City Government - Regular Meeting

So, call to order. Uh, the Larmy City Council work session, Thursday, May the 7th, 2026. And uh before we begin this board session, uh I'd like to ask if there are any public comments on nonaggenda items. Anyone online? Uh no one online.

No one online. Uh with that said, we can move on to the work session. Uh yes, councelor Newman. I move to suspend the rule's time to allow open dialogue between council members and staff including the name the use of first aids for the purpose of encouraging open discussion. Thank you. I have a motion by Newman and second by all in favor say I.

Oppose. That motion passes. The rules are suspended. Now I get just thank you. Thank you. It would be a few people really did the work to make this happen. So these two are the workhorse products and turn it on. So really as I did by the team in order of the people it's a fantastic budget and really what I want to talk about first before we get going is you know the the values or the core priorities for what we're working on first um you know we want to be able to evaluate Larry's financial position and create That's one of our main goals. The next one is to rightize our local government. Uh evaluate our capital investment and to build trust with our residents through a clear, understandable, digestible budget book that will hopefully encourage our residents and everybody to really get deep and not have that stigma. It's too hard to find the information.

Uh Jen has really done a great job. I'm excited to go through the process of

I also would be remiss, you know, as you know my teeth like it's a really small team. Um and um some of you are aware that actually January just went live the third module of the year. Um Jim Malmer who is joining us online tonight is currently a key part of the budget team and move on. This year her role is a little bit more limited as it has been in previous years just because there's been so much hitchiness related to not only that project but of course her transitioning into the role that I used to have. Um but she is a key part of that team and she is joining us tonight. She is heading out to a conference next week and she actually coached five race. So I encouraged her to join online. That was just fine. But I want you to make sure that to make sure that you know that she's that team. And so I want to start tonight I'm asking you to go to um 15 for publication and I want to make sure before we go to page 15. Um I think one of the things that been guess council is that the first main objective of this council is financial sustainability which I think for the first school year 247 so that is super important to us

and so um actually if you're going to be if you're if you're going to be navigating with the page number um and typing it into Adobe, you'll want to type in page 16 for that landing page. Just summary of the overall budget. And what I'll do is I'll actually just see if I can't put it up on screen. Nancy, do you know the mortgage 15? 15.

And so, you know, the budget book got a significant base upgrade, whatever we're going to call it. Um so and that really is in alignment with our work together on transparency and so I'm super pleased with that you also spended the um for tonight's session because I think transparency at its core it's really about understanding the information in front of us. um not just regurgitating a lot of schedules that are with tiny tiny numbers that are tough to use and are overwhelming within about um it's actually really thinking about audience not only you as council members as but also members of our public um if we want them to start to understand the budget even give us 5 seconds what we put in front of them needs to be something that they feel comfortable with um one of the things that my mom always tells me um and she's like say it to me in a way I can understand. Um because I think one of the trappings of government, right? You sign up to do this work, you become more and more of a technical expert, you become this person in your field and you start to use all of this language and start to learn all these rules about how we have to do things. And I'm not really sure why that is. Like, you know, almost the tail end of my career probably. I I don't really know why that is, but I know it's a thing and I know I see it all the time and I know it feels like and it absolutely does not feel sincere. And so what you'll see in this budget book are lots of graphics that illustrate far in in a much more concise fashion. Um anything that I could put into words and hold someone's attention with. You're also going to see using of the first person a first person language instead of third person language. far more conversational, even a little bit silly at times, but still professional just to, you know, kind of play with the

idea that maybe someday someone might want to be a legend because it's not going to put you to sleep. And I believe that that might be possible. I think we have a lot of work to do ahead of us. Um, I think there's probably more potential for video and things like YouTube. But if we keep doing this work, we keep refining, we keep making it shorter, we take those steps towards a document and a process that people actually feel like they want to get engaged in. And that really is the goal, right? We want people to show up and talk about their interests, not when the issue blows up and not when like the the third vote is happening, but maybe during the budgeting process um while you all are making plans because you know how I feel about this, right? The budget is the plan. it is the way that you're planning to execute and use those resources. People just don't understand it in that way. And if they have any kind of money trauma at all, of course, that's going to factor into the equation, right? And so, um, I will be super curious to hear your feedback after we get through this pro process. And I'm also really willing to keep working on it and just improving it year by year until we all come to a space where we're like, "Wow, I'm so proud of this." Um, and I I actually don't think the work is ever going to be done. To be truthful, I think every year we look at it with curiosity and a fresh set of eyes and we see where we get. So, without further ado, this first page, this page 15 or 16 in of your electronic document is really a highlight of the recommended budget. You'll see it's $98.7 million. And that graph at the bottom of the page is really going to tell the story. So, of that $98.7 million, um, a fair amount of that is for capital investment, right? 25% of it, that's a significant portion, about $24.9 million. But look at wages and benefits. That's even more than capital investment. Does that surprise anyone?

No.

No. Right. Um, and those, you know, wages and benefits, it's not just like employers taxes. and things like pension and health insurance and so types of costs that really do add up. The smallest one of the smaller percentages of our cost are operating supplies, right? And that's about 17%. And often times when you hear people talk about like, oh, let's look for efficiencies or let's look at this. They might be thinking about operating costs. What you do um in the way people work and and how we're actually bundling and strategically planning for capital investment has far more value. um than the kind of cherrypicked small cuts that are much easier to focus on and talk about that maybe don't add up to as much of a meaningful impact. Um that's about all I have to say about this graphic. Do you guys want to have some discussion here? Todd, do you have anything to add?

Yeah, and I think Jen hit the nail on the head. You know, one of the things that we talk about as we're talking about our core priorities of right sizing the government, right? We have a lot of capital and operation. If you combine it together, that's 42% of our budget, maybe 35% of personnel. I feel that there's a an imbalance or is there been an imbalance that we haven't had the right amount of staff to get the projects out to use up capital projects to get these done? And you're going to see that as we go through and we talk about right sizing government. I'm going to be the first one to admit that when I say right sizing government, I don't believe Larry is overstacked. I believe we've been a little bit understaffed, unable to get some of the resources out in place and I hope that some of what we what we've proposed through the budget meets your favor and helps us attain those goals. So we'll go to the next page which is page 17 electron. We'll go to the next page which is page 17 electronically 16 in the hard copy. And I we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about the personnel budget but we do have some standard disclosures we make about the number of authorized positions. Um I do what where I want to where I want to pause here and talk is about the notion of the base personnel budget because you're going to see throughout the publication if you pay attention to the summary of the budget changes and why those budgets changed. There's a lot of comments in this book about this change because the base personnel forecast. Well, what does that even mean? Um well um the way we treat benefited physicians is that council authorizes new benefited positions, we have the same number of positions that roll forward year after year. And depending on the person who occupies that position, maybe they're a new hire who make a makes a little bit less than the person there before them. Maybe they have a different type of insurance coverage. Whatever the case may be, we always budget using an

updated forecast. So, it's kind of like a zerobased budget every year um for that current employee. And so, we're not using standard costing and we're not loading in family coverage for every position, which is I know something that some some organizations do. And we're also not allowing departments to build reserves from vacancy savings. And so, occasionally the department is really strapped during the year, like this has happened to me in finance. Um I've had two people down. We're a really small team to begin with. I might transfer some of that budget to go get some consulting services to do our core functionality, but I'm not able to roll that additional budget forward between fiscal years and create a little pot of money for myself. And so I want to make sure I talk about that because we have another major governmental institution in town that behaves a little differently and that's a okay. There's no problem with that. Um, but we're a smaller operation and we're a centralized operation from a financial planning standpoint and I think it's really important to talk about that. And so that payroll based budget is really objective um and just based on the people in the positions at the time that we do that forecast sometime in late February or March. So I want to make sure I understand what you're saying. So if a new employee comes in, you know what you're using. You're not saying across this department the average is this and we're going to assume family insurance. You're saying based on this particular person is in there now. Correct.

Okay. But then when somebody leaves when there is an open position, a truly open position, we will budget at the rate that we think we're going to be able to recruit for. And depending on the position, that will change. And then we will budget family coverage for open positions. There are no compensation increases included in the payroll base budget unless it's related to a standard process like certification pay or occasionally reclassifications because a department is proposed to do something more efficiently and that's been approved by the city manager. But if we are talking about a cola or the city manager is talking about performance-based increases, those are not part of the base budget. You would actually see that as a separate budgetary request or a placeholder later in the document. Are there more questions about personnel? Okay. So, why don't we just take a brief pause on page 19, which looks like this on the screen, 18 hard copy, and just talk about our long-term debt and lease obligations. And so, um, you know, the AICPA is talking about it. you'd have to live on under a rock um to not know that federal debt service, not the liability, the actual debt service is over a trillion dollars annually now. Um it's a pretty spooky number and I think it has people spooked for a pretty good reason. And often times when people get spooked about something, um they look at the government closest to them and become concerned about that same issue. And I totally understand why that happens and it makes a lot of sense. And so I feel like we need to talk about debt a little bit more openly um and as not as an afterthought but as a before matter in the budget book. And so we made a decision to pull this up this year. Um what you see here um are our

outstanding obligations as of last fiscal year end. And so for the governmental activities that's things like our general fund and our SBT funds. Um we had about $9.7 million in debt outstanding. If you look, six million of that are the general obligation bonds related to this vet tax. And so, of course, as you know, we just called we just redeemed all those bonds. You guys did that just maybe a week ago. Um, so for our governmental activities, that brings us down to about $3.7 million. For the amount of assets we have, that is almost no debt, and that's how we prefer it. It's a very conservative financial structure. It's not that we shouldn't incur that sometimes. And when it makes sense and there's revenue to support it and that's real revenue, I'm all for it. Um, but we want to make sure the more debt you have, the less financial flexibility you have. And we want to make sure that we have that right mix of those two things. And remember, we're going to be issuing general obligation bonds for our next bet tax. And so that's where you're going to see a lot of those debt issuances in our governmental activities. For our business type operations, we have more debt. We have about $28.7 million across water, wastewater, and solid waste. So that's all three funds. And actually, most of that debt, remember, they're state revolving fund loans. And so those come at an interest rate of 2%, 1.25% or 0% over a period of 20 or 30 years. And so economically speaking, you're actually coming out way ahead because you're you're you're definitely beating inflation with those types of loans. And so I think this is really important to get out there. I've also just calculated the debt to assets ratio. It's 08 for governmental activities and.16 for business type activities. Anything under a.3 is considered considered to be a very conservative financial structure. So I think it's important we talk about this because there is some conversation in the community. There should be conversations about debt and in Laram um

I hope the numbers speak for themselves. Do you guys have any questions here? helpful to have that perspective.

It is all the overview we have and we're ready to dive right into the general fund which you're going to find on page 23 in your electronic document. So the real question is what isn't in the general fund, right? And that's the way I think about it. So what isn't in the general fund if we want to have some conversation? Recenter fund. Well, I'm not answering. I I thought you were posing it to the counselors.

Recenter funds, enterprise funds.

Yes, for sure. Yeah. Right. Um and that's pretty much we have some smaller funds, right? But that's pretty much it. And so that is the conundrum. Uh because you're trying to do all of these services in the one fund that is not primarily supported by user fees. It's supported by general taxation. Um or intergovernmental revenue sources that tend to not grow very much over time. Now some of them do, but not really. a lot of this revenue sources from the state of Wyoming. Huge win this year with the direct distribution by the way. Um that will grow over time now. Um but until that win, most of those revenue sources, things like federal mineral royalties and severance taxes, those revenue sources have been flat since I started working at the city in 2011.

It's a long time. um the economic development fund which is not enterprise or general. How much do we have in there now?

Um I believe it's something like 1.5 or 6 million. I could be a little bit off of that. And so from what you just said, I what I heard versus what I know is that you said, "What doesn't it pay for?" I don't know if the public would hear that conversation and know that it doesn't pay for utilities, um the solid waste. Anyway, things like that. I I think from the conversation we just had it sound like you're saying all but rec center and I know that's not I believe Mike Mike also said enterprise funds and so rec center and enterprise funds

it's important to define enterprise fun water and so the include no enterprise no

okay would um the storm water become an enterprise or would that just be a general obligation when we establish that? And well, we we're making payments out of the general fund, but if we ever establish that as one which we receive money from a tax, how will that be treated? I think that's an interesting discussion board. Um, today was actually some discussion around that also and will be discussion with the legislature throughout time. As it's proposed right now, it's proposed to be a function of the general fund and then hopefully over time we have a way to set up a fee structure or fee system to support that and not through potentially a general tax.

It all depends on what happens. Correct.

And so you'll find a lot I'm not going to go over a lot of the information at the beginning of the book. I do encourage you to read it, especially if you're a New Yorker council member, just so you understand how our how our financial condition now is very different than it was even in fiscal year 2020. So in the past six years, because of both wind energy development and the taxation of online sales, Lar has revenue that it has never had before. And I think this council and previous councils have been done a very good job being good stewards of those resources. But we're starting to see that wind energy development trickle. Um but with the benefit of having a lot of reserves on hand because our councils haven't gotten out ahead of themselves. Your city manager hasn't recommended to you budgets that expend all the available reserves. and we've been basically saving them, planning for them as one-time resources and allocating them out after the fact in a way that is sustainable and really levels the impact um on our departments and hopefully provides for our capital needs for a fair amount of time into the future. So these decisions I just want to tell you they have been very intentional and consistent over the past six years. So this is not magic. This is basically risk management and financial planning. Right? That's what you see here. Jen, just to clarify, you had said um we looked at those reserves as a one time.

Um so I just want to repeat that so that we're not looking at that as a sustainable or a fund that we could rely on or something that we're using long term. It is really looked at as one project sort of thing.

Once um once you have resources that go into reserves um they are essentially one time at that point. you are managing them as a one-time appropriation. Um because it's it's like spending from it's spending above and beyond your income. Yeah. But I think that an example of that is the street project that is going on right now was funded through one-time funds through the way in wind energy sales tax and that's that's the things that are bought to put up the wind energy. It's not um like a fee that we get from from utility operating. It's the construction sales tax on the equipment.

So let's talk a little bit about what we view as revenue or income, you know, whatever you want to call that, right? What whatever labor we're going to use. So in Laramie, we plan for our revenue um based on the revenue that we expect to be sustainable. So if we're getting a glut of let's say we're getting $5 million or more from wind energy development and we know that's not going to continue. I mean you can see it. It's not hard to predict. We're not going to increase our core revenue budget to have that $5 million embedded in it. We're going to let our because our core revenue budget is what we're using to balance our ongoing operating cost. Now, we may know that we're going to get some more revenue and we're fine with that. We welcome that. But we say we're going to use that for deferred capital maintenance or fleet purchases or something like that because we're not going to be able to rely on it. And so if we go fund a bunch of ongoing operations with that, um, all we're doing is setting ourselves up for a let down later on. Same thing with property tax, right? You can you could have seen that for three years. And so are we going to let our base budget be at an artificially high amount with that revenue forecast? Are we going to go ahead and adjust that down and as other revenue sources are growing, let that growth offset that reduction in property tax early so that you're not creating a crisis when it happens. And that's how we roll here. Um, and so when you see the variances between the final revenue that comes in and the revenue that goes out, that's actually one of the major reasons that that happens. um because we have been planning for some of these sign the reduction in property tax for at least two years. Um and we also have been not loading in those one-time sales and use tax collections for the duration of that um endeavor. And so we're seeing

variances in the millions of dollars for that reason. I just have a comment about that and what it what it is is I I appreciate the work that's gone into that because I think it makes our job a little bit easier like you're not coming to us and say hey just so you know like we got to cut this $5 million or you know we're kind of treating it if I like look at it as the workforce side of it we're treating it just as a bonus and it's like hey cool we can do this other thing now, right? Um, but you're making our job easier. That's how I look at it. So, I appreciate that.

Yeah. And what if you get a bonus in the millions of dollars and you invest that bonus? Amazing. How do you get a million dollar bonus? Yeah.

Um, and that also kind of this conversation makes me think about a lot of the discussion that also was legislator about cities having this big pool of money, right? and us being really smart about that, we are saving it for one time big projects that we know are needed setting that aside um setting it right away. So I think that is also important for the public to know that if there is a den of money there is a plan for that money for something that will event that the community. And does this also explain like why we count on consultants for things because we don't want to hire a bunch of people because we got money this year and then have to lay them off next year or after. So, so we count on consultants for um for something that would our staff would be able to handle and that's a reflection of that keeping our base budget stable and when you have some extra you can afford to hire consultants. Is that part of the strategy or that's different? Okay. I would say that it's that's about balancing workflow and work

product and what you do what you rely on a consultant that you know when I've got uh Eric here as our city engineer to have him behind a computer drawing in CAD or RMS or doing whatever while he should be managing a vision you know it's about what the expenditure of the workflow is whereas they have engineers that are built that 40 hours a week they're working in RMS have that's there's the balance there is what I would envision that is I think the most important thing to take off of this graph if I remember correctly and J wrong is it's about that use of reserves which is the far right column we want to just remind council that although we're suggesting a use reserves none of those reserves are allocated towards ongoing expenses which is most important statement of this grant

so I'm going to ask you all to go to page 28 now in your documents if you're not already there before we do Can I ask this question? Obviously, this the federal government has a $39 trillion and growing debt in the state. I think that's 40 billion in reserve. We have a reserve, but I don't know how much it is that we've invested. How much have we invested in the city of our reserve?

Um, across all funds right now, the cash and investments we have on hand is something almost $200 million. I mean it's it's a lot for learning across all funds and you know those come with varying levels of restriction. Yeah.

So page 28 um this is really the general fund budget summary. And so those pages leading up to this that's where some of that history that we were just going over is going to come into play. And I think that's really important for you all as council members to know as you're working with the public because they're going to ask you about those things like reserves. And so if you look at this graph, you're going to see the revenue forecast uh for the current period and some of the key features of that forecast. You'll see the recommended expenditures in total. And you're going to see our recommended use of reserves at that $7.96 million number. Most of the use of that reserve is actually for capital investment. And that's important for a couple of reasons. So looking forward, uh what we definitely see are some signs that economic contraction may be coming our way. We do have about a million dollars still in wind energy revenue for the year. It's actually a little bit more than that, but that really has cooled off. And so if that doesn't pick up again, and then we also have these flat sales and use taxes, it's reasonable to think that we may have a contraction here. And so even though we have about $16 million in total reserves in the general fund as of the time that I was doing this forecast and I consider about $22 million of that to be available for the budget. An allocation of 7.9 million. Um there might be a circumstance where we want to claw some of that back a little bit. um if the economy cools off, if we start to see troubling signs and because most of the use of that reserve is going to be in capital investment that isn't going to go out the door very quickly, there's still a lot of flexibility embedded into this model. And so still plenty of resources in the general fund. Remember really a lot of my job in finance is to be a risk manager. Um and so I feel very comfortable with this allocation of reserves. What you'll also see here, which is a little bit unusual, is we

have a $2.1 million commitment of future a future reserving. And so $7.9 million is what is required um to fund the fiscal year 27 recommendation that $45.9 million. And because you're going to see a couple of multi-year authorizations that are limited term in operating, we also need to restrict 2.1 million of our current reserves to be able to fund that. And so there's a little bit more going on here than goes on in a normal fund summary. Um, this is information that we typically present but not in this form. And I think this graphic really drives home the structure of the budget. Um what I can tell you is that no reserves are used for operating expenses that we are authorizing as ongoing. And so in that sense it is structurally balanced and we're not using to so many reserves that were compromised and not using an amount of reserves or using them in a way that reduces our financial flexibility if um situations occur economically that really make us nervous. So Bob, do you have anything more to say about that? I really I really like the piggyback right explaining just being really explicit say none of the ongoing operating expenses. I think that really helps us to explain it to the public.

Thank you.

One of the things that I'm I'm a little bit fearful about with this graphic is you know 22 million is the amount that I consider available for allocation during budget. Again, the actual amount of fund balance is closer to $60 million. It's just that things like the $10 million you all committed to the spat tax and some of the land acquisitions and capital you've already committed, all of that um binds up a fair amount of that fund balance, right? Um but even those numbers I'm putting here are still conservative enough for me to be comfortable. I think the only thing that we really I really want to talk about with revenue before we start to give you an overview of expenses, you'll find on page 30. So, let's go take a look at that. So, you'll see this chart on page 30. And one of the things that I really heard from you all during civic sense is we want to know where the money comes from. And in the general fund, that can be a little bit harder to see in the big table just because it's the general fund, right? The tables are really big. Um, so this graphic actually will show you where most of the revenue comes from in the general fund. So, look at those top three revenue sources. That's more than 50% of revenue in those top three revenue sources. 4 cent shared state sales and use tax with this cent tax which we all know that's on the ballot here in just a few months and 10% from the direct distribution. So we talk about these revenue sources in the general fund an awful lot for a very good reason. And that's why it makes us nervous when we see contraction or stagnation in sales and use tax because it's such a significant portion of our revenue. So, if we could move on to page 37,

you'll actually see an overview of the expenditure recommendation. And so we started in that fund summary at the highest level number um that over $40 million number and then this graphic shows you how the budget breaks down a little bit more for the general fund. So of course that big section there that's personnel that $27.6 million of the largest expense in the general fund followed by those contracted services and capital improvements. Now in the general fund it conducts limited capital improvement. Many of the capital improvements related to government type operations not our business operations occur in the SPE fund or in the capital construction fund. And so you typically see a lower amount of capital investment in the general fund for that reason. You'll also see some other types of expenses like interfund transfers. I am still stocking away $3 million for the capital construction fund for future capital investment. So some of the recommended budget you see in this fund is actually to move money to other city funds to fund for reserves for future capital investment. You guys have questions about the overall recommendation? If not, we will move on to let's go to the next page which is page 38. So, you'll start to hear from departments at the next meeting, and they'll give you an overview of what their budget's all about and their top requests, but the graph at the top of this page is going to show you the departments that receive resources um as part of the general fund budget. And the departments that um I don't really like this word, but I'll use it, consume the most resources to deliver their services. So you see um top budgeted services are for police and fire followed by public works and then those general government expenses which are shared costs things like warm property insurance premiums and things like that and then a trickle of services down beneath that.

So some of the things that fire and police uh they use together is still broken down into proportioning like you know the large that kind of stuff. It still shows it's not showing general it's showing which department gets a percent.

Absolutely. This graph is just rolled up by department to make it not be so long. So, let's go look at this next page. Um, and we're really going to dive in a little bit more, and I'm sure that Todd will have something to say here, um, about our our how we're going to invest in personnel. Um, because personnel is our biggest need in the general fund and we're just simply not able to grow personnel in an ongoing way um, in the way that is probably needed. And so, we needed to come up with creative solutions for how we could do this. And there were a certain amount of ongoing authorizations, the highest priority authorizations approved. And then there were other authorizations that were approved for a limited term investment. And so if you look at this graph, it's really clear what we're doing. 227,000 about in ongoing increases, which are funded by current period revenue. So it's sustainable. 638,000 about for a one-year investment. We've got a $441,000 investment that's going to last for two years and a $411,000 investment that's going to last for three years. That three-year investment per year is actually surface water drainage to expand the level of service.

One of the things that we have the benefit of in Cheyenne is we had employees that were contracted and they had a significant investment in the community but not the ongoing effect on the budget. And what we're trying to do is balance and get some help in some certain areas. The intent behind those those uh positions that are time limited is that they will lead to either improvements in revenue generation or matching funds from outside agencies to try to make those and get those to where they continue to be ongoing. But we have to have we have to find a way to get the help to do some stuff to get it in place. Uh one notable position is I believe it's called the rental housing coordinator. uh city council had passed the rental housing ordinance, right? And I'm not going to deny that through probably failures in my office and workload. It's been very difficult to get that lifted up off the ground. And I think the only way that that really truly is going to show the benefits that council wants to see is if we have dedicated personnel to work on that. Uh Brandon and I are actually meeting on the small landlord improvement project. That's a type of project that will land under a position that does that. And the intent is to hopefully see increased revenue through rental registrations and such that will provide for that position to be maintained in the perpetuity. But we have to make sure that we plan on those those as we move forward. In the past that revenue unfortunately was used up and was not in place to provide for personnel. So now we're trying to make that change to get that lift in place. One of the other things they'll do is they'll reduce some of the work of the city clerk's office through management of permits and uh the permitting process and the way the complaints come in. So there's a lot of benefits to a position like that, but we need to test it and see if it bears the fruit that we want to see as we go through and that's how we're looking at those positions.

So it will be a little different. Um and this kind of started last year. You guys will remember in your final budget resolution um you assigned committed some resources to street infrastructure improvement. You also um committed some resources formerly as a governing body to housing enabling infrastructure. This year what you'll see in your budget resolution is actually a commitment of future reserves um for some of these multi-year requests. Um as you know um your capital projects when you authorize those those can carry forward. you do the carry board amendments and those reserves are tied up after you authorize them. It's not really how these types of operating costs work. And so we're going to need to acknowledge that in the budget resolution because what I don't want to happen is it to look like those reserves are available um to our staff to members of the public um when council has taken an action to support a multi-year allocation and those reserves are actually tied up. Um and you know it really does matter you guys. People are talking about reserves, our own employees even talking about our amount of reserves. And so we need to be willing to talk about how we have those assigned to be initiative.

On the next page, um, which is page 40 in your electronic documents, you'll see an overview of the operating budget recommendation. So, kind of the same approach. We've got ongoing costs that we can fund with revenue that we know is going to come in for about $238,000 a year for a variety of um types of activities. And then we've got a shorterterm investment of 436,000 that we're recommending that's going to last for a period of of several years. The majority of that short-term investment is actually in the expanded level of service and surface water drainage. It's really all so tonight is all about overview. So giving you the big picture of the budget for each fund at the highest level. Um and that's what we've done with the general fund. Um do you guys have questions? Is there more you want to talk about tonight to help get you ready for those department presentations and hearing a little bit more about specific requests? you know, we just pushed the sixth penny tax and what have you and then the fifth penny's coming up. Are we going to be doing something to make sure we educate the community on that election, you know, so we get that done, too? Because losing that would be horrible also.

Absolutely. For the for our community, as Jim Jen and I have discussed today, that is the golden goose, right? 20% of our budget is our revenue comes from the big penny for the city of Laramie. Um, I actually did reach out to the county commissioners today to see if they had any appetite for potentially moving that to the to the August primary. And I have some reasons behind why I think that might be a good idea that I'd like to uh look at and see. We might have already missed the deadline on that, but we we at least I at least need to ask the question of what we've got coming. So we will absolutely will take the same fervor that we took with the specific purpose size ice tax and put that towards the general obligation ice tax and make sure that we get every best chance of passing. um and significantly it's important and that work will happen in this

and I I felt like uh you all really prepared us with the sixth penny uh and a number of us were able to go out to speak at public uh events and things like that and we became well-versed. We had uh handouts and materials to give out And I think all of that was helpful. So I'm I'm anticipating that we will have the same kind of resources as we get out there promoting the fifth penny. And I would think that uh during Freedom has a Birthday might be a significant time, but also for us to get back out to these groups that we're affiliated with and and that we can present. So,

it's it's actually heartening to hear you guys talking about that. I started talking about this the other day and Chief Brown asked me to give us 24 hours to celebrate. He's like, "Can we at least get 24 hours to celebrate the police department?" Well, public I think does the public I think needs a little bit of a break, but we don't have a lot of time either. Correct. And if there is any chance that it does move to August, then that's even less time, right? And that's

I I don't know that we have the hope of getting that. I I will give you my philosophy for that is you know in the general primary we're going to ask folks about the people's initiative to reduce property tax right which is cutting tax at the same time we're going to be asking them about travel and tourism tax and potentially a fifth opinion I just feel like that's confusing on the ball to understand and I'm afraid of confusion now we did have a great turnout great support for the city and and the that specific purpose excise tax from the county and the city rock river or the airport and I hope that that ls true for the next one but I'm just afraid of a large ballot having ambiguity and confusion as we get there and I think there's a better way or cleaner way if we can't get into the August election I believe it was at your retreat and I think it was councelor bowling that had the idea of council dunk tank that costs a nickel uh and you have to be educated about the bit penny tax uh for freedom as birthday. I think that's brilliant. I maybe it doesn't have to be a dump tank but you know somehow having some of that as part of it. I think that was a an inspired vision and I think he was the one volunteering to be in the dump tank. So

who was counselor bowling? Yeah. Yeah. I'm missy that day. Yeah, I'll do it for 5,000. I'm there might be some cool visuals we could do about the budget like stacks of marbles and to show what the how much of our budget comes from.

Absolutely. And I think what people really like if we we learned anything from the set videos we did, I think people like a story and you like something a little less formal. So I mean huge shout out to Melanie for being willing to go out and play in that way because it is like play because you're experimenting. Um but I think some more of that in addition to some really clever videos. Um, Erin, to your point, just more of that human interaction with employees and and what what what does this actually buy you, I think that's really compelling and you see who works for the city if you don't know that already. Um, it's kind of hard not to like it. But that filtered produced kind of thing where it's just a talking head. It's not the space where people are at and it doesn't really get their attention. And so I think you'll see us experimenting with more of that for the fifth scent and really trying to get that refined um a little bit more than we currently have it.

And we want to do it all in the last week, right? Oh my gosh. Poor Owen. He did such hard work that week. He really did.

He really worked so hard and he he cared so much about it and he he did four hours into 20 minutes is pretty phenomenal. Great work. over the past few days through the Wyoming city manager uh emails and such, we've received such good response and everybody wants to know how we did it and so they're starting to ask for the the the road map that Owen created because they everybody's coming up on this actually have their six penny in August and I think their fifth penny in November also and so they're what is the roadmap? How do we follow that? What do we do for us? sitting and I think about it, you know, I want to thank everybody that participated in these last videos because they were so amazing from Spencer was in them, Jen, Melanie, Brandon, Owen, and that whole team have been so creative and brought down that human that human connection, right, which was so important, I think, to what we were able to do on Tuesday.

I would be in full support of um doing that again. I think from my perspective, right, because I don't spend every day with um staff and just to see I I mean I'm selfish and I want to do it again, but I would encourage anyone um maybe even some of the newer counselors to to get on board with that because the what I learned was um not only like how knowledgeable staff are, but like how passionate and how ready to like just talk about their area that they were like there was no time to prep for that. So you couldn't have if you wanted to. And so um it was really cool and especially too uh I was talking to um some of the fire department staff and then they got a call like right as I was talking to them. So it was like a scene out of out of like the office or like it was crazy. Um but yeah, I I that was like the best day I've had in a very long time. Like that was so so cool. Um, and so yeah, I hate seeing myself on camera, so I haven't watched all of it, but I hope I hope it's good.

It's it's amazing. You really should watch it. Um, and the thing is I I actually work here, and I know that that's actually how like people are when you talk to them. Um, you know, there is a lot of passion in general for the work that it's done. I think getting that out there, um, is just super important. Um, because again, it removes that gatekeeping. it removes oh my goodness the scary big government and I mean there's some reasons to be scared of scary big government right there's no problem with that but that's not what we have in Laram and it's certainly not what we're offering to our public so are there any final thoughts about the general fund before we move on to our most fun recreation center

can I say something about the sand

um I believe that the final number on the six senate was 78% of approval rate. I don't know what historically it's been for the fifth senate, but I believe it's in the 50s sometimes. We probably need to do a more focused job on the fifth sen because there's a a much bigger impact to us than anything else. And the thing the thing that I found which we focused on this time are the personal stories the human stories that we can come out and say you know this is depends upon the fifth senate not only the city's health but also employees health and and also the you know the benefits that come directly to the city. I would hate to think what we would do if we ever lost that scent. And and if it's historic, do you have any numbers that we can start with so we know what the base of what we're working with and how how hard we have to work to get the numbers up to the what we accomplished in this last special election.

What was last year the betting was 2022? We'll find it. Council member Jean. Okay. I have a comment about the the the irons that you guys want to do for like the short term to see if they like that's a smart plan. Like I I really appreciate that thinking cuz you know like the storm water um the SP was just passed. It's we have $4 million. So like that's a lot to put on, you know, a department that's already probably short. So getting somebody to kind of help with that and the thinking into that is phenomenal and I I appreciate that because it make once again I say this a lot but I mean it like staff makes our our job easy because you guys think about some of this stuff before we do. If I could respond just real quickly to that, you know, that started with council's commitment a couple years back or a year or so ago, $5 million to see the program to get it going. And for us right now, it's about proving the improvement that can be made by dedicated maintenance and service at that higher level. And you're right, we did just pass this. So that means that there's engineering projects, capital projects to perform out of that out of that tube. The hard part about that is remember we're on collection base with no bonding on that. So it will take time before we get to those first capital projects, but we can continue to work towards improvements.

So bonding is only fire and what about animal shelter? I believe that there's a little bit of animal shel shelter noted into that number token, but it's a total number and so we'll end up allocating that funding in a way that makes the most sense once we figure out kind of the order of how those projects are going to go out the door. Okay, so let's move on to the rec center fund. We won't spend a lot of time here. Um, as as a mom who now as a 20-year-old but raised my child at the rec center, I have a particular affinity for this place. And I think a lot of people in Laramie feel the same way about it. Right? Whether you're going there to work out, whether you were part of the group of people who got together way back in 2000 to get this thing built with with the specific purpose tax, there's been an awful lot of commitment in our community to have this really this space for all people to come and rec and recreate. And um we have had a lot of support for this facility on subsequent spets. We do have two million on this next bet. And that actually those spet dollars are really how we've paid for a lot of capital investment and improvement. And that'll continue to be part of our plan because user fees for the recreation center are just never going to be sufficient um to be able to provide for that capital investment. And so the capital investment that can be provided by the SPE really has to come from either the earnings on the recreation center endowment and those are much better than they used to be and they're going to get even better in the future when we get some help from an investment advisor. Um and any amount of general fund support and so we've had a couple of years now where we've really been dealing with a lot of deferred maintenance. I don't think that's going to end like tomorrow. I think we've still got a couple of years of catchup left to do. Um, and I think that's important that we talk about during budget season, right? Like just know that the user rates are not going to

fund that capital investment. That's not what they're there for. And so we're looking at that those resources are probably the city's general fund um to be able to provide for that capital investment. The capital investment, remember, it's a one-time cost. So, in the general fund, when we get additional revenue from wind energy development or we're smart and we take our property taxes out early because we know it's coming, um we're getting those reserves built up for ongoing foret one-time investment without investing them in that those ongoing operating costs. And so, we've been able to support the recreation center fund for that capital investment in a higher way than we used to be able to. And we know that that's going to continue for a little while. Um, so this fund is a special revenue fund. Council set up this treatment for the fund as far as I can tell after the specific purpose tax was um elected in 2001. And a special revenue fund is is a type of governmental fund. So it's not an enterprise fund. It's not a business type operation. However, it does mean that all of the revenue earned by the rec center has to be reinvested back in the recreation center. And so while the general fund can support the rec center fund, the rec center fund is not going to be sending money to the general fund. So one of the things that you may know about our rate supported operation, our other rate supported operations like water and wastewater solid waste. They've got that transfer called the net um the shared services support transfer. That name has changed over time. And that's the sharing of administrative costs for things like HR and finance of it. um because those operations don't have their own HR, finance, and IT departments. That wouldn't be very efficient. So, we share those costs with our business type funds. That's not the case in the rec center fund because the rec center fund is a governmental operation and so finance supports the rec center out of the general fund and there's no transfer made for those

resources. So I think it's important to talk about that just so you know it it does not behave like an enterprise fund in that way and I actually think that works to the advantage of this fund and I recommend that we keep it that way for those reasons into the future. If we look at page 95 could yes make one suggestion. Um, back in 2000, the chairman of the county commissioners, Ty Gabriel, and I, uh, stripped down to our swimsuits and sat on our on the the desk at city hall and made a calendar.

Yes, she is. And I would suggest that our mayor, if she wants to raise some money, No, I wouldn't suggest that. Wait. I mean, talk about commitment and talk about love for that facility. That's what I hate you. Everyone loves the rec center. They're willing to do crazy things for you. You know, I I still think of it as the new rec center and it's it's like I mean it's 20 years old and and that's that has become a great um asset to our community and it's loved by everyone that goes there. I I have to give a lot of credit to Todd and also the staff there for all that they've done to keep it

keep it new environment because it's just such a beautiful place to go.

Yeah, I I went a couple weeks ago because I really like the sauna and I don't have one at my house yet. Maybe I will one day, but I'm like I don't like a locker room. They kind of gross me out. But I'm okay in the rec center locker rooms. Like I think the staff have done such a good job even though they're older, right? I know they need to be upgraded. Um, we really have kept that facility in very nice shape for the age it is and but we all know that there's the need to continue investing to make sure that it doesn't deteriorate because it is it is a gem. Um, if we look at page 95, um, Spencer did a really nice graphic. Um, really just illustrating the two pillars of support that the recreation center fund has. And so the biggest pillar of support is that user support, right? people being interested and loving facility. We do get a significant grant from the Albony County Recreation Board every year. I think that's somewhere just under $200,000 if I remember that correctly.

Little over this year.

A little over this year. Um but the rest of the resources in the fund come from city support. And you all may remember, you know, I mean gosh, during the pandemic, everyone was inside. So that amount of city support had to grow for that reason. But because everyone's come back to the rec center now, the pandemic is long behind us. We're right back to that cost recovery number that I consider to be very normal over time. We're at about $410,000 this year. And so that cost recovery, that general fund support, that's the amount of ongoing support that we have to plan for out of general fund resources. And so when we're balancing the budget, we consider the recreation center transfer to be part of that operating budget in the general fund because essentially that's what it is. We have to contribute that so the facility will operate it will operate effectively and so we can keep the doors open to be honest about it. Um and we want that number to be something that the general fund can support long term in addition to whatever capital requirements are necessary. So, I'm really proud of the work this team has done to get that revenue healthy, get everyone back to the facility and keep it a buzz with activity. Um, for the recreations that are done, it's small fun. So, that's really all we need to go over from the highest level. You you'll hear more later. What questions do you have or Mike? Do you have anything you'd like to add tonight? I know we'll talk more later, but if you want to add something, feel free. just that I mean we we couldn't run that building without the staff that that are there and and we've made you know a lot of changes over the last 18 months. Uh but I can categorically say that we when I first got here uh I heard more complaints than praises and that has almost completely flipped. I mean, we still have a few naysayers. Uh people that are unhappy with our schedule or uh

but but what we're not hearing anymore is that the building's dirty. Uh that our fees are too high. Um in fact, I had somebody just the other day tell me, "Wow, this is such a steal. You guys should be charging more." Uh and I said, "I will take that to uh into consideration." uh but we're uh but staff is constantly looking at innovative ways to bring in uh not just more revenue but more people uh into the building. So uh for instance we're getting ready to launch I think on Monday a summer rate uh a summer membership package. So, it's just June, July, and August. Uh, you get a 10% discount on on the base rate of that. But in an effort to in and really in response to what people are telling us, we we have a lot of people that say, "Hey, I only want to come uh to use the outdoor pool." Uh, yeah, I mean, I might use the weight room occasionally, but really, I just want to be able to bring my kids to the outdoor pool. And uh so we're offering, you know, different rate packages and trying to be innovative and offering different new classes like our line dance class. I mean, it's not totally new. It's been around for several months, but I mean, that's been huge. Uh and so we're always trying to innovate and and my goal is to continue to be looking at new revenue sources and different ways that that we can package memberships. in in an effort to get more people through the door versus having to charge the same people more uh that are coming through the door. And that's that's our our base philosophy for for success there. And the support of the community is is just incredible there. Uh it's truly a pleasure to work there.

Before we move on to the next fund, I did look back at the past three penny percentages. uh 2014 was 69%. Or in 2018 it was 63% and in 2022 it was 63%. There are no more questions or comments on the recreation center fund. We'll move to the capital construction fund next and just take a brief pause here and that's going to be page 102 in your electronic document 101 on the paper. And really what I want to talk about is the purpose of this fund because it does get a little confusing. We've heard that from the council before. What are all these different funds? What do they do? Well, the capital construction fund um is a fund that accounts for the cost of major capital initiatives for essentially what are non-exchange transactions. And so in our rate supported systems like our enterprise funds that capital is accomplished in those funds and it's funded mostly by rates as well as some grants and loans. However, the capital that you see occurring in the capital construction fund is mostly being funded by either transfers from the general fund. So if you recall we talked about that $3 million transfer earlier, me moving some of those reserves over to this fund to build up a reserve for capital. um we're not fully allocating that out this year. Um or we're going out and we're working with maybe state agencies to get grants. Um you don't see as many loans in this fund, although that can happen. Um but the point is the activity in this fund is primarily supported by nonchange revenue. And so a big difference you'll see in the the graphic on the bottom. I wanted to put a little bit about exchange versus non-exchange transactions in here because of the conversations that I know are coming

about service water drainage. Um because in an exchange transaction, you receive something for the services you are providing. Now that something you receive can take a bunch of different forms. Um in something like our wastewater system, you're you're paying for access to that system and your impact on that system. In our water system, you're ris you're getting consumption based on that metered rate. At the rec center, you go to the counter, you check in, you pay your daily member, you have your monthly membership or your annual membership, right? These non-exchange transactions, that's where really taxes come into play, right? Or grants because the city does nothing to earn a grant. The city receives a grant because we apply for it. We say we're going to do certain things. So, I mean, there is that earning part of it, but it's not the same as if you go to the cash counter of a gas station and you buy a Coke or something, right? It's a very different type of transaction. And I think that's really confusing to members of the public, to residents. And I think we need to do a better job talking about the differences between these exchange transactions, um, transactions like Matt would do and his businesses, right? And then these non-exchange transactions, these taxes, these poolled amounts that we assess and they get distributed out more generally based on the needs of the government. And so this fund, remember, governmental fund primarily non-exchange revenue sources that pay for the capital you see here. Next year, I hope to have one of my dreams come true. We're going to move all the capital from the general fund into the capital construction fund. And it will basically be and and same thing for the rec center fund. And then we'll accomplish most of our governmental capital that is not funded by this bet tax in this fund. And so we'll have a separate capital fund. And I actually think that's going to be great for the budget because then when you're looking at that general fund, all you're seeing is those operating costs.

And I think it's going to be a lot more clear. Questions about the capital construction fund? Okay. I guess I do actually. Yeah. Is there a reason we're not fulfilling this year? Yeah, time. It's always time, resources, and priorities. There's always this moment where we look at the list of projects, general fund, and we we decide, okay, which ones of these are so big, they really should be in the construction. We did that step, but that's next year.

It's it's continuous improvement, right? Thanks. It's never done. Okay. So, the next page we're going to go to is page 108. I want to take a stop over here because I mean, my goodness, we have so much to celebrate this week with this tax passing. Um, and I just want to remind everyone as part of the public record that um these tax these taxes are not comingled. So now that the 2026 FET has become a reality, not just a dream, um we actually will create a 2026 FET fund and it will be separately reported um in the budget so that people can see how those how those monies are allocated out um and we'll talk a lot about that later. We've got a lot of planning to do, but I just want to make sure I get that on the record. And so it's not that we have one SPT fund and we load all the resources in it with every sp issue. It's absolutely not what we do. Um we keep them separated and as you've heard um even the interest gets allocated out based on the proportion of what the voters approve in each category. And so it's a pretty tedious exercise sometimes. And I'm looking forward to how our new financial software is going to make that a lot easier than it was with the 2018 spet tax which was very manual. I think that's all we need to say about the 2018 spa. So glad we have a 2026 bet. Next is page 115 and now we're taking a big shift. Um it's the water fund. So we've transitioned to our business type operations, our enterprise funds. So very different than the space we've been

living in functioning mostly on these tax revenue sources. Two systems that are primarily supported by user rates. And so you all know we have three enterprise funds. We have a water fund, a wastewater fund, and a solid waste fund. And these funds are completely separate and their rates are not comingled in any way to support their operations. And Wyoming state statute actually tells us that our water and our wastewater utilities and solid waste utilities have to be fully self-supported. And so it's not just that we elect to have them in an enterprise fund, which we would do anyway. It's that state statute also says, hey, by the way, we expect you communities to have to be able to provide for a depreciation fund, which is basically a long a reserve for long-term capital investment um for these types of operations. And so there's some directive that we actually really take responsibility here and we plan for these resources for the long term. And so I love the graphic actually that notebook LM generated for me and I loaded information about the water utility all the way from the source of our water um from our water rights the delivery and the treatment and into our community and the various functions that this water utility really performs for our community. Do you all want to have any discussion um about really what goes on in the water utility tonight? Are there questions here?

You said it has to be self- sustaining, but we get grants. Totally fine. Yeah, we get grants, we get loans, we can get user fees do not have to pay for 100% of the cost of the operation. Just can't come from the general. Correct. and you can't go into debt. Uh you actually can incur debt in the enterprise funds. Um there's we we often get state revolving fund loans. Those are the ones with the great interest rates that we love. We also have some revenue bonds in our enterprise funds and we can go issue more if we wanted to um with that specific revenue source assigned to them.

In the solid waste fund, we also do finance a lot of garbage trucks and land for large equipment. Thanks for clarifying.

So that that's a great question because it's what is not true is that user fees is that you're bound to a certain financing structure because you're an enterprise fund. So you can have for example um in 2009 if Mayor Shamor former mayor Shamboy was on the council at that time, right? like we we had to go out. We actually asked the voters to approve SPE proceeds to invest in the water and wastewater and solid waste utilities because we were just starting that 10-year planning process. And there was no way that we were going to be able to come up with through user rates um the ability to fund that system. And so you can even augment these funds with taxes voters approve, but they have to approve those taxes under Wyoming law. whereas that user B is something different. And so the financing structure really can be tailored to the needs of each individual community under current Wyoming state statutes. Um so we've built self-supporting enterprise funds. That's what the council in 2009 decided to do and that's really the result of the work you see today that we'll go over more. Um and it takes that kind of decadesl long planning to end up with the kind of financial position that you see in these funds. And it it it there's no magic to it. It's just good risk management and good planning.

And as you may recall under your financial sustainability goals, reviewing the 10ear capital plans and fees for water is part of our goals. And we'll see that in hopefully early winter 2027.

Jen, you already mentioned that there's no intermingling buns. In other words, water on standalone and waste water and solid waste standalone. However, there can be my understanding is there can be um equipment such as vehicles and things like that which will be rather than have fleets for everybody, they they can interchange those but then they have to pay back and forth so that they're not, you know, they're not using up the the the expenses of the water fund to support the waste water. But they can they can do that so that we can have a cost savings there also.

Absolutely. And it's always separately treated. And so if you think about that graphic I use all the time of the little piggy banks, they're always separate. And then any activity between the funds, even if it's a transfer of a truck, there has to be an exchange value assigned to that. And the funds purchase those vehicles from each other. and we record that even if it's an old contract, you still process that transaction that way.

So if there's an exchange, but does it also allow for concurrent use where a single truck would be used by both funds? If we are if we are provided the information that that's how it will be used um and we feel that that is a reliable representation then absolutely what we will do is we'll distribute the cost of that asset between the two funds. No problem.

And so um you know on on page 116 I'd like to take a a brief pause here and talk a little bit about where we came from. um because it's kind of where we're starting with surface water drainage, right? Um it's actually we're it's actually better than when we're starting with surface water drainage because we don't have anything there. Um but but in 2009, that's really when the council, the city manager, the finance director, the public works director, everyone kind of came together and said, "We are the needs of this system. We have not been maintaining an overtime. We've not been keeping up on rate increases. We don't have enough of our infrastructure. We're going to have to do something different." And that's really when our 10-year financial planning process be implemented. And it was pretty scary and it was really tumultuous. And I heard council member Shamway kind of talk to the council about this over the past year because it was a big deal in the community.

Jim, that was called the red oak study. Yes.

And it was overwhelming when we came in and said, "You are so far behind." And the re one of the reasons we got so far behind was there was kind of a a vocal minority on the council that just said we're going to take general fund money and put it into enterprise funds. We're going to keep our rates flat, never increase them. And we got to where we dug such a deep hole, it was almost to the point we didn't think we could dig our way out. But in the red oak study, they, you know, they gave us a very clear path on how to get out of the mess that we were in and get to where we were sustainable. I think we have accomplished everything that that study brought for us and that we were able to get to a point now where we're I think on sure footing and we're strongly moving forward with a lot of support from financially and and with manpower and everything that we needed. Thank you very much.

Yeah, it's it's really an honor to look at like I I told Todd today that we are the we're the beneficiaries of decades of really good financial planning and decision- making at the city and I believe that as a team and I mean us and you together. We really have to keep thinking in that way. um because you know that that's how we're able to provide for our community and not just be stuck in this reactive cycle of growth contract go broken track that you see in a lot of communities. And so I wanted to just take a moment on page 116 here and show you a little bit about numbers that tell the story of where this fund has come from. So if you look back in 2009, our user fee revenue that year for the entire water utility was only about 5.5 million. So that's pre the red oak study. Look at what happens by 2014. Just five years later, the revenue has gone up to 8.229 million. So that's the point of tumultuous. That's the tunnel, right? The public outcry when we actually started to implement rates that paid for the cost of service of this utility. But then if you look after that, right, you go to 29, you see that's up to 9.3 million. You go to 24, you see it's up to 9.5 million. you're seeing that level out a little bit, right? And that's because we've been planning for such a long time that we have more flexibility. We don't have to pass on those rate increases quite as frequently to our end users. And just to be really honest, during the pandemic, we were really hesitant to do so even with the inflationary environment just because we knew what members of the public were experiencing and we didn't want to add to that. And so my opinion um my professional opinion is that we are behind in both our water and wastewater utilities. Um we did a 10-year plan last year that is backed up by that 10-year plan. We're we're going to look at that formally all together this year. Um and then going to try to

be planning for some big things like a water treatment plan. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Um here recently the uh public works completed with the environmental protection agency is water treatment plant optimization tank but that doesn't mean that we don't have to be planning for replacement of this water treatment plant that's now 60 years old somewhere in there and we have to in the study this council and this staff has to make decisions now so that in 10 years that sound financial planning is reaped by those folks that are in position at that point too and that's going to be a very difficult process to go through. It's going to be a lot of discussion, a lot of education, but it is something that is critical that we have to start finding out discussions on that began five 10 years ago. Then no movement was made, but now it's come to the point where we have to make a move to account for the funding, the depreciation, right, to create the funding that funds a water treatment plant in 10 years. And we know that easy ways all of that. Um but they'll need to do a significant portion. And so um that'll be a really a really fun endeavor and a really exciting one for the long-term future of the community, but also one like Todd said that has some pain points during the discussion and planning processes. And so the last thing I'll draw your attention to here before we move on to the topic.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And and just thinking about that, it it also and I'm sure Seth is thinking about this as well, but really getting to the story behind that too, so that we can really try to provide buy in and even showing some of this like past, you know, we don't want to end up in a space like this again. So how we how just making sure that we can really clearly share why the why behind part of that story is also working out what assistance is out there too and making the plan for what available assistance is going to be there and there's a lot of communities across Wyoming that are going to be in the same boat that city of Larry is going to be in is that it's time

to make those changes and to do that but we want to make sure that we're at the forefront of being prepared for the changes are happening.

Before I forget, um, several years ago, I brought a a water treatment policy that was successful in Tampa, Florida to to our city manager. And the technology was developed in the Netherlands. And it's for water that's that's being pulled out of a river after it's moved several hundred miles down to Tampa, Florida, and then it's being pulled out and treated there. I I know we have options of of treating at the source where the water is not contaminated and piping it into the city, but also it may at some point be economically feasible for us to have a treatment plant closer to to the city where we use all of our water rights, pull water out of the river, a point closer to the city of Lar. if we're going to make that investment at least you probably had a look at what they had done in Tampa, Florida and their success that they've had there. But when when I toured their water treatment plant several years ago, they were absolutely thrilled with the results that they had and treating water that had been moved down a river for several probably hundreds of miles. So that's something to look at when it comes time for us to make those decisions.

Thank you. Thank you, Joe, for that. Um, no stone will be left unturned when it comes time to look at all technology for future facilities.

The other thing I wanted to point out on this page is look at the difference in capital investment between 2009 and let's say 2019. Um, in 2024 there's a lot of grants with the North Side Tank and so it's a little bit of a spike there. Um, but in 2009 we were only able to do about $3.7 million of capital investment per year, which really was not sufficient at all. And by 2019, we're built up to $6.3 million a year. That's really what managing these utilities over a 10-year period allows you to do is to start amping up that capital investment in a way that levels the rate impact um to your end users of that system. So, we'll go to the next page, which is page 117, and you'll see an overview of the water fund budget. So, I'm going to need to expand my screen a little bit. You'll see that we've got about $12.2 million in forecasted total revenue and about $14 million in recommended expenditures. We're only going to use about $1.8 million in reserves and we're normally going to be using reserves in our enterprise operations and it's always going to be for capital because remember we're managing that utility for the long term with these reserves and these depreciation funds in mind. We had $16.2 million in available reserve. So only using 1.8 8 million of that for the capital plan at hand keeps us in a really great position as we move forward. And remember, the same thing applies um to the enterprise funds. I don't have that number in my head as readily as I do the general fund because it's the general fund. Um but we certainly have more than $16.2 million um in fund balance in reserves for this fund. That's just the amount that's available for allocation during the budgeting process. And so, um, a really conservative budget in front of you from that standpoint, um, with not very many

requests and, um, 5 million it looks like in capital investments. Would you talk to

I've got another question for you and maybe it's really obvious now but when we're talking about reserves does the water fund have its own reserve budget to the so each of the three enter they have they have their own assets liabilities and reserve like they have everything is self-contained it's like they're a little they're a company and a company that is not consolidated at all with any other city operation. So if we um have more revenue than we spend that um fund balance that creates um we just be kept in that fund and that's where you get that reserve.

A question about the reserves because it was brought up to me why do we have so much money in reserves right and I made I made a comment I hope I spoke right so so like this 16.2 too. When we start doing, I don't know, the water underneath Snowy Range and we we think it's going to cost X, but then as soon as we tear it up, oh my god, we got to do so much more. Like, that's a good reason to have some of this reserve, right?

Yeah, that's one of many good reasons. And so, there's there's the emergencies you don't anticipate because maybe your budget estimates are off or maybe something breaks and you didn't think that was going to break and that's always a thing. Um but really um in the enterprise funds it's because you know you've got this capital schedule to complete and let's say that you have two million this is not 2 million in the first year 2 million in the second 6 million in the third 2 million and then 10 million. So if you were to just have the user rates kind of be low and then try to go up high, your your reserves would never really be what they needed to be for to pay for those projects in a way that leveled out that rate. And so you could be saving for something really big like a water treatment plant and you could have a fair amount of reserves on hand. Those might not get sent for a while, but that's because you're doing that long range planning. The other reason you can have reserves on hand, and this is an this is a concern for both Todd and I, so I want to talk about it, um, is that you actually can get behind in completing your capital appropriation in former capital appropriations. So, you know, you heard us talk about that $95 million rebudget that we had for capital projects. And so, um, we've been doing a really good job of getting capital appropriated, but for lots of reasons that are outside of the control of our teams, we haven't been able to get that money out the door. And once you appropriate something for a capital project, that money is assigned. So, it's assigned above and beyond that 16.1 million. So, that's just unassigned reserve, but we probably have another 20 million on top of that that's tied up in capital appropriations. And so, um, we've done what we can this year to trim those capital appropriations, but not, um, upset the apple cart in terms of getting things accomplished for the community. But if we see another year where that capital

just doesn't get spent at the rate that we're expecting it, we're going to need to look at that and look at how we redeploy those reserves and how we talk about those to the community. Because to your point, Brandon, it does create problems when you're starting to build that up and you're not talking about your plan for those resources. Can you share some of the examples why those sellers haven't been able to go out the door you instead some of it is outside of our our

I think some of it is staffing you know which is in our control but in the local market it feels outside of your control sometimes some of it also has to do with the local construction market um and especially with DW doing so much construction you know they've taken up a lot of the local capacity for a long time that's going to be changing of course um but that really created some issues and I think I think Eric can speak to this more. There were also some issues post pandemic um that really made it difficult to get some things out the door. Do you want to elaborate a little more on that?

Yeah. Um yeah, I think Jen hit a lot of the ones that we started with. Um one that we also are starting right now is getting east for projects. So we have projects that are planned that are multi-million dollar projects that we're working with land owners and you know we have design almost done but trying to finalize those last minute things are some can sometimes delay jobs years as you're kind of working through some things like that. Thanks. So that's all in the water plan.

Again, before we move on, I want to I don't know what the study will come up with, but I've heard that the new water treatment plan and all the expenses will be up to $100 million. The Campbell County was given $100 million for a water project that they had of moving water into Campbell County by the state legislature, which was a grant, my understanding. So somewhere we got to get in a queue where we put forward the number that we come up with which will be our cost so that the state can take a large bit of that burden off of us and fund the water treatment plant when it comes time for us to do that because our reserves won't even touch the cost of what it's going to be to completely renovate or not renovate but build a new treatment plant wherever it's built. We we're going to have to depend on grants from the state for long-term loans and 0% or what do we have to do then to that as we work on the next 10ear capital plan and preparing for that. That's part of the whole goal is to find out what is the amount that we feel comfortable that the city can raise through fees to prepare for a portion of that. And then also again turning over and talking about grants or revolving loans, whatever whatever the project is to pull all that together to provide for the community at the mark when it's needed. Are there any more questions or comments about the water fund? If not, we'll go to page 136 to the wastewater fund. So, it feels like when we get into our enterprise fund, there's a lot that we don't have to say a second time. So, we don't need to talk about user fees and the structure because we've already

waxed poetic about those nuances. And the same thing is going to apply in the wastewater and solid waste funds, too. You'll see a graphic on page 136 that gives you just a little bit of an overview of what happens in a wastewater operation. I I think wastewater is really cool. Um, and I don't I mean I don't know if you don't love the wastewater treatment plant. I mean, it's just a neat operation to see, right? There's so much that goes on there and there's so much that goes on in those pipes. Um, just like with water, right, that we take for granted that is so important to our community. Do you guys have any questions about the components of the wastewater operation before we take a little bit of look at where we've come from. All right. So, we'll go to page 137.

Julia is once we treat waste water, doesn't it go back into the river? It does. Yes. And we we have to treat it to a point where it's it's again correct or close to it. Yeah.

I don't believe it's portable. It's pable. But I do not believe that the water is potable, but it is a point where it's clean. It meets the requirements through EPA to get them back in. Um we were actually visiting I was visiting with J today while we were in select water about some of the stuff that I heard said and there was a presenter there from the University of Ping that has said some stuff that raised my curiosity but uh you know average we use about 5 million gallons a day and these are just averages and we discharge about 3 million gallons into the river daily. So think about that as the what we take in what we discharge into the river. Just charge three million a day.

Just charge three. You know, in the summer we might use 9.5 or 13.5 on a high draw day, right? But the discharge obviously that's mostly irrigation which doesn't come back through the wastewater treatment. It it's about wastewater treatment. So, the story of wastewater on page 137, it just mirrors water because they went through the same process in 2009. We don't need to repeat any of that. Um, but what I do want you to see is where the revenue started in wastewater in 2009. It started about $3.4 million for that entire utility. Now, it's up to about $5.8 million. And this is actually I mean I worry about the water treatment plant for sure, but from a financial condition standpoint, I also worry about the capacity of this fund. And so the capacity of this fund, the needs of the sewer utility have really changed a lot over the past five years or so, five to six years. And what I'm noticing is the amount of kind of what I would consider to be the standard capital allocation for this fund has really grown over time. And so there's the biggest potential just like kind of winging it. Um, aside from the water treatment plant, this fund has the biggest structural potential to need more resources from rates, I think, than any of our other funds, aside from the treatment plan issue. And so, I just want to draw your attention to that because it seems a little mised when I take a look at it. That happens every time I take a look at it. And so, it's still doing okay. It's still got sufficient reserves, but when I look at what's coming ahead, that rate revenue probably isn't sufficient right now to really fund those means into the future. And we'll go to the next page, which is page 138, and take a look at that recommended budget summary for the fund.

You'll see that we have about $9.6 million in forecasted revenue, about $9.8 8 million in recommended expenditures and we're only using about $255,000 of reserves of the 15.8 million that we have available. So, not touching those reserves much this year. Making sure we get some capital out the door, prioritizing some design um projects. Um and so this year, this looks really it's a great budget. It's very conservative budget and we look forward to coming to you with that 10-year plan. Is that designed for distribution not for the actual wastewater treatment?

Various types of design projects like getting the design started on capital projects. That's what I meant. Not um designed for anything specific. I'm sorry if that was confusing. I'm just wondering what the capital projects it seems like it's mostly the transportation on waste water. I'm trying to get you details on the

So it would be it would be the collection of waste water and then it would also be the treatment of waste water. Um, in the collection function, we have about $5.1 million in capital. In the treatment plant, we only have about $54,000 this year. Um, but that can really vary over time depending on the needs of that treatment plan. But we've done some significant upgrades lately. And so that that's probably going to be quiet for a while, but not because there's not need there. It's just been recently attempted to. That's why you're seeing that debt service be $1.2 2 million because of some of those recent treatment plant projects actually.

Are there other questions? Todd, do you want to add anything about the wastewater fund? We'll just cruise right along. One more question. Are we continuing to use bioolids? Any are we using that for compost and also for any other projects within this county or city? Yes, we're still using those. Uh and if the opportunity presents itself, we are using them for within city projects like calling out to a ranch or something like that and using it for that as well. Uh that that the bios actually with our compost actually get used up quite a bit each year on that. So

good. Okay. So, we'll go to page one. We'll go to page 152. Now, for our last enterprise fund and it's our solid waste fund. So, a couple different functions, right? We have collection, we have disposal, which includes our land operation, we have diversion, recycling. Um, a lot of the costs in this area in the solid waste fund really come from the provision of those garbage services to our curbside. um as well as maintaining our landfill, right? Maintaining that landfill capacity and planning for the remediation costs that are necessary when you close a landfill and the costs that you incur after you close that landfill. Those are called landfill closure and postclosure care costs and they are a significant um commitment um when you sign up to operate a landfill um which of course you know we offer that service for our entire county and some surrounding areas. We go to page 153. You're going to see the budget summary for this fund. We've got about nine, let's just round that up to $10 million in forecasted revenue and about $10.5 million in recommended expenditures, which means we're using something around $500,000, $54,000 in reserves to fund this budget. So again, what you're seeing is we're not using a lot of reserves in our enterprise funds this year. Um because we're really trying to focus on getting the capital that we already have in progress out the door. We've really limited new capital projects to either projects that really had to go forward um because maybe they complement a project that's in progress or we've limited those capital investments to getting design started on future projects so that when we get our current backlog completed, we're ready to start that next round so we don't have a couple year drought um while the community is waiting on us to get those

designs out the door. And so these decisions are strategic ones. Normally you would see a little bit more reserves used in the enterprise funds um but way more important that we get caught up on our current schedule before we um invest more into that at this time for reserves. It'll also align really nicely with our 10-year planning processes so we go into that fresh with an idea of what has gotten accomplished on that capital plan, the reserves we have in hand and we're not tying up a lot for the future because we know those major planning processes are going to be in place this year. questions on the solid waste fund. Okay, everyone should spend a day at the landfill. Yeah,

you learned so much. Spend the whole week.

We don't have a whole lot more for you this evening. Um, what I would encourage you to do if you have the time for it is to take a moment and just read the story of each fund. Um, so every single fund is going to have a little bit of a story. In all that the general fund, that story is a couple paragraphs and so take some time to read it. Really get familiar with how that fund ended up having the financial has so that you can talk to members of the public who may have questions. In the general fund, it's a little longer, but that's because it's more complicated, right? It provides for a lot of services. There's a lot going on. So, if you read those sections of the book in addition to paying attention to the bigger tables, you're going to be able to talk about the budget in in an excellent way, you'll know a lot, and then it'll be easier to navigate the conversations you need to have with your constituents um when you need to have those conversations. We're not going to go over the smaller other funds tonight. Just because they're fairly small, it doesn't mean they're not important. And so if you'd like us to take a bead and go over things like the cemetery perpetual care fund and the economic development fund, happy to do so. Um, but they they tend to be a little smaller and we we tend to gloss them over, but we do encourage you to read about them because they will be part of they are part of the recommended budget. So would you like to spend a little time there this evening or would you like to kind of do that reading on your own and just take a look at those?

Glad your turn. I think we can look at it on our own. I I think we can. So, because we're we're trying to do this so that we can also explain it to people that aren't accountants. I would like some help with that table on 115 and the similar tables like interpreting because you were reading the top number. So, it's page 112. 115. Okay. Uh, and I can't remember if that was the Absolutely.

Yeah. I don't remember the digital or so they were like before. Yeah. That so it's called use revenue. Then it says all revenue. So, and then the negatives. So, it's an expense but it's negative. Does that mean that's a positive? So, could you am I the only person that has a hard time reading that? Because if I am, I'll just ask Jen or Spencer to explain it to me later. But does anybody else have a hard time reading that little those little tables? Just remember, two negatives make it.

So, just I'm going to point here. I know I'm not I don't have a mic, but I think that's okay. So, I think you want to see. So the user view revenue, this is what we collect from our community in user fees. It's a really important number, but it's not the only revenue source in that fund. I didn't list all the revenue sources in that fund because it makes it even harder because there's even more there. Yeah. But I did want to show you total revenue. The difference between this is probably grants and loans, right, that we're getting.

That's your positive number. And then your expenses, they're in two categories. So expense is just negative because it needs to be a different direction than revenue. Um so we're using this money right for operating expenses and capital investment to have a total expense of this. So I did give you both parts of the expenses to talk to people about because the point is that most of the money we're spending is actually not an operating cost. And if you look, there's a long period of time where those costs didn't change very much. It's that capital investment. So, so a member of the public might say to you,

well, I'm just paying for the water operator salaries or something like that. It's why it's really important for you to say and you see the cost breakdown so you can say actually the rates you're paying. I mean, yes, you are paying for people to come out and fix water lines when they they break. You are paying for the trucks that you see. You're paying for the fuel that runs those trucks. But the purpose of all of it is taking care of that infrastructure operation. And by and large, the biggest cost is that capital investment. Yeah. Does that help?

Well, what what doesn't help is that I see a line. And so I expect it to be 19. Let's say it's 19 million. Mine is 5 million. Mine is 15 million or 16 million. Then I would expect that total expenses to be two. You see what I'm saying? That's what's confusing me. The line that makes me think it's a sum. So total expenses is really just those last two lines. It's the last two. So not having a line between all revenue and that's what's messing me out of that table because I'm trying to do or like that.

There should be revenue and expenses. Yeah, that's what I'm saying because I keep I kept she was looking for it to add up right like a column. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Good point. Especially if people are coming in and Yeah. Just a quick question. I want to make sure that I'm telling people correctly. We don't pay for water. We don't pay the state for water. Water comes to us out of the aquaberg and from Snowy Range at no cost. Correct. Yeah, that's that's correct. And there's a cost in treatment. Yeah, we we don't buy source water.

Just wanted to add something. I thought of this earlier, so I'm actually kind of glad I got back to this table. And you look at that um 2009, you know, this is great to see the financial, but from the real world, the amount of water breaks that we had back in 2009, it was very difficult to keep up with.

And you know, seeing how that capital investment, we we've seen our water breaks, our infrastructure, and everything else much more reliable and be able to provide a better system for the community. And that's something just to kind of keep in mind because this is great to show the financials and you know Jen kind of touched on it but just to watch our break history and how we're able to maintain the system has uh decreased and not not having maintain it but that break history has decreased substantially since we before these rates were put in. And so those numbers those those numbers in 2009 and and when it was at its worst was close to 150 per year and now we're under 40.

Yes. I don't remember exactly what we were last year, but it was well over a hundred um earlier and it was decreased by over half or more on that. I I remember when uh Brooks gave us that figure and that's one that I use in my narrative when I'm talking to people all the time. It really gets the point across as to where we were in 2009 and the investment that we needed to do to get it to where we are right now and what that impact has been

any other questions. Let me just say one other thing. I don't know if everyone knows here, but you know, we've moved away from the water delivery system. We I think we made I think we replaced all of the wood that we had. We got rid of the clay. We got rid of the uh metal all we're getting to where now the the pipes that we use are mostly the PVC. Correct. And so it's a lot more durable, a lot cleaner, and a lot more resistance to breaks. It seemed like when we were having those 150 brakes, most of them would when the temperature would drop below zero, that's when that all started breaking and our poor employees would go out there and 20 below and be working in miserable miserable conditions. But now I think we've got a much better delivery system, much better infrastructure. We're getting to the point now where we're stay where we're not only improving the delivery system, but also improving the way that we we work with them with how we with the equipment we have to find the brakes, fix the brakes and do all that. So, great progress in the last 10 to 15 years. And I think it it all has to do with technology and and a great crew that we have that works on our water.

Yeah. When I when I think about all the investment in the water side is the call conservancy as we go through, you know, leaks, undetected leaks and the amount of undetected leaks that have been cleaned up over the years and what that leads to on available source water for our community, right? That reduction is important. And so I'm I'm pleased with these capital plans. I think council already to your question earlier as it looks now. If you just look at all revenue and all expenses and you see what it is, then you can calculate if that year we were all the revenue covered all the expenses or we did at that point

that that I think it was a waterline break up on Grand 30th. Was that water that caused all that? The river down. Yes. Yeah. Um, so what kind of pipe is that? You remember

that section there was a steel line where we had that or cast iron right there at that location. So we do replace all the new lines PVC pipe and both water and sewer. So the effect on streets where we have leaks and the effect on alleys and also I mean so it's more than just wasting the water and the line breaking and people not having water. It's the stuff that's above that that now is get saturated and can cause other problems. So I'm I'm just so proud of the council that you have that foresight and our team that did it. Another thing with that on the you know it does affect the streets speed with our sewer the amount of infiltration

has significantly dropped over the so how much water we're actually treating because those those clay lines allow water ground water to enter in and we're no longer treating that when we upgraded those major outall lines and we saw millions of gallons a day that we quit treating we upgraded those are great talking points huh Yeah.

So, as we think about wrapping up um before Todd pops in, there's one thing I've tried a presentation sketch I did. There's one thing we need to still talk about. It's a special meeting on the special meeting on May the 26th. And so, if you remember, as part of every budget process, you go through a couple of the work sessions. This year, there's three. There's one work session tonight which we just completed which is the overview and then you'll have two work sessions next week where the department directors really come and talk to you about their budget request and then on May the 26th we'll have a special meeting on the budget and at that special meeting council members have an opportunity to propose changes to the recommended budget. So you propose that motion to your fellow council members and you vote on whether you want to adopt that motion. Um, so I'm about to send you all the forms for communicating those budget motions. They're going to be due to be um back by the midnight on May 19th. And so pay attention as you're going through sessions next week. Start taking notes, familiarize yourself with this form. Make sure you get me that information by the 19th. I'll share with Todd, the whole budget team, and we'll go back and forth, and we'll work on that language, and we'll make sure that we really have alignment there. Of course, we love it when you reach out to us beforehand because sometimes your ideas are big and bold and it's really hard to get to a concise something we can implement in a day. And so if you're thinking something big um it would be awesome if you could go ahead and reach out to Todd, reach out to me. Let's go ahead and get working on some language and talk about how we plan to fund it so that we have a little bit more time um in the leadup. And so I just want to make sure you're all thinking in that space of where you're heading and also all realizing that you do have the power to propose motions to change the recommended budget.

The Jang puzzle.

So again, council, thanks for your time tonight. Thanks for the questions. Thanks for the involvement. As Jen indicated, we hope you take the time to read the first paragraph so you get the story of each department as we come through. And as we're working through for Tuesday, you'll see hopefully all the departments except for public works and parks and rack. And then on Thursday, we'll see public works and parks and recover that we have. But uh all the department directors have been working on nice presentations to go over the highlights what their departments do and highlighting parts of your budgets and what they're actually coming to you and requesting at this time. So um we look forward to those visits next week and I think we're probably at the point that

so as far as replacing Brooks Web, how are that going? We are aligning some strategies. We're going to put him on a bunch of committees so he can't leave. Such a phenomenal leader in our organization and it's we certainly hate to see him go, but we wish him well. But he's leaving us in a very good position with a very efficient, well-run public works department. that is going to hopefully get a leader of the same kind in the future. Why would you leave a place like this for a place with a beach?

I did. Believe that um Brooks has a secret dream to manage hurricane response, which is actually real. Um he told me he was actually really looking forward to that. So, you know, he's just so smart and so thankful.

I grew up just north of Day. Do we have to turn back? Oh yeah. No, we got two public comment at the end of That's right. So agenda item. What mayor? At the end of each agenda item. Oh, at the end of each agenda. That's great. I can't do anything without my notes.

So is there anyone online? Is there any public comment on this agenda item on this work item? We have no one online or in the room. Okay. Well, um I don't and we were I think we give reports next week. Yeah. This is special work session. Okay. So then I would say we're