehicle. It has to be something. If it's 12,000, I would have to go back and see the listing, the actual listing.

My only concern with it was just that it seemed odd that the self-insurance fund had a physical asset. Correct.

I can't speak on it right now.

I really got to look at the list. That's fine. No other department or fund has computers. They all fall under IT. I'm just wondering if it's miscategorized.

I'll look into that.

on page 279. And this could be because if we go down under operating expenditures, contractual services, other contractual services, it's doubled. And I didn't know, given that we moved some of the premiums into OpEx, With the other line item, did we do that here or did we truly double our consulting services?

So if they took a negative 323 from the insurance, I'd be in our two lines down. You look at it.

Well, no, that was another question. The negative 323 is actually a credit. And so I had another question. So that when we get the actual report.

And they tell us that our liability for the IBNR has reduced. The entry that we book ends up to be a negative expense. It reduces the overall expense. So we could reduce the liability.

Yes. But in terms of the consulting services, what was the reason to double it? Talking about contractual services?

Yeah.

From 25 to 26?

Yeah. Okay. We'll have to dig into that. And then...

Back on the workers' comp, do you guys track our open exposure to ongoing responsibility for medicals?

Yes, we do.

Do we have any kind of ballpark what that number is?

Off the top of my head, no. Therese, do you know off the top of your head? No, but I can get that for you.

Absolutely. The reason why I'm bringing that up is if it's a large number, we could benefit from doing a settlement project and set up.

That worked. Okay. So every quarter, Therese meets with Dentu and our TPA. And we go over the big claims. A lot of them are their legacy claims from when we had police and fire. And they're not going to ever settle those claims, especially with the presumption cases for firefighters. So even though they just have to go to the doctor once a year, but we do try and settle as much as we can. So we'll look at all the claims and see who do we think will settle? Can we try it again? And they reach out once a year to see. But quarterly, we examine those.

And have those monies already been set aside? Yes. So those monies have already been set aside and they're in a separate fund somewhere?

They're part of the fund. They're part of our liabilities.

know i don't know how finance so i guess my question there is where would we see that in the financial reporting um because in it's not in in allocated in this sheet that i can tell so for all so those are all those pending claims that we have and we have money put aside

That's part of the actual report. So they provide us an actual report that has what the liability should, all the pending claims and the corresponding liability that we need to book at the end of the fiscal year. And that's where we update our liability and it hits the expense account. So if you want the details, we'll have to provide you with the actual report.

The reason why I'm bringing that up for colleagues is this particular fund seems like it has a very large fund balance, but it doesn't. Right. And so I didn't really see in any of the documentation where that liability for an ORM or for a Medicare set aside. was established so that for us here, sitting here and going, oh, look at that, $9 million to spend, or for the public looking at it and going, you guys are just slush funding this stuff and you got all this money there. I think it would be important to see that those are actually tied up similar to how in some of the enterprise funds, we have the cap capital projects reserved for that pending claims and open ORM and lawsuits so that we make sure that our reserve is adequate. And that was the next kind of question for my colleagues. Right now, this fund has a reserve a very low required reserve, which we know is not reality. Because we kind of have a blanket policy which says, these are 25% and these are 50% based on the expenditures. And I think our self-insurance fund is a very different beast. And I think it needs to be based on our risk. I, for one, would like to set a new policy for this particular fund based on risk and the open ORM and the set-asides, as well as pending litigation, so that we can ensure this doesn't get touched. For me, obviously, I asked a lot of questions of you guys this time because I'm new here. Next budget season, we're going to have a couple of new people up here as well, and they might not grasp it and might seek to utilize that. I think we need a policy that somehow instead of this one being based on revenue and operating expense, it has that component, but it also has a risk reserve that cannot be touched.

It's kind of like these funds are encumbered. We still have them. But they're not available.

And I'd like to make sure that we just have a policy that indicates that. We could base it off of our set-aside, our open ORM, as well as...

Some historical data we brought forward so we know what to threshold that at, right?

I'm sorry?

Maybe some historical data to bring forward and say, based on claims already settled or pending lawsuits, we think that this would be a good threshold for us to target. So that's just shooting in the air.

Well, no, I think we have actual claims data. And then for pending lawsuits, we could do a percentage of pending lawsuits, 50% or what have you.

There is what Yannick was referring to. We have an actuary do an analysis on this every single year, an actuarial evaluation. And the actuary tells us how much to put aside.

But we don't have a policy from the commission that says, all right, all right, all right. No, no, I'm sure you're keenly aware of it. I just want to make sure we have a policy that says don't touch. Based on that actuarial finding, this has to be reserved.

So to your point, Commissioner, The actual report, the latest report we received from the actuary has a liability, the total of workman's comp and property liability of in total like $3 million. So that $3 million should actually be excluded from that excess fund balance, correct? In addition to that, we should have like, because we have a pending lawsuit, which is pretty hefty and that should also be added on there, but I don't know if you want to...

yes but we'll i do support the idea of maybe explicitly labeling earmarking some categories that these are committed they're not uncommitted balance absolutely yeah and i don't know the weird yeah i don't know the right word yeah i think it is the right word on the wordpress

Um, just real quick, Commissioner Segrich, from one of your questions that you had, you wanted to see the breakdown of the 332,000. It's on page 285. Full page. I'm sorry, you have to go. It's right under operating expenses. It's the third line down. It's other contractual services, and it shows you a breakdown of the batch.

Correct, yes.

A lot of it is stuff.

Yeah, we need stuff.

I don't know what PGIT is, but...

Thank you for that. The only problem is it just didn't have the breakout for the 2024, which is the lesser, but that's very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you, Matt.

I went back a bunch of years.

All right, let's keep going.

is that all the questions for okay thank you thank you very much okay community sustainability general fund building fund and code remediation fund mr waters you are up good afternoon william waters community sustainability director uh to give you a little bit of history i want to help with this um this division or this department was created in the FY 2012 budget out of three other departments, building, planning and zoning, and co-compliance. And it was set up through a collaborative effort with the then commission and the then city manager to create a one-stop shop to facilitate overall community sustainability, not just environmental, but fiscal, ecological, historical, cultural, as well as fiscal. And so we have six divisions. including the building fund, which is separate. And then we have separate funds for the Tree and Landscape Fund and the Code of Remediation Fund. Can we go to the next slide or do I have the clicker? So our mission was just that. Through our comp plan that was adopted in 2017-18, we identified that we are a community of neighborhoods, and our primary economic development focus was to build healthy, strong neighborhoods through providing the widest variety of housing possible, both rental and for ownership, And that will be our economic development push will be housing and neighborhoods versus office development, that sort of thing. We will be a huge bedroom community for the services that are other communities. achievements over the last year we did finish in collaboration with leisure services the open space recreation master plan and we're in the process of working with them to implement part of it we've completed parts one phase one and two and parts two phase one of the citywide mobility plan we are in the part two phase two section that ordinance is being prepared we have had our first meeting with the county They asked for our priorities in terms of how to focus some of the efforts from mobility plan on projects that are county related. That priority list has not yet been provided to the county, and we have not yet scheduled our second follow up meeting to include the ordinance, which will have to also be presented to their county commission. I don't think we're going to have it set up by the end of the fiscal year, which was our original goal. We've been very successful implementing our affordable workforce housing program. We have a very progressive program compared to other communities, and we have not only by percentage-based, but also numbers-based, more affordable workforce housing units being created here than anywhere else in the entire county, including the county. We have two LIHTC projects that are in the works. One of them's already been completed, Madison Terrace. phase one, then there's phase two, then we also, you'll be seeing it probably next month, the Pinnacle on Six project, which I believe is a LIHTC project, and we've been asked whether we want to participate in other LIHTC projects through an email that was received today. LIHTC does require a commitment from the city or the municipality to move it forward, and we can talk about that at a different time. We started our 1900 project. That is not going as well as I would hope. You will be seeing a commission item on that in the near future to deal with some change orders that have arisen out of unforeseen building conditions, some issues with the building plans, some disagreements among the parties, the architect, the contractor, and myself on how some things should proceed. I'm hoping it will be before you on August 4th. but we still do plan to try to have our planning and zoning staff back in their spaces by September. And then the rest of the department will be funneling in probably in February of next year. But the whole project will not likely be completed until April. Next slide. Our emerging issues. We, though it's not directly our responsibility, there are a lot of unfunded state mandates that regulate how we can adopt things that affect the city. It's been very demoralizing as to the number of things that have been adopted that undercut our efforts toward performance enhancements in buildings, green architecture, reduction of carbon gas emissions, and some other things. That relates to our loss of home rule. As you know, we've experienced, we've not been able to update our business tax receipt schedule that was created in the 90s. There's some limitations with the building fund. There are issues with FEMA, co-compliance, planning zoning, which we'll get into as well. The biggest challenge we face right now is the new ERP implementation. I have to give major kudos to IT and my staff who've been working collaboratively across several meetings every single week because each division has its own module, business licenses, planning, preservation, building, and co-compliance. Things have gotten better, but it's bumpy. Trying to get 1,900 finished and deal with the challenges for customer service and having our staff split in multiple areas has not been great. And across our entire department, retention and recruitment of staff is a huge challenge, remains a challenge. And we hopefully, based on some of the comments you made earlier, you will work with us to provide professional ladders because most of our positions are sort of progressive in nature. People come in with a little bit of experience, gain experience, and in order to keep them, they deserve a raise or a promotion or additional educational opportunities. Otherwise, they're going to go to other places. opportunities. We have broadened the website under the previous version of it, as well as a new version of it. We are working collaboratively and Alicia's here with me. She's our budget manager officer, as well as you hopefully will continue to support her being made an assistant director on providing as much online accessibility to the city as possible. one of the things that will cross over with the building fund is that we will complete sometime this year later this year the complete digitization of the property files uh we are keeping the historic pieces of it but we do not have them archivally stored they are not on archival paper they are not stored in archival boxes they are not stored in archivally climatized places so we are losing paper historic documents at an alarming rate, because some of the documents are as much as 100 years old, and they do not last forever. So we're keeping what we can. We're digitizing all that we are able to do it. It will be eventually available through the website attached to each parcel.

And that's why I asked the question. My property file, my house, right? I mean, I know there's little pink stuff in it. I've been in it a few times.

will the little pink slip the the telephone messages be scanned in how they are scanning everything that is in a condition that can go through a scanner by a third party we are losing some that are just it's basically falling apart and it's how they're maybe they're shooting them through a scan and not laying them down and having the scanner well there's a variety of ways there's some things don't shoot through some things are And we're doing the best we can. We're having a pretty good success rate at getting things back, but we are losing paper records that are very old.

When, let's say, my file is scanned in, can I get that? I would like the opportunity for the owner to get that paper file back. I would like to have that in my possession, because I know at times there are discrepancies. In my log, I just got a copy from the county clerk's office of an order from years ago, and it was a double-sided paper, and they scanned one side. some of the some of the final order that we're now like litigating about what to be done so i just in in terms of i think it would be good for us to have the ability once you're done with it if you're not gonna if you're you're gonna destroy them just give them back so i have it so i i know in my hands i've got my my property file how would you do that you'd have to call every single person and say there's 16 get it there are 16 000 records uh

We can look and see what we have. If somebody wants it, we could make a paper copy of the paper copy because there are some things that we need to keep for historical purposes. Some things, like I said, are not surviving the scanning process and maybe move back and forth. And we can see what we have. But you're welcome, as anybody is, they can contact Pretoria in our office and they can come and request a copy be made of their record. And then everything that is scanned eventually will be attached to our gis mapping by parcel so you can it'll be a little button it's going to take us a while you can click on what has been scanned for your property and you can at that point have access to it in any manner that you want you can download it you can save you can print it that's our ultimate goal and we'll probably have that finished around fy28

okay as long as this whole thing that just happened to me with this county scanning just flipped me out it's like i don't know what to do with this case and it's the scanning thing uh mr mcvoy and mr saverge and i hear you madam mayor on wanting the records i would kind of i did go look at mine i don't know a number of years ago i hope they're still there um but if william were to give them to me and i sell the house the next owner does you know there's no obligation that i give them to the next owner so i think their needs you know they're just there they're just If it is, I mean, the concern you have is that the reason you want it is that you're not totally confident that the digital is there. So somehow there needs to be some balance of, you know, obviously the best is scan everything totally properly and have no entropy for falling apart.

Mr. Secretary.

yeah i would tend to agree with mr good boy on that that i mean even my own file i know many of the documents couldn't be digitized just because they're you know the ink had faded so so much um but it was available to me to go and take pictures of it and i did i did with my camera and the camera the iphone actually did a great job of being able to preserve that so i would be uncomfortable with us giving up our files i mean we need to be the system of record for that destroy them And then talking about the professional ladder, in our answers that came back from one of the workshops, it was indicated that we don't have that, right? Because it was asked in context to the certifications of which certifications actually Should you be taking in career paving? I think that is absolutely critical for a number of reasons, especially employee retention, as well as making sure that we have an incentive program based on career laddering and education. But we don't know what the ladder actually is and whether that ladder is supportive of our goals as a city. So I would like to ask my colleagues if you guys would like to make that a priority for this year is to establish those career ladders per department where the department head can look at it and say, yeah, these are the education items that I believe or the department believes are valuable for it. And here's how someone can progress through that. It's up to us to set the policy to make it happen. Here we are, a city that's how old, and we don't have career ladders. I think this is a worthy thing to dedicate time to, and if there's additional resources required, To make that happen, I would like to know what that is, but I for one would like to see this happen over the next year as a goal for every department is to establish this. And I'm just bringing it up now because if there's budgetary concerns about making that happen, I would gladly support a supplemental to support that effort.

I'd be interested to hear from someone from HR what their thought on that is, but I'm guessing that the thought would be, yes, showing people as they come in or making it available, here's how you can advance would be helpful for retention, attraction, the works. I don't know. I have no idea what the workload is to do that. Probably not insignificant.

We've been looking at a couple of things. We've been looking at possible testing for aptitude testing for some different positions so that we could test people before they start to see if they have the aptitude for the position. I would have flunked for this one. I would have too. And I appreciate these people so much because it is really a thankless job. But, you know, we have a, you know, Yolanda runs a tight team and these guys are troopers, but it's tough. I mean, nobody wants to see a code officer. I think we're just talking about this. Nobody wants to see a code officer at their house. Even me, you know, I live in a historic neighborhood. I see the code officer. I'm like, oh no, but luckily I'm sympathetic because I understand what they're doing, but not everybody does. You know, it's dangerous. It's hot and it's thankless. So we're trying to figure out, we're also trying to create a, we're trying to, this is one of the things I think we talked about the other day and that we're in that that shade meeting is that we're trying to create career paths for people. So I think when you can see that if I do this for this amount of time, then I could get promoted to do this and promoted to do this. We also try and promote from within and within the city. So you maybe can start as a lifeguard or a code officer and you can transfer to different positions. So we're always trying to do that. If you guys could think of any other creative ways, we're open.

Well, that raises a question I see you on Sunday, but when we talked to we discussed, you know what people were taking what course people were taking. Are we, are we going to use the intention to live in 70 if you're in code, you can go up the code ladder or if you're, but one person who's working for the city and code says you know what, I'm really interested in electricity.

i'd like to train for that is that flexible or is that you're on your path well generally an apartment is going to you know williams department is going to pay for training that supports his department but if you transfer in you know absolutely we were you know there are you know let's use the alignment apprentice program as an example those people a lot of those people started different actually all of them started different positions in the city you know they started in water they started in public works the alignment apprentice program so it's perfect example so we're training them from ground up it's me and just two seconds and the other thing about the education thing would be that everybody if you had the courses aligned with the track you'd be um kind of uh what's the word i'm looking for where it's all the same

no um where everybody's learning the same thing so you know you're getting the same information each employee is getting the same information let's say it's a training course you know it's everybody that goes through that will have that same training as opposed to i want to go to this course i want to go to this course i want to go to this course and then you have people with all different um educations coming at and trying to do the same job you know what i'm saying like if you're like okay well you're a brand new code officer this is your course And then you go here and this is your course. And if they're all taking the same courses, they're getting the same information. And then we have that consistency in application. You know, I think that's one of the things the residents are complaining about. Well, you know, this person trained this person, but this person was trained by that person and they're getting conflicting information. So it needs to be consistent. Well, part of the standard. That's the word I'm looking for.

Yeah. The code actually is standard. So there are certain courses that are built into a code officer's training. And William can speak to that more. He's the department expert. And I know that Yolanda has finally got a solid team behind her where the training should be consistent. Okay, good. So she's been building and developing up her employees through the ranks. and developing. So there's one person who's doing all the training. I don't know if she's actually created a syllabus, but that's a great idea. Yeah, I standardized training. I agree with that. I appreciate that. But as far as like the face training, they all go through the same training for their certifications. Okay, thank you.

Second.

And I can appreciate that. And I guess what I'm trying to say, tying it to the budget, we have an incentive program whereby people can get a 5% pay increase by going through education. We do not have a roadmap that tells us what things qualify and what things don't. And that was apparent from the answers we got back. And what I'm trying to say is I think we need to pause that program until each department has established what that roadmap is. Otherwise, each time we had some that we questioned, is that really pertinent to your department? And I'm pretty sure the individuals who had that denied were very disappointed because maybe they probably felt that it was very important to their job. Otherwise, they wouldn't want to go through it. So until we have that, I think we need to put a pause on that particular program from a budget perspective, because I don't want necessarily us up here to be deciding, oh, that training is appropriate or not appropriate for you. that belongs at the department level, at Williams level or Ed's or so on. So I would like agreement from my colleagues, let's pause that until this roadmap is created by that department.

In the case of this department, though, hold, hold, hold, it is set. So for a code officer, it is set. When they are hired, there are expectations that you must take these certain courses, and they're all taking minutes built into their compensation and their career path immediately. And that's fine.

So then that department can continue on and utilize that. And when we asked, hey, can we see that? It should be readily available. The answer that we got back was, just so we're clear, was no, this does not exist. So if it exists in some departments, awesome. They're ahead of the game and they just continue on and they're not paused. But for those departments that don't have it, they need to get that before they continue in this program.

Well, the program is managed at the department head level. And we came back out of this meeting and I did compile a list of all the certifications and training programs for you. I just hadn't had a chance to review it before I forwarded it to you. So that list does exist.

It's not a list of all the possible trainings. It's a plan.

No, it is a list of all the certifications and trainings.

What I'm saying is that is not what will satisfy the request. The request is a plan, a roadmap. These out of that master list, these are the ones that count. These ones don't count.

I think she made just a list of count.

That's what I. Yes. And what I was going to do and the reason I haven't forward to you is I was going to break it down by the levels for the policy.

Understood. So it sounds like you're on the way. I would just like it paused until that exists because. When we got the answers in writing, it said it didn't exist. Now you're coming back and saying it does exist, or maybe it's going to exist tomorrow. Let's just agree. Can we put it on pause until it actually exists and we can see it?

No, hold on. It did exist. I just didn't incorporate into the policy. And I needed to update it.

Why in the answers? And I can read you the answers. Why in the answers does it say it does not exist?

Yeah, yeah. It's a budgetary item. Can we just agree to pause it until it exists? I mean, I'm going to ask that. that mr segret is just that we pause all if i'm incorrect all training for people until no not all training no the five percent salary credit until the roadmap exists

Madam Mayor. Yeah, thank you. Two facts. I understand what Commissioner Secker is trying to say, but things I like to consider, would like to be asked to consider. A, some of these are tied to bargaining unit issues. So we can go back and take a look at it. We'll be more definitive. We can go back and look at it as it relates to it. So we'll go back and take a look at it, break those out and come up with a roadmap. We understand exactly what you're looking for as a result. So we'll take a look at that. But I want you to know that we can't pause the entire program because there are people who are bargaining with you that are impacted by the program.

Yeah, I mean, if somebody asked for something that's appropriate, why would you pause it?

And this is tied to people's compensation and their careers and their morale.

I understand that. But can we just understand that in writing from staff, they said they had no roadmap. Now staff is saying they have a roadmap and that is the source of the conflict.

City manager, please handle this so we can move on. This is a direct conversation. one item thing that can be handled offline but we need to stick to me we're now way behind track and my light is dim and unrelated to that um

that may be applying generally um under the emerging issues it cons under community sustainability this is for william um it it concerns me a good deal and i guessing it might concern you as well as the director of that department that on the one hand You already have state unfunded mandates things that they're telling us you got to do but here's no money to do it and by the way, we're going to take away another source of your funding on top of that and I would say you know residents need to be really aware of what comes out of tallahassee that is a very inconsistent and unplanned way of telling municipalities to try to do their stuff it's untenable so push back on that um and the loss of home rule is is certainly related to that but it's particularly acute with the unfunded mandates You got to do this. There's no money. And by the way, we're going to take away additional money from you. What a good idea.

Unfunded mandates are as old as government.

So I think we'll go on to slide 65. on performance measures. We have been doing a, I call it a city manager's report that tracks every single city department activity by month for every year, except for about 14 months in 2019 and 20, when there was some disagreement about how the department should be run from the city manager's office. This doesn't reflect any current administration. And so that report was not completely filled out those 14 months. it has about 75 items that we track monthly across all divisions.

For example?

For example, how many building permit applications came in, how many building permits were issued, how many inspections, how much revenue was brought in by what type, business licenses, planning activities, co-compliance activities. preservation activity and that list has grown and Alicia is responsible for a brunt of it and that keeps growing as we identify items that we feel are appropriate to track and report back out. So for every fiscal year since I've been here, except for a little gap, I can provide you what the department did any month of any year.

That's an incredible database.

One of our challenges was that I was hoping our ERP would be like, here are all the things you want to track, create a button that I can push and create it. We're not there yet. We hope, as I mentioned, a mobility plan for the adoption of mobility fee, and we will see how we track funneling money to do infrastructure improvements in the city. can continue to collaborate with the team that is hoping to open the gulfstream hotel in september and i've taken some recent courses and this gets back at the downtown improving our community focus on what's called sustainable preservation there are a lot of buildings in this city that are worth being kept that aren't necessarily historic but they are limited by building code fema uh existing condition and where the building code and other things limit their ability to be reused. But if they are lost, then they have to meet the new parking requirement, new setbacks and whatever else. So I'm working on a couple of things that's going to be presented at the APA conference in Miami on how to encourage the reuse of existing buildings more creatively and open up a broader breadth of how we apply the non-conformities in the city since we are a city with a whole lot of non-conformities and i'll report back to you on that um a little bit later yes and when is that it's in uh october friday october 15th or 16th in miami and can you when you come back and then give us that presentation as well Yes, there's also going to be a roundtable discussion at the Palm Beach County Planning Congress in August. I think it's on August 14th, and I'm going to touch on it some there because we have a number of performance measure activities with our buildings that is now being undercut by legislation from the state. We still want to encourage people to try to be resourceful with the buildings that they have. and improve them because that's an embodied energy that's been there. And someone did spend time building that building, and it should be reused. And if you ride through downtown, there are a lot of vacancies of which a lot of those buildings need substantial improvement and investment, which is stymied and not necessarily encouraged by the building code or our LDR. So I'm working on some of that. So we'll go on to the next slide. I didn't see any questions. Good. With the administration, which is headed up by Alicia and myself, again, unfunded mandates, recruitment of staff. We are looking at the broadest array of revenue generation opportunities as we can. Where have we created new revenue and how could that be enhanced? Hopefully we can help finance identify some new revenue sources that have not been studied by the city. And then also the administration division is taking the lead on the ERP implementation. And poor Alicia stuck going to most of the meetings every week. And so she spends probably six hours of her week just on implementing the ERP at meetings. The planning and preservation, there's two offices. There's a planning and zoning office and the preservation office. Their emerging issues is how we creatively deal with customer service, addressing the variety of information requests that come in, and also the challenges presented by state statutes that limit our ability to make things any more difficult or challenging until October 2027. We are constantly reviewing the LDRs and other things. We have made some substantial changes on how we approach the landscape code and the landscape consulting. This is a division that's probably the challenge the most with recruitment and retention. As an example, the manager of that division, we've had six in 15 years. That is unsustainable. We have been very fortunate to train up many of our staff. As they are trained up, they choose to leave the city. It's a similar challenge in the building fund. Opportunities we are looking at through the ERP program to improve cross-departmental coordination and communication. Thank you. um mr perry he's coordinated a meeting that's happening in august we're going to bring us all together to figure out how we might better communicate among departments and within the department to address customer concerns as it relates to building permit processing entitlement processing and a bunch of other things that come through us and then also streamlining the permitting process on the planning and preservation side and we have rolled out a new zoning permit application process online and through our office that deals with the areas where zoning has to be addressed that is not covered by the exemption for the building code of $7,500 or less. There are things that still require zoning review, but no longer require building permit review. So the staff was very good at getting that off the ground. And it is where you're going to be seeing some changes to the fee schedule on the 21st related to that you can go to 68 please so the code compliance there's a big meeting coming up on the 21st we're going to give you an update on William I have a question for you on planning preservation um I know you you're giving a monthly report and you're tracking a whole bunch of metrics is one of those metrics turnaround time for permits I think there needs to be a better understanding of what permits involve. We have permits that are very quick to turn around, same-day permits for exchanging an air conditioner, doing some electrical upgrades. There's another one that's a same-day permit. Permits have a very broad scope. breadth of complexity. Some require just a building and a zoning. Some require multiple departments to review them. We don't have the ability to technically track how long someone spends on reviewing a permit because most of our staff are multidisciplinary and they don't just spend their whole day looking at a permit. I'm hoping we can create something to the new ERP, but because there's such a large variety of permit types. How many building permit types are there? do you remember it was like 70. and then in addition there are a whole variety of what we consider similar to a permanent type in the types of things that planning zoning preservation is reviewing and so they're not all the same and kind of understood that they're they're not all the same understand all the complexities of it it sounds like just to keep it quick the technology doesn't support you understanding this permit stayed in historic for two days

Is that a fair statement? We can look at that. Yes. You can see that today. Okay. So based on that, one of the largest complaints that I see from constituents in this department is historic review times. I know that you are short-staffed. to say the least, right? It's an understatement. I know that you have open positions there and are hoping to fill that. Even with those open positions, do you need more resources in that department so that that turnaround time can be compressed to match more of, let's say, the building department, where pretty much it seems like 72 hours, once it hits their department, it's coming around. Whereas in the historic department, the goal is two weeks, but A lot of times in actuality, it ends up being very much longer for different things. Do you have enough resources? In other words, do you need another position? Will that help alleviate it? Is it something else? How do we help a pressure relief valve for that?

The division has never been fully staffed. I set for maybe two years in the almost 16 years that I've been here. Yes, we could use more staff. However, it would be great if the positions that we have were actually filled and we can get a better assessment of how fast we can do things. Also, the turnover rate has negatively affected historic preservation because we've had six preservation planners, four assistant preservation planners since the position was created in FY12. Are we losing them because of money? We're losing them because of money, working conditions, advancement opportunities. We've lost people to going to other states. They've come here, not liked it, left.

unfortunately um we've lost people to the private sector the public sector there's a whole variety of reasons so i didn't see a supplemental for any kind of increase in the historic department um in terms of raising salary ranges or anything like that i would just without belaboring the point i personally would like you to analyze What do we have to do? Is it going to cost us an extra $200,000 to fix this? An extra $500,000 in terms of that aspect? Because this not only impacts our residents and businesses, it's new businesses and new residents come here, they hear about the nightmare that it is, and it's not necessarily your department's or staff's fault when you've got one planner trying to handle the world it's it's an unfair thing and if we have to pay more to fix this i think we have to do that so the second part of it is as a pressure relief valve would and i know there's new legislation that's kind of mandating private permitting and inspections would encouraging and driving projects to that outlet help be a pressure relief valve for your department is that something we should look at doing

Well, we and you just approved it last week was an increase in the budget for Chenmore, who has been supplementing our plan review and preservation.

Not for internal consultants, private.

Well, the private side of the building can be done. The private provider review of. historic preservation type components and some of the planning zoning entitlements is a little dicey because people, the expense of which they would pay us to review it is far less than they would pay the private sector. In addition, then we have to confirm what the private sector said was copacetic. So we can get back to you with a little bit of input on that, but it's available, but it will be challenging. And I think because, sorry, but because of our community being lesser affluent and our education level across all boards is not the same as other communities, putting an additional financial burden on them probably won't go over very well.

I wouldn't belabor it, but I disagree with you there. There are many people in the historic neighborhoods who would gladly pay double, triple, quadruple to get their plans approved in a more timely fashion.

Can I finish? I just want to add, though, I think we need to put it on the record. And Mike, you know, Mr. McFoy is the earth scientist. I am the person who's been working for him since 1993 on various levels. And I'm fully aware of the fact that we take too long understand that completely but i think it also needs to be mentioned that a lot of times and i've done this again from all different sides you know i put my point in three months ago and haven't gotten anything well because they asked you to send a survey or they asked you to fill out this form and it hasn't been done so i think we have to be really cautious you know i mean certainly the time frames are not great but i think we have to be a little conscious of the fact that some of the things that we're hearing in negative feedback are things that they either don't understand the process or they're sort of lax about fulfilling the process there's a lot of times i've represented people and hopefully looking they're having problems with permitting and code and i go there and i say to the city well look at that and then well okay we asked them three months ago to submit this approval or submit this and it didn't happen so i think we have to be a little judicious in our criticism of in each individual case um because it's really easy to criticize but i think we also need to acknowledge the fact that a lot of times that's part of the applicant yeah i wasn't concerned i was hoping for how do we fix those problems mr mcboy

And I hear both what the mayor says and what Commissioner Segrist says. I believe if I understand Commissioner Segrist correctly, what he's looking for is not criticize, it's empirically is there anything that is within our power basically budgetary that would help empirically reduce that whether that's a better interface that informs the commissioners more some of the stuff that the internal auditors report suggested hey automate your forms a bit more so the form tells you hey you're not moving forward till your surveys here um have the computer the technology help out with because yes it's it's probably true some of it is the city and staff level some of it is the resident the applicant level But empirically, our goal here, and I think yours too, is shorten that time. And I think the question is, not for right now, but before the next budget, come back, don't be shy about telling us, look, what I need is a Craig computer sitting in the corner with awesome software, get me that, or I need two more people or whatever. We may or may not be able to provide it, but we would like...

to move that whatever it is we we're not in a position to sensibly judge that but we might be in a position to spring loose some funds yeah i i don't disagree with any of this i just think that we need to be mindful like if it if the empirical what i'm not mindful of what i'm trying to i'm not trying to finish a sentence um You always tell me don't interrupt.

I know. Come on.

Okay. I think, you know, so empirically, they applied for this permit on January 1st. They didn't get it until March 30th. That tells us that it took a long time, but it doesn't tell us why.

Correct.

And I think that's my concern.

Yeah. I agree. I agree.

That's all.

We have some very good data on the wise and the one little caveat. It's not necessarily excuse. I hope that you will appreciate that the planning of the preservation division has dealt with three of the most complex long term development projects that this city has ever seen. The Gulf Stream Hotel, La Moda and the parking garage. Right. They're all in a historic district and other staff has tried to help in. But the amount of time that our preservation staff has had to spend on those three items, is monumental and it's across not just months but years so that we're getting toward the end where they're not going to be as involved as much so hopefully that's going to free up but we have two other big projects coming in preservation um in the next months that you'll probably see eventually um the hotel conversion at uh is it e and fifth down close to federal the maybe it's third and But that's the old folks home. That's moving along in a process. And then there's some work that's over here that's going to be in this district that's going to probably plan development coming forward. You'll be seeing those shortly. I think we can jump to slide 68. Co-compliance. They do have an increased workload, and hopefully our meeting on the 21st will provide clearer direction. Yolanda has been very aggressive in recruiting people, and our management arrangement has changed a bit. So I hope that our recruitment and retention will be a little easier. successful and then your policy direction that you've provided in our first meeting and our upcoming one will help with the emerging issues. There will be increased workload based on how we're going to be approaching to be more outreach in terms of formal courtesy notice letters especially with the inspections that we changed with a business license and also with dealing with worst first life safety issues versus other co-compliance issues and the erp should be helping with that there was a and this also affects business license which you haven't gotten to there are some increases in funding as you are aware the postage is going up another five percent on sunday We have not raised postage funding for these two divisions in years. We finally had to bite the bullet and ask for some more money and keep going.