City Council - Regular Meeting

Lee Summit has lots of local destinations, but where do you start? Green Street, a vibrant community space in the heart of downtown, is where Lee Summit comes together. Its three dynamic areas have something for everyone. Green Street Market is a modern event venue and home to the downtown Lee's Summit Farmers Market. Green Street Lawn is a covered performance space hosting live music, family activities, and more. Green Street Grove is a mixture of gathering spaces, an immersive playground, and bold architectural features. And all three areas host community events year round. So the next time you set out to enjoy the city you love, remember, meet at Green Street. Hello Lee Summit, I'm Jordan. Here's your flash briefing for the week of June 1st. City Council will meet for a regular session Tuesday night at 6 in Council Chambers and City Hall. Meetings are open to the public or watch live on the City's YouTube channel. If you can't watch, catch the recorded meeting on demand on the YouTube channel or by subscribing to the Council Debrief Newsletter, which breaks down three to four key agenda items. Subscribe at cityofls.net. Get ready for an exciting season as the World Soccer Celebration comes to the region. Whether you're a resident preparing for increased activity or looking to join in the fun, we've created helpful resources such as transportation, short-term rental guidance, and FAQs along with a full lineup of events happening throughout the celebration. Find more information at cityofls.net. And Downtown Days is this weekend, June 5th through 7th. Kick off summer with this free event. Enjoy live entertainment, vendor booths, fair food, and so much more. Visit leesummitdowntowndays.com for more information. Thanks for listening and have a great week.

Welcome to the Leaf Summit sign department. We are going to walk you through our process from start to finish. We make signs as needed here. It's not like we just go out into the field and place the speed limit sign here, no parking here. Our traffic engineers, they go through and they'll do field studies. They'll send us down an engineering work order for us to go out, place new signs or remove signs as needed. Coming from the material, our blanks come in and they're just aluminum blanks. We can put our white our red, our fluorescent yellow, green, whatever. And basically what it looks like is just that there. Throw it up into the roller. And once we got it covered, take it to our work table here. and Tim will cut the corners, cut all the access off to where it's lined up right. As far as the plotter and the software that we use, there's a street name sign there, and he's gonna go ahead and print that out on the plotter so you can see the plotter and how it operates and runs. There's standards for the height, even just on letters on the sign blind. Basically what we have on the computer there is it's pretty much set up to those. And it goes through, it's got a very small but sharp needle. that goes through and cuts everything out letter by letter. Once that's done cutting, our next stage would be bringing it over here. Currently picking out the sign letters right now. We call it weeding or picking or however you want to call it. Next, putting it on the transfer tape. Then after it's taped, we bring it over to the roller. That's where we apply it to the actual sign blank. And we'll roll it through one time just to get the air bubbles out. And the last stage is basically just Taking the transfer tape off the front of it. And there's the finished product of street name sign. We'll take you out to the field and show you our process that we go through. We're gonna go out and follow our sign guys, get something installed for you. This is where we check our underground utilities. Tim, you got AT&T? AT&T is back here.

Ever-G, Google.

We should be good to go. We normally put all of our stuff together out in the field. Then once the base is installed, we'll go ahead and put the post in there. Perfect. And that's how we do it. Simple. Quick.

Every time you turn on a tap, high quality water is ready. But where does it come from? In Lee's Summit, water flows from two trusted sources, the Missouri River and its surrounding aquifer. This water is collected and treated in the cities of Independence and Kansas City. In Independence, the Courtney Bend Water Treatment Plant operates 42 water wells. These wells reach 85 to 125 feet underground, drawing water up from the Missouri River Aquifer, an underground water source that naturally filters water through layers of soil and rock. The facility filters, cleans, and softens the water before pumping up to 7.5 million gallons a day to Lee's Summit. In Kansas City, the KC Water Treatment Plant draws water from the aquifer and the surface of the Missouri River. It then filters, cleans, and softens the water before pumping up to 25 million gallons per day to Lee's Summit. In Lee's Summit, Water Utilities controls the flow of these sources into the local system. Advanced software monitors the entire system, including three pumping stations and eight water storage tanks. which maintain the water's pressure as it moves through 639 miles of water mains, carrying it to your home and the homes of more than 100,000 citizens. Water utility staff collect samples from throughout the system and send them for extensive laboratory testing, ensuring your water is safe, meeting or exceeding state and federal standards. When you turn on a tap, you're accessing a vast system spanning hundreds of miles, each foot carefully planned and strategically maintained. A system that leverages innovation to harness nature, turning a vital life source into an ordinary convenience, bringing you safe, reliable, high-quality water 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. To learn more about Lee's Summit Water, visit lswater.net.

Traditionally, we think as police officers, those responding to law enforcement needs within the community. But honestly, we are there to serve our citizens, and our citizens do go into crisis. They do have mental health crises, and we're being called to those scenes on a regular basis. In order to help serve those citizens better, we did initiate the Crisis Intervention Team Program. These are officers that are specially trained to de-escalate crisis situations. Recently, we've brought co-responders onto the scene, licensed, qualified mental health professionals housed within our police department. and they respond with those officers directly to those scenes where a crisis is occurring so they can interact with that citizen and get them the help they need right there on that scene.

The co-responders are either a bachelor or master level in a behavioral health related field. They wear plain clothes. They don't carry weapons or anything like that.

I have a police radio that I listen to all day. Listen for, you know, those key words. Mental health, behavioral health, crisis.

There's a lot of officers that just call for me. I have my own radio number.

I also have the ability to self-dispatch to them and say, 982 is en route. Officers en route, 914.

So typically I arrive after they've made it safe. I'll make contact and get kind of the rundown. And then I just kind of jump right in.

Like, hey, you know, my name's Allison. I'm a mental health professional. I'm here to help you. I'm not here to take you to jail or arrest you.

Sometimes All a person needs is a voice, someone neutral, someone outside that can listen. I do a lot of safety planning, including family, their support network. Who's close to you? If they're home alone, who can come over and hang out with you today? Can we lock away your sharps? Can we put up your meds? Do you need meds? Can we get you over to the urgent care to get you assessed for your medications? Some of them also are like, oh, I'm so glad you came. This made me feel so much better.

Our main goal as co-responders is to, one, get people connected to the services that they need and also divert from emergency rooms and jails.

And they almost get a different view of the police responding. That lets me know you care and the officers care. Please call the police.

How can we help you?

In 2020, we had 722 mental health related calls for service. 2022, by that time, 1,479. These mental health related calls for service are increasing. How we're responding to that is increasing the number of crisis intervention team officers we have available, as well as the number of co-responders we have available to respond on these calls.

So what I think is important for the community to know about the co-responder program is that we're here, we exist. All you have to do when you call 9-1-1 is ask for us. You know, say, hey, I want a co-responder to respond to this crisis and we'll go. I was really struggling about eight years ago. My personal journey with mental health and I met some amazing social workers and amazing programs that have helped me get to where I am today. I really couldn't see myself doing anything else. We want to help and that's what we love to do.

So I had a client, we got a call, she had some suicidal ideations and she really felt that she had nobody. And you know, in getting to know her story and getting to know who comes around and sees you, well then we found a support person and they responded immediately and we made a plan. I called back and checked on her in an hour and then I checked on her in two hours. We were able to get her into the additional services to where she talks to someone every week or more. I just took a person that really just thought they had nobody and nobody would show up for them and show them you do. And you'll be amazed who is in your corner if you just simply say, I need a little help.

Bye. Thank you.

National Recreation and Park Association. So they also just made a video for their final entry for that, which is going to go on the website soon. And then they'll find out if they win at their annual conference at the end of September. So congratulations to the Park Department. And then also, this Saturday, June 6th at 10.30 a.m. will be the Kids Fishing Derby. So if you want more information on that, Lisa McParks, go to their website, you can do that. Also, we had a Finance and Budget Committee meeting yesterday where among the things discussed was the... I don't care. Okay. was the employee health insurance. This topic will eventually come to the full council, so I wanted to bring it up so that people could go watch if they're interested. I hope you're interested. It was the last item on the agenda, so if you just want to watch that part, that's great. And then let us know, anybody on the committee, if you have any other questions or something that might need to be asked. The next time it comes before us, we ask them to go back and do some more work on it before we bring it to full council so that we can really vet it out and not have to have the whole discussion here again once it comes here. So... I would ask those interested to go watch that. And that is all I have. Thank you.

Good job. Thank you. Council Member Pryor.

Thank you. Well, so we are officially getting a Medi's. So I feel like that's monumental for this council since we order Medi's so often. But now we're getting one at the Mod Pizza location, which this isn't like new news because we knew about it. But like Kansas City Star, like put it in there. But that's exciting. So I just wanted to tell everyone.

Excellent. Thank you. Councilmember Frazier.

I'd just like to share that the Metropolitan Community College at Longview is having their ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Automotive Institute on Friday at 2 p.m. It's close to my heart. This started right about the time I started on the Planning Commission, and we've seen it come through. It is an absolute gorgeous building. And I think it'll serve the students in our community in the greater Kansas City area definitely moving forward. So just want to let you know that's there and they'll be ribbon cutting on Friday afternoon.

Thank you. Great asset for our community. Council Member Atkins.

Last week on Wednesday we attended, several of us attended the quarterly Economic Development Council investors meeting and it was a great panel talking about the activity centers throughout Lee Summit and It was a really good presentation. I think the best way to find information is to go to their Facebook page and see the post that Joe Perry left about what they did. But they talked about the reserve land north by Lakewood and then south by the Rock Island Trail, and then talked about the Longview Station and the middle of downtown. But three out of the five activity centers are pretty well built out, and there's two more that are remaining that are not built out yet, and it was just a really good educational panel to talk about the exciting growth.

Thank you. So we'll move on with the agenda. We have a proclamation, is that correct? We have one. Great. I'll join you down below.

This proclamation emphasizes that protecting the safety of Lee's Summit residents is a top priority and recognizes that unauthorized access to firearms can lead to preventable injuries, deaths, accidental shootings, and suicide. It highlights research showing that securely storing firearms unloaded, locked, and separate from ammunition reduces these risks while respecting the rights of lawful gun owners. The proclamation also acknowledges that increasing public awareness of safe firearm storage practices can improve community safety, save lives, and reduce demands on emergency service, and it supports collaboration among health care providers, schools, veterans organizations, public safety agencies, and community groups to provide residents with secure storage information and resources.

So now, I therefore I, Beto Lopez, by virtue of the authority vested in me as mayor for the city of Lee Summit, Missouri, do hereby proclaim the month of June 2026 as Secure Storage Awareness Month to promote awareness, education, and outreach to keep our residents and our community safe. Thank you all for being here. Can you please introduce yourselves?

Carol Webster.

Dave Webster.

Bob Ludlow. Al Frisbee.

Absolutely. We represent Grandparents for Gun Safety. We are a grassroots local organization that our primary goal is to distribute free, high-quality gun locks to family members throughout the community. Matter of fact, we gave 30 away at your wellness fair a few weeks ago. We really appreciate this, and it just shows that you're committed to keeping your community safe.

Thank you. Appreciate that, and we appreciate you all very much. Thank you. Another applause, please. Great, thank you again. So we will move on with the agenda. We are still in public hearing, obviously. I'm sorry, we're going into public hearings. So I will now close the regular session and open the public hearing on an application, number PL2026-070, Preliminary Development Plan for the Rush Funplex, Lots 1 through 3, 900 Northwest Ward Road, Rush Funplex Applicant. Oh, those wishing to speak, please rise and have our city clerk swear you in. Thank you. Will we start with staff presentation?

Don't leave me up here, Grant. Come on. Good evening, Mayor, members of the City Council. My name is Steve Rich. I'm with Townsend Capital and my address is 837 Northwest Donovan Road, Lee Summit. First of all, I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate all the new members with the recent election results and welcome you to the City Council. We're pleased to be here tonight. I've been working in this community for almost a little over 30 years now. And we are pleased to bring our development plan in front of you for the final development parcel in Summit Orchards West. It's approximately a 10.1 acre site on the very north end of a 25 acre parcel. When we originally came before this body approximately five years ago, we had a preliminary development plan, which at the time I didn't know what uses we were going to be able to attract or even want on the north end of the project. So at the time, we simply put two 70,000 square foot office showroom types of buildings on the plan as a placeholder. However, approximately two and a half, almost two and a half years ago, I was fortunate enough to meet Matt Gerke and his team at Rush Funplex. As I learned more about their operating philosophies, the character of the principals, and the demographic that they attract, which is young school-aged children and providing entertainment options for them, clean entertainment options, I felt like this was the right use at the right time. However, this particular site, as I said, is approximately 10.1 acres, is challenging. And the reason it's challenging is when we purchased the Western Electric plant in 1998 from Lucent Technologies, we inherited a lot of what I'll call legacy utility lines. Some of these utilities are in excess of 30 feet in the ground. So relocating those utility lines would make a project like this absolutely cost prohibitive. So we were able to work with our engineers, the staff, our architects, and the user in itself, Rush, to be able to fit this 76,000 square foot footprint on this site without having to relocate any major utilities. It was challenging, but we also wanted to be very sensitive and focused on the transportation access, circulation of the building, pedestrian access, and landscape perimeters. So, long story short, this was the last piece of Summit Orchards West. However, it's the final piece also to our overall Summit Orchards project, which started in December of 2016. Since December of 2016, we have completed over $240 million worth of development on the 60 acres of land. So I believe it's the right use at the right time. And I believe it would be a tax windfall for the city. It's going to generate a lot of sales tax that we don't take a dime of. So when all the public improvements on this project will be completed by myself and Townsend, we will be completing all the public improvements that were recommended by the city staff and our traffic engineers. So with that, I'd like to introduce my team real quickly to you. I've got Matt.

I've got to turn this way. Where are you?

Matt Gerke is the president and CEO of Rush Funplex out of Utah. I've got Scott Slogge with Slogge Architects. Scott's one of the preeminent retail architects in all of the Midwest. Also with me, not in person, but on my team, is John Huss with SK Design. John has been my civil engineer on this project for over 25 years. Also, we have on our team Amy McCurdy, McCurdy Traffic Consultants. She was our traffic engineer for both Summit Orchards and Summit Orchards West, and we will all be available for any questions that you might have either during the presentation or afterwards. So with that, I'll introduce Matt, and I want to thank you for your time in advance for your consideration. Thank you.

Thank you, and happy to be here. I'm Matt Gertz. 2238 North Church Street in Layton, Utah. Decided to be out here to see this moving forward. We've been talking about this for a long time. And for us and the Rush Fundplex, we come from a pretty small background. We started with the first Rush Fundplex about 20 years ago in Utah. My background is a contractor and developer. We did a building and ended up taking it over as a fund center, and that's what got us into the fund center business. My brother and I had young families at the time, and so We decided to give it a go, and after 10 years of beating our head against the wall, we thought we figured it out enough to keep going. And so it was actually our second location near Salt Lake City, Utah, that the developers of that development owned some property out here in Kansas City and asked us after we got that one going if we would come out to Kansas City. So that brought us out this way, and This particular location is exciting for us because one being a new build, our existing locations in Kansas City and Shawnee, Kansas were existing buildings, not the size. You don't have the same platform to work from as you do when you do a new build. We did just complete and open two locations of this identical building in Utah over the last two months. And so we really love the layout and the way that it functions for families and and for everybody that comes. Steve mentioned that we have a large demographic of younger kids, which is true. We do a lot of field trips, a lot of day activities and things like that, but it really does extend to teenagers. In fact, in many of our locations, we do graduation all-night parties. I use our facilities as a safe place for the teenagers to go after graduation and spend the night, and we leave it open all night for them and that. and under a controlled partnership with the school. So it's a fun activity. It's a fun business. It's a very safe and clean family-oriented business founded there in Utah where families are big, and a lot of them. And so it's also directed us to everything we do is indoors, controlled. uh, very secure family moms can come and stay in the cafe and feel comfortable that their kids are out playing in 75,000 square feet of space. But we have employees at every, every activity. So, um, up until now, we, we now, this would be our 10th location. Um, and we've not had a single issue arise with any sort of violence, any sort of, I don't even know that we've had any real fights break out in our facilities. It's just that people are there to have fun and it's just not a contentious atmosphere at all. With that, I guess I would ask if you have any questions for me or anything I can explain further.

We're going to go hold off until the staff presents, and then I'm sure we'll have some questions for you. Okay. So thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Oh, Mr. Schlage.

Do you have some design details?

Absolutely. Mr. Mayor, members of City Council, my name is Scott Schlage, Schlage Architects. We're located at 4600 Madison Suite 350 in Kansas City, Missouri. As Steve mentioned, we've been working very carefully with the planning staff, and Steve was mentioning how difficult this site was, and I'm going to use what he used to describe it. He said it's like dropping a box in a bowl full of spaghetti. There were so many issues for us to get this 76,000-square-foot building to work. We're very pleased with what the results are, and one thing that Matt neglected to mention, that if you look on the screen where my hand is, that's, of course, the Funplex, the adjacent building to it, is a flex office space in which the Funplex folks will have about 2,500 square feet or so of office space as our administrative offices for this region, because you already have two locations here in Kansas City. This is where they're going to have their staff there to support their operations here. And so the adjacent building next to it, of course, is not what's... for your review tonight. It's these two buildings here. The third building Mr. Rich owns and has plans to have the same sort of building there with the same kind of uses where they would share and share alike with access easements and park easements throughout. So here's again the team that Steve mentioned that has been working diligently on this project. We're very proud of the the package we've created in which working with Mr. Soto and planning staff, we hope we've acted accordingly to meet all the expectations by the city in terms of your ordinance and requirements. So on the site plan, again, orientation, here's the Rush Funplex and the building that the Rush folks will operate and then the adjacent building, Lot 3. You can see here there's a property line that straddles the Funplex property from the Townsend Capital property that they own. But again, it's cross-parking throughout. The intent is for these buildings to be very flexible. So you can have everything from, say, a tile showroom to maybe daycare or other office uses that might be there that can support this area. So when you look at the overall development, we did utilize the Rush Funplex prototype, which they have used time and time again. As a starting point, the one thing we found was working with the Planning Commission, they had some comments regarding how we may be able to make some positive changes so that the elevation facing Northwest Ward had more of an entertainment-oriented look to it. So you'll see here as we'll show the four sides of the architecture, one thing we've done that's changed their prototype is that we changed this tower element to have a 45 degree angle with illumination that will allow for that to be a party room type space. We found, though, working with staff, if you look at the east facade down below where the main entrance is at the intersection of Northwest Tudor and Ward, is that the planning folks had some comments that maybe this has to have a little more life to it. So we looked at this working with staff and the Planning Commission. We made some positive changes. So above is what we had presented to the Planning Commission for which they approved but challenged us to make some positive changes. So down below you'll see we've created a marquee type sign that is centered with the Tudor intersection and wrap the glass around where that corner tower is I mentioned earlier. To provide we think a more interesting look as you're coming into the building Another thing we were challenged to do is perhaps provide some more interest with some lighting So the lighting you're seeing there it projects a pattern language onto the wall so that it creates vitality and all four sides the building which We are happy to do and this was approved again by the rush fund plex to provide this this gives you a better view Looking that would be let's see. That would be south east Southwest rudder look in that direction And again, there's the elevation the one thing that Matt mentioned is that everything is is internal so we introduce glazing we have to be very very careful about it, so that doesn't affect how they Perform their services inside most of the building of course has to be opaque so they can control the illumination and control the way everything is perceived. And so this kind of gives you an idea as to the level of finish and excitement they have within the space. And maybe you have some more questions for Matt on their services they have. For example, that tower I mentioned where the glass is, it's taken up to where they have this climbing wall right here. and where the marquee sign is, again, to control the environment within that space. We worked very carefully with staff on parking. In fact, the good thing is that because the Rush Complex has 10 locations, we could actually gather empirical data on what they need for parking. I know that there is a need, perhaps, to reduce the amount of parking that we need to have in our communities to allow for more green space, more meaningful green space. So we found working with them and staff that we had the right sort of balance of parking necessary to serve not just this building, but the two adjacent buildings that are part of the development. And by doing so, we're able to create this campus, if you will, by having a ride-in, ride-out off of Northwest Ward and having a full movement at the Tudor intersection and running all the traps necessary to make sure that we have the proper ingress and egress for the development. Again, working with staff and looking at your ordinance, we created an architecture we think that is pleasing and is consistent with and harmonizes with the Rush Funplex building. Again, materials palette, we had to make sure that we're using materials that are acceptable by your code, your ordinance, and also meets the Rush Fund Plex's requirements on their prototype. We are showing three different monument signs. They're all dedicated here in this key plan. The latest entry was this B sign here that would serve the adjacent Townsend Capitol building here. The other two are more general in meaning in which they could have a list of all the tenants within this overall development. And that I'll leave to your questions and answers. Thank you. Thank you.

We'll have Mr. Soto come up. And I guess before you get started, as you walk up, Little birdie talked to me beforehand today, tonight. It's your birthday. It is. Yeah, Mr. Soto's birthday. Let's give him a round of applause.

And I'm choosing it to spend with you, so there you go. No pressure now. The first thing I would like to do is, well, thank you again first. Then I'd like to enter to the record exhibit A, list of exhibits 1 through 19.

Exhibits 1 through 19, please enter into the record.

So the applicants have done a comprehensive, a good comprehensive job of covering the changes and overall high points of the development. So I'll try not to reiterate too many of them. Just to highlight some of those items, just to recap, the preliminary development plan in front of you does cover all the buildings that are depicted on the plan. The immediate plan is for the construction of the larger Rush Funplex building, which is the larger footprint, 77,000 square feet. As was stated, there's a plan to put some offices here that would be the local headquarters, and there's a potential third phase here for... for a future third building on the site. All told, the development is going to have a little bit less than 103,000 square feet. To provide a little bit of comparison, the previous plan that Mr. Rich had referenced had a total of 123,000 square feet. So this plan will reduce the overall development by about 20,000 square feet now that there's a more defined vision and defined need for or use for this particular project. last 10 acres of the 25-acre original site. So this here is the original elevations that were presented to Planning Commission. The middle elevation is kind of a mirrored elevation. It's the west elevation, but it also mirrors what the east elevation would look like. The overall response from the Planning Commission was very positive regarding the development as a whole and the architecture, with the one discussion point being that east facade facing Tudor Road, which all stemmed from a modification request to the UDO requirement that there be a minimum 50% of clear glass fenestration along all street facing facades of a building. In this case being the east facade which is the one that is depicted here on these renderings. So the original plan here showed, let me actually go to a different slide. Okay, so the original plan here had about 1.67% of clear glass fenestration. The direction, so modification request was being sought. The Planning Commission overall again had no issues with the architecture as a whole, but did like to see some additional improvements or some additional architectural embellishments or elements added to that east facade, which the applicant has come back with here, provided some more clear glass use of materials that kind of reflects a little bit more or gives the illusion a little bit more of a break between a first and second floor, although this is just a single story building. This particular iteration bumps up the amount of clear glass within the pedestrian view area to about 7%. So it about tripled the amount of glass that's visible just through this little view corridor, which is measured as basically the first 10 feet of the building. So it doesn't take into account the upper kind of almost more of a clear story piece of it. So just looking at the lower portion of the building, there's now about 7%, which was up from that 1.67%. So certainly the applicant did make significant improvement in that respect based on the direction given from the planning commission. So what's in front of you tonight are essentially two options. And I guess maybe later the applicant can express again their preference for which option they would like to go with. there were essentially two options being presented. The original fundplex with the 1.67% on the east elevation, and in response to Planning Commission comments and direction, there was this alternate design that was presented. So both are certainly within your purview to be selected. You have the ability and authority to to go back with the original version if you choose. You also have the discretion to grant approval for the alternate design. But I'll leave it to the applicants to address which is their preferred design of the two. But again, it's your purview to select either of the two. So from here, I'll just kind of more skip to, well, there was a neighborhood meeting held on April 9th. No members of the public attended. Staff has not received any direct communication from any of the adjoining business community members or any adjoining residents with any comments or concerns or issues with the proposed development. So the approved conditions here, one through four, the top three are original to staff's recommendation, number four being the one that was added by the Planning Commission, giving direction to add a little more architectural relief to the building. So there's some additional text on the bottom. So if you were to decide to go with the original version, then Conditions one through three would really be the ones that you would go forth. Condition four was the one from Planning Commission giving additional direction for embellishment. If you were to decide to choose the alternate design, then condition number two, I've provided the language here, is just an expanded version of the one above, where it makes direct reference to the alternate design presented to City Council on today's day, June 2nd. So if you decide to go with the alternate, Alternate condition number two would be would need to be incorporated into your recommendation So with that I'll just yield to any questions that you may have Great.

Thank you. Are there any questions from council? Yes councilmember prior Thank You mayor.

Well, so this question is probably more for the applicant but If problems arise on a Friday or Saturday night, do you guys have a security plan in place? Would you be willing to have security officers there if... I mean, I just know... I'm looking at surrounding areas and I know that... You never want any problems to happen, but even the one in Leawood on Nall, their racing center, a few weeks ago, they had an issue arise. It's very minimal, but there was a fight that broke out there. And then in Independence, I know at Main Event, they have issues from time to time. So is that something you'd be willing, is that something, do you guys have a plan in place just in case? I mean, when young people gather, things happen.

If you can come up to the mic, please.

Yeah, I guess I would respond to that in that our business thrives and literally survives on the notion and the security that families have that it's a safe place for them to come and enjoy. So absolutely, there's been areas that we've gone into that we Actually, we're more thinking that that would be the case, and it has not been the case yet, but we have been taught, we've talked to private security companies about what that process would look like if that ever became necessary. But yes, to answer your question, absolutely, we'd want to ensure that that continued to be the impression that people had of our business.

Okay, thank you so much.

Good. Great. Council Member Atkins.

Mr. Gertz, Gurch, I'm sorry. Thank you, Mr. Gurch. Can you describe the environment when people come in? Do they buy tickets to get in or tickets for the arcade or what's the age range? How does that work?

Yeah, so most of our sales are done on an hourly pass basis. Usually the most popular is a three-hour pass. So you get in and really, and those passes can be purchased online or at the front counter. And once you get in there and sign the waiver, then you have three hours, which basically includes everything outside of there are separate arcade cards that they can buy. And they can purchase individual venue passes, but that's actually fairly rare. So most of the sales are hourly.

Okay. And do parents, is there an age limit? Like can kids just get dropped off and run in, or what's the requirement?

They can. They can be dropped off. We don't see a lot of younger kids get dropped off, but we do do large groups, field trips and things like that, and as long as they've signed the waivers, then we allow them in.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Funk. Thank you, Mayor. Is the intention to construct the Funplex building and your second building simultaneously? Are you doing the main building first and then that one will carry second?

I think we would like to construct them both because as Mr. Slaggy mentioned, we would like to use part of that building as our offices. This is another reason this is kind of a big deal for us is this location gives us enough, I guess, presence in the region to really boost up our marketing and events teams and gives us a location that's much more conducive to bringing in large groups and parties and things like that. So we've decided for this region, this would be kind of our flagship location and be kind of where we're based out of. Okay.

Mr. Ritz, you would do the third building as needed? That wouldn't be something that would fall under that?

I'm in the process of marketing it as we speak.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem Shields.

Thank you, Mayor. So this is zoned P-Mix, did I get that correct? So is this an allowable use in that zoning, doesn't require any kind of changes or modifications?

No, with the way P-Mixes work, they somewhat, they will, approval of this plan will establish the uses that are allowed. So in this case, Office, flex, entertainment center are part of the plan. So that would be rolled into that.

All kind of like what would be envisioned. And if he makes sound, this isn't out of the question. No, no.

It falls within what would be allowed.

As far as the signage goes, does the applicant have any particular preference on those two options that were presented? I think you guys said you were happy to make the modification. Do you, like, given the choice, do you Is there one that works better for your business model?

Yeah, actually the second option, the proposed change, works really well with our business model. Most of what we do, our common theme is glow in the dark go-karts. So the glass that was added to the front corner versus straight in actually opens up into our arcade area where all the glow in the dark events are kind of in the other spaces of the building. So we're good and happy with that proposal.

Okay, so you'd be good with us having that modification approved tonight?

Yes.

Okay. I mean, we're just approving the site plan and the use that the PDP does?

That is correct.

Okay. Yeah, I don't have any other questions. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Frazier.

Do you see an area for parents, we talked about the ability for parents to drop off the children or the kids, is there an area, a holding area, if you would, inside other than, say, the food court, if you would, if they wanted to stay?

Yes, we typically do bench seating throughout the facility, so at every venue there is places for parents to sit.

Great, thank you.

Good. Thank you. I don't see any other questions at the moment. So I will ask, is there anyone who wishes to speak in support of this application? Is there anyone who wishes to speak in opposition of this application? Yes.

I'm not really in opposition. I'm kind of neutral. But I think there's some questions that need to be answered. So I'll tell you what I like. I like giving the youth a place to hang out and engage in fun activities. So generally speaking, I think that's a good thing. I love that they aren't asking for any incentives. That's a breath of fresh air. But my concern that they kind of brought up and try to gloss over, and this is a concern of many people in the community. I announced that this public hearing was going to happen on my page, and the big concern was about crime. We have a neighbor independence with a similar venue, and Mia mentioned it has issues here and there. The truth is it's been riddled with issues. You know, they've got fights, crimes, calls for service. And as of right now, you're proposing a budget that accounts for zero overtime for police and fire. So I think before you can approve or decline this project, we need to get some historical data from Independence on calls for service to main event. And we need to find out how many hours are spent responding to calls there and how many hours are spent on proactive measures to prevent crime. If the increase is truly substantial, we may have to punt because we're already in a bad situation where we can't afford overtime. We can't afford a lot of the other things. And it's unfortunate, but that's where we're at. And so that needs to be a big part of how we make our decision here. Thank you.

Okay. Anyone else?

Teresa Vollenweider, 5201 Northeast Maybrook Road. I'm just curious as to where all the water runoff is going to end up with this particular development. And I mean eventually where is it going to end up? How does it get there?

When we originally began the development of this project, we dedicated over 16 acres of land in the northeast corner of this property as dedicated stormwater retention. It's not on the development plats. It's we've dedicated to the Stormwater Association, and it's more than adequately designed to handle all of the stormwater from any of these projects, which is why these projects don't need to have stormwater retention inherent in the development plan. So we made that commitment a long time ago.

Thank you. Are there any other questions from council? Hearing none, I'm going to close the public hearing and reopen the regular session. At this point, are there any other questions or comments from council? Yes, Mayor for Tim Shields.

Thank you, Mayor. I think this looks like a great addition to our community. I think one thing we've talked about a lot is needing more family-friendly activities in town, and this seems like it's well-designed for that. It's a good location for it, and I think it could be a real asset. So I'm also happy to vote in support of their PDP. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Council Member Pryor.

Thank you, Mayor. I'm already getting text messages about when will this open because people want to schedule birthday parties. So thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Frazier.

You had me at Project Grad. I think it's a great location. It is sandwiched in, if you would, between Missouri Innovation Campus, as well as some of the apartments there, as well as some of the newer development down to the, I guess that would be the north, potentially, So, I like it. And the comments previously are right in that, you know, we always look for places for our youth to be able to safely congregate, if you would. We have to look at the potential crime, potential incidents everywhere we go. So, I don't think this place is unique. I will say as a parent of a student who went to Project Grad in the other state, on the other side, this would be welcome to have it in our own city. So, I like the way, the look with the additional glass, the illumination, that stands out and I think that's absolutely wonderful. So, definitely I would support it. Also, one other thing I wanted to note, at least in the renderings, the green space that was depicted was beautiful as well. So, definitely I would be in support of this and I'm with Council Member Pryor. When? How soon can we get it in?

Thank you.

Council Member Funk. Thank you, Mayor. I'm not going to repeat everything my colleague said, but I would just put in my notice that I think the alternate plan with the added signage and additional glass are on the horizon for us. Thank you. Council Member Rader.

Thank you, Mayor. Couple of things. I think this is a lovely project, and I like it a lot. And my kids live over in Leawood, and we've been there. It was very nice. But I will say that that was one thing that I was concerned about was the, I don't want to say the crime, but how when kids get together, things happen. Mr. Gersh, you did say that you weren't really specific about what you said about security, but I'm sure that you've dealt with that in the other projects that you had. So, I mean, is there anything that you, do you have people that are there in the building at the time to make sure? I know you said that there are people on duty all the time that are watching the kids and things like that are happening, but is there anything specific that you can tell us that would maybe align some of the Lay some of the fears that might the public might have about gathering places like that Mr. Dunning or mr. Head before you answer sir.

Do we need to reopen the okay great great.

Thank you You know that the only thing that I would add to it is there is a lot of staff there and and that the every location is also heavily under security surveillance cameras and things like that, especially where it's a lot of glow-in-the-dark activities and things like that. But we also are cautious about congregation areas. And so, like I said, we've actually held multiple high school events at our facilities and have not had any problems. I just... I think if anything, the only occurrence I can even think of is a parent getting upset that their kid got bumped too hard on the go-karts. And so we really, I don't know what it is. I guess I don't have a specific answer as to why that is, but I understand the concern how it could be perceived as a confrontational place with a lot of teenagers hanging out. We just have not experienced that. And for lack of better words, even in a much more, rough neighborhoods than what we're going into here.

Yeah, we hope we haven't turned to a rough neighborhood. Okay. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks, Mayor.

Thank you. We're going to go to Council Member Cravens first. Council Member Breyer.

Thanks, Mayor. Thanks for the presentation. I always love to see projects that include our children because I think that that curbs crime when they have safe places to go and visit. I think the only thing that gives me a little bit of pause is the drop-off component. I do know that when we look at some other places where drop-off, dropping children off do become problematic just because they don't have the oversight of parents. I am curious to know in your other locations, because I think you said, and I could be all the way wrong, this is like your 10th facility? complex facility? Are all of the other facilities drop offs? Is that kind of the theme? And then if so, what is the majority age range that supports this type of project? Is it more so school age children or do you tend to see a lot of teenage high school plus young adults in this space?

If I were to pick a majority, it's probably the junior high age group, the early teenagers. We do get a lot of date nights, and it kind of depends on the activities. I think the other thing that kind of helps, again, is that there's no single area that's a large area without employees. So you're either going to the go-karts or you're going to the foam pit. And then with it being hourly passes, it's typically a two or three hour that they are there. So it's not an all day to where they get overly bored and into, I guess, mischief and things.

Second question to that to piggyback. So when those passes expire, do the children or the young adults tend to kind of hang out, gather, or is there any type of precaution taken when, you know, you notice that the children are not, or the young adults are not using the play passes and they're just kind of lingering and doing

No, I mean, once they're wristbands, so they get a wristband that kind of calls out when their time is up. And then once that time is passed, they're not allowed to get onto any of the venues. We really don't, and maybe it's because there's just not a lot of hangout space where there's not an activity. We don't get them usually hanging out.

Okay, yeah, and that's kind of what I was looking for because when you kind of give young adults, teenagers space to kind of linger and do their own thing, you tend to see a lot of gatherings that can lead to other escalating things that we don't want in you know, in these types of spaces. And then, you know, other than that, I do agree that, you know, with all of the things that we invite into our community, we do want to be cautious of what type of attraction or crowd it brings because we are getting residents from surrounding areas. So I do think that that was a good comment to kind of make sure that we are aware of safety and security when we you know, bring entertainment spaces for the children. But I am glad that we do, we are looking to provide those because I do know that that also curves a lot of activity, that negative activity that can happen when children and young adults don't have spaces to occupy their time in a positive way. So thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Atkins.

Sorry, Mr. Gertz, got a few more questions for you. Just a couple touch-up questions. How many staff, like how many employees will that bring?

So it does depend on the hour of the day. So during most of the business, probably 80% of the business is on Friday and Saturday, and then Sunday would be the third most busy. But during the busy times, you've got about 25 staff in there, and they're at every venue, so they're, They're strategically placed. They're not just wandering around. During the week, weekday, it's a little bit different in the summer, but a typical weekday during school year and things like that, it drops down to about 10. But there's actually just very little activity in the facility during those hours.

Great. Okay. And what's the hours of operation?

So we stay open until 10 o'clock. We open at 10 o'clock. We stay open until 10 o'clock on the weekdays, open until midnight on Friday and Saturday. Okay. And then Sunday we actually close at 8 o'clock.

8 o'clock, okay. And then just are there toddlers? Like what's the youngest?

We do have some activities for kids as young as 2, 3 years old. We have some mini go-karts that they can do. But I would say anywhere in the 4 or 5 years old range is when they start getting into the foam pit and things like that. And those activities are generally right by each other, so it's kind of a more younger area.

Area, cool. Okay. I have seen conversations about this online, and what I've seen on the community is that they're thrilled because we really don't have anything like this. I think it's amazing to bring it, and I think it'll be very busy. I like the location over in that area because there's not a lot built out around it, and I can see it being very convenient for parents who are driving around and going to the grocery store and doing their things over there. I think it's a great destination location, kind of cozy back in there. So I appreciate you bringing this, and I think it will be very well loved. When is the estimated date?

So as soon as we're able to break down, we'd like to get the shell up. hopefully before it gets too cold. But once we break ground, it's usually about a 12-month. So ideally for us, for sure, we'd be open before the Thanksgiving holiday next year.

Next year, before Thanksgiving. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Just a reminder to all council colleagues of kind of the process of the closed session versus public hearing or open regular session versus public hearing. When we have public hearings is when we ask some of the operational and logistical kind of questions. And this last part is reserved more so for our opinions and if you have recommendations. But we'll all pick up on it as we go. So just wanted to point that out. I won't repeat what my colleagues have already said. I think for the reasons they've asked excellent questions, I think a concern you all have seen or have heard our safety and security type questions just to keep patrons and our community safe. And it sounds like you all are prepared to address those kind of issues and potential issues. So appreciate those responses. From my perspective, I think this is the kind of project that our community has been longing for for years. We have other recreational type services in our area. We have a great park system with great amenities, but these kind of private entertainment type venues are things that many people in our community go spend their tax dollars outside of our community. For years that's been the case. For most of us that have older children, young adult children, that's kind of been the case. So thank you all for considering Lee's Summit and for wanting to invest. The fact that This is the 10th overall store that you all have opened across the country. Tells a lot about you as an operator and working out the kinks operational wise. The fact that it's the third store in this region also bodes well because you've worked out the kinks within this market. And you want to make this one kind of a prototypical newer concept. You're wanting to open your corporate offices, regional offices here in our community. I think all those are amazing positives that this community has been longing for for many years. So we appreciate that. And thank you for making the trip here to our area to present. That being said, I don't see any other questions. And I just want to tell you again, thank you for wanting to invest in our community. And welcome. And we'll go ahead and if there are no more questions, we'll go ahead and Mayor Pro Tem Shields, will you please read the bill?

I move for a second reading of bill number 26-101, ordinance approving a preliminary development plan for land located at 900 Northwest Ward Road, all in accordance with the provisions of chapter 33 of the Unified Development Ordinance of Code of Ordinances for the City of Lee Summit, Missouri.

The modification, is that part, or did we add it?

I would say you need to just, as part of your motion, include alternate number two as provided.

Including alternate condition number two, development shall be in accordance with the preliminary development plan dated April 14th, 2026, and the building elevations contained therein except that the east facade of the Rush Fundplex building shall follow the design alternate presented to City Council on June 2nd, 2026.

Great, thank you. Motion's been made by Mayor Pro Temp-Shields and a second by Councilmember Carlisle. Is there any other discussion, any additional discussion? If not, please cast your vote. All votes are in. Motion passes 9-0. Thank you all. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you, Mr. Birthday person. Thank you. I don't say birthday boy. Be respectful. All right. We have one additional public hearing. Just a small thing, not a big deal. So I'm going to close the regular session once again and open the public hearing for application number 2026. Oh, wrong one. 2026-7622. So, Mr. Dunning, all those wishing to speak, please rise and be sworn in by our city clerk. Thank you. Now, Mr. Dunning.

Thank you, Mayor. Members of the Council, Mark Dunning, City Manager. So we are here to public hearing for our fiscal year 2027 total proposed budget. And I would like to enter, I'll call it Exhibit A, this presentation into the record, please.

Please add Exhibit A, this presentation into the record.

Thank you. So our fiscal year 27 budget, what that entails is our fiscal year runs July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027. So this is that annual budget that we bring forward every year. It's an annual plan. It's an annual policy. What this establishes is what we anticipate and estimate to be revenues for a whole year, and then how we choose to deploy those revenues, those resources to provide services to this community. So I think of this plan, this budget, as one of the annual policy decisions that we all make together to deploy resources and initiatives throughout this community. It's a very important and impactful document. And so I appreciate the time that we have spent with the Finance and Budget Committee on numerous occasions to shape this budget. So thank you to those that have served on the Finance and Budget Committee. You know, I mentioned allocation of resources. Every year, we have limited resources, right? We as an organization always want to do more. But we know we have limited resources. And so when we prepared this budget, oftentimes we consider expansion requests. As the information became more transparent and we put this budget together, we still, there were departments that were requesting expansion requests to do more, but recognizing that we were not in an expansion mode, we pretty much set those expansions off to the side as we prepared this budget. And we live within our means, right? And so that's the way that we prepared this budget. It is required to, as a city manager, we're required to bring forward a balanced budget, and that's what we're bringing forward tonight in the city manager's budget proposal. So we will cover all funds in this, and I want to quickly go through the agenda. So I mentioned we've been in front of Finance and Budget Committee at least three times preparing this budget. So what we will do this evening is go through this agenda, recognizing that at the end of the agenda, there are recommendations that the Finance and Budget Committee provided to us as staff, and we'll cover those at the end. But as we go through the presentation, if you have questions, please ask along the way. That would probably be most appropriate because we do have numerous funds that we get into. And we'll be diving in and out of different funds as we go through the presentation. So the agenda will start with where do we take guidance from that vision? It's our strategic plan that was done in 2019, 2020 with the community. And that's still relevant. And so we take cues from that. We'll get into council priorities. General fund budget section is our most flexible fund, and we'll spend probably a majority of the time there because our other funds are more restricted. So that'll be a big component of the presentation and discussion this evening, I would anticipate. We'll get into those other funds, those dedicated revenues for certain needs. We'll recap and then we'll get in. We'll cover that Finance and Budget Committee recommendations and then talk about next steps. So that's the overall flow of the presentation. With regard to the strategic plan, what you see here, again, done in 2019-2020, what you see here is Cliff Notes version of that. I mentioned that Finance and Budget, you can do deep dives into each one of these. We call them critical success factors. So as we go about our work, Initiatives here at the city. We want to connect those back to one of these Street one or more of these critical success factors within the Strategic plan and that's what that's the way we go about our resource allocation To see how we're doing in these certain areas The city is not the leader in every one of these critical success factors But we we can play a part and so we recognize that as we go about our work.

I

Also want to mention council goals. In 2024, we had a council retreat and we established some, we called them big rocks priorities for the council and staff to work on. Those were in the spaces of housing, beautification, stormwater utility, and I'll call it contracted residential solid waste collection. And so we've done a lot of work in those spaces and we know in two of those, in August and November, we'll have elections on stormwater. and then contracted residential solid waste too. So the plans are in place for many of those big rocks and initiatives that were established through that council retreat priorities from the council. Lastly, I would mention, too, our citizen survey from 2024. We can take guidance from that document as well. And we know within that citizen survey that priorities for the community were police services, And kind of right there in number two was fire and EMS services and then overall maintenance within the city. And so I wanted to mention those as we craft our budget, being mindful of the guidance that we take and can glean from all those efforts. Also add to that our core values, our vision, our mission, and our values. I'm not going to read these to you. We are very mindful of this. The vision statement is one that was created by the mayor and the council at the time, a vibrant community ensuring the finest quality of life for all generations. That's a continuous improvement statement. Always striving to do that. It's forward looking. Never knowing when we fully achieve it. It's intentional that way. The mission statement from the organization's efforts then is how do we go about, it's our fundamental purpose. It's our guiding principles in the work that we do. And then to the next level are organizational values, stewardship, service excellence, and integrity in doing the right thing. That talks about the approach that we take to our work. So we always keep this as a compass as we go about preparing our budget and providing service to the community as well. So those are high-level kind of overview in how we approach and what we think about as your city manager and staff as we prepare the budget. I want to create an understanding, too, of the overview of this budget, and these aren't on the slide, but I know those of you that are on Finance and Budget Committee know the level of uncertainty that we're dealing with and trying to put together this budget with. property taxes at the county level with credits and rebates and assessed values of property that are still uncertain at the county level. And quite frankly, we've got our preliminary assessed value information from the county and it shows a 4.4% decrease in our assessed value, which I can't explain. So that's levels of uncertainty at that level. Of course, always economic uncertainty, right? We're always wondering what the future holds. And we have seen that while sales and use tax continue to grow, they're more to marginal growth than Maybe some more aggressive growth. So we're mindful of that. We've got the recently approved Collective bargaining agreements that are in place. We just heard about health care costs, right? Health care care costs are escalating and we're asking ourselves. What can we do to contain those? Health care costs we have work to do in that space We with our Corps General we've been on a mission. We call it our pan pay and growth plan, so this is nonrepresented employees, to go out and do a market check to see if we're still competitive with our pay and compensation within our core general. We are not there yet. We had hoped to be further along, but that's still an initiative that we are not letting go of and still pursuing, so I wanted to mention that. And then just overall, operationally, right, fuel, utilities, we are bringing on additional facilities. That's included in the budget, but those costs are increasing as well. So we're mindful of all that, and those are some of the financial pressures and cost drivers that are contained within our proposal in this budget. So having said that, what is in the budget? We worked really hard to maintain a 3.5% merit increase for core general employees. That's We go through annual performance reviews, right? And that's where those merit increases come into play. We also recognize that we have a number of core general who are topped out, right, in their salaries. And in previous years, we would say, well, you're topped out. We're not going above that top out, but what can we do to at least show that you are valued? And so we've found ways to do that, but we haven't done a range movement for a number of years. And given where we're at, we felt that a 4% range movement would be appropriate for those employees that are topped out. And also included in this is the agreements, the negotiated collective bargaining agreements. So that's all within the budget. Some feedback that we received as we shaped this budget I'll say from one of the work sessions at Finance and Budget Committee was as we prepare this budget. Let's be mindful of the fire and communication pay disparity. There are resources in the budget to resolve that disparity, okay? We've calculated what that may look like, and there would be a, it's actually, I think we're really close on, you know, realizing what that entails. So that's within the budget. We wanted to minimize reductions to public safety, again, tying back to public safety being a priority, and the citizen survey would reflect that, and that's the feedback that we've received from you all as well. In that economic development space, be mindful of reductions in development services and services that we provide that create that environment that folks want to invest in Lee Summit. And so keeping that in mind as we prepared this. reductions in right-of-way maintenance and I'd say overall city assets right as we bring on new facilities we want to keep them looking nice and representative of the quality that this community desires and expects and lastly avoid going into this budget to where we're not over overreacting creating irreversible reductions under the level of uncertainty and that we're operating in. So that's a high-level overview of how we went about preparing this budget. And I think with that, I'm going to chime in here and there on the overall approach to the budget and certain topics, but we have Eric Stoyanov and Rick Gentry that will carry a lot of the weight when it comes to the numbers and the expenses and the revenues that we're seeing. So I'll turn it over to Eric. And I'll be back here in a moment. But at this point, any questions so far?

Not seeing any.

Okay.

Good evening. Eric Stoyanov, budget manager. As Mr. Dunning had mentioned, the city has several funds. It's how we categorize our various operating expenses. The general fund being the primary operating fund for the city. To differentiate a little bit between them, we did color code the slides. So general fund slides are all the olive color, and the other funds are in the sapphire color, just to kind of differentiate that main operating fund. Then we have special revenue funds, things like public safety sales tax, debt service funds for our general obligation debt, capital funds, enterprise funds that are more of our business-like funds, such as water utilities and airports. and then our internal service funds, which include ITS, CBS, and Fleet. So starting off with revenue. So this shows two years of actual revenue, where our budget started at for FY26, where we project to end FY26, and then our proposed FY27 budget. Tax revenue makes up the majority of our revenue for the city, about 80% of it. For property tax, we're projecting a 1.4% increase. Mr. Dunning had mentioned... The assessed value is actually decreasing, which our permitted revenue growth off our preliminary assessment is zero, so same as this current year. We do not have our final numbers, and so we do not have our final levy at this point. All that becomes finalized in September, I believe. And so those numbers are not final, and we also have not received new construction. But there is a lot of uncertainty, so 1.4% felt like a good point to put property tax growth. Sales and use tax is our second largest category. It is a volatile category because it depends on economic conditions. Right now we're projecting 4.2% increase in this category. It's basically sales tax. We've been seeing 2.7% growth this year. Use tax is where we've seen a lot of our growth. We're just above 8% growth year to date in our use tax category. So overall, we're around 3.7% as of today with growth. The sales and use tax category also does include marijuana tax. We just can't break it out separately because there are too few dispensaries to give that detail in a public setting. Franchise tax is things like electric, natural gas, telephone and cable. Electric and natural gas are the two largest drivers in this category, very weather dependent, but projecting minimal growth there. And then we have motor vehicle tax. And so, sorry, motor vehicle tax, we are projecting Lower growth than we've seen in the past. So this includes fuel tax, sales tax, and license tax. We have had consistent fuel tax increases for several years now in a row. That has been the primary driver of growth in this motor vehicle tax category. That stops, this was the final year for that stated increase. And so if you look at times before we had these consistent increases, we had minimal fuel tax growth overall. So more relying on the sales tax in this category, which is why that growth percentage is lower for FY27 for motor vehicle. And so this is just showing a visual trend of these categories. You can see for FY26, our original budget, we overshot it a little bit on what we were expecting. That's primarily because of franchise tax. Right now we're about 2.6% down compared to this time last year originally with the budget. We were projecting growth. And so then you can see the FY27 budget is slight growth over where we project to end 26. And here are other revenue sources, so this makes up the 20% remaining revenue for the city. So we have fines and forfeitures, things like minor traffic, court costs, probation fees, things of that nature. For here, we're projecting 3.7% growth. Licenses and permits, so those are things like occupation licenses, inspection fees, grading permits, things related to just development activity in the city. We're projecting 4% growth here. We did work closely with development services throughout this process to talk to them about what activity they are seeing, and this was the number we felt comfortable with for the budget purposes. Intergovernmental, things like federal, state, county contributions for programs like hazardous moving violations, Jackson County Drug Task Force, and then school resource officers for public schools. Charges for service, the biggest item here is ambulance fees, makes up about 80% of this category. So ambulance fees are charges for service provided by paramedics. This category also includes our EMS dispatch contracts, communication tower leases, and then this is also where our revenue goes for collecting property tax payments at City Hall. And then our other revenue category is kind of a catch-all category. It has things like cigarette tax that we receive, which is a very Fairly minor amount compared to the entire budget. It also has our ground emergency medical transportation program, our GMT program with our fire department. And then it also includes private school resource officer amounts that we receive. Investment earnings is the interest earnings we receive on our portfolio. Right now we're earning about 4.1% on that. And then transfers in is the general and administrative we receive from other funds for activities performed such as legal, financial, HR, things of that nature. And I did wanna note in FY24, there was a one-time revenue of $3.7 million. That was a sale of property and a significant transfer for one of the grants. So that did bring that FY24 number up pretty significantly. Then in FY25, we did not receive any money for the GEMT program due to changes in how that program was structured, which caused the dip. Typically, we fluctuate between 20 and $21 million in this other revenue section. And so here's just a summary of where we project to end FY26, the FY27 proposed budget, the dollar change and the percentage change. As I mentioned, 1.4% growth for property, 4.2% for sales, and then an overall growth of 3.1% compared to our FY26 projection. And here's just a visual of that. FY24 is skewed a little bit by that $3.7 million one-time revenue amount, but if you Take that back out. It's been pretty consistent, just steady growth in our revenues. And I will pause there for a moment just to see if there's any questions on the revenue side before getting into the expense side. Any questions?

Council Member Atkins.

I did have a question that's kind of been lingering and I couldn't find it in any of the presentations. When it comes to property tax for Jackson County, Can you describe the range of the impact that it has on us? Like, is it a million dollars or could it be five million more or less? Or, like, what's the tangible impact of that uncertainty?

Do you want to? I was going to say, I think you've been involved in more recent meetings than I have.

So the correct answer is it depends on what the county does. Right. But I know that we modeled, if the county executive were to afford rebates over a three year period, I think that initial year impact was to the tune of 2.2 million. I'm getting a head nod that my memory's correct. Now, that's just a scenario, right, if that were to occur. And then future years would not be as great. I don't remember the numbers there. I think it was more like maybe a million, 1.8, 1.8 in those years two and three if that was implemented.

An increase to us per year? A decrease. If he does the rebate, then it lowers that.

Correct.

And if he does not do the rebate and he just moves forward where it is now, then there's no impact?

Well, I'd say this, right? Our anticipated revenue with the decrease... Assessed valuations decreased based on the preliminary numbers, so we needed to model what might that look like. So, really, what's in the budget is... What we've prepared is that if that were to occur, the county were to do the rebate program, we didn't hold back $2.2 million in revenue. That would be, we would lean on our reserves just to get through that time frame, okay? Because we don't know yet, right? And so we didn't just prepare the budget saying, well, let's pretend we're not going to see that, right? But that would be the impact. Based on that scenario, again, but we don't know.

Yeah. Okay. When we started off at the very beginning a couple months ago, it was like between the wish list of extra things, it was like a $14 million gap. So how much of that would have been covered if Jackson County had not put us in this situation? Like a $2 million, you're saying $2.2 million?

Yeah, it's hard to say, and I appreciate you saying that's the wish list, right? It was $13.4 million, what we started with, and that was representative. If resources were just not an issue, what would everybody like in our budgets, right? That was the starting point, and so that gap, though, I mean, that's why we worked through a process, and we closed the gap. I don't know that, you know, that... It's hard to factor in what might we expect from the county because we just don't know. But that 2.2 is what we modeled based on that if rebates were afforded over a three-year period, which was being discussed at the time. I don't know if that's still relevant in today's world, though.

Okay, okay. Moving forward regardless because we have the reserve fund to handle that kind of loss. And then I'm sorry, I do have another question about the sales tax, if this is the right time to ask it, because I saw the percentage of the four-point... whatever the backslide was, 4.2 or something, and most of that was use tax. So with sales tax, even with all the onboarding developments coming on this fiscal year, we're not estimating a sales tax increase.

I feel like we are estimating a pretty healthy growth on sales tax compared to what we've seen with our trends in recent years. I'd also say it's kind of hard to exactly know because I know Costco is a big talking point, but how much does Costco cannibalize other businesses? Are people buying more food there instead of Hy-Vee? So it's kind of hard to know the exact impact until we're able to see the true data for our area. It's also an incentive on Costco, but Compared to our past trends, I feel like we're showing a fairly healthy growth. It's also due to economic uncertainty. I know this week there were stories about this is the lowest savings rate for Americans since 2022 and the highest credit card delinquency since 2015. So, I mean, it does seem like consumers are struggling a bit. I know we are increasing options in the area, but didn't want to go overboard necessarily.

Okay. Okay.

And going back to property tax, too, I will just mention every year we do go through a mid-year process, and that's about the time we're getting our property tax receipts. And so if we get to that point and we're seeing that property tax is coming in healthier than we initially anticipated, it's a chance to reevaluate our needs and opportunities to invest in the community that we weren't able to do initially. So that's normally a good opportunity to review everything. Yeah.

And with the sales tax as well, we're bringing in the southern region of all the Harrisonville and Warrensburg and all the towns that wouldn't normally come here to go to Price Chopper, but they come here to go to a Costco.

Yep. Yep. It'll be something we evaluate on a monthly basis.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, thank you for those questions early because I've been pondering them for the last few weeks. So thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Pryor.

Thank you, Mr. Denning. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little on the 13.5 million being, or 13.4 million being a wish list. I know police and fire got unfairly blamed a lot for these, for the discrepancy or for the gap in budget, but could you elaborate on that a little bit? Sure.

So as we prepare the city's annual budget, while we're working on what might we anticipate from a revenue stream, the departments are also working on okay, what's our request for the budget? What are we going to need? And so they don't know at that point. And the way it works is all this kind of comes together at the same time. And so those initial requests from all the departments, based on what we anticipated for revenues, that's what that's representative of. It was purely a wish list of if we could make all this happen, what would that take, right? And so that's what that was representative of.

From all departments and not just police and fire, correct? Correct.

All departments.

Okay.

Yep, we bundle it all together.

Okay, thank you.

Good. Thank you. Mayor Pertem.

Thank you. I wanted to kind of follow up on a couple of questions that my colleagues asked. When we talk about kind of some of the issues with the county and the uncertainty there, the rebates are part of it, but also we talked a little bit about that our assessed valuation has actually gone down a little bit, and if I mean, I'll put words in your mouth. If the county hadn't gone crazy up and down with tax assessment levels and we'd seen the same kind of steady growth we expected every year and we had 3% or 4% or 5% assessed valuation growth, that's part of what this gap is, right? That we're not seeing the normal just inflation growth in those numbers that we would usually expect. Is that an accurate way to put it?

And I will say we don't have final numbers from the county either at this point. It's just preliminary and we have nothing from Cass County. So we don't have all of the finalized details.

So this will become clearer as we get those final numbers. But that's part of what we're dealing with is that because the county's been up and now down, where we would normally expect in a normal year, just slow, steady growth, we may be seeing something flat instead. Right. So that's part of what's accounted for here. And then as far as like Costco, which I am optimistic about, but they're opening in August and then it's, is it a three or four month lag between when sales tax is collected when it's remitted to the city? Is that right?

Two months.

Two months. Okay. So even optimistically we're, we're getting towards kind of halfway through our fiscal year before we start even start to see those revenues. So we hope that they're going to come in really strong, but again, it's, We can only see maybe half of that in this year's budget because it won't show up until later in our fiscal year.

Correct. Yes.

Thank you.

Any additional questions? If not, we'll proceed.

Okay. Moving on to the general fund expenses. So this is just a high-level overview of the general fund expenses. You can see that the biggest category here is personnel, which makes up 66% of our general fund. So that is salary and benefits. I will say with benefits, loggers did increase, and we've already talked about the health insurance. Transfers out is our second largest category here. That includes things like workers' comp, which did increase. We've had some significant claims, so it increased $1 million overall in this budget. We have our property and liability insurance, and we also had some significant public safety equipment replacement transfers this year. So we recently, in recent years, switched to a lease program. So we have the principal and interest payments included in this transfer out for ambulance and pumper principal and interest for those leases. And then the remainder of these are things that supplies, fees, claims, just the normal supplies and services to run the day-to-day operations of the city. And so here again is the two years of actuals, our original FY26 budget, and then the FY27 proposed budget by expense category, just putting dollars to the charts that you saw in the previous slide. We'll also note here we did have a one-time transfer of $9.8 million in 2024, and then nearly $16 million in 2025. The $9.8 million was to Green Street, and the nearly $16 million, 11.7 of it was to Green Street, two and a half million was to our vehicle equipment replacement program, and then one and a half million was for a downtown safety package. All of those were planned spend downs of our fund balance, but just wanted to point those out for comparison purposes. And then this is comparing the original budget to the proposed budget with the dollar difference and the percentage difference. I do know Mr. Dunning has a slide coming up talking about the operational impacts, so I won't spend too much time on this. But I will say this includes the 3.5% increase in personnel for Corps General, includes the collective bargaining agreements, includes loggers increasing, 10% increase in health insurance. So all those things are included in personnel. I do also want to clarify a comment that was made earlier about overtime being removed from the budget. Overtime has not been removed from the FY27 budget. As of right now, we have nearly $1.5 million budgeted for fire overtime and $1.1 million budgeted for police overtime. So total public safety overtime is $2.6 million in the FY27 budget. So it is still there, and it's in that personnel section. Overall, our overtime is like $2.9 million. There's some public works overtime as well. When we were going through this budget process, we knew that we had several things to solve for, most prominently the collective bargaining. And so you can see that reflected in the other categories. We tasked all departments to go back and look at their budgets, their operating expenses, what was needed, what could potentially go. And that's why you can see some negative percentages in the other various categories throughout the budget. And then this is showing those same numbers, but it is showing it at the department level. So, again, you can see two years of actuals, the FY26 original budget and the proposed budget. Those one-time transfers that I mentioned in the previous slide are located in that citywide category, which is why those appear significantly larger in those two years. I think this is a better comparison of all the departments. So, their FY26 budget, FY27 budget, the dollar change and the percentage change. You can see outside of public safety and municipal court, most budgets are decreasing. Again, I know Mr. Dunning is going to go into more detail. I will also mention public works. Part of that decrease is The way we typically handled capital projects was we had a capital project reimbursement in the general fund. We changed how that was structured with the FY27 budget. So we are charging the personnel that work on capital projects directly to those capital project funds. So that is part of the decrease there, too. There are obviously operational impacts as well, but that's just part of the change that you see there. But all departments did have significant operating reductions, and then this also includes personnel freeze of 30.8, I believe, FTEs. I did want to mention on citywide, just to clarify exactly what's in citywide. So that has things like property and liability insurance. It has our building equipment replacement transfer. It includes our ITS overhead and our CBS overhead has election expense. Just a lot of things that impacted the city as a whole rather than an individual department. But it is a relatively new category. We created it when we went to work day. So just wanted to point out what was included in that citywide account. And then here is the budget allocation comparison. So on the left is the FY26 original budget, just grouped by the major categories. On the right is the 2027 proposed budget. So public safety had traditionally been around 55% of the general fund. It is increasing to 61% of the general fund in the 27 budget. And then you can see the subsequent decreases in general government and public works. And I will turn it back over to Mr. Dunning to talk about operational impacts.

Mr. Okay, so this slide is intended to help put that framework to how did we, what approach did we take to get to a balanced budget? I can tell you that we looked at the budget from different angles. At one point in time, we asked all departments to go back and model what it would take to get back to 2025 actual costs, not what was budgeted, what were actual costs. And so that was an exercise we went through. And that's where I know there was a number that was thrown out there. We need to reduce 70 some odd employees if we use that approach to balancing a budget. And so what we realized through that, though, is I'll call it more operational non-personnel, right? Where can we trim other supplies and services and things of that nature? And so that's a portion of how we got to a balanced budget. But that angle changed from just going back to 2025 actuals to looking at, if we did a hiring freeze, what would that entail? And that's what we did. That's the platform, I'll say, that this budget is prepared by. Eric mentioned 30.88 frozen positions, and that is the case. On May 6th, we froze those positions. We worked as a management team and said, are these able to be frozen? If so, what impacts might that have on us as an organization? So we owe that to you and to the public to say, what areas are we talking about hiring freezes? Those positions exist in administration, in law, in HR, cultural arts, public works, development services, finance, creative services, central building services, our fleet operations, and then our ITS. So a lot of internal facing, supporting positions in order for us to deliver services to this community. It's not impacting... I can't say it's not 100% impacting public safety because that's not a true statement. There are some hiring freezes in police and fire. Those entail expansions for fire dispatchers, five positions, but we're only freezing two, hoping to bring on three. And then in police department, taking a phased approach to bringing on police officers to the tune of over 20, 21 sticks in my mind. We know in that hiring process that come July 1, we're not gonna automatically have 21 new police officers on the street. So we've phased that in over a year's time to bring those police officers on. So those are not frozen, but we've tiered the approach in the budget to bring those on board. So frozen positions in in the police environment would be some call takers that have been we've been pursuing for quite a while We haven't filled those in a position in animal control frozen now when I mentioned hiring freeze I want to make this clear. It's it's a snapshot in time saying if we froze the froze these positions What would they be and and we're not? Reduction enforced by doing this these are vacant positions As we go through the year with what we call a vacancy analysis process that I'll describe to you, we will look at those positions when they become vacant and ask ourselves as an organization in taking guidance from you on what are priorities, what positions are necessary to bring back online to ensure throughout the year We're staying balanced does that make sense so it's not to say that these positions will be frozen for an entire year We don't know that but what a hiring freeze allows us to do is take a methodical approach to Restructuring thinking differently about how we can deliver services reorganizing Reorganizing whatever that may be and so that's the that's the approach. We're taking with this hiring freeze You heard a little bit about overtime there is I'll say trying to be more mindful of overtime in that public safety environment. We will talk about that. That came out when we get to the finance and budget recommendations. That'll be a component of that. And then just overall, organizationally, we've worked really hard through, I know many of you have heard the ASR initiatives, Attraction, Satisfaction, and Retention of our Workforce, to make sure that we as an organization are providing employees with professional growth opportunities. But in a budget situation like we're in, if we can scale that back, still provide those opportunities, but be more mindful of it, that's what we're doing. Across the organization, just being more mindful with the resources that we have. So that's that staffing environment, if you will. I'll stay in that space and talk about the vacancy analysis process then. That's not applicable to public safety. We know we want to fill those positions. We'll talk here in a little bit about enterprise funds. They're not part of the general fund. Their revenues operate more like a business, like water utilities and the airport. and Parks Department. So this hiring freeze does not necessarily apply to them directly, but if there are positions as we think about reorganizing and going about our business differently, it does kind of trigger at least a discussion about how we're approaching a balanced budget and thinking about our structure here at the city. That's that staffing and capacity space. With regard to service level impacts then, right, what might be visible within the community, I spoke briefly about right-of-way maintenance, and that's a high priority. And we have worked over the last couple years to bring on additional crews because that's what the guiding documents were telling us about. We do have some vacancies in the operations, and so pausing on some of those, I'll say lower priority mowing and right-of-way maintenance in agricultural zoned areas would be an impact, right? We would feather out that, how often we mow those areas, which would impact other schedules. So I wanted to make that clear. We did. We're not eliminating sidewalk and curb repair. I want to make that very clear. It's scaling that back. This is repairs, right? You'll hear in the CIP portion sidewalk replacement, missing sidewalks, curb replacements. All those are still taking place. That's through the capital improvements plan. So this is just general funded. What are we allocating towards reactive? These need repair. We scaled that back a little. Not completely. In the facility maintenance space then. We call this our building and equipment replacement program. We were planning to set aside half a million for that fund. We dialed that back to 250,000, knowing that we have a lot of newer facilities now. All facilities need maintenance, though, but dialed that back in half in this budget. And then I mentioned expansion here. Excuse me. As we bring on more facilities, we're not bringing on more staff right now. Quite frankly, we have a hiring freeze, as I mentioned, in central building services right now. But as those needs continue to grow, we need to be mindful of that. But I just wanted to mention that since maintenance is a high priority as well. Kind of tying back to professional development across the board, just looking at, we know there's value in all of our departments having interaction and community engagement with the community and the stakeholders in the community. I'll say dialing that back a little as well. And then what might be expected from some of these frozen positions? Well, when we think about our service levels and how we can go about delivering those services with a hiring freeze and as we go about rethinking how we deliver, there could be increased turnaround times. Now, depending on what sector of services are we providing, that may be different, but generally less people, right, doesn't automatically equate to a higher level of service. Now, thinking about that, though, the way we deploy technology, you've heard Workday mentioned, right? What efficiencies can we gain from those types of systems? So we're thinking in that space as well. I think I hit on all my points there. Oh, I would mention too, and it's been mentioned before, as we go about this budget and working this plan throughout the year, just like we did last year, let's check in monthly. And then at a mid-year point is a great time to just say, where are we at in today's world? And reprioritize and ask ourselves, are we still in a hold tight mode or If we're in an opportunity mode, what are those priorities that we think we should put those resources towards? So that's the commitment in working through this budget with these reductions that are in place. uh... so i think i can wrap up the general fund overview and and then we'll move into public safety sales tax here in a moment but what you can see here a balanced budget now is it going to end up with that exact that would be awesome if it did i'd like to see it come in higher on the on the revenues but we don't know yet but that's the goal to anticipate a year's worth of time What resources and how would we deploy them? And that's why we have a zero difference. It's a balanced budget. That's the plan, but we work the plan. Noted below, then, we do have a general fund reserve balance policy. And you can see there what that general fund reserve balance is. And I will tell you that's 37.9%. Our policy is between 35% and 25%. We kind of hold tight. If it's above 35%, then the city manager is to bring forward recommendations. You heard Eric mention intentional spend downs. That's what that was a result of. Let's deploy the resources that we have. and invest those in the community. And so those were some of those projects that you saw with the asterisks by them that Eric was mentioning previously in his slide. So we still have a healthy reserve. We're still in accordance with the policy. We're bringing forward a balanced budget in the general fund. And so with that, I'll stop before we move into the next. We'll go into different funds now in the next portion of the presentation.

I think we do have some questions, Mr. Dunning. So we'll get those addressed now if we can. Sure. Council Member Frazier.

I just want to clarify, you mentioned hiring freezes, and that is different because there's a lot of misinformation out there. There are no layoffs. There are no cross-the-board layoffs.

That's correct. Thank you. That's correct. The freeze is on vacant positions. Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Pryor.

Thank you, Mayor. And this is just for my own knowledge, but do you know off the top of your head which department has grown the most since like 2020? Or if you don't, can you get us that information?

Well, I could tell you this. Between, I don't know the exact data, right? But when we added public safety sales tax to our revenue stream, and that's reflective, I think Eric showed that chart of The increases, our biggest increases in our investment has been in public safety.

What about employee-wise, do you know?

I would probably say public safety too because that public safety sales tax was intentional to create, you know, those opportunities in those spaces.

Okay. And is there any way that you can send me an email at some point soon, like ish, just what departments have grown with how many employees?

So you're thinking just from an FTE perspective, grown in what way, right? Yeah, FTE perspective. Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you. Mayor for Tim Shields.

Thank you, Mayor.

If I could, Sergeant, I'm hearing some comments. Mr. Dunning, can you send that to all of us?

Absolutely.

Yeah, thank you.

Good?

Yeah, thank you. I guess when I look at this hiring freeze, TRAVEL AND TRAINING, REDUCTIONS TO MOWING AND THINGS LIKE THAT. IT SEEMS TO ME LIKE THIS KIND OF TIES BACK TO WHAT YOU SAID EARLIER ABOUT AVOIDING IRREVERSIBLE CUTS AND UNCERTAINTY. THESE FEEL LIKE THINGS THAT IT'S EASY TO TURN THE KNOB BACK THE OTHER WAY IF THE REVENUES COME IN STRONGER. IS THAT KIND OF THE THOUGHT PROCESS HERE THAT RATHER THAN CUTTING EMPLOYEES OR MAKING OTHER BIG STRUCTURAL CHANGES THAT WE WOULD PUT SOME THINGS ON HOLD AND IF THE NUMBERS COME IN GOOD WE CAN start rehiring and expand some of these services again, and if they come in worse, the revenues come in worse than expected, we can tighten up some more, but trying to kind of thread, like that's what this feels like to me, trying to thread that sort of middle cautious ground, but things that are easy to turn back on.

Yeah, I use the term methodical approach. Spot on, right? Agree with that, yes.

Okay, that's all I had. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Atkins.

A COUPLE OF, I'VE BEEN, YOU KNOW, GOING THROUGH THESE PRESENTATIONS AND LOOKING AT THE PAST COMPARISONS AND THE SLIDE THAT WE HAD UP A FEW SLIDES AGO, YOU KNOW, TALKING ABOUT THE PERCENTAGE INCREASE FROM THIS YEAR TO LAST YEAR. THERE'S A PRETTY STRONG DECREASE IN A LOT OF THE DEPARTMENTS, BUT IF YOU COMPARE IT TO THE YEAR BEFORE IN 2025, IT'S ALMOST VERY SIMILAR, WHICH I KNOW WAS THE POINT OF THE EXERCISE WAS TO GO BACK TO 2025 LEVELS. What is lingering in my head is why did 2026 balloon so much? Why is there such a, because if we were staying steady from 23 to 24 to 25 and then 27, they're pretty similar, but 26 was like huge. And that's just my perspective, but maybe that's not accurate.

I'm looking at Eric to see if I, I'm not following, are you? Is that some of those intentional?

It seemed like 2026 went up really large and now we're back to where we were again. And I'm wondering what happened in 2026 that made it go up.

Was there a certain slide that would be helpful to look at? The bars. The bars? Okay.

Maybe that.

She wants expenditures. Expenditures? I'm going way back. Go ahead, Eric. Expenditures.

You're talking expense, correct? I thought it was. Okay. I was going to say, we don't have a bar, but I will say, I mean, the FY25.

The FY25 went up, yeah.

Yeah, the FY25 budget was around $98.5 million. This is showing the actuals, but that also includes the intentional spend down. But the budget, at least the original starting budget, was around $98.5 million. I'm going off of memory there, but I believe that number sticks in my head.

Okay.

So then, yeah, we increased. marginally going into FY26, but then the biggest item that changed were the collective bargaining agreements is what happened in FY26 that's causing the significant jump overall. That's the only major change that's happened.

So when it comes to forecasting ahead, you know, because at the beginning of this process, it was like, you know, the wish list of 13.5 million. If you had been forecasting for collective bargaining agreements and 3.5% for Corps General and loggers, like those things seem like they would have been somewhat predictable. And so why, what process do you go through on the back end to have the staff come up with a wish list that large when those other things are priorities? Like why would we be exposed to a wish list that large when we know that those priorities have to be locked in Why would the wish list grow so large?

So we've taken an approach where we haven't, I'll say, limited departments from thinking creatively and then helping understand what are those requests. And this happens every year. We'll have a whole list of expansion requests, and we'll trim that down. But we'll be mindful of what were those requests in the prior years and help us understand. So I would say this. The mayor and the council don't see all of the requests. They don't because we bring forward a balanced budget. But that's part of the process is thinking creatively. If you had certain equipment or positions or things like that, what would you do with it? So that's that wish list. Again, with the departments not knowing what are anticipated revenues for the next year, given all the items that I've mentioned.

Yeah. Well, in a presentation, it might be helpful to see two separate lists because it's hard to tell what our base minimum was versus what was new information that hadn't been there before. So I'm trying to understand, are we solving for a $14 million problem, or are we solving for a $7 million staff problem, or loggers that was a surprise? I'm trying to understand what we're solving for. And then in the last presentation for finance, we listened for an hour about public safety and what they were giving up, and we went through every single service that they had, but we didn't do any of that with any of the other departments. So I'm curious, other than staff freezing, have the other departments gone through that level of scrutiny behind the scenes? Is there extra, are there, you know, is there money being allocated to things that haven't been cut yet? Because the public safety has cut a lot, which I think is going to have a negative impact overall with what we're all trying to achieve.

So, yes, all the departments, we worked on this with management team over numerous sessions through these different exercises, right, and identifying especially the hiring freeze. Can we live without those, right? And that helped solve for a, was it 3 million, Eric? About 3 million of that gap.

Of which gap?

So don't, I wouldn't compare it to the 13.4 million. Right, it's a gap to get to a balanced budget, while being mindful.

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what the gap was.

What's that?

I'm trying to figure out what the gap actually is, since so much of it was wish list. That signals to me that it's extra money, but what would the gap have been if there weren't wish lists loaded in there?

I don't know that we have that number, do we?

That's what I'm trying to understand.

Yeah, I don't know that we have that number, because once we understood anticipated revenues and all the financial pressures and cost drivers, we dialed in on what is that anticipated revenue and then we worked to get to a balanced budget. So that gap, I don't know that I could quantify from that wish list to where we're at today, just our work together, better understanding what our resources were and how do we get to live within our means was the exercise.

Okay. So will we hear from departments later about their operational changes also? Is that in other fund areas?

Well, we did. I will say this. We gave high-level overviews of department when we got to the slide about those reductions. Okay. But we did have deeper dives into public safety, and you'll see that when we get to the finance and budget committee recommendations.

Okay.

Thank you.

Mayor Pretem.

Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to highlight a couple of things. I think one thing that was different this year is that partly as a result of the feedback from this dais that we were brought into this process a little bit earlier, than maybe normal, like a lot of times just a finished budget product would be brought for an up or down vote. I mean obviously there's a hearing and there's discussion, but we had asked, we want to be a part of the discussion early in the process before all the outcomes are finalized. So I think we saw maybe a little bit of a, I don't want to say messier, but just an earlier iteration than we would normally see. Is that kind of accurate?

Yes, and I'll speak to that because I felt we owed that conversation to the committee to help shape the budget, right? In years where we do have that opportunity to look at expansion requests, a lot of times we'll filter that through and give you at least an idea of what kind of expansions and why. How does that connect back to strategic plan or those types of items? And so in this case, I've said this before, it's hard for any of us to be where we're at and then say, how do we dial it back? That's not the way we're wired. We always want to do more and do better.

Kind of in the spirit of transparency for the community, for the council, we got to see a little bit more of that process from how you get from wish list to balanced budget that we don't necessarily see as much every year.

Correct. Yeah, usually. I mean, you would see us bring forward the general fund and the public safety sales tax in a session and have some dialogue, and then we bring all the other funds in a separate session, and then we're here at the public hearing, and that's pretty much it. That's at least the past three or four budget years.

So this year we had more of an opportunity to say, here's the starting point, get feedback from the committee, from the Finance and Budget Committee on priorities, bring back some options, get some additional feedback, and then eventually bring this more finished product, which, as I think you'll get to at the end, is not 100% finished products because we do need some feedback from the full council on a few items, right? Correct. And then as far as, like, the department by department, I know we didn't drill down deeply into those in committee, but each department did have a chance to come up and kind of speak to how this was going to impact their operations and their staffing. And I really did appreciate each of those department heads kind of walking us through some of that information. So I just want to say, like, we may not have drilled down as deeply into each one, but we did take time to talk that through in committee. So thank you, Mr. Dunning. Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you. Don't see any questions at this moment. Okay.

All right, we're switching gears based on the color of the slides, as mentioned. We'll move into the public safety sales tax, which is now we're moving into more restricted funds, okay?

All right, so with public safety sales tax, we have two revenue sources, and it's sales and use tax. It is mimicking what we're seeing in the general fund. The one difference between general fund and public safety sales tax is that it does not have the marijuana tax in public safety sales tax. That's a general fund only, but overall revenue growth is mirroring what we're seeing in general fund. So $14.8 million in the FY27 proposed budget. And so here is the expense trend, again, two years of actuals, the original budget and the 27 proposed budget. I think this comparison is a little bit better, but I will caveat that, especially with public safety sales tax, it is a newer fund, and there has been a lot of one-time expenditures out of this fund. So it does make comparison year over year a little bit difficult and messier than it does in the general fund. The general fund is a very established fund, and so it has a better rhythm to it than the public safety sales tax. This has had a lot of one-time expenses. It has had, we've had vacancy savings and police that we've reallocated to capital spending. I know we built the live burn facility and accomplished several other projects out of public safety sales tax, but that is why in the end you see some wild percentage swings in this area. Transfers out, those are the insurance kind of similar to some overhead amounts, and then there's also a public safety equipment replacement transfer out for the axon contract that was brought before finance and budget earlier this fiscal year. But I do think this kind of tells the story of where we stand with public safety sales tax at this point in time, and it is that it is very personnel heavy. It's almost viewed as an extension of the general fund at this point, but it is 81% personnel. The remaining is essentially those transfers out for some overhead amounts and for some public safety equipment replacement programs. But you can see the supplies and services is pretty minimal overall. It's very personnel heavy in public safety sales tax. And then this shows the overview. Again, we are presenting balanced budget for the public safety sales tax. The fund balance for June 30, 2025 is $7.3 million. We do not have an established fund balance policy for public safety sales tax like we do in general fund, but just wanted to put that on for informational purposes. And I do know we'll be talking further about public safety potential additions. So I wanted to be transparent about where the fund balance sits for public safety. And I will pause there before we get into other special revenue funds, and I turn it over to Rick Gentry. Don't see any of the questions at this point, so we'll proceed. All right. Thank you very much.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, council members, Rick Gentry, budget manager. We're going to change gears here and go into the special revenue funds and our other funds within the city's budget that will be included in the FY27 overall budget. So the first group we're going to talk about is I'm going to kind of go through and talk about the, especially for our new council members, kind of talk about the revenue sources, what provides the revenue to these funds and what makes them special and unique. And what they are limited to expend their money on so the special revenue funds will begin with a parks fund This is a comes from the approved voter approved property sales tax or I'm sorry property tax for the parks and this is for their administration and operations of park facilities the maintenance of their parks facilities They they're going to have a slight increase in their use sports association fees this year and that's kind of help offset some of the causes and provide some additional services during the World Cup as we expect additional visitors to park parks and using their facilities The cemetery trust fund. This is a city-owned cemetery that the parks they manage it for us and The revenue from that comes from the interest earned on the fund balance as well as fees charged for internments and the fees for burials That's a lot that's passed through but that's also majority of their expenses is the obvious that maintenance mowing of the grass and then the preparing of enclosing of graves Business and industry fund. This is funded by a 5% sales tax on the gross daily rental receipts derived from the transient guests sleeping in accommodations. That's the way it reads in our law in the ordinance the city passed. This is a 5% tax that is collected and paid monthly by the hotels. They do have an incentive. They do get a discount off that 5%. They do get to keep some of that if they do pay it early each month. And we'll talk a little bit more about business industry fund here in a couple of minutes. Eric just talked about the public safety sales tax. That's a half a percent sales tax that's passed by the voters in 2022 for the purposes of retaining, recruiting, equipping our public safety departments. Road and bridge fund. This is for a small fund that collects deposits for related to roads and bridge improvements projects. Our Green Street fund, this is a new fund this year. We opened Green Street in August. It became operational and came online. This is the fund where we pay for the operational expenses out of that. The construction was funded out of the capital fund. This is the operational fund. And our budget for FY26 going to FY27, you can see just a slight increase there. And we do have anticipated revenues based upon local agreements. some rentals that they kind of anticipate and some sponsorships of about $531,000 anticipated revenue. They hope to gather more bookings and increase that revenue along throughout the year. And then the final one, the grants, contracts, and settlements. We used to have separate funds for all of our different grants. As we went to work day and we had better abilities to track revenues and expenditures, we consolidated these all into one fund. So we used to have a Violence Against Women Act fund and a Community Development and Block grants, or CBDG grants. Those are all things they all funnel through and run through the grants and settlements funds as well as our

Settlements would be like our opioid funds reserved from the received from the opioid settlement fund that goes in our police and prosecutors can use Question yes, just a short one on the Green Street asterix is that 531 thousand of revenues so a net cost of sixty thousand or is that the net cost of five hundred thousand? $531,000. What does that number mean?

That is just a projected revenue number. It's not a net of any...

I guess what I mean is if you take that and say it's costing us $595,000 to run, we're bringing in $531,000 in revenue, so we hope that it really only costs us $60,000 a year to run net? Yes.

I just want to make sure I'm understanding the numbers. Yes. Yes. That would be a net, yes. Hopefully, it'll become profitable. That's the goal.

No, that's really helpful information because I know we've had some questions in the community about how much the facility is costing to maintain, and that really helps to get some perspective.

So thank you very much. Yes, and it's like me. As they increase rentals, the expenses will go up, but also the revenue to match that to help cover those expenses. So that's the plan. Thanks. All right. So the previous slide was kind of the, as Eric had shown on the previous slides with the general fund and public safety, we had the 24, 25 actuals, 26 budget, and 27 proposed. This is kind of looking at the difference between comparison between 26 budget, FY27 proposed budget. Parks revenue, well, it's like a big increase, but they have a lake dredge at Legacy Park. You've probably been seeing them doing the dredging on the lake. That project's included that. because it's paid for as part of that property tax that's been collected. So that's a big project in 26. Then FY27, they have a, as we've done restructuring, a large part of the depreciation comes out of that fund now. So that's an expense reflected there. So the true operational expense are really only about a 3.5% increase instead of the 19.6% increase you would see there. Cemetery Trust Fund, it's just some adjustments in some of their internal service fees that they pay and realignment some of their staffing for out at the cemetery. Business and Industry Fund, we're seeing a slight increase and most of that's due to the increase in the PSAs from FY26 to FY27. Public safety sales tax, we've already talked about that one. Road and bridge fund, that one, we have a project that is budgeted that they're working on. They haven't sent the money yet this year. It may roll into next year, and that's where there's anticipated spend on Eel Creek and the Park West development project. Green Street, again, we talked about the difference there. They're just going up slightly due to the operational cost for salary employees and just the operational cost in general. And then grants, these are just kind of based on anticipated grants we usually expect. Some of the grants we typically get every year are some things. The police officers, it pays for overtime for police officers to sit in construction zones. Those are monitoring theirs. That's through grants through the federal and state level. We receive grants for that. That overtime is paid through that process and charged directly to the grants fund. The business and industry fund. I have a couple of slides about it. It's got a little more of the detail because it is a fund that's interested the council and the community. So this is the funding, how things are split out, and then the fund, what is there spent on. Administrative fees, that's kind of the process. That's the fees for the city collecting the money. So that's revenue that would go into the general fund, that $38,000 anticipated for FY27. Discount expense, that's the discount that we have to show as an expense in case a hotel does pay early. And then that discount, we have to show that as an expense because it would have been revenue we would have realized. Other supplies and services, the $100,000 there in FY26, that was to include some expenses we incurred that we did not budget for initially. And it came into a budget amendment earlier this year. But it also includes the $50,000 for LS Goal 26 for the FY26. Football Fridays. Yeah, Football Fridays over here at Green Street. So that $50,000 is part of the FY26 budget, and they have already created the purchase order, got the money encumbered, so we did not need to move that over into FY27. And then next there you have the three PSAs. Those are public service agreements between the city and organizations. We have the downtown Main Street, which has got downtown days coming up this week. and then you have the Lee Summit Economic Development Council, and then the marketing fund, which used to be there, but it's now the Lee Summit Visitors Bureau is now agreeing with that. So this reflects FY25 was year one, 26 year two, FY27 budget, this is year three of those agreements. So hopefully prior to the preparing the FY28 budget, we'll have new agreements in place negotiated for those. So kind of looking to see how much, how the money is going in the fund balance. FY24, you can see that we did not have the agreements in place for a couple of years, and the fund balance had grown up to the $1.5 million. And then in 25, when we put the agreements in place, we've been working away at that fund balance. And so we're down to anticipated just a little under a million dollars in FY27. And looking at trends, If we do monitor increases to those agreements, we could probably go about another three years, and then we'll need to kind of really look and see what we're going to do there. We are charging 5% right now as our tax on that. We could go out to a maximum of 7%, so an additional 2% if council chooses to move forward with that. The next group of funds or these are their economic development funds. So this represents the money that comes into the city for the pilots and eats and that we just redistribute out to other others. Some of it goes developers and some goes to the or mostly goes back to the developers. And this is based upon the development agreements. So each one of those is different and has a different method and tool in place. But this is just a reflection of that. And these are all kept in a separate fund. All that money is received into the fund and then expense out of that fund is kept completely separate from the general fund. The only thing that touches the general fund is that $40,000 at the bottom. That's just an administrative fee that we were able to charge to help recoup some of the city's cost for that. capital project funds, let's get into the big dollars now. So these are our most volatile funds as you look at the expenditures across from left to right. Or sorry, from left to right. Those are 24, 25 actuals in budget. Because the projects, this is based on the CIP, and the scheduling of projects. As we all know, when we plan a project, sometimes the weather cooperates, contractors cooperate, We're on schedule sometimes there are unknown things that come up some priorities change The will call us to cause a project to move on the schedule So that's why you'll see a fluctuation in these sometimes several million dollars because some things and sometimes things are delayed because we do need to build up the balance in our fund to be able to cover the expense of the projects So there's kind of the little bit of the revenue sources on each one of these the the first one is the capital improvement sales tax and and that's a half percent sales tax that's in effect for 15 years. The current one is set to expire at the end of 2033, and that's a 15-year one. That's for road, transportation-related, and stormwater projects. The second road and bridge excise tax, this was a tax approved by voters in 1997, and it's applicable to development, redevelopment, the development expansion, and changes of use throughout the city. So the funds can be used for streets, roads, bridges, and other transportation-related improvements identified in the Thoroughfare Master Plan. The third one, transportation sales tax. This is another half percent sales tax approved by the voters in 1990 and is an ongoing, does not have a sunset, and is for transportation purposes. Next one, the parks development tax. This is the quarter cent sales tax for the parks department they used to fund their capital projects and some operations. And we're all excited about the new field house will be the next big project coming online during the next year. Next one, the capital bond fund. This is when the citizens authorized the city to issue general obligation bonds. We go out to market, we sell the bonds. And then those bonds, when those proceeds come in, this is where those proceeds are placed and then spent from the bond fund. So that's the Capital Project Bond Fund because we're required to keep those funds separate from other funds. The next one's Capital Project Fund. This is a new fund we created as we went this year. We used to have many different funds for construction projects. Green Street used to have its own fund. We used to have several different single project funds. So now with Workday, we're able to track all those individually. So we have a capital project fund. And the resources for those, the funding allocations will come from the general fund. It could come from donations, sale of property, and many other Many different places, but that's what those lead the large amount you see in 24 25 and 26 That's the construction in Green Street mainly along with some other projects the four hundred thousand dollars you see in there for FY 27 is the four hundred thousand dollars for the for the Gateway projects for the city and that was part of the general fund spend down back in FY 25 and The next one is the public safety equipment replacement. This is a equipment replacement program for our police and fire. Probably those of you who have been on the council a little bit, we've gone through a couple of budget amendments this year in which we've transferred some spending authority and expenses from general fund over to this fund. So we're putting all of our equipment purchases, large equipment purchases for public safety out of this fund. So that's why in 24 we didn't spend anything because we didn't buy anything that year out of this fund. But we did deposit part of those transfers. We're putting money in there each year for future purchases. As well now we'll also be putting annual transfers in there for the fire truck pumper leases, the lease interest and principal interest. as well as the ambulance interest in principle, and the axon contract that was recently approved. That money will be transferred from public safety sales tax into here, and then those payments will be made from here. So the authorization is for those contracts and for the lease and contract payments. The bottom one, water tap, and I'll go into the next one because they kind of go together, water tap and wastewater tap. These two rates are for part of our water utilities. This is part of the schedule of fees that was approved a couple of months ago, in which when we have a new home business that wants to attach to our water or our wastewater system, there's a tap fee. There's a cost associated with that. Some of the things includes the meter and things, the installation of that. As well, it helps... collect money to help support that. As we continue to grow in areas, that money helps go to help grow and develop and expand as the systems we need to. The next two, water construction, wastewater construction, also water replacement. The revenue from these comes from our water and sewer bills that we pay monthly. So most of that goes to pay for the water, a portion of it goes for the maintain our systems, the water towers, when those get painted, that comes out of the water replacement fund. So those are things that they plan for, then they pay in each year and set the money aside for those. The next one, the airport construction fund, this is to pay for construction out at the airport, hangar two, the new tower, the terminal, those types of things are paid out of there. The supporting revenue for that comes from the transportation sales tax is transferred over to the construction, as well as when we receive federal aviation grants, that money comes in to the fund as well to pay for the construction of those facilities. For the next four down there, these are new funds we created this year, and you'll see these on a coming budget amendment. As we went to Workday, we were kind of redrawing and trying to find better ways, tracking mechanisms for our expenditures on projects and to help Departments see the balances that they have in their actual funds for those capital project funds above where the revenue comes in. So these are funded by transfers from those funds, and this is where the expenses will actually go out of to pay for the various projects. So you'll see a little more explanation and a budget amendment coming forward on this probably in the next month. So if you take the $248 million at the bottom, you take off about $79 million off that, and you'll get about the $169 million of the true expenses we'll be paying out of those capital funds. Any questions about those? That's a lot of numbers.

No, we're good.

Okay. Okay. The next one we're going to talk about is our general obligation debt service fund. As I mentioned earlier, our voters authorize the city to issue debt and sell general obligation bonds. When they say we authorize you to issue the debt, that means we have to go out and use the mechanism, that's our property tax, to pay for that debt. So part of the tax hearing we'll have in September will be to set that debt rate, and it's usually we maintain it. try to maintain a flat rate. We had the no tax increase bond issues that we passed in 2023 that said we wouldn't raise it. So we're trying to maintain that. But this is where the mechanism that comes in, the revenue comes in, and then the expenditures are the interest payments and the principal payments we make. We make payments in August and April each year. Each bond issuance has a different schedule. So that's why you'll see these numbers go up and down. And some years we'll pay more and the balance will go down. The next years we'll pay a little bit less and the balance will go up. Those are all set out, and we have our financial advisor we work with to help make that plan for the issuance of the bonds and the payment schedules. And then you see our fund balance as of June 30, this past June 30. Our enterprise funds are the funds that operate like businesses. They provide either a service or some sort of project and they charge for it. Our water and wastewater fund is pretty eminent. It's our water utilities. They provide the water, sewer services to our citizens. And you can see these three of the four funds, they're pretty linear. You see the gradual growth each year. on there. So the water utilities, that's again through the water bills. Airport fund, their revenues come in through hangar rentals, the sale of fuel, and other service charges that they have out there as they provide services to people that come to the airport. The recreation fund, this is our parks and rec centers. So that's Lovell, Longview, Harris Park, those community centers, and it'll be the field house as it comes online. Those are all paid for through membership fees. Those are operational costs for the membership fees, activity fees for different programs they put on at the facilities, as well as other charges they may have at the facilities. And then the Stormwater Utility Fund, this was a, we set it up as an enterprise fund initially several years ago when we were in a lot of the exploratory over the last few years of doing the study, what does the city want to do? And then we do have the ballot coming up in August, so that's the $100,000 just to pay for that election as well as information to disseminate about the election and what the tax entails to the citizens. So that's $100,000 there. And to say it probably will not be an enterprise fund once it goes forward, it will probably become a special revenue fund once it changes to a sales tax. And with the increases, you can see waste water utilities. They are experiencing like everyone else. They're experiencing increases in their water prices and the sewer prices that they're having to pay to little blue and a city of independence and Kansas city for water. Their operational cost went up minorly. And they also, part of that $70 million, about half of that is the $35 million that's being transferred to their water construction, wastewater construction, their equipment replacement fund. So their operational budget's roughly a little over $11 million for their operation for day-to-day. Airport fund, you see the production there. Part of it's some restructuring there. They've just presented, you've seen recently in the last few months, you've seen their master plan. In a couple of reports, there's a lot of professional services they paid for out of FY26 that they will not have those expenses in FY27. And the recreation fund, that's just, their adjustments for their operations are always looking at ways to do better, be more efficient, and they do see a slight increase in their anticipated expenses for next year, but they're also not planning to raise their membership fees at this time for next year. The last group is our internal service funds. So these are departments that provide services to all of our... Departments across the city central bills building services you think that's they maintain our building us or they manage the custodial services Repairs and maintenance of our facilities and you can see the operational cost there So again, these three are operational sort of similar to the general fund you see video very linear budget movements They're just slight increments each year central building services does have one position frozen the facility managers position and Fleet operations, that includes one frozen position, a mechanic. And IT services, I believe that included four frozen positions. We also recently, this also includes, those of you who were on the Finance and Budget Committee yesterday, we had the amendment. Part of that is moving three different positions around to different departments in the general fund. So part of that's included in that reduction reflected here as well. Are there other internal service funds? So these are not people, these are more services and things that we do for the city or that the city does for employees. We have a fund that is our short-term disability, helps fund support that. We do that through short-term disability. Unemployment, where we collect the money in through the payrolls to help pay for or provide unemployment or unemployment coverage. In our workers' comp, we are self-insured for workers' comp, and one of the items on yesterday's agenda was the two-year agreement with our third-party administrator that helps us administer that program. Our risk management, that is an internal funded program. That is our risk management. That funds our property liability insurance, inland marine insurance. cyber security insurance, all those types of insurances are paid out of this fund, as well as small claims and damages. If one of our city vehicles backs into somebody's car and causes damage and it gets repaired, we pay for it out of this fund. As well, if we have a significant claim damage, this is where the deductible would come out of that fund as well. The next list of funds there is our building equipment replacement program, it's the BURP. That's the one Mr. Dunning referred to earlier. We have been doing $500,000 each year over to that. We're just doing $250,000, and that covers pretty much the projects they have planned for this year. So it's not going to dip into the fund, but it will help the fund maintain their balance this year. Vehicle equipment replacement program, it's one of those that does fluctuate each year depending on how many vehicles are up for replacement. and the cost of the vehicles and lead time on getting vehicles in. Machine Equipment Replacement Program, that is, we refer to it as MERP, that's computers, that's our monitors, computers that you're using, those are all charged departments based upon the FTEs and how many, so this is based upon how many devices they have, so they're direct charged for that to the departments. Software License Equipment, the ones that say direct charge, those are departments that are charged directly for that. And that money is brought into this fund and then we place the orders through our IT department. They place the orders and pay for those. The bottom two, these are citywide items. So you think of citywide software, you think of Workday, Microsoft 365, and a lot of big products that we use on the enterprise level. And those are in charge of the various departments based on the number of FTEs. The money comes in and we have expenditures for those. as well as the Citywide Machine Equipment Replacement Program. It's a new one. It's kind of been collected in the past and paid for. It's been kind of blended with the other MERP. We're trying to get it separate so we can get a better tracking history and manage that more transparently. And those things like servers, network servers, the AV equipment you see in our conference rooms and around facilities. So that will be one you'll see more of in the future. All right, so now you've seen all the funds and all the slides. So this brings us to our total proposed budget. And I apologize, one of the things, I'm gonna bring it to the FY26 amended column. You'll see that asterisk next to the $34 million. And that internal service slide up there, if you'll try to tie it back, it's not gonna match because we did a one-time transfer with an amendment earlier this year. As we transferred, those used to be together, our ERPs and overheads used to be combined together. and it made it very hard to track and do things. So as we worked the work day, one of the things we did is we separated those. So we did a budget amendment and FY26 do that separation for those equipment funds and that. So that's not reflected in that operational cost because it will really, really skewed it. So that's why we, but we did include in this cost just for transparency just so it could be included in the total amended budget for FY26. So you can see as our total proposed budget's a little over $500 million. No questions, I'll turn it back over to Mr. Dunning, and he'll take us on. Thank you.

We do have a couple questions, I think, based on your information, Mr. Gentry. Council Member Atkins.

Thank you for that presentation. I do like hearing about each individual fund and see it in a glossary format. That's what the budget is. I mean, I think the long budget has all that written, and that's great. But as I'm looking at it, without a fund balance or a revenue next to it, the numbers seem arbitrary, like they're arbitrary. Oh my gosh, start over. Thank you for the detail. Since on my screen I cannot see fund balance or revenue, the numbers seem arbitrary to me. Like none of the numbers, they're just arbitrary because we can't see what it's compared to. But I do see there's a $500 million, you know, it's $500 million in expenses or budgeted expenses. So I'm curious, what's the, fund balance of the accumulated funds? $500 million out of how much? Do you have that number? Yeah, but where's the revenue? So the revenue is exactly 500? So we're spending everything that we have and nothing gets saved until the next year? Every penny gets spent and none of it gets held back for the following year?

That's the question. So, yeah, I understand your question, yes. So, yeah, so like on the business and industry where we show the revenue and the expenses and like that, yes, that does make it a little more challenging.

Yeah, because I know business, I know specifically that fund, I know there's a lot of leftover fund, like it's not spent down to zero. There's a, you know.

Yes. So on most of them we do, so we are required to present a balanced budget and we do go through that process. And part of this, this year, with the, as I, yeah, let's see, which one is it? Yeah. So part of this is, you know, part of that makes it look like that 500 million extrema hire is about the $80 million we have there in extra things, which as we go through the process of budgeting, the money we actually have. So yes, it would be better if we had those and I think we'll probably take that back and probably come forward in the future, maybe bring more information to share the revenue side of that. So things like the The expenses for internal services and these bottom four items here. So those are already showing up as expenses up here above. So as you kind of look through some things, you're almost kind of double counting. So we're really not expending probably $500 million. If we spend everything, it wouldn't be $500 million. It would be much less. What we were asking for with the budget is spending authority to go forward with those. and spend those, because a lot of those will be the transfers. So for example, the capital improvements sales tax fund, that $18,414,000, pretty much all that's going to go down to the bridge, to this bridges, streets, and signals program. That's where it'll actually be spent, because it's going to come in. It's going to have transportation sales tax. It's going to have some grants come in there as well. So it will come in. Well, simple answer, yes. We do monitor the budget, make sure we don't overspend. But it does look like we do have more spend than we do have money.

Yeah, I know. It's hard. I'm sure there's lots and lots of layers after this. It's just a balanced budget could be like sticky notes. You could do anything to make a budget balanced. So I'm just trying to see if there's excess that gets saved or pushed back or If you spend down things because you have to spend it on something, because I'm looking at $500 million of use there, but we're, you know, over in our operations budget, we're trimming by a million dollars at a time. And are there systemic things in the future that could be looked at so that we don't have so much excess here and that we're reallocating things over? Are there policies or changes to be, to look at those long-term things so that we're not going to do this every year?

Right.

Yes. Great question. I know we can't this month, but other than act of God, what would happen to redirect some of this revenue? Because our budget has boomed over the last few years. We are booming and thriving, so this is fantastic. I love that we have all this revenue, but Is it balanced accurately for future?

Yeah, and as we said the first ones were the general fund public safety everything else has a specific purpose We have to spend it on so that's yeah Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you mayor for Tim Yeah, a couple of things one is which you kind of touched on but when we have a lot of money in the capital project fund we legally we cannot move that to the general fund right like that is coming from a dedicated revenue source a sales tax that legally we are obligated to spend it on a specific kind of project right we can't just say well we have a lot of money for bridges we should spend that on salaries over here or computers or whatever like we we can't make those kind of changes right

Correct.

And there's no amount of planning that would allow for that.

That's like a... You're correct. And how we've done that is, like Eric mentioned in the general fund section, part of the, when you talk about public works, they've kind of identified, because public works, a lot of their staff works full-time on CIP projects. So we've been doing it as a chargeback, so we've kind of moved some of them there. So that's kind of one of the ways we found to get some relief to the general fund and public works works with us. So some of their staffs charge directly to those, because that's what they work on. So those are allowable expenses. So we can't move the money over there, but we do remove the staff over there to help support those projects.

But those are pretty limited opportunities. Like we're looking to make sure that we're adequately expensing those programs if staff time is being spent on those programs. But we can't just say, well, we're going to just take a big chunk of money over here and move it to where we'd rather have it.

You are correct. Yes, correct.

And then the other thing is the IRPS programs. I feel like some of what... Councilmember Adkins was talking about in terms of, well, aren't we saving anything? Like, we do have a lot of programs where every year we put money into all the different ERP funds to say that we are planning for the fact that we're going to need to buy a new police car in five years, so we're putting money into that fund every year, right? Like, some of this is accounting for those savings mechanisms, right?

Yes.

Okay. So it's showing a balanced budget, and part of that is because we are putting... money earmarking into savings accounts for future use, and that's part of what the balance budget includes.

Yes, that's the whole equipment replacement, all the ERPs.

So it's being earmarked this year, but it's not always necessarily being spent this year. It's being set aside so that we can plan for the future, right?

Yes.

Okay, thank you.

Yes. Thank you. All right. Mr. Dunning.

Okay, what we just went through was the city manager's recommended budget, and so we're morphing over into the feedback we had from Finance and Budget Committee on May 18th. And I hope that we captured kind of that feedback from the committee, and that's what we're trying to represent here is that through those department presentations, there was discussion amongst the committee about restoring some funding in certain areas. So one of those was our federal lobbyist and discussion around that space. We had, this is the first year that we've engaged federal lobbyist services and we did in the Administration portion of the budget, peel that back. But the discussion was perhaps we should restore the funding to that. That's $60,000. We still have in the state lobbying services within the budget. So that's one point. I don't want to speak on behalf of the Finance and Budget Committee, but please chime in if I'm not kind of hitting the mark on these. There was quite a bit of discussion, and this is in public safety reductions. There was mention of overtime, that overtime's eliminated. Overtime's not eliminated. A lot of the programs, especially within fire, training and types of programs are done through overtime. And there was reductions in overtime for those. And I've got another slide that can get to more details, just trying to paint the picture of areas of feedback that the Finance and Budget Committee felt were important to restore funding towards. So that overtime and training kind of goes together in many spaces because a lot of that training is done through overtime. Overall, I mentioned this across the city, community engagement, more so, well, in police and fire, youth programming, getting back into the school systems on the fire side, and maintaining what we're doing on the PD side. That was a concern. Paramedic school funding, encouraging our EMTs to get to a paramedic license. There's funding in there. Peer support is one where we provide the peer support, but overtime is necessary to provide some of that peer support, and so restoring funding in that space. Continuity of operations plan, we call this the COOP. 110,000 to bring on, engage a professional to come in and help us. craft, revise our continuity of operations plan. It's a one-time cost, $110,000, so I wanted to mention that. A lot of these overtime training, these programs fit right into it's time for a fire to reaccreditation. That's $13,000 to go through a reaccreditation process, but if we trim a lot of the Training and programs then you ask yourself. Well are will we even be successful with accreditation so that kind of couples together with some of those reductions Excuse me And then more so on the police side was downtown foot patrols and so I've got a couple more detailed slides I just wanted to paint that high-level overview of some of that feedback we received from finance and budget Here was the listing from FIRE looking at restoring funding. Now, this shows increased the budget of $721,500, but what's also in here is that $110,000 of the continuity of operations plan, one-time costs. And we spoke about accreditation renewal of $13,000. I know at the Finance and Budget Committee it was around $600,000. If you remove those two items out, you realize that, what was it, like $598,500. So that was the discussion of finance and budget for fire. And then on the police side, more general in nature. I know Chief Forbes was more general in nature, trying to respond to the inquiries. We did work with Chief Snyder just to look at, okay, downtown foot patrols. If that was part of the reduction, but if we reinstated downtown foot patrols, what would that be? 50,000. Some of that community programming, 20, and then youth programming, 15,000 as well. So these... With the exception of the continuity of operations plan and perhaps the accreditation, our ongoing costs, which it's not ideal to fund these out of reserves, but could be, but if the direction were to fund these out of public safety sales tax reserves, we would need to work over the coming year to figure out how to get to a balanced budget with ongoing revenues and expenditures to really solve for this, but that is one way that these could be reinstated, the funding restored, and what we talked about at Finance and Budget Committee was bring forward the balanced budget because we needed, we were on the plan to have this public hearing tonight, but to have this discussion, create the dialogue because Finance and Budget Committee makes recommendations, but the council gives direction to us as an organization, so we need to have this discussion. And then the thought was, you know, given the direction that we received, we could prepare a budget amendment and bring forward and restore whatever funding levels were directed to restore. So I'll pause there. Of course, we have our whole management team here, both chiefs, if you'd like to have discussions about some of these reductions and these recommendations from finance and budget. I'll pause there. Mayor Potem-Shields, I know you chair finance and budget, so I'll see if I miss. Actually, yeah. Sorry, Councilmember Carlisle, you have taken over. Please fill any gaps that I may have missed in trying to represent those recommendations.

Mayor Potem would like to ask a couple questions or comments.

Unless Councilmember Carlisle wants to hop over this. Okay. Just a couple of things. I think when we had talked in committee It was still unclear, even with these proposed restorations, to the fire budget if accreditation would be really feasible at this point. Is it the thought that if these restorations were made that we could achieve that accreditation again this year?

Yeah, I'd let Chief Snyder respond to that. He'd have better awareness.

Thank you.

Mike Snyder, Fire Chief. Somewhat of a loaded question. So when we are going through the accreditation process, obviously we have to have the funding and the out-year funding to support the initiatives and level of services requested by our citizens through our strategic plan, citizen-driven strategic plan, and then our standard to cover. I think we'll be very close to give you an answer. There are some specific core competencies that it's going to be determined by our peer assessors on whether we meet those or not. But this does get us very very close to where we were and to show that continual improvement.

Okay. Thank you And then mr. Dunning I know one of the things that committee discussed was wanting to make sure that a discussion was had on the police side of if there were other Training or especially units or peer support anything that they need tonight So I saw you brought back this is that kind of the result of that discussion or has that been?

Yes, we did have that time to consult with Chief Forbes.

Okay, I just want to check on that. So obviously having this have come out of the Finance and Budget Committee's discussions, like I feel good about these recommendations. What exactly the funding mechanism is, if we wanted to do that out of fund balance or if we wanted to I'm not sure what the other options are, Mr. Gerning. We kind of discussed a couple of possibilities at the committee. What kind of feedback do you need from us? Yeah, sorry, the public safety fund balance. What kind of feedback are you looking from us tonight, Mr. Gerning or Mayor? What do you need from us?

Yeah, that is, you know... I would say if the desire is to find ways to restore funding to these levels, we need a little bit of time to work through what might that look like. I know I mentioned doing it through a budget amendment to give us that time because I think if accreditation were in there at $13,000, you've got $123,000 in one-time expense. Those can be funded out of reserves and not be as big of an issue. What I don't know is... Within the general fund, how much more can we find to come up with $683,000 to solve for? The two funding sources are general fund and public safety sales tax, or the reserves in each space to make this happen, tying back to the discussion that was just had about being mindful of... funds in the intended purposes. So, I'm sorry.

And I know in public safety sales tax fund balance, we don't have an identical policy to our general fund balance, but generally our, what we do in general fund is we don't want to have one-time expenses or ongoing expenses going out of, coming out of the fund balance reserve.

That's correct.

I don't think we have that formal policy for public safety sales tax, but.

No.

I feel like we probably have the same philosophy generally. I would think.

Yeah, and that was my thought. And, you know, if it's funded out of public safety sales tax reserves for this year, we have work to do to make sure that next year that we have this solved for in our operating budget general fund operating side of things.

Okay. I'm open to ideas, and I would yield back to you or other council members, Mayor.

I'll let a few other people speak, and then, yes, I'll give you my perspective. Council Member Funk.

Thank you, Mayor. I know at Finance and Budget, and Mark, if you want to speak to this, or Chief, on the other slide there where we kind of had Chief Schneider break everything out, some of that burn facility, live burn tower training and things like that, there was some potential to maybe some chargeback to... LSR 7, some of that was the time that our firefighters put in to train those folks. Is that what's still in this number?

I would need to have Chief Snyder clarify. I recall $10,000 that is in, I'll say overtime. Is he coming?

Okay.

I think that was $10,000 based on our experience that we're committing to that, and perhaps there's a reimbursement.

So this as far as I can see that is not inclusive of that that was a separate line item So that would still be something that we would work through with the school district and see if that's how they prefer to move forward Okay.

Thank you chief.

Thank you mayor.

Thank you councilmember Pryor Thank You mayor How many departments are accredited in our city and

Gosh, are we up to five now? Five, yeah. Fire, PD, parks, water, public works.

Are any other departments having to do away with their accreditation during this budget process?

To my knowledge, nobody else is up for reaccreditation, so no.

Okay. I know I try hard to stand a lot of fire things that why does it appear that they're having more. They're having to cut more from the budget than any other department.

As I reflect on our approach to the budget. As I mentioned we looked at going back to 2025 actuals right and I think this is a part of that exercise and then we looked at angles from you know, just kind of all came together and these reductions stayed within. Now, I will say that was the case with all departments. When we did that initial review of 2025 reduction to get to actuals, a lot of the community engagement, travel and training, those reductions maintained. It was just the staffing change that kind of changed as we switched to that platform, if that makes sense.

So when the other, I mean, I know accreditation is kind of a prestige thing, but it is important. I mean, a lot of cities, it is looked at in a lot of, so when other, I want to see our departments maintain their accreditation, but when other departments are up for accreditation, does that mean they're going to have to go without also?

It's going to be based on that budget year, right?

Okay.

Honestly, I don't know the cost for accreditation for the other departments. I'd say this. I don't think any of us want to see an accredited department not be reaccredited, right? Once you achieve that, you want to maintain that and continue to improve. Again, we all want that.

But what does that mean for our city if we don't get reaccredited as a fire department? It doesn't affect our insurance rates, correct?

That's more the ISO rating that affects insurance rates.

And that's not going to be affected through all of this?

I can't speak to that. I can speak to the code side, but not the fire side on ISO ratings, whether or not this impacts ISO.

I know we have one of the best around.

So speaking directly to ISO, it is a separate assessment that's conducted by the insurance companies. They pull together to determine our public protection class. That's 50 percent of its fire department based. Forty percent is water and 10 percent is communications. And then there's some additional bonus points for community risk reduction that you can obtain that would that goes into how they assess you as an organization. We are up for ISO review. I, we are still going to be able to have the staffing that we have based on this budget proposal. So I don't see that being affected in that regards. Our water is good. Our communications are good. So it, it really will come down to how do they assess that, that staffing model and deployment model that we have, which has improved since our last ISO rating. Now I will, mention that and say we've seen a lot of departments across the state that are seeing a different assessor come in that have had a not as positive impact on it. So I want to be very clear, even though I see improvements that we've made, you could still see adjustments based on that assessment when they come in. So I don't see it not being accredited will not affect our ISO rating.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Council Member Atkins.

A couple different questions, Mr. Dunning. I had seen it on a chart before, but what was the impact, what was the line item impact of the freezing of the positions? Like how much did that impact?

Yeah, it's around 3 million.

3 million, okay. And have you thought more about what number we're solving for altogether? Are we solving for 7 million? No. I'm trying to going back to the baseline of what it was and Well like without adding on the extra wish list stuff like was there a seven million dollar increase because that was all the staffing or what? What changed I? Mean those those questions aren't connected. They're just my second question like I

Well, I guess we've solved the gap in the budget presentation presented, right? But what we're talking about now is did we go too far? Do we want to restore some funding to support these items, right? And if so, then that's what I'm asking is what is the desired approach to restore the funding to these so that we have that guidance and can bring forward a budget amendment that's hitting the target?

Is there any analysis that's been done across departments, like what would it look like if there was a travel and training freeze across departments or something that's an equitable approach to trimming back some of those things across the board and see what type of number impact those things would have?

That's something we haven't done, but if that's the direction that we want to go, we would figure that out.

If I could help you, Mr. Dunning, I think the idea, I did serve on the Finance and Budget Committee up until my title changed. But the questions you're asking are very valid, very key questions. But these things were vetted out, and that's how we're here today to this point. And I think going forward, that's the objective is the fact that With so many unknowns, we talked about those unknowns. The big one being the county. Not knowing what sales tax and use taxes are going to be as well. I think now more than ever, and this is not the first time we've been in this situation. I mean, I can think of Council Member Carlisle and I have been on here for the last eight to ten years. There's been many situations like these where there are similar times where there is a lot of uncertainty. And so I think what we have to do now, we can't live in the past, but what we can do now with the finance and budget and working with Mr. Dunning and his team is monitor this even with more of a Hawkeye now. Whether it's monthly, quarterly, I know Ms. Eric said they monitor this on a monthly basis. That's just our job to make sure that we stay on top of these, the revenue and the expenses. And this here is what's being proposed along with the balanced budget if we're willing and if we're comfortable proceeding with this recommendation by finance and budget right now and we'll solve for it as we go in the next month, the next quarter, the next 12 months. So that's where we're at right now.

And I would add too, right, the reserves, right? If we have that authority to fund through the reserves, it doesn't automatically mean that we reach over into the public safety sales tax reserve and then bring that over, right? As we work the budget, if we have that authority, We would use the funds, the resources allocated to get through the budget, but if necessary to dip into the reserve, we have that ability to do that. And as we work through the budget, that's something that we could keep the Finance and Budget Committee and the Council apprised of is just the overall status of where we're at.

That's a perfect point right there that I was going to wait until later to make that point. I see the board lighting up. A lot of people want to speak, but let me go ahead and reemphasize what he just said because... We're very fortunate that I know eight years ago we were in a similar crossroads situation with unknowns. And again, like I said a second ago, we did not have the public safety sales tax eight years ago, nine years ago. And so that puts, because those are the wishes of our citizens, our citizens approved that. And so that's, and even in the strategic plan, as Mr. Dunning said, those are the bases following our core values and our mission of what we have to use as we set policy. So that game plan's already in place for us. We just have to execute it. And so, but we do have opportunities. And again, the citizens... are the ones that approved the public safety sales tax. That's why we have this fund available. And that's eight years ago, we didn't have a policy for our reserve balance. We have a policy now.

It was different. It was different. There was a policy, but it was different, yep.

But there was not as good certainty then as there is now. And we're not... Then there was a lot of questions of how you use it. Again, there's just more certainty now, which gives us an opportunity that if we have to tap into it, if... which doesn't guarantee that we will, but if we have to, it's there. But that's where the finance and budget and the rest of us have to make that decision as we go. So, anyway. Let's go ahead and call on some of the council people that are waiting to speak. Council Member Funk.

Thank you, Mayor. So Mr. Dunning, pertaining to this slide and kind of move this section that you brought us to forward here, I know, and Chief Snyder, sorry for you to get your steps in coming back and forth, but we might just run you back and forth anyway. So I know some of these items, when we talked through them, were items that may not occur tomorrow. Some of those were, I think, when we talked about paramedic school, we talked about there was only going to be maybe so many ready at this time and that it was going to be a certain period of time before more enrolled down the road. I think... Mayor Pro Tem Shields, I know you're up next to speak, but I think we had those discussions that some of these things weren't going to be expenses that needed to happen tomorrow. So I guess... I think for the sake of conversation, and Mr. Dunning, you're wanting some direction, I think we were pretty set at finance and budget that the continuity of operations plan and feeling confident about the accreditation plan, that we were going to look at a one-time expense for those and move the needle on those now. Then start building these in these other items that we want and obviously the things for PD as They came about and make budget amendments as we went forward not to affect your balanced budget That sets today am I close or no? Halfway there, okay I'll Yeah, I'll yield to Mary protein shields there I

You're next in line.

So I think, actually, Council Member Funk, you hit on some really important items that this is spending authority, but there are some of these things that may not be fully utilized, like the paramedic school. That really depends on how many folks choose to enroll this year. So some of these things may not end up maxing out that number. This is authority. It's not. required spend, right?

Correct. This is the plan, right? Anticipating.

Yeah. And one other thing we touched on in committee was that there's a little bit heavier overtime load right now due to some FMLA leave that some folks are on that we hope that that won't be a recurring expense in future budget years. So that also makes me a little bit more comfortable to look at fund balance in this case because there's some extraordinary circumstances that are driving that, but hopefully that overtime we'll get under control and hopefully those folks are able to come back to their normal schedules and that kind of thing. And then one other thing I think the council member prior had asked about in terms of why the cuts were so deep on the fireside. Part of my understanding, and please correct me if I'm wrong on this, but part of it is some of the direction from council was let's maintain staffing levels. And if you're maintaining staffing levels and maintaining those salaries, it's already a personnel heavy budget So whereas some other departments might have some more to trim or some frozen positions to hold or that kind of thing to kind of get them to their target number.

Because fire's already running at minimum?

What I'm saying is because whereas the council finance budget committee that said let's not cut any fire jobs because we don't want to cut staffing. But if you're not going to cut any jobs, which I think is the right call, but you're still trying to hit a target number, it's all of the optional items that you can cut. And that's what they do is they cut everything optional. And so then the committee looked at that and said, we don't feel like this is truly optional for our community that we want to see these things restored. Because I just think that was sort of what happened is that since it was such a personnel heavy budget, the only percentage that wasn't personnel, that wasn't salaries, that was available to cut was things like this. But that's part of our policy decision here to say, hey, just because that's what's available that's not cutting staff, we still don't feel like that. We said this is still part of protecting public safety. So we had this discussion about we want to preserve public safety. But do I have that kind of right that it has a lot to do with what percentage of their budget Discretionary if you want to call it versus I'd say Chief Snyder has a term for it, right?

We're gonna still respond to all emergencies, right? That's our core mission but then in addition to doing that we like to train and equip and You know have our staff be ready when that call comes and this is part of that, but yes But if you're saying you need to cut a certain amount that's all that's available if you're not cutting salaries So then the committee said

we don't think that's a good decision for our community, and that's kind of how we're here, I think, is kind of what happened.

They're already at minimum staffing.

They're already at minimum staffing, so they can't cut.

So what we're saying for now, what's before us.

Because they can't cut staffing, so you guys are.

So right now the topic is not, right now we're not debating that part right now. But right now what we're saying is in order to get this budget approved, The committee's recommending this, which restores pretty much everything chief needs and what is being proposed on budget. It's not saying it's a perfect situation. So that's what's before us that we have to decide on. And no matter what, it's a tough decision across the board.

And I was just trying to say, like, I think how we got to the point of having to have this discussion is just that that discretionary budget involved a lot of really important things. But that was the only thing when they're trying to get back to those like 2025 actual numbers. That was all that was. available which is how we got here but that's why like we have to have the decision as a council do we want to go ahead and restore this say we're willing to do it out of fund balance hoping out of public safety funds balance hoping that we can see the revenues come into where we don't have to really dip into that balance very much and then plan for next year to have these in our just planned budget and is that like the because that was kind of the recommendation of the committee um but is that the the consensus of the full council because we're only three people in that room and we want to, I think that's why Mr. Dunning needs to get everybody's feedback. But that was just kind of the baseline understanding that I had going into it. And if I'm misstating any of that, please tell me because that was just kind of how I understood the situation.

That's correct. And kind of tying back, Council Member Funk, to your thought process. I didn't get the sense that every item could be brought forward as a budget amendment. I was thinking we could bring forward a budget amendment to approve funding, like I mentioned. Not to say that we would transfer funds from a reserve fund over to a department right away, but we have that authority the approval that if needed, that's a resource that could be utilized. Is that a good way to?

Yes. Okay.

We have a few more people that want to speak. Council Member Rader.

Thank you, Mayor. These are more operational type. How are we going to impact how are the cuts are going to and how they're going to impact the community? So can you tell me Mr. Dunning if this statement is still correct? So we are switching from a proactive to a reactive public safety model. Is it accurate to say that behind the scenes functions that are critical to technical rescue is fire department reported will force department heads to triage core emergency duties over proactive programs that currently prevent emergencies? And what would that look like in an emergency situation? It may be a fire Chief Snyder question, but is that still accurate?

Yeah, I would not, I'm not going to weigh in on the operational side. I don't have that level of detail to accurately respond to that question. Okay.

I appreciate the question. I think I'd go back to the statement that I provided at finance and budget and say that core emergency services will not be affected with the proposed budget by the city manager. When I say proactive versus reactive or reactive versus proactive, all of the programs that we have that are based on our community driven strategic plan are set to be proactive and continually improving our organization to meet those expectations. Reactive 911 system is simply we're providing the base minimums in order to ensure that our personnel receive the training that's required and they will meet all the needs of the 911 response. So it's taking out the additional beyond the base that is required, which we would still be providing within this proposed budget.

Okay, thank you. And then my second question I think for you is, Mr. Dunning, is, and this should be easy, but we were, in the overview, you were talking about scaling back on the agricultural mowing and things like that. Are there other services that are going to be, is it just that curb and sidewalks being reduced 30 to 50 percent? Is that still accurate? And will there be other services that will also be reduced?

Yeah, so I know enough to be dangerous, but I know, you know, scaling back, what that means is not as many crews, personnel, right? Now, they don't just mow, right? They could be on pothole patching and things of that nature. There's all kinds of maintenance activities that those employees would work on. So mowing was just one example as we've added additional crews to maintain all the rights of way. So it's not just mowing, I would say that.

But maybe snow removal, will that be affected?

Yeah, I mean, we call on operators and folks in public works to plow. And we call on volunteers too. Well, I say volunteers, right? those that are qualified to plow. So we do, when needed, reach outside of public works and water utilities to provide services to this city. When it comes to snow plowing, no, not calling on other employees outside of public works to go mow or patch potholes and things like that. So different approaches based on what the community needs are.

Okay, and then this is kind of going back just a little bit, and I'll make this question short and sweet, but we talked about the marijuana tax making up some portion of our deficit, but we didn't know what it was. But did we know what it was in the past? Do we have an idea of...

I don't know that we've used the marijuana to solve for it. That's just, you know, as the voters voted in that tax, that's just a revenue that was realized.

Right, revenue. So, but, thank you.

Eric, you got this? Yeah. Sorry, it wasn't that we don't know what the marijuana tax is, it's that we can't disclose it in a public setting because we can't disclose what their sales are so that potential competitors could know that. So we know it internally, but when we're providing it to you all, we need to put it in an aggregate sales use tax category.

Okay.

Once we have, I think, I forget what the rule is. six I think yeah six retailers then we could provide detail but we just don't have that many dispensaries in the city.

Okay well what I'm trying to get at is we had a pretty aggressive as it was stated 4.2 percent target growth and we're short of that and that maybe the marijuana tax would make up for that I thought that's how I heard you say that so that's what I was questioning is how we how why we why we have that that lofty of a projection and what are your thoughts behind how are we going to get up there to that 4.2%?

So I will say right now, overall, we're around like 3.7. I know last month we still have to finish the year out. It fluctuates by month. Honestly, like last month, if you looked at our cumulative sales and use tax growth, it was 4%. So I don't feel like 4%, 4.2% is too aggressive. It's just that marijuana bolsters the sales and use tax, essentially. But we're not far off from what we're seeing currently.

Okay, well, that's good. All right, well, thank you. And then, Mr. Dunning, I went back and, you know, as many people here on the council have researched so much of the information that's come out in the last few weeks with the budget meetings, the finance and budget meetings and other things, and this is where I'm pulling this from, so you know. and then our discussion tonight. But the budget, there was, I received a letter this afternoon from ASR, and I already had this as a question, but I wanted to ask. Was the $2 million removed from the amount that the police and fire communication specialists were supposed to have? Because I'm wondering if there's still a pay disparity there. And that was what was in the letter. And do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, and just to be clear, I think a couple things merged together there. going into the budget that this was part of that thirteen point four million dollar gap wish list right we we were hoping to identify two million and resources to then use uh... as we were in the pay and growth plan process to make adjustments for core general employees that's that's that two million reference and recognizing that the resources were going to be there we recognize that that You know, it's not in the cards. So that's what that two million is in reference to. With regard to pay disparity between police and fire communications, that is in the budget, planned in the city manager's budget. So that portion is being recommended. What is not is adjustments to Corps General on top of the three and a half percent and the top of range adjustment. Does that make sense?

Yeah, but they still feel there's a disparity.

Well, it's been since 20, I don't know if it was 2018 or so, where our last compensation study was done. Now, since that time, though, we've brought on a compensation specialist that has helped us stay more, I'll say more mindful of being in line with market. But it's been, since then, since we've been out for core general employees to do a market comparison, market study, to see if those positions are still competitive in their wages. It's an overall compensation package, I should say, not just wages.

I'm sorry, we're currently doing a study?

Well, so we were in the process of doing this study with a provider, and we have parted ways with that provider. So timing is not great.

So we don't have any solution to that right now?

We are not giving up on that. We need to continue to find a solution to bring forward for core general for a market comparison pay and growth plan.

Okay. But right now we're just... Is that what you're saying? I know you're working on it. We need a new plan.

Approach, I should say.

And then the last one is I had a constituent ask me this question. They were watching the budget and finance meeting and it was brought up about the presentation of the employee health insurance and why that wasn't a part of this budget. It's an ongoing. I know there's a funding gap there.

Due to losses, but it's an ongoing It will be coming to council and maybe one of the budget and finance can finance and budget like my next-door neighbor here can know more but a Lot of that's timing right and we still don't know at this point in time That's forecasting what our renewals might be knowing that we need to do some work to make adjustments if we're going to do our part to help contain costs in the healthcare space. There are so many ways, and that's what was presented to Finance and Budget Committee. If we snapshot as of today, based on our claims history and all the other data, what might that renewal be? That's a guess by our broker, but until such time that we understand what that renewal is, we budgeted 10%. So that's the point of the discussion earlier, was we have work to do in that space.

Okay, thank you very much. You bet. Thanks, Mayor.

Thank you.

Council Member Pryor.

Thank you. So why did we part ways with the person that we parted ways with?

Yeah, we did not feel that the work product was meeting our expectations.

So then... At that time when you guys parted ways, did they give you their findings up until you guys parted ways?

We have all of the work product that they had accomplished.

Where were they at in that process?

Excuse me. We were reviewing all the job descriptions. That's one of the foundational things that you do in a in a study is make sure you have accurate job descriptions so that when you go to market, you can as best you can do an apples to apples comparison. And so we were in that foundational building stage.

How long had you been using them?

Well, we used them for, gosh, We used them for a first phase to kind of create the philosophy and the approach to what we were striving to do through this pay and growth plan. So that was a phase one. And we were happy with the work in phase one. And I will say we bundled together numerous phases to get through this study. And here we were in phase one. And yeah, we weren't happy with the work product. I couldn't tell you when that work started, Jennifer, do you know? It was last fall, generally.

Okay. And then, so at this point, what's next for that?

I know that's not extremely budget-related, but I mean, it's... Well, we do have resources in here to continue that to the tune of $70,000, I believe. And we're asking ourselves what... In a way, we hitched our wagon to one course, right? And do we want to do that again to get through what is hoped to be a number of phases, or do we take an incremental approach and we're asking ourselves, what can we, what capacity do we as staff have to bring to that effort too? And so that's part of the plan B, right? What's the approach now that we need to put together? But we're still going to see it through and make sure that... That's my commitment. I'm not giving up on it.

Okay, because I just don't want to, and I know we focus a lot on police and fire and public safety and public works, but I really, we really need to make sure that that study gets completed. Then as far as the public safety sales tax just for a little clarification Correct me if I'm wrong, but can it be used for supplemental costs or does it is it was it specifically written for?

growing the the overall approach to the public safety sales tax was to attract retain equip and TRACK, RETAIN, TRAIN, AND EQUIP PUBLIC SAFETY. SO IN A SENSE, WITH THAT REVENUE SOURCE, WHAT ENHANCEMENTS CAN WE BRING IN THE PUBLIC SAFETY SPACE RATHER THAN, I'LL SAY, SUPPLANTING And I recall there was a commitment to maintain, I think the number was 42 million in resources towards police and fire public safety so that that supplanting of sources was not there or didn't occur. So that's an enhancement. But that was what I recall we went to the voters on helping educate for how public safety sales tax, if approved, would be utilized.

Okay. Thank you. Um, and then I do have, I do have clarification on, I kind of wrote down, but I don't know if I should do it right now or during round table, but just kind of the, um, just kind of the questions that I had that I wanted, like whenever you send us all the email, do you want me to go ahead and read it? You want me to do it right now or during round table? They are kind of budget-related. They're kind of just in general.

We're still in public hearing.

I know.

You can ask.

Okay. So in that, how much has the city revenue grown from 2020 to 2025, and can you parallel that to population growth? And then do we base employee growth off of revenue growth or population growth? And then how much has each department inside City Hall grown from 2020 to 2025 by people and salary? Is that stuff that you...

I don't have any of those answers. I know, I know you don't have it right now.

But is that stuff you can email us?

Yeah, what would be helpful? I didn't write down all that. If you can shoot me an email and there's a commitment, I would share that information with the entire council.

I didn't know since there were questions if I had to do it during public hearing or roundtable because I didn't, but I knew you didn't have the answers to it right now. Okay, thank you.

I wish I was that smart.

You are, but thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Atkins.

So based on Council Member Rader's questions, so are we still systemically in the middle of several phases of exploration? Yes. health care is on pause, like health insurance is on pause until you find a better solution, and then figuring out the job descriptions and market value of all the pay scale, like that's a project that kind of has to be completed. Because I know the health care discussion has been going on for a year or longer. So are there timelines for when these projects, when the research will get done on these?

Yeah, so on the healthcare side, I wouldn't say it's PAW, the term used, I think PAW is healthcare still being provided, right? But what we're, so our new broker started with us in March. And we know through our open enrollment process that in October, we need to go and have a plan in place for offerings for our open enrollment for And so between where we're at today and getting back to what options do we have to drive the costs of health care, contain it, or drive it down, what are those options? And that's what the broker is working with the Finance and Budget Committee on, receiving some of that initial feedback so that they can go do further work and understand if changes were made to our program to our offerings, I'll say, what might we realize in savings if those levers were pulled, I would say. Knowing that one of those options is, yes, sharing, expecting employees to share more of a burden on health care costs. That's one. It's not a popular one, especially in light where, you know, we want to make sure that our employees have competitive wages and if we're not ABLE TO AFFORD INCREASES IN PLAY, HEALTH INSURANCE CONTINUES TO RISE AND IT FEELS LIKE YOU'RE GOING BACKWARDS. SO THERE'S A LOT, YEAH, TO WORK THROUGH WITH REGARD TO OVERALL COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS.

OKAY. SO A COUPLE OF THOSE PROJECTS ARE ONGOING UNTIL THE FINAL SAVINGS CAN BE REALIZED. AND THEN WHAT IS THE PROCESS FOR FORECASTING AHEAD THESE TYPES OF OPERATIONAL INCREASES? You know, is there a 3.5 increase raised every year for CPI, or how often do those core general increases happen?

That is one of the things at the very beginning of the budget preparation process, because it impacts all the departments and internal services and things like that, is what's out there in the municipal world for increases for local government. And so it's... It could be different every year, but CPI comes into play for sure, right, understanding what that is. And, again, trying to stay up with market. There's a lot of factors that go into that, and I work with HR and others to come up with a proposed increase for Corps General, and that can vary. Honestly, I can remember years and years and years and years back where we were in a position where 7% increases were not unusual, but that was years ago. That's not the norm in today's world.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Pryor.

sorry again I don't know if this is a to ask during the public hearing or not but going forward so say and 3 years we're going to be doing minutes super consistent so 3 years will be negotiation times time again. So I know that fire dispatches represented But police dispatch is not represented. So how can we ensure, like, in three years there's not going to be a big pay discrepancy again, for one? And for two, is it an option to have them as a represented group? Like, can they go under the FOP? Or what does that process look like so there's not a pay discrepancy? Like, so we're not in the same boat in three years from now with them not being represented since they're considered core.

Yeah. I don't know how many years ago it was, but there was an effort for the police communications to organize, and that did not happen, right?

So I know that that didn't happen, but how come they can't be under the FOP? I don't know.

I don't think that's a question for represented groups.

Okay. Yeah. But that's not... Okay, I just don't want to... In three years, it's going to happen again with them not being represented.

Yeah, we recognize that, too, because you've got represented groups, and then you've got core general, and there are different pay structures. And so we recognize that, that come three years from now, that... if we're not making adjustments on the police side, that there's going to be a gap again, right? And at the end of the day, there's four positions. There is a market, right? And we need to be mindful of that as we do any pay, whether represented or core general. To remain competitive, I think that's a desire of everybody. We want the best and brightest employees that we can have. But that does come at a cost, right? And so that's the balancing act. But we recognize that too. I mean, you've got one side that's represented and one that's right now core general.

So since we recognize it, are we going to be proactive and not let it happen? Because I mean, otherwise it's going to happen and then we're going to be in the same boat again.

Yeah. I don't have that answer for you right now. The goal is to create parity right now, recognizing that there are different structures right now, and that's part of getting this pay and growth plan done for Corps General too, is helping us in those spaces because there are some pay disparities as we make any adjustments to wages, represented or not, that we need to solve for.

Okay, thank you. And I know there's no easy answers, but I just I just want to be proactive versus reactive, and I feel like we're very reactive on a lot of things. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Council Member Carlisle.

Thank you, Mayor. And while I appreciate all these conversations, and we really do need to have them, we also really need to get this budget presentation over so that we can move on to the next item. So if we could just get back to this budget that we're looking at to pass for our next fiscal year, that would be fantastic.

Definitely the objective. You can ask, is it directly to the budget? Yeah. Okay, sure.

Well, I have a lot of questions because I'm told I can't be on finance and budget because it's a conflict. So I do have a lot of budgetary questions that I can't. I don't think dispatch is a conflict at all. But so I do have a lot of questions because I'm told that it, well, everything's a conflict when it comes to me, but it's a conflict. So thanks.

All right. So for now, I'm not seeing any other questions. We still are in public session, public hearing. So at this point, I'm going to go ahead and ask, is there anyone who wishes to speak in support of this application? Is there anyone who wishes to speak in opposition of this application?

Yes.

All right. You know, my first issue is this isn't actually a balanced budget, right? You know, we watched the finance and budget meeting. There was about a half million deficit, and you decided that we're going to add back about a million worth of that. And so the reason you're presenting this as it is, it's just on paper to be a balanced budget. And that's not the intent of the charter, by the way. They didn't put that in there so you could fake it and pretend, okay, we're We have a balanced budget, but we know we're going to go over it. We know there's going to be overtime. You have to have a balanced budget. That's the first thing. Second thing, Mia, you mentioned the council meals earlier. I sunshined a few weeks ago. You guys spend $30,000 plus a year, $600 every week on council meals. You're worried about the $13,000 for the firefighting accreditation? Go to Hy-Vee. Get a deli platter instead of going to Jack Stack and Iron Horse and everywhere else. You know, you've got everybody making sacrifices around you, and you guys want to sit high on the hog. Leadership's about, you know, taking the pain with everybody else. So my recommendation is cut that down. Get something cheap because everyone else is having to make sacrifices. The third thing, that 500K projected revenue for Green Street That means it would take 88 years to get our investment back on the $44 million. I know better. You're an MBA. Do you know what the MPV on that would be? It'd be wildly negative at any discount rate. That's insane. That's insanity. I can't believe that you guys allow that to go through. And then you're sitting here talking about budget problems. That is a big example of why we have the budget problems. You guys can't plan. You make decisions like that. It's crazy. All right, four, stop pointing fingers at the county. The county taxed everyone to death. It was so bad the way I recall Frank White. That's terrible leadership, terrible accountability. You're talking about $2.2 million, very small portion of what you have to solve for. That doesn't solve for a third of the CBA, the contracts you guys put out there. It's not Jackson County's fault. It's your guys' fault. You didn't plan for the collective bargaining agreements. You didn't even look six, three months ahead. And so to sit here and say, oh, this is a Jackson County issue, that's crazy. The problem is... mostly your economic development. Part of it's your lack of planning. Most of it's the economic development. You guys are cannibalizing revenues with all these huge subsidies you're giving out. And it's not going to get any better. You know, we've got Van Buskirk, your friend. He's on the Guadalupe Center board with you. He's representing all the Mormon church land. Just for the first thousand acres, they're asking for a quarter billion dollars. You're going to give it to him. You're going to give him these subsidies. And he's going to ask for about three quarters of a billion for the other 3,000 acres. And what's going to happen is we're going to keep giving away revenue that should go to the employees, should go to the unions and the firefighters, to developers who you have relationships with. So if you want to fix the issue, fix that. I'm running out of time, so I guess I'll save the rest for public comment. But thank you.

Thank you.

Are we back to being able to ask additional questions?

I want to speak on that too.

Sure.

Teresa Vollenweider, 5201 Northeast Maybrook Road. I think about what has happened in my own neighborhood when I think about this budgeting. Because I think about the various mistakes, intentional mistakes, made by city staff. And then the council and the planning commission just go along. Maybrook, they're now talking about a new bridge. Why do we need a new bridge on Maybrook? Do you know what the traffic is on Maybrook? It's a little bit more now because Lee Summit Road is closed. But why do we need a new bridge on Maybrook? Where is that money coming from? I've got cameras on Maybrook. I could tell you what the traffic is. I could sit down there with a clicker like I use for counting steps to check the accuracy of pedometers. But the reason we need a bridge on Maybrook is to cover up for mistakes because of this bunch over here. The web of lies just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And the coverage of the lies just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. When do you all finally start pinning them down on the mistakes that they make? And they're intentional. I don't know what the remuneration they are getting, but they're getting something for it. Maybe you all need to start asking questions to find out what they're getting.

Thank you.

Okay. Now there is an opportunity to ask more questions from council any more questions comments.

Yes council mayor pretentious Thank You mayor So just a kind of few final questions from my notes tonight to mr. Dunning probably so you know we've talked a lot in finance and budget when we adopted our like fund balance policy about our city's bond rating and our fiscal position, just generally being good stewards of taxpayer dollars and making sure we're prioritizing that. Do we still have our AAA credit rating?

Yes. Yes, we do.

And with this proposed budget, do we anticipate any issues maintaining that or anything like that?

That's a hard one to answer for me. I would not anticipate because we're maintaining our- We're maintaining our healthy fund balance. Our fund balance reserves. proposing a budget living within our means, right? So I don't, we're fulfilling our debt obligations, right? We've got a plan in place to function and provide the levels of service to this community.

I mean, my hope is that we maintain that bond rating, obviously. I just wanted to make sure that, you know, there's a lot of talk about living within our means, being responsible, but like we're We're still on track, maybe that's a question for the finance department, like we don't, right now we're not foreseeing any issues there.

Yeah, I know enough to be dangerous in that space, but I couldn't think of anything that would say, with our proposed budget, right, would that impact our rating?

Okay. I believe our, so we do shoot for a balanced budget. We are presenting that. We may dip into some fund balance for some of these public safety items that we specifically talked about, but that's all within our charter, right, that a balanced budget under our charter allows for that kind of strategic use of reserves?

That's correct.

Okay. And then I know we've talked about the need to kind of do some check-ins. We're planning to do some pretty serious. monthly, quarterly, mid-year check-ins to make adjustments as we get more information about revenues, actual expenses, what happens with the taxes, Jackson County, all that kind of stuff. We're kind of, this is being built into the process this year, correct?

That's correct.

Okay.

Oh, and then the just last thing was maybe more of a comment, kind of following up on something that Council Member Adkins had talked about. I think this year I have no, I'm fine with where we're at with this, But in future years, I think to be able to see, like, baseline expenses and expansions as kind of different categories when we talk about the initial budget projection would be really helpful. Just to say, like, if we maintain this year's staffing and everything, here's what it would be. If we did some expansions, here's what it would be. Here's what we're solving for. It would be really helpful, I think, just going forward to have that kind of information presented. I thought that was a really good comment earlier, so I just wanted to kind of second that. Okay. Yes. Anyway, that's all that I have. Thank you so much.

Great. Thank you. Any additional questions by council? Okay. Hearing none, I will now close the public hearing and reopen the regular session. Now, are there any council comments before we go to vote? Council Member Pryor.

Thank you. I see the fire budget is pulled out separate. Is that because that affects my husband's pay, or is it because I'm just supposed to recuse because the word fire is mentioned? Do we know?

It includes the entire fire budget, including the paying classification for the fire department. So, yes, I would recommend that you recuse from that particular item. It was broken out so that as many council members could vote, as was municipal court for Mayor Lopez.

Fire Department has more employees than the Municipal Court, but okay, thank you.

All right, thank you. Mayor Pro Tem Shields.

Thank you. So, Mr. Dang, when would we expect to see the budget amendment that we talked about tonight? Do you have an idea of the time frame, so we don't need to vote on that tonight. That's just kind of general consensus that you'll take back to prepare that?

That is, and thank you for the question because I want to make sure I'm approaching this right. Public safety sales tax reserves for what was shown, but not for the The lobbyist services, right, want to be mindful of the funds utilized, right? Right.

That would need to be solved for separately. Right.

So that's something with that direction. It's the authority, right, to utilize the reserves. So we can turn that around. If that's the direction, we can turn that around really quickly just to provide that authority.

That's acceptable to me. Mayor, did we have a consensus on that, or do we need to...

I think we have a consensus. The committee, there's three of you. You guys good? We have a consensus.

Okay. Okay. That's all I had. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. That being said, Mayor Pro Tem, can you please read Bill No. 26-102?

Thank you. I move for second reading of bill number 26-102, an ordinance approving, adopting, and appropriating the budget and establishing the pay and classification plan for employees except for representative fire staff for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2027 for the city.

Thank you. We have a motion by Mayor Pro Tem Shields and a second by Council Member Carlisle. Is there any discussion? If not, please cast your vote. All votes are in. We have six yes, one no, and one recusal. Please record that vote. Thank you. Mayor for Tim.

I move for second reading of bill number 26-103, an ordinance approving adopting and appropriating the budget and establishing the pay plan for fire represented employees for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2027 for the fire department of the city.

Thank you. Motion has been made by Mayor for Tim Shields, second by Council Member Carlisle. Any discussion? If not, please cast your vote. Motion passes 7 yes, 1 no, 1 recusal. Thank you. Please record that vote. Mayor for Tim.

I move second reading Bill number 26-104, an ordinance approving, adopting, and appropriating the budget for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2027 for the Municipal Courts Division of the City.

Motion by Mayor for Tim Shields, second by Council Member Carlisle. Any questions, comments?

If not, please cast your vote.

Bill is adopted 7-1 and one recusal. Thank you. Before we go on to the next item, we'll take a 10-minute break. So thank you.

Ever wondered how the city budget works? The total 2026 budget is over $380 million, which includes funding for daily operations, capital improvements, debt service, internal service, and enterprise operations. For example, the General Fund is the foundation for the city's day-to-day services and investments like road maintenance, public safety, and fire protection. The General Fund is supported by property taxes, sales taxes generated by local businesses, franchise taxes, and other sources like licenses, permits, and fees. For every dollar citizens pay in property tax, the city receives 18 cents. This means the city receives $845 a year in property taxes for a median single-family house. These taxes provide public safety, park maintenance, infrastructure, and the best services to keep Lee Summit going and improving. One of the community's top priorities is infrastructure investment, which is reflected in the Capital Improvement Plan. $113 million of the 2026 budget is invested into the capital improvement plan. The 2026 capital improvement budget includes investments like the 291 and 50 highway interchange, 3rd Street, Ward and Purcells intersection, and Prior Road. The budget process includes guidance from the City Council, citizen input, and critical success factors from the City's IGNITE strategic plan. To learn more about the City's budget, visit cityofls.net backslash budget.

When the person called on the phone, she said that there was a dinosaur walking down her road. Of course, we had to go out and check that out. We get out there, and it was a big African tortoise, probably 60 pounds, walking down the road. When they walk, they really stand up tall, so I could see why she thought it was a dinosaur. I'm Rodney Wagner, I'm the manager of Lee's Summit Animal Control. So as you can see, we've got all sorts of animals here. We've got some guinea pigs off to the side. All the windows up here are animals that are adoptable right now. Every one of these dogs is ready to go and ready for adoption. And the same thing with our cats over here. A lot of cool cats in here now, so. This is our three-acre lot we have out back. This is where we do all the walking of dogs, exercise. We also have a side yard off to the side over there so we can let them run loose. They can run together and we have what's called play groups. Kind of like having a bunch of kids. Here's our vet room. We have a vet that comes out twice a week. This is our sally port where we bring the animals into. This is one of our animal control trucks. And we can hold up to six animals. We have a lift on the other side to put big animals in. We actually have temperature gauges in here and in the truck to tell us how hot it is. Once it gets to a certain temperature, we bring all the animals back here immediately. So this actually has traps in it, but... We do a lot of wildlife trapping. I mean, a lot, so... Bats, pot-bellied pigs, horses, cows, emus, a lot of reptiles. We had a system one time that had over 200 reptiles in his basement. Caimans and alligators in here that are four or five feet long, you can't keep those. And people do, and they're surprised when they can't keep them. I'm like, really? You're surprised you can't have an alligator in your house? Our main goal here is public safety and also the safety of the animals. And we have very dedicated people back there, and they definitely stay here for the love of the animals, which also includes getting them adopted out. We'll have about 4,000 impounded animals a year. Probably about close to 2,000 are dogs and cats. The cats and dogs, when they get impounded here, they go on a five-day hold. And then after the five days, if the owner doesn't show up, then we can put them up for adoption. Adopt an animal here is actually really simple. You just come in, look for whatever animal you're looking for, find the right pick. You have to go to the adoption room up there and see if you get along with them. You spend as much time as you want to in there. From that point on, it's just a matter of making sure they're spayed or neutered and all their vaccinations up to par and they're good to go. We have a very high adoption rate because we try everything in our power to get animals adopted out. We have Heart of America, a humane society that we do a lot of adoptions through. And then we also have other groups. We have some people that literally will just look all over the country for somewhere for a dog to go. And we sent dogs up into South Dakota, North Dakota, Washington State. So it's actually, it's a huge united effort to get all these animals home.

Tarzan's got lots of energy. Hazel's got a weird bell bell. She wants nothing to do with the other cats. She'll kind of get her grumpy face going.

And the good thing about the people here is that they get all their friends to get animals too. All of us have probably the limit of all the animals that we can have at home. You know, they are huge animal lovers. If it was up to the people here, we'd have 15 cats running around in here. We had a citizen one time out there, and he was bathing his two nine-foot-long boa constrictors in the front yard. Apparently, that was garnering some attention, and so we went out there and had to talk to him about that. Do I do this job? Oh, dude, I love this job. I grew up on a farm, and taking care of that many animals, you can't help but like animals. This is just like fancy farming. You know, you're just bringing animals in here, taking care of them and finding them homes and yeah, absolutely animal lover.

This is the best place to work.

I love working here. I feel very blessed. I love it here. I look forward to coming to work every day, being a part of this team. Like a family away from home.

Where everyone feels like everybody knows their name.

The city that supports you, we see that with our benefits. A pension, vacation days, job security.

Being able to be heard. We feel valued. We feel respected.

Lee's Summit is a very progressive city. It's growing, it's thriving. We have this drive towards not just doing a job, but doing it with a spirit of excellence.

I had the opportunity to continue to grow regardless of 30 plus years doing this kind of work.

It's more than just dollars and cents. We're here really to give back. Providing a service to better our community. To go out and serve people. To be a part of something bigger than yourself. If I would have known what I know now years ago, I would have been here much sooner.

Traditionally, we think as police officers, those responding to law enforcement needs within the community. But honestly, we are there to serve our citizens. And our citizens do go into crisis. They do have mental health crises. And we're being called to those scenes on a regular basis. In order to help serve those citizens, better, we did initiate the crisis intervention team program. These are officers that are specially trained to de-escalate crisis situations. Recently, we've brought co-responders onto the scene, licensed, qualified mental health professionals housed within our police department, and they respond with those officers directly to those scenes where a crisis is occurring so they can interact with that citizen and get them the help they need right there on that scene.

The co-responders are either a bachelor or master level in a behavioral health-related field. They wear plain clothes. They don't carry weapons or anything like that.

I have a police radio that I listen to all day. Listen for, you know, those key words. Mental health, behavioral health, crisis.

There's a lot of officers that just call for me. I have my own radio number.

I also have the ability to self-dispatch to them and say, 982 is en route. Officers en route. 914. Armed forces en route.

So typically I arrive after they've made it safe. I'll make contact and get kind of the rundown. And then I just kind of jump right in.

Like, hey, you know, my name's Allison. I'm a mental health professional. I'm here to help you. I'm not here to take you to jail or arrest you. Sometimes

All a person needs is a voice, someone neutral, someone outside that can listen. I do a lot of safety planning, including family, their support network. Who's close to you? If they're home alone, who can come over and hang out with you today? Can we lock away your sharps? Can we put up your meds? Do you need meds? Can we get you over to the urgent care to get you assessed for your medications? Some of them also are like, oh, I'm so glad you came. This made me feel so much better.

Our main goal as co-responders is to, one, get people connected to the services that they need and also divert from emergency rooms and jails.

And they almost get a different view of the police responding. That lets me know you care and the officers care. Please call the police.

How can we help you?

In 2020, we had 722 mental health related calls for service. 2022, by that time, 1,479. These mental health related calls for service are increasing. How we're responding to that is increasing the number of Christ's Intervention Team officers we have available, as well as the number of co-responders we have available to respond on these calls.

So what I think is important for the community to know about the co-responder program is that we're here. We exist. All you have to do when you call 9-1-1 is ask for us. You know, say, hey, I want a co-responder to respond to this crisis, and we'll go. I was really struggling about eight years ago on my personal journey with mental health, and I met some amazing social workers and amazing programs that have helped me get to where I am today. I really couldn't see myself doing anything else. We want to help, and that's what we love to do.

So I had a client, we got a call, she had some suicidal ideations and she really felt that she had nobody. And you know, in getting to know her story and getting to know who comes around and sees you, well then we found a support person and they responded immediately and we made a plan. I called back and checked on her in an hour and then I checked on her in two hours. We were able to get her into the additional services to where she talks to someone every week or more. I just took a person that really just thought they had nobody and nobody would show up for them and show them you do. And you'll be amazed who is in your corner if you just simply say, I need a little help.

Just before we go forward with the agenda regarding public comments, Mr. Head, is he back in the room? There he is. We have Council Member Pryor would like to change her vote on Bill No. 26-102.

The first one. I didn't mean to recuse on it, but I would be a no vote.

Okay. I think you can direct the clerk to change your vote on that particular item.

Would you please change my vote? Thank you.

Thank you. All right, we'll proceed with the agenda. We'll go to public comments. We'll start with Mr. Alshawish.

Thank you.

I had a whole different comment plan, but I guess I'm not the only guy to get you guys about the budget yet. So there's one more thing I wanted to get to, and it's the insurance, the insurance part of it. This is a big hit. You know, what he announced, what the alliance announced, is they're raising insurance rates by about 25%. And you guys just voted on the budget, which I knew before, but you voting on the budget makes it clear you're not going to absorb those costs. You're going to push them onto the employees. And there's just a series of events that really bothers me about this. So in December, the Rick gentleman from Alliant donates to your campaign, Beto. He gives your campaign money. In March, they receive the new contract. And then in June, they announce a 25% increase. Now, maybe that increase would have happened anyway, but it just never looks good when you're changing companies, they're giving you money, and then the employees end up having to pick up the cost. And when I look at overall how this budget worked out, we've got now with this increased insurance, Like, the raises are going to mean nothing for court general. That 3.5%, it's gone. And for the unions, you know, you gave them a big raise, but these guys live off overtime. And so now they've got no overtime. They've got increased health costs. They'll be lucky to break even. And so, you know, Melanie, you posted, you know, about your EDC, 13% increase in revenue. Where's that money? Why can't we pay for our firefighters? Why can't we absorb health insurance costs? So you guys really need to think about it. I know there's a company line about the economic development, and it's good. You guys are cannibalizing tax revenue. You're putting yourselves and the city and the employees in a bad position. I hope that you actually deeply take a look into it, because these people put their trust in you. And you've got 110,000 people who are relying on you for services. So I hope you guys can figure it out.

All right, thanks. Ms. Teresa Wallenweider.

Teresa Vollenweider, 5201 Northeast Maybrook Road. We're going to be talking about, this is Maybrook Road area. This is my neighborhood. We're going to be talking about this section right here and Senko Acres, which is this minor platted piece, and this is lot two, lot one. This detached garage is on Sanco's property, so it's part of lot two. This house is on lot one. The person that lives in this house uses this detached garage. Can't do that against the UDO. This barn, shed, detached garage, if it belonged to this person, but the property line is right through here, but this is part of the cover-up. This is part of what they've done to get what they want or to try to cover up what they've done. This was from revised April 2019. That Sanco Acres was, I think, recorded September of 2019. So what you'll see is, I did the calculation for you. My neighborhood is that Maybrook Road area. So my neighborhood, there's a total of 78.53 acres. Divide that by nine and you come to 8.72. Multiply that by 80% and you get about seven acres. How did we end up with a half acre lot? When I've calculated that it really couldn't be any less than seven acres. The average lot size shouldn't be any less than seven acres. How do we get in with a half acre lot? When you've got seven acres, five acres, about four acres, 10 acres, 10 acres, 10 acres, 15 acres, 15 acres. How do we end up with a half acre lot?

Thank you, Ms. Fulmer. Thank you.

To be continued. Because something needs to be done about the neighbor using the barn. He could get it as big as he wanted, 2,400 square feet, but yet it's on ag property and he's zoned residential large lot.

Thank you. All right, we'll move on. We have some resolutions. Ms. Akari?

Resolution number 26 desk 0-0 9 a resolution adopting the FY 2027 through 2031 capital improvement plan in accordance with the city of Lee summit charter Thank you We have a motion by mayor for Tim shields and a second Going once going twice the council member Cravens any discussion Hearing none, please cast your vote

Missing a couple. Sorry. You can do voice vote. All right, all votes are in. Motion passes. Resolution passes 9-0. Thank you. Mayor Pretem? Oh, I'm sorry. Fish?

Resolution number 20-10, a resolution authorizing the mayor to appoint successor directors to the Cedar Creek Community Improvement District.

Thank you. We have a motion made by Council Member Funk and a second by Council Member Pryor. Any discussion? Hearing none, please cast your vote. Resolution is adopted, 9-0. Thank you. Please record the vote. One more.

Resolution number 26-11, a resolution authorizing the mayor to appoint successor directors to the Chapel Ridge Community Improvement District.

Thank you. We have a motion made by Mayor Pro Tem Shields and a second by Council Member Adkins. Any discussion? If not, please cast your vote. Resolution passes 9-0. Please record the vote. Thank you. Takes us to item number 8, agenda item number 8, proposed ordinance of second reading. Mayor Pro Tem.

Thank you. I move for adoption of Bill number 26-096, an ordinance amending Chapter 33, Unified Development Ordinance, Article 5, Orly, Districts of the Lee Summit, Code of Ordinances for the City of Lee Summit, Missouri.

Thank you. We have a motion made by Mayor Tim Shields and a second by Councilmember Funk. Any discussion? Councilmember Frazier, you're recusing? Okay. That being said, please cast your vote. Okay, we have motion passes eight zero and one recusal. Thank you and mayor pretend for adoption No, okay So that takes us to committee reports Anyone new committees are formed, right? Yeah, we already did find it. Did you cover everything? Did you cover everything?

Well, I just want to make sure people heard it. I figured it was going to be a long night.

I know the other committees have just recently been formed. So, Mayor for Tim Shields.

I would just say I attended the downtown Main Street board meeting. A few days ago as their liaison, and they are hard at work preparing for downtown days, which is going to be a great event, and just really proud of the work that they do. Thank you.

Looking forward to it. Thank you. All right. No other committee reports. Council comments? Council Member Funk.

Thank you, Mayor. Mayor, Mr. Dunning, do we need to take the pay and growth plan to a committee to have a discussion to see about helping you get that back on track of what would be helpful in that space?

Perhaps. Just thinking about our approach, much of that may be determined based on the approach one and then the cost Because over 75,000 right the city manager brings things forward to the committee But if there would be interest in what our our thoughts are about the approach to that I mean that's something that if there's a desire to take that and have a discussion with the committee we could certainly do that You requesting that?

I think it would be great to have a discussion on that and make sure we can start developing and be helpful in a timeline and where we could get this thing moving back on track.

I think finance and budget handle that or who would that most naturally go to? I would think. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Pryor.