City Council - Special Meeting

Great thank you and staff will be in touch.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. You're welcome.

It's too easy, right?

Yeah. Alright, next on the agenda is a. I guess it's a three part request. For 733 McKinley Ave beginning with a landmark designation and alteration certificate and a grant request and we will have a staff presentation.

The Mayor is running a few minutes late. He says ETA 1205. So no, he said do not start and I shall not. Are we on Zoom? Okay. Thank you all today for being here. I'm sorry for my delay in getting here.

um but we will be done no later than five o'clock period and maybe uh a bit earlier than that um why don't we take a roll call first council member fahy here council member kern present here here here If you would join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Is Caleb online? Yeah, one of our members today got pretty violently sick last night. I'm not going to say that was either because he had to come to council meeting or that he had to pick up family at the airport, but I do wish him well, and that's why he is not here today since his regrets. All right. We're at the budget retreat for the biennial budget for 2027-28, and I'm delighted to be here, as I think council are, and hopefully staff and the public are as well. I wanted to provide a few preliminary comments, and I'm going to also have the chair of our Finance Committee do so Councilmember Hafner because that's Had a huge integral part in the development of the budget so far This meeting is being recorded so I hope that those who can't be here and even those who are here can look back at it and and be here to understand what we're doing, because transparency is incredibly important, especially on this issue. And I want to, at the outset, thank the kind of following groups of people. First, the staff who have worked absolutely tirelessly to get us where we are right now. And that includes all the directors, I think, who are here today, their staff. I want to thank council, who are going to do, hopefully, a lot of heavy lifting today and throughout the process. I want to thank the members of the boards and commissions who've had big input into this as well. They've been asked for their input, and they've provided it. Want to ask or mention members of the public who? Get to that in just a minute that are gonna play an important role in this and indeed all already are in comments that they've made to us and I do want to single out our city manager Daniel Langley for leading the staff charge on this and she and her staff will be conducting a chunk of this meeting. I want to make four points. One is that one of the most important things a city council and this city council does under the charter is passing a balanced budget. And we will do that later this year What does that involve it involves making policy choices and setting the spending priorities of the city for The next two years we do a biennial budget We will revisit it next year and indeed will revisit it throughout the year for certain purposes but We're going to make those policy choices and set spending priorities that we believe reflect and balance the values that the community that we serve, the voting public, and those who can't vote yet or can't vote at all embody. and that we understand, I think, to the best of our knowledge and ability. We also are collaborating in this process, and I have enumerated some of the folks we've collaborated and are collaborating with in evaluating and making those choices and those decisions. That's why I call it a budget process. The second thing I think to know in all of this is that every municipality in Colorado, probably across the country, and most other governments, including our state government particularly, are undergoing incredible maybe metamorphic financial pressures. And it makes this job all the more important and difficult. I think, I don't want to overstate it, but I do think that's a really important lens through which we all have to understand this. We've got tough choices to make, but we have... what I consider to be the ability to stand on the shoulders of a lot of people, staff, residents, public officials, who have made really terrific choices, often conservative choices, to protect the city and bring us to what we're going to do today. So while these are tough decisions today, there are many communities that are really in much more difficult situations than we are. And I think that's important. Third, during this budget process, there will be quite a number of important points in which or at which the public has input. formally in meetings and so forth. And of course, the public is always willing or able to send us emails, contact us when we're not meeting. But today is not one of those. We have a lot of information to get through today, and we will... We'll take public comment in other circumstances later in this long process. And fourth is that we will get through as many items as we can in the budget today. During this retreat, there may be in particular some elements of the capital improvement budget that we may decide to put over to a subsequent meeting. We've allowed time for that. That is a challenge in and of itself, but we'll do that. can and will do that. So those are the points I want to make to kind of frame the bigger discussion, but we have the benefit of a terrific finance committee supported by staff, Ryder Bailey, the finance director, and many others. Members of that include the chair, Dietrich Heffner, and Josh Cooperman, and the Mayor Pro Tem. They just happen to be sitting to the left of me, to the right, from your point of view, probably. And we want to give them an opportunity to, Council Member Heffner, to make a few comments. about their work and the way they're seeing that and he's seeing it as a financier.

Thank You mayor I'll try and be brief the Finance Committee has worked hard to date on The items were me looking at today in the retreat. I know many of you were with us at the budget retreat preview on July 2nd and and got at least a taste of some of the issues that are going to be before us today and Think the thing I want to underline that the the mayor talked about is We are in a much better position in many ways than a lot of neighboring jurisdictions the state government the county Take take your pick who are all facing decisions that are much harder than the ones we're facing in terms of not having the money to continue the programs they've already got. We are fortunate in the sense of we haven't gotten ourselves into that particular situation. I think everyone deserves a lot of credit. for the prudent decision-making that got us there. Nevertheless, we face all of the same cost pressures as everybody else, which we've heard a lot about, that costs of lots of things are going up faster than city revenue. And if we don't continue to be diligent and prudent and responsible, we could very easily find ourselves in a situation where there isn't, for example, enough general fund money to cover all the things the general fund needs to cover or not enough capital fund money to cover undertake the sort of core capital projects we need to do. You know, I think this has been and will be described as a transitional budget and a sort of bridge from the way we have been doing things toward potentially a new way of doing things. I hope we can all think about that as we talk about the long list of decisions in front of us. Because I think we're at something of an inflection point, but nowhere near as bad of an inflection point as some of our neighbors. So there's both a challenge but an opportunity as well.

With that, I'll turn it over to staff. I think there may be a number of people who are going to have some part of the presentation. The council will be weighing in at different parts, and I'll be kind of shepherding that discussion. But the staff is going to be shepherding us through some preliminary thoughts and hard thoughts. analyzed facts and suggestions and priorities and decisions for us.

Thank you. Thank you, Council, for joining us today. I would like to reiterate the gratitude for staff. To get to this point is a culmination of months' worth of work of all of the departments and really appreciate all of the time and effort that you've put into this. I also want to thank the Finance Committee, Council, for your support to this point, and then also the advisory boards for submitting their requests as well. As Councilmember Heffner noted, we are entering transitional budget years. As we were starting to prepare for this workshop, we realized all the things that are in transition. While we will adopt a balanced budget, we do have a structural issue with our ongoing budget. When you look at the the models, they will show that costs continue to exceed revenues. So the transitional piece of this is setting the foundation to understand where we are at as a city with the community, to understand the services that we provide, the constraints that we have, and then opportunities to move forward. Also, there are opportunities to increase revenues through evaluations of fees. perhaps a technology fee, plan check and inspection fee, and then also reviewing credit card fees. And then there's impacts to be determined as we have the adoption of the PROS guidebook, which was a huge input from the public. You'll see requests for not only maintaining existing amenities, but new amenities. How do we fit that into the long-term plan? Adoption of the comp plan, which is very exciting. That will result in development that is not factored into this budget. And then looking at cost allocations, and that's a behind-the-scenes item that we do. Not only cost allocation of the... internal divisions in terms of finance, IT, and HR across the entire organization, but then also how staff are allocated amongst the funds. And as finance has pulled back the curtain on some of these positions, we have found that they are not allocated appropriately, and so we need to evaluate that and go through. And then finally, you know, if you look at the current budget, there are a lot of KPIs and I understand why they're in the budget. As we move forward in this next two-year cycle, we would really like to evaluate the KPIs and make sure that they are meaningful and that they actually tell a story and that they provide value, versus right now it's more so they're a long list in the budget that are occasionally referred to. Next slide, please. So just looking at what this is a brief snapshot of what's occurred within the last year of what we're currently working on. Again, this list is small compared to what the entire city staff have completed. But these are some may be considered very small in terms of RV dump station, but it has a big impact. on the public. And then we have very large, the comp plan adoption. And so, you know, kudos to staff for all of these items. What this really reflects is that staff does not just sit there and stay with status quo. There's constantly, how can we improve? How can we better our processes? And we always receive feedback that we need to. And so we take that in and evaluate what we can do. So again, thank you. And I'm going to transition this to Ryder.

Thank you. Thank you all for attending. I'd like to thank our city department heads and their staff for the hard work and input so far in this process. It takes a village. I'd also like to acknowledge the outstanding work of Mahir Mansurabadi, financial analyst, who's been instrumental in compiling and analyzing the budget to date. and our Deputy Finance Director, Mr. James Franks, who's embarking on his initial budget journey with the city. I'd be amiss not to recognize also my finance team, many of which are sitting behind me, our tax team, Travis, Hope, Melissa, and Jess, as well as our accounting team, Jordan, Kylie, Ali, Julie, and Jen. They're fabulous. I really appreciate all the support they do for me and my team and for the organization. I'd like to start with the purpose of today's budget meeting and what success looks like. You're going to be presented with a lot of information today, a lot of information and details. It's meant to be interactive. Along the way, we'll be seeking your direction at council decision points. To help us along with that process, we have a multi-pager handout for you to follow along as well. So let's set the stage. We'll start today's presentation off going over the budget process and the calendar, budget guidelines, financial policies, council's priorities, city manager priorities, some key considerations, overseeing in other communities, fiscal and policy issues with potential significant impacts, and council decision points. Then we're going to hop right into it for long-term financial forecasts and initial focus areas of budget development. The general fund, the parks fund, open space fund, and the golf fund. Then we'll touch on some major revenue and personnel and benefit expenditure assumptions. We'll go over the city manager's recommended adjustments. This includes both personnel and operational. We'll revisit fiscal and policy issues with significant impacts. As mentioned, expense growth continues to outpace our revenue growth. The recreation debt mill levy, temporary credit expiring and resetting to align with annual debt payments. I will not spend that much time on the historic preservation tax after last night's council meeting, but I talked of these materials before last night. We'll spend some time on board and commission requests, LSAB, sustainability advisory board, cultural advisory board, open space advisory board, recreation advisory board, and the historical museum advisory board. And at the end, we'll talk about our preliminary CIP. So the calendar. A lot of good work has been done to date. March through May, we compiled capital requests, material operational requests, and personnel expansion requests. May through June, the department 2027-20 operational budget was developed and refined by department heads. Preliminary revenue estimates were also prepared. June and July, finance and CMO staff consolidated those inputs and developed the materials you have today. Earlier this month, we gave the finance committee a budget retreat preview of this meeting. Here we are today in council chambers for the 27-28 budget retreat. Looking forward, depending on the progress made today, I feel it's very likely we'll have another meeting engaging the entire council to do further CIP refinement and development. At the August 20th Finance Committee meeting, we'll have a budget retreat recap and additional CIP discussion, all targeting Tuesday, September 1st, council meeting for the city manager's recommended budget, September to October, we'll have working sessions as necessary. Tuesday, October 20th, will be our public hearing, the city manager's final budget presentation with adoption slated for Monday, November 2nd. Budget guidelines. The city is currently developing its 2027-28 biennial budget and six-year capital improvement plan. This is a heavy lift. The budget process aims to allocate resources in alignment with our priorities. We've talked about a balanced budget. I'd like to add on to structurally balanced. What this means is that one-time funding is only to be used for one-time expenditures, not ongoing funding. Put another way, your revenues need to exceed your ongoing expenditures. Line item adjustments are based upon detailed analysis and projections. Staffing requests will include detailed and specific information defining the need for those positions. One thing I've talked a lot with our department heads is cost neutrality that increases are to be offset by commensurate reductions. What this has allowed us to do is prioritize our staffing and our obligations. And given existing and potential fiscal challenges, our community's high level of expectation, we do expect the budget development process to generate some challenging conversations and difficult decisions. The city's financial policies are posted on our department's website and are routinely reviewed by the finance committee. They were last amended on June 16th of this year. The budget is developed within this framework. The financial policies that have a direct impact on budget are asterisks on this chart, reserves, revenues, and our operating budget policies. This budget aims to align your council priorities with our resources, economic vitality, core services, safety, housing, all within the lens of EDI and environmental sustainability. Our city manager's priorities are to prioritize our existing critical infrastructure and core functions. What this means is public safety. In the recommended budget today, you'll see market adjustments for police and Boulder ODM, maintenance of our capital investments, including technology and critical infrastructure, and addressing the long-term stability of general fund, parks fund, open space fund, and gold funds. investments in staff with an emphasis on retention, training, and development, to continuously evaluate and implement cost saving opportunities and operational efficiencies, and to evaluate fees and cost allocations where appropriate. Some key considerations. We are not alone. Other cities are going through something similar. Louisville has a high quality of life and delivers a high level of service. This city has taken on truly impressive and aspirational work. We just need to balance those with our resources. There are pathways through this. We are seeking your guidance on proposed pathways forward, and we will have a balanced budget for adoption this fall. This slide, neighboring communities, aims to set some context. Here are some of what our neighboring communities are experiencing as they develop their budgets, many of which are just entering the budget process. Staff will continue to monitor what's going on in our region. I would like to highlight and applaud the fiscal discipline of your council and prior councils, which have placed this city in a better position than some. Fiscal policy issues and significant impacts. Again, addressing the general park and golf funds structural balances. The general trend of expense growth outpacing our revenue growth with projected slowing or flattening of sales and use and also property tax revenues. Our personnel costs and retention. Suspension of the temporary credit of the rec center debt mill levy to align with our annual debt service payments. service level alignments as necessary, and prioritizing our capital investments to balance our CIP. We'll be revisiting this throughout and at the end of today's presentation. Council decision points. This slide aims to put you on notice of council direction sought. And again, you can reference the multi-pager that has a matrix throughout. This will include our parks fund, extend, increase the conservation trust fund transfer for park operations beyond 2020 in models, increasing general fund subsidy and or service level reductions, the open space fund revisiting the acquisition reserve percentage set aside, the golf fund continue to engage the recreation advisory board, we'll go over the city manager's operational and personnel recommended adjustments, service level reductions, the rec center debt fund temporary mill levy credit, historic preservation fund we will not spend much time on, and boards and commission requests. Let's hop right into it. Initial areas of budget focus. Over the next few slides, we will review the city's major funds. The general fund, parks fund, open space, golf, recreation, and consolidated utilities. The capital fund will be later in the presentation. But before we do, How are they developed? The long-term financial forecast for major funds are developed using 2025 actuals to arrive at our beginning fund balances. 2026 current year adjusted or revised budget and in some instances projections. Our 27 and 28 requested budgets. Turnback is utilized for certain funds in model years. I'll spend a little more time on that. Projections and assumptions may be updated throughout the budget development process. I would like to remind folks, unlike at the budget retreat preview, I did not have everything modeled. At this time, all 2027 city manager recommended adjustments are reflected in the models. So before we get into the charts, a few more slides. A few additional inputs worth considering. While your council adopts total appropriations, our long-term forecasts incorporate operational turn back. This is often largely driven by salary savings or vacancies, but also could include materials or supply line items coming in under budget. These savings are taken into consideration and greatly impact the following forecasts. Interfund transfers for 2027. These are increased over 2026's transfers by 4.2%. These transfers are codified in the city financial policies. I'll run through this real fast. The General Fund transfers out $1.1 million to the Parks Fund. It transfers out $140,000 to the Cemetery Fund and nearly $1.5 million to the Recreation Fund. The Cemetery Perpetual Fund or Endowment Fund makes a transfer of its interest earned to the Cemetery Operations Fund. The Historic Preservation Fund transfers $230,000 to the General Fund for museum operations. This takes into account the existing percentage, not any future percentages. depending on the outcome of a future tax measure. The capital projects fund transfers 174,000 to the recreation fund that supports capital expenditures. And we'll talk about this more later, but the conservation trust lottery fund transfers $100,000 to the parks fund for park operations. All these transfers are in the model. Looking at a two year budget, we're looking at 2028. Here are all those same transfers again, increased by 3%. All right, beginning with the general fund. Now before I get into the numbers, I'd like to touch on the general fund a little bit. This is where your primary governmental activity occurs. It is the city's largest operating fund. It's where public safety lives, community development and building safety, cultural services including our library, museum, and arts, sustainability, resiliency, our clerk, our legal team, CMO, and portions of HR, IT, and finance. And as I just mentioned with the transfer slides, significant support of parks, rec, and cemetery via those transfers. This fund is the core of a lot of what your government does. It's primarily funded by tax revenue, sales, and property tax, and to a lesser degree, building and permit fees, the Superior Library IGA, Excel, and Comcast franchise fees, just to name a few. So general fund forecasted revenues for 2027 are $28.7 million, for 2028, $29.6 million. The general fund forecasted expenses in 2027, $29.2 million, $30.2 million in 2028. These forecast expenses do include $250,000 in one time in 2027 and $40,000 in one time expenses in 2028. I touched on turn back a little bit earlier. These models, those forecast expenses do take into consideration operational turn back of approximately $1.5 million. Put another way, our operational gaps at this time are approximately $200,000 for 2027 and $600,000 in 2028. These models include approximately 1.5 additional FTEs, a piece of a Civil Engineer 1-2, a piece of an Operations Technician, a portion of a Construction and Stormwater Inspector, and a portion of the PROS Deputy Director. These are staff's preliminary efforts and not the City Manager's recommended budget. You will be seeing a few charts like this one today. So let me explain by what these bars mean. The blue bars are your revenues, comprised of a lot of different revenue sources, but primarily sales and property taxes. Your red bar are your expenses. The green bar is the ending fund balance for that year. The orange line across the bottom is the 15% minimum operating reserve set by financial policies. The dotted line is a 25% minimum target operational reserve. So focusing in on 2027 and 2028, you'll see visually demonstrated what I mentioned on the prior slide. Ongoing revenues in 2027 are 28.7 million, about $200,000 short of ongoing expenses in 2027. This is our current structural gap. Note that from the budget retreat preview to today, staff has modeled all city manager recommendations, which has widened this gap. We'll speak on this later. In 2028, our operating revenues are 29.6 million, our ongoing expenses of 30.2 million, a structural gap again of 600,000. And you'll note, if you don't address this structural gap in balance immediately, it compounds over time. You also note that throughout the forecast, we are anticipated to remain above our minimum and target reserves goals throughout this model. So important to note that staff will continue to refine forecasts throughout this process. That the information presented today includes assumptions of revenues and expenditure growth. This could mean evaluating things such as the wind tail deductible buy down or other cost saving opportunities. Potentially reallocating resources to higher priorities, which would likely include programmatic or service level reductions. You may assess vacant positions and city policies. We will continuously evaluate cost setting opportunities and efficiencies. We will evaluate fee recovery and cost allocations, and this all may be impacted by future development and policies. I will continue on to the Parks Fund, our second fund of initial area focus. Our parks department is widely recognized as top tier, safe, clean, and extremely well maintained. Credit to our current superintendent, Chris Davis, Director Blackmore, and their extraordinary staff. The department is nearly CAPRA accredited, which is an incredible accomplishment nationwide with less than 2% of parks departments receiving such an honor. Our parks forecasted revenues for 2027 are $2.9 million, Same in 2028. Our forecast expenses in 2027 are 2.9 and 3.0 million in 2028. Again, this does our forecast expenses takes into consideration operational turn back of nearly $200,000. Our preliminary operational gaps within this fund are 40,000 in 2027 and about 85,000 in 2028. Future needs and some current are not funded, including front center maintenance, red tail development, and as City Manager Langley mentioned, our PROS long-term plan. A reminder that future capital parks expenditures are not modeled in this fund. There are some personnel recommended changes, a partial allocation of the PROS Deputy Director. This has been offset by a reduction in variable hours. This reflects staff's preliminary efforts and is not the recommended budget at this time. So here's the parks long-term financial forecasts. Within the blue bar and at your request, we have split out tax revenue from the general fund ongoing transfer between the deep blue and the slightly lighter blue. Also, you can see atop, the lightest of blues is the conservation trust fund transfer. While nearly structurally balanced in 2027-28, the deficits that were previously noted on the former slide, staff has extended the CTF transfer throughout this model. This is a council decision point. So let me pivot briefly to the conservation trust fund. Here's a summary of what the Conservation Trust Fund is paying for from 2024 through 2032, which covers playgrounds, wayfinding, and signs for parks and open space. And as mentioned, beginning in 2026, the Conservation Trust Fund transfer supports approximately 3% of park operations. This fund brings in approximately $200,000 to $250,000 annually, and notably the playground replacements are tapering off in out years. Here's that same information visually demonstrated. Again, blue are revenues, red are expenses. I'd like to call out the bright pink atop is the $100,000 transfer to the parks fund for operations. You'll note there still is projected to have a balance of approximately $200,000 at the end of the model in 2032. So as you noted, staff extended the conservation trust fund for park operations beyond 2028 in modeling. It was kept at 100,000 through 2032 where previously it's been discussed 2026 through 2028. It's worth noting the potential impacts to the capital fund and other divisions that rely upon this fund. So this is our first council policy direction point. We'd like us to consider extending or increasing the CTF transfer for park operations beyond 2028. We could potentially increase the annual transfer beyond inflation, annual general fund transfer beyond inflation to the extent feasible or possible. I will say today that is not possible in our current projections. And or service level adjustments. We could consider aligning variable personnel expenses with historical trends. So at that, at this point, I will pause and open it up for some council direction discussion on this decision point.

Thank you. First of all, just a question, and it's more for the folks who are watching this who may not be as familiar with budgeting. Can you describe turn back just to make sure people – you may have covered it. You've certainly talked about it. It's a concept that the average person sometimes doesn't know.

Of course. So where I came from, Mayor, turn back was often discussed as salary savings, just because you would have staff, you would have vacancies, and when you had vacancies, it took a little time to rehire and fill that position. So operational turn back kind of builds upon salary savings and looks to all of your operational accounts, including perhaps your paper budget came in under, and so that would be returned to the general fund. return to that fund. Your council adopts annual budgets, so in the unexpended appropriations funding would fall to the fund balance. Your council adopts appropriations and what we do in our modeling to really refine, to fine tune where we're headed, we do take into consideration those non-expenses, those things that may not occur. So really it's a way for us to adopt a budget but then refine our projections as sharply as we can, knowing that there will be some expenses that just don't occur.

Thanks. What we have been given, which is a nice kind of little bit of a cheat sheet, from staff on council decision points and on parks, rec and open space, which are different funds. Maybe what we ought to start with is the parks fund. It looks like from the list that there are three decision points. One, extending, you know, it's on the slide here, but extending or increasing the CTF transfer for parts operations, increasing annual general fund transfer, and service level adjustments. I wanted to ask Council if, based on their review of the budget materials, are there any other decisions that they think we ought to be making in addition to those. All right, seeing none. Go ahead, Councilmember Cooperman. No, no, just on parks fund. Yeah, we're just doing this one bite at a time, rather large bites, but yeah. Any thoughts initially? Yes. Council Member Heffernan.

Yeah, so Director Bailey, if you could flip back to the general fund for a minute, because this is relevant to the general fund transfer. I just want to talk briefly about one thing I saw in the CIPs, which is moving about $500,000 a year of software expense that currently lives in the general fund into the capital fund, which obviously we need to pay for that expense from somewhere. But I assume this graph shows that 500K moved out already, and that if it still lived in the general fund, we'd see the gap increase by half a million dollars.

I believe your question is, did we reduce our software expense in the general fund to account for the request in the capital fund? We have not done that to this point. It's still in this chart. We are currently refining exactly what software will extend to the future. So I've not accounted for that. And I don't want to say it's double-counted, because we're still working through all the softwares that will be required.

So it's still showing up here, and it's not showing up yet in the chart for the capital fund?

This is showing up in both charts, but I think my point is we may need more than $500,000 for software.

Okay. So this, okay. I think I'm with you. Back to parks. Sorry, I have a couple more things. So I think one thing we talked about for the Conservation Trust Fund on finance is that that fund does other parks-related work, mainly playground replacements. And so I think the thing that had been the recommendation on finance was what is the amount we can transfer out of Conservation Trust that leaves enough money behind to continue to pay for the playground program. And I don't know if there's an answer on that or not.

I will maybe turn it over to Director Blackmore to speak to the specificity. But we have modeled the request within the CIP program. And we have allocated those costs between those both funds. So I would say the demonstrated need is reflected in these models to be funded by the Capital Fund and the Conservation Trust Fund as presented today.

So my question is a little bit different though. So on that side, we're talking about a hundred K transfer. And I think the question posed by finances, what is the dollar amount of transfer that can come out of conservation trust without prejudicing the playground and stuff that gets financed out of there?

I think that's dependent upon what you want the playground replacement process to look like. We have some models that you're not seeing today that if there is a desire to use seats increase the CTF transfer into park ops, what that does to the playground replacement depreciation schedule. Um, so, you know, outside of 2027, which the majority of that playground money is going to potentially be needed to do community park the way we would want to do community park. Once you get 28 and beyond, um, It's kind of all fair game. It's just a matter of whether we want to fund park operations or expedite the replacement of the playgrounds. Once we get through community, all of the playgrounds will have been replaced. They'll be in their existing lifespan. So if we want to defer a park playground that we had depreciation and replacement at 10 years to 12 years, for example, like a net brand, we could certainly do that. And then you could use the entirety of the playground money for a separate purpose in say 2028, if that makes sense.

And so what are the sort of 28 and onward expenses in the playground here?

So what you're seeing here is beginning back again with a net brand in 2028. This is a percentage assistance to the playground replacement money that's also out of the capital fund for I have the list. It's a net brand, cowboy, pirates, and then potentially allocated money for a new park, 2031-32, based on how things evolve with Red Tail or some other placeholder property.

But you're saying we may not need to do those projects?

Correct. There's a way that we could not do, if desired by council, all five of those parks. we could consolidate that down to only doing two playgrounds over the next six years. Okay. And transfer that money as well.

But even if we do this program, there's still enough to move 100K every year? Oh, without a doubt. It's not an issue?

Yep. No, it's already been modeled, and we're fine with the playground replacements, as currently stated, with the 100,000 coming out.

Okay. I guess my question back then would be, should it be more than 100,000, which doesn't quite cover the gap? I mean, that's a nice round number. Will you pull up the chart?

Chair or Council Member Heffner, you could extend and increase. I think there's a cap, though. If you look, we have, if you go to the Conservation Trust Fund, you could see through 2032 having $200,000 in the bank. You could potentially increase it by... $25,000 and still have a solvent fund. So there is a little room there, but there is a ceiling because only $200,000 to $250,000 calls in every year. So if you're looking to potentially increase it, you could probably go to $125,000 and then that green bar on the far right would be closer to zero than it is to $200,000.

Does that answer your question? No, that's helpful. So there's a little more headroom, but not a lot. Correct. But if we kick out some of the parks projects that Director Blackmore just described, there could be, maybe we get to 150. Correct.

When you say kick out, do you mean defer? Defer, yes. Rather than reduce any given...

I assume there comes a point where you have to undertake those projects, but it would be delaying them further into the future.

Director, did you have something to add?

I would just add maybe a staff opinion that from a replacement and expectations of the community in terms of quality and fresh appeal of the investment of this money, staff would prefer a deferment or a delay to ensure an appropriate amount of funding per project versus a reduction in scope, if that makes sense.

I appreciate that. One of the things I guess I would say, and this is true I think across the budget is there's always tradeoffs. One tradeoff certainly is doing things to a lower service level or a cheaper, for lack of a better term, but a cheaper product or a less exemplary product that perhaps the city Residents would like and I think you know My general view is that we ought to do fewer things very well Rather than a bunch of things in a mediocre way. It's not always That kind of trade-off, but I appreciate I think that's consistent with that kind of at least in that area kind of thing I Yes. Council Member Hafner.

Yeah, I agree. And I guess the suggestion I would make on this topic is give the direction to defer playground projects to the extent sort of that's reasonable and use that savings to maximize the amount of the transfer from Conservation Trust.

Are you suggesting a particular amount of transfer?

no i mean it would be nice to have it be more than this but i think whatever we can squeeze by pushing off you know look i don't think any of us want unsafe playgrounds or falling apart playgrounds but if it's mainly an aesthetic concern and we can eke out three or four or five more years from a aging playground i would rather take that money and spend it today on operations and maintenance that really is unavoidable that if we stop doing it will be quite noticeable and then try and stage out the playground replacements, space them out a little farther than we have been.

I'm going to do, as we go through this, quite a few kind of straw polls. What we often do is a thumbs up for direction. If there's additional conversation that needs to happen, fine. But I don't know if others have comments, but are people generally in agreement with that discussion or that suggestion? Council Member Cooperman?

First, I just wanted to ask, so the service level adjustments, there's one bullet point. Is the implication that our variable personnel expenses were lower in the past than they are now?

Councilmember, when Finance is reviewing detailed line item analysis, we did notice that there was just a delta between actual expenses in that account versus what was budgeted, appearing that there may be some room, but there's a myriad of reasons why there could be some delta between your staffing and what you have budgeted.

Okay. Generally speaking, I'm supportive of Councilmember Heffner's suggestion, but I would also be interested in what other service level adjustments might be proposed.

Any other questions?

Question and then a few comments. Will you please refresh my memory of how the Conservation Trust money can be spent. Does it have to be on parks, or are there other ways in which that money can be spent?

I believe it has to be spent on parks. I'd have to go back to the code. I could say the city has not spent it on anything other than parks, although, like you mentioned, open spaces also is an eligible expense. So at this city, we have used them for parks and open spaces.

So it's a public lands thing? Public lands. Public land and outdoor recreation.

Okay, that's really helpful. The reason why I ask is because You know, I am open to the proposal from Council Member Hefner about increasing the dollar amount and extending it beyond what we originally were thinking in FICOM. But this is now feeling like a long-term solution to the problem. And I'm not confident that it is going to be a viable long-term solution in itself. So I would be interested in some additional service level adjustment conversations. I feel like there's multiple levers that need to be pulled here to try to make this fund more balanced in the out years and be able to sustain itself without having to dip into all these other funds to make it viable. So I'd like to see more service level conversations as well. as it relates to this particular fund. And correct me if I'm wrong, if the intention is not to have this be the long-term solution, then I think that discussion needs to be had. But what's being proposed right now feels like it is. Where originally we were thinking just a couple years, pull more money out of the trust so that we can kind of shore things up and then maybe get our long-term plan going. But this feels like we're transitioning to long-term here.

I'll just state my agreement. I would appreciate proposals on what else we can do to stretch our dollars.

It's fine. I actually think this particular fund has greater stability with the income. Correct me if I'm wrong. We're pretty certain of how much we're going to get from the lottery trust every single year, correct?

Yeah, we've seen minimal variability in that.

Right. And so given that some of our other sources of income through the general fund are actually more variable, they're less fixed, I actually feel more comfortable versus less comfortable using this as a reliable source to help maintain our parks. I think... The parks are a real treasure in Louisville. I think lowering the service level would be disappointing, and if using a reliable steady source of income helps the park staff to maintain certain levels of service, so, you know, rather than doing upgrades or making bigger changes, I think this is actually a good source of income for that because it is reliable and can be counted on. So I'm fully in favor of increasing the amount so that the everyday maintenance is, can be counted upon. And I think it might be easier for Director Blackmore and his team to know that that's a reliable source of income versus us worrying about how much money is in the general fund and we have to allocate that away from parks. I mean, we put a significant amount of general fund money toward the parks. And that is a source that needs to be spread widely across the whole community and a lot of other things. We're going to get to staffing concerns. So my preference actually would be to make this a long-term plan versus a short-term plan.

I don't know that we need to kind of decide between the short-term and long-term. I think it is a really good point to be making as between you and Mayor Bertin about how we do that as we move forward. One question I had was, if you go back to the, can you go back to the CTF? don't know the answer to this offhand what is there a is there 15% reserve that we include or is it not it's not that kind of a fun because it comes in from elsewhere okay that's correct this this fund does not have reserved it's those are generally driven with the operational funds didn't see that familiar blue or yellow line so I just want to clarify that all right I think we're ready with that. Let's go to the next one, which is a question of increasing the general fund subsidy. The current transfers are $1.125 million in 2020. Excuse me. The transfers that are... noted are about one point one two five million dollars and twenty seven and one point one six million dollars 2028 to the parks fund and The question is whether we would like to increase That amount if it's feasible Any initial thoughts about this? counsel Did I get that issue correct?

Yeah, Mayor, if you don't mind, I feel like I have the feedback necessary to kind of remodel for September 2nd. I think the only thing I would need on this, because at this time, I don't have the funding available to increase this, just to know if this is still a tool in your toolbox that you want me to monitor, and if it presents itself, I could bring it back in that modeling as well. So I don't know if we need to spend a lot of time on this right now, because again, We are we are in the general fund, but if it's something that you still like to keep on the slide keep on the board Should present itself.

I could bring it as a future decision point in the modeling Unless we say absolutely we don't want to do this seems like monitor is a good Position, but you know councilmember Hefner.

Yeah, just maybe a little more color along the lines of what the mere pro tem said which is you know, we're looking for a long-term solution and maybe we'll get there as between service level and changing playground replacement schedule and borrowing or transferring from the conservation trust. But if we don't, right, if those factors aren't enough to get us to a stabilizing solution, then, um, Sort of short of some other new revenue source. This is the remaining thing the remaining tool we have And so I do think we'll need to look at it if the other tools don't get us there Thumbs up for monitoring this in light of the comments have been made Okay

If you've got adequate direction, then let's go to the next one, which is considering service level reductions. We've had discussions about this a bit, but not as much about the variable personal expenses in particular. Any comments or thoughts about this one? Yes, Mayor Paterno.

I think, does staff need more details on it or can you take kind of the general theme and bring back some ideas? Okay, thank you.

So we're talking about the service level adjustments. One of my thoughts has been, and we recently got a lovely award for two neighborhood parks that were redone post-martial fire, burned to the ground, unfortunately. But one of my thoughts has been in these neighborhood parks, to get the neighborhoods more invested in them the way that it was like a decade or more ago. And I was thinking that, I mean, we're talking about potentially trying to activate some more volunteers. This might be one of the ways to do that is engaging neighborhood members to help maintain their neighborhood park. Most of, I think, the neighborhood parks are predominantly used by the people who live in that neighborhood, although they are accessible to everybody in the entire, they are public parks, they're accessible to all. But I think that, one, it's a way for people in each neighborhood to own their park. And I think that might also help, especially if they understand we have some budget constraints doing maintenance. Perhaps that's a way to help reduce some of the staffing costs.

Is there any initial thoughts from staff, very high level, about that? No?

I think it could certainly be considered a tool in the toolbox, as Director Bailey said, so we'll keep that in mind.

Okay.

Yes, Councilmember Cooperman.

I very much like that idea and would like to see it as part of a larger discussion about how volunteers could assist the city in other ways.

I would like to note on that because this topic has come up about volunteer utilization. If we're going to go that route, we need to add a position for volunteer coordinator. It's not a realistic expectation to put on the supervisors to manage all of the volunteers. I think there is an opportunity there, but we would want to add a volunteer coordinator position to assist with coordinating all of these activities. And that might span multiple departments. It wouldn't just have to be PROSA. It could be cultural services as well. But there is opportunity, but we'd want to be able to have that staff person to manage it as well.

Yeah, and I don't know the answer to this, but volunteers sounds, sort of resonates in a certain way, but I don't know whether there are potential insurance implications of using volunteers to a greater degree than we've done before, but that's something we don't need to discuss that too much today, but it would be good to know that if we decide to expand that. And that's one of those things where I think as we move forward, we're going to need an offset or at least an estimate of kind of how we could accomplish savings, but with those with that input do you have enough council comfortable with the input okay, let's move to open space

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for that discussion. Onto the Open Space Fund. The city owns or has interest in nearly 2,000 acres of open lands that serve a wide variety of values. These lands provide recreational opportunities for residents and visitors, supports diverse wildlife and plant communities, and buffers between Louisville and our neighboring municipalities. It's funded by a dedicated sales tax through December 2033. It's led by Ember Brignall and her amazing staff. Open space is another great reason to enjoy Louisville, what makes it a great place to live, work, and recreate. In 2027, revenues are $2.8 million, growing to $2.9 million in 2028. For forecasted uses, I'll go on to why use uses here. For 2027, $2.7 million and $3.1 million in 2028. Those uses include not only your operating expenses, but also capital expenses of $200,000 in 2027 and half a million in 2028. This also accounts for the acquisition set aside of $300,000 annually. If you recall last budget cycle, your council set a target acquisition reserve of $5 million. The Open Space Fund is structurally balanced in 27 and 28. It includes 1.2 full-time personnel recommended additions, a natural resource technician, and a partial allocation of the PROS deputy director. However, our long-term modeling identifies an imbalance in the out years. The acquisition reserve at current set-aside levels, which is 30 percent of the incremental one-eighth, or another way, 12 percent of the total tax, is projected to accumulate $3.1 million through 2032. Recall that the open space acquisition reserve amount was set at $5 million during last year's budget development. So this brings us to another council policy direction point, whether to revisit the acquisition reserve percentage to balance operational capital and acquisition expenditures against available funding. But I'll continue before we have discussion. To the chart. So the open space again, open space fund again is structurally balanced. What this means is your ongoing expenses are less than your ongoing revenues. However, future refinement of your capital projects would be necessary through 2032. So let me touch on this forecast, because this one's got a lot of action on it. Your blue bar are your revenues. Your red are your operating expenses. The bright pink are your capital expenses. The orange along the top is the acquisition reserve set aside. And in addition to the ending fund balance for each of these years, the green bars, your purple bar is your accumulation of the acquisition reserve. This is subject to change if and when land is purchased. In 2031, the minimum reserve exceeds your operating fund balance. You're not meeting your target in 2031. This continues into 2032. One of the drivers of that is significant capital expenditures in those out years. A reminder that the additional FTE to maintain open space, the natural resource technician is in this model. Let's touch on the capital projects in these orange slivers on the next slide. It's actually not so bad to read, but you all have a handout to look at these capital projects here. So you can see what's making up the bright orange piece of the open space chart. The bright selections of the long-term forecast chart. So now I'll probably kick it back to slide 41 and revisit the council policy direction. So you have a few levers here. You can adjust the acquisition reserve, which is $300,000 set aside. We have an expansion position that Director Blackboard can speak to a little better than I, and you also have capital expenditures as another lever. Again, this fund is structurally balanced for 27-28, but we do run our model through 20-32 for good reason, so you can see where we're headed. So with that, I'd like to go back to council and open up discussion on the open space fund.

Thank you very much. Question you have was there is revisiting, potentially revisiting the acquisition review percentage. Are there other questions that council might want to add to that? Yeah. Council member.

Great, thanks. So I was actually just curious. It looks like in 28, there's $255,000 that's for open space planning documents. Is that part of the PROS long-range plan that's the component just for open space?

Now that would be the next step of open space planning. So open space is a little unique that it's managed by what used to be called a master plan. It's a comprehensive plan. It's intended to be basically property level management recommendations and evaluations for all the things on all of our properties. The last time it was done was 2004. It was intended to be a 10-year document. It's been a high priority of the community members who advocate for these things and for OSAP. And so the discussion between doing that process or the long-range plan first or second. We're using the long range plan to inform that plan. It also includes set asides potentially for other evaluations that we've heard from the community that they would like us to have a more formal approach with as it relates to ecology, wildlife, management plans, that kind of thing that we don't have formalized and adopted currently at the moment. We have operational best practices and we have reliance on the 2004 recommendations, but it's kind of a catch-all for the prioritization of planning efforts that comes out of the long-range plan.

Does that also include or is the trails separate? Because I know there was a trails plan as well.

Yeah, the trails plan is a separate document. It informs property level impacts moving forward. The 2028 effort will also include the 147...

ish acres that were being dedicated as preserved not preserved as dedicated open space to be determined what kind of open space it is at red tail ridge as well so and then i was looking at the warmburg so we're like when we're looking at future out and how it's depleting the reserve and some of these projects these are some pretty high ticket estimates as well for warmburg so there's a hundred this is for the planning, and then another nearly 600,000. It's estimated at 575 now, but it's so far out, my guess is it'll go well over six. Is that, again, part of it is just to create a plan for that, and that's not included in the The 2028 plans and then is it also the cost of like redoing that whole pond that's there?

Yeah, so that so the 160 in 2031 would be the site planning evaluation community engagement what they want to see basically the intention of OSAP and staff is in alignment with the recommendation is to really Turn Warrenburg being centrally located in town is kind of a hub of open space operations, if you will, for things like educational programming that potentially could result in a restroom facility. It could result in an educational amphitheater set up of some kind, basically more of an activated recreational open space opportunity at that property. is what those particular projects are.

So I'm curious if this has come up with the Open Space Advisory Board for where the priorities are. They've always really asked, and I think we've heard from the community too, a high priority on putting funds aside for additional property. But if it's a higher priority that these... And it sounds like a really awesome plan to do for that Warnberg space because it is so centrally located for everyone. If that's the bigger priority, then... I mean, now I could see where shifting some of the funds to programs like this away from acquisition, but I would say that we have to balance the priority here, and I wasn't sure where their input came into this.

This operationally is the top of their list. They were really excited about this prospective opportunity and the change of just the addition of some recreational amenities within our open space program. We would have to ask them, you know, if one of the directives today is to evaluate that acquisition percentage, if it wasn't either or recommendation back to council, we could certainly do that. Thank you.

Moving forward. Yes. We'll start with member Thim and then council member Heffner and council member

So I think, thank you Council Member Kern for your point regarding maintaining what we have and balancing that with trying to expand through acquisition more properties. I think it's a really important discussion and there's certainly quite a bit of money that's sitting in acquisition that if we need to revisit that could be used for other more immediate purposes. Talking about Warenburg Pond, do any of these costs encompass the neighboring part of the neighboring property that will now need to be maintained or brought into that fold?

The 2031 site planning would. Operationally, we wouldn't need to do any type of capital investment for that particular parcel, but assuming it's under our control and management by 2031, then yeah, it would be included. as a potential site to include an investment with the 2032 money. Okay.

That's helpful. Thank you. That was my only question right now.

I was just going to echo some of Council Member Kern's, I think I heard skepticism about some of the numbers in here. Um, maybe starting with a small one, $30,000 for the weed management plan, that's a 15 page document and a few pages aren't substantive. I mean, that's $2,000 a page for a weed plan. Is there any, I mean, is that outside consulting just abusing us? Why is that so expensive?

It's not just a open space weed management plan. It's also for the entire department. This is the percentage, so it would be an evaluation of parks, herbicide use, golf course, all of the things, then... I think it is a bit to be determined the exact amount. We could certainly consider altering a projected amount to align with the projected scope. That just dictates what we're able to put into a proposal that would come before council before a contract was approved and would also go before PPLAB and OSAB as a high priority for us to do in this next two year budget to ensure that they're getting they're proposing what they would like to see as an outcome from that plan.

And then, I mean, I guess I sort of have the same question about the budgets for the planning documents, for the professional services budget and the Warren Borg fishing pond plan. Maybe to put a finer point on it. I'm worried. We're paying consultants to go out and do essentially repetitive community engagement style work where they ask people about what the city's core priorities should be and have lots of focus groups and do I mean it's thousands and thousands and thousands of hours essentially of consulting help here for areas where i think we have internally quite a bit of knowledge about what the priorities are and you know i don't know what the consultant proposals are um but right 255 000 even at 250 an hour that's a thousand hours of consulting work for those planning documents which is one person working full-time for six months um that like that's a lot of That's a lot of time, and if there's any way to sort of pull these back and try and tailor them. I think it could help with where we land on the bar graph. I'll just say out loud what's driving this is I've not been terribly impressed by the consulting help we got on the long range plan. And I don't think that's the fault of anyone in this room. But I do think there's a lot of consultants out there who are happy to charge us too much. And I would love to see sort of a more skeptical approach to what they're proposing.

City Manager has a comment on this.

Yeah, so a couple of things. One of the things that we've talked about with the CIP is to budget appropriately. You know, we've seen budget amendments come to Council for projects because we underestimated. And so part of what staff has done is they've tried to put estimates in that, you know, we think are more realistic in what can be accomplished. The other thing I would say with particularly this budget, You know, OSAP, PPLAB, they have a lot of expectations for what the department's going to do. And then also with the guidebook, you know, we also see that this community is very passionate about open space and parks and how they're maintained. And, you know, the level of documentation does seem to be... to some excessive but i would say to those that use it this becomes the document that they refer to to defend what they're doing to the community because they get so much skepticism in terms of, and so much, there's so much expertise in this community and everybody knows how to do it better than they do. And so when we have these documents, they're able to point to that to say, you know, this was prepared by somebody that's an expert in the field. It was vetted and went through the process and, you know, we are following best practice. So could this be scaled down? It probably could. With that said, though, we also know that we would get a lot of blowback from the community in terms of, well, we know better than you do, and let me tell you how to do it.

Council Member Cooperman. The open space signs row, is that mostly for wayfinding?

The 2027 especially is mostly for interpretive signage and replacement of kiosk and trailhead signage. There is an element where it could fall into assisting with wayfinding, but most of the wayfinding projects are being funded out of the CTF allocated funds. So this is more site-specific, property-specific signage.

And then are there specific projects in mind for the trail connections for those three years at $75,000? Yes.

Not yet. Those are trail system plan placeholders. We have heard that there's a strong preference and priority for community trail connection expansion, neighborhood connections, that kind of thing. And so this is the placeholder for where open spaces, part of that would be impacted.

Okay. And then I'll just make a comment. Well, I know of a few or especially one resident who is quite interested in mustering a lot of volunteer effort for the Warrenburg Pond project. So I feel like that's a place where maybe we could get the community more involved and reduce our costs. Yep.

Council Member Fahey.

I just have a long-range question, and that is, has the Open Space Board decided, or staff, how new properties are going to be maintained within the budget when you purchase another piece of open space? Where's the money going to come from to pay for it and then maintain that?

Probably the short answer is no. We've spent the last 18 months or so refining what the actual acquisition process is going to look like, and that's been a high priority of City Manager Langley with OSAP since she came on board. How we then fund the maintenance after that I think would have to be discussed as a component of the acquisition process.

I want to... trail back to a comment that was made by Councilmember Heffner. Actually, a number of different people have raised issues. Including the city manager to kind of speed this along a bit because we have a lot to cover Still and we're having good discussions, but we have a lot to move through I'm kind of keeping a list of Like major sort of thematic issues that I think would be good to cover not just in this part of the budget but frankly in many parts of the budget where they come up consulting generally is something i think most council members if not all council members have um discussed in the past particularly parts that councilmember hefner talked about which is sort of the redoing over and over and over again at times of community sentiment because we get a lot of that through public comments, but also we have a large body of information. So that's one thing that I think could apply to many consultant situations across the board. I think another one that we've talked about is sort of the board and commission, uh, input and, um, um, support. Uh, this is something that's kind of a discussion that is going to happen over and over, uh, at times because our boards and commissions are very motivated, very involved, very excited about what they're doing with a lot of energy and a lot of information. There have been times when I think some boards and commissions have verged on suggesting that maybe they have a budget and they don't. We're the budget making folks. You know, I think sometimes it's easy to not think about staff pressure to do other things when boards and commissions meet. and suggest they want certain things. I think part of that is board management and I know that staff is doing that in the course and hope that will continue and I think It's a tension constantly because we want to make sure our boards and commissions are doing what they need to do and doing it with support. But like all things, that's got to be balanced against other stuff, their advisory. And so I encourage that. I think that's the kind of thing that we can do. I think we're hearing about volunteers multiple times here. I think to the extent that any... part of the city government can make use of volunteers. I think you can assume that that might be something that's worth discussing. We could flag those each time, but I think, you know, maybe these are the greatest places or the most likely places to deal with volunteers. But I think those issues are going to be coming up over and over too. So we've got very involved citizenry that can do a lot of things. there's trade-offs there. So if that's okay, I am thinking that's one way we can not cut down the comments, but move through this as expositiously as we can. All right, does staff have, let's see, we still have, I think the question of adjusting the acquisition reserve percentage. I mean, I didn't hear anything definitive on that. So Councilmember Kooperman.

I guess given the current modeling, I feel like there's maybe sufficient wiggle room in the capital side of expenditures for me to sort of hold off on making any adjustments to the acquisition reserve.

That's what we're after.

Yeah, I... I'd suggest a slight modification to that, which is rather than tinker with the percentage, we just bring down the target so that it's not continuing to drive the balance negative in the out years. And that way we're still saving for the future. If we're able to sort of get a handle on the capital expenses, we can always increase the target again. So I would say, you know, let's bring that down to a million and a half or two million. I forget where it was, if you have that chart. Go back. but sort of do it so that we can stay above the yellow line.

Talking about smoothing? What's that? You're talking about smoothing or something different? No, more of a cliff. Okay, then. Others? Council Member Cooperman, you raised this just a minute ago. Are you comfortable with that? Or others?

Maybe if I could add high-level math as I look at this PowerPoint, that would put a 30% reserve or 12% of the total tax through about 2029 or 2030, at which case the purple bar would be frozen and those kind of net proceeds, or it would stack a little bit further on the green bar, keeping above the orange line. This is something I could model for the next presentation. Cool. I guess I would just add I would need direction on the amount of which that the purple bar is capped at.

Do you think it's 1.5 or 2 just looking at this? I think it's somewhere in that range.

Somewhere in that range, but I would have to put in a spreadsheet for that.

And just to put a finer point in, the reason I like that is because it's essentially status quo and if next year or the year after we want to, things are going well and we want to increase the target again, we can.

Any other thoughts about that proposal? Yes.

Actually, I really like that idea of adjusting the target for the acquisition because I'm not certain I see any opportunity here with just maintaining what we have to cut a lot on this current itemization. I think doing this proposal, is a is a nice path forward that allows us to maintain what we have but also still plan for the future and then pivot for that future if needed um so that everything is staying balanced there councilman cooper just so if we went with that direction but let's say we bought something

I don't know, in 2029 or whenever, it would go down, right? And then we would keep putting money into it, right, until we got back to the cap. So I'm just wondering, like, would an acquisition throw off that idea, the aim of that idea to keep us above the minimum?

I think that would be a challenge for future us, future council.

Which is another way of saying it grows more speculative as we go in out here. We're not only focused on 27, 28 and so forth, but I think we can probably hopefully move on with the proposal The proposal has been made by Council Member Heffner with the considerations that have been otherwise brought by Council Member Cooperman and Mayor Poteau.

Pardon me?

Council Member Kern says you may be able to make the chart look better. So I'll leave that to you. All right. Do you have enough... Okay, and I think we're good. All right, moving on to the golf fund.

Thank you for that direction. Nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, Coal Creek Golf Course is a landmark in public golf.

That's great.

This is strips straight from the website. Want to hear about the layout? Okay. It's managed by Mark Jensen, Bo Lewis, both PGA certified. And I'd be amiss not to mention the Turn restaurant at the golf course if you haven't been there. Forecasted revenues for 2027, 2.9 million. Forecasted revenues for 2028, 3 million. Forecasted expenses in 2027, 3.5 million. Forecast expenses in 2028, 3.6 million. This does, those forecast expenses do include significant capital expenditures of $400,000 in each year and minimal amount of operational turn back of 60,000 in each year. This leaves us with preliminary operational gaps in 2027 of about 200,000 and 230,000 in 2028. The preliminary CIP includes significant capital investments of approximately $1.7 million over the term, 3.65 FTE recommended additions. This is a piece of the partial allocation of the deputy director and also an increase in FTE's variables for maintenance workers and guest service attendants to align with actual hours worked in recent history. Recreation Advisory Board has been engaged with multiple meetings established throughout the summer and staff is currently modeling multiple revenue scenarios next to be presented to the RAB meeting on July 27th. This reflects the staff's, sorry one second, preliminary acting what I just mentioned on the previous slide. 2026, that purple bar, you see significant capital expenses, $1.3 million at varying degrees of completion. 2027, again, the structural deficit is visually demonstrated between the blue bar at $2.9 million and 3.1 on the red bar, the $200,000 deficit, $400,000 in capital expenditures. 2028, $3 million in revenues, $3.2 million in operational expenditures with $400,000 in capital. I'm going to give you one other forecast to look at. We removed capital from 2027 and beyond. This chart does may indicate some urgency in capital investment in 2026. Next one. All of the $1.7 million in capital expenses are listed here. You can actually see this OK in the chart. And I did not mention this earlier, maybe mostly for the folks at home. In the attachments to this item, we have the summaries as attachments. And they're hyperlinked. So if you have any questions of any of the individual projects, then we have great staff here to answer your questions. You can hover over it. It'll take you directly to that page. Again, mostly for those folks watching at home. So significant capital expenditure here. And some projects that did not make the recommended list. Here's a list of unfunded projects as well. So staff has engaged the Recreation Advisory Board on the following. It's modeling a number of fee increases and other items. The Finance Committee's direction at the May 18th meeting was to re-examine unlimited golf, fees, and residential preferences. The fund is expected to be self-sufficient covering operational and capital expenses. So council policy direction. Assuming the fund is expected to be self-sufficient covering both operational and capital expenses, Shall we remove or defer certain capital projects? Continue to explore 2027 fee rate adjustments. It should be noted, I don't know what you're gonna say. Initial modeling suggests we cannot fee our way out of this. And that some other creativity is needed. And while RAB has been engaged, the stability of the fund will likely require a combination of actions.

Yeah, just to expand on that. So finance has done the modeling that RAB requested and then also what finance committee requested. And what it basically shows is when you include capital projects, which I want to say this is a modest list of capital projects, you would have to increase the fees. I think it was 55%. in order to cover capital plus operational, which then you wouldn't have people coming to golf at Coal Creek Golf Course. And so realistically, if you look at the chart where it removes capital, I think kind of at best we can try to target to be able to cover our operational expenses through the fees, through some fee increases, but then we're going to need to rely more on the capital fund to fund capital projects at the golf course. And this is an enterprise fund, and so recognition of that, but we don't see a path forward where the golf fund is 100% funding operations and capital projects. Note, we haven't told RAB this yet. That meeting is this Monday. So there's a subcommittee that has seen the model for this, but the entire RAB group will see the model on Monday.

In other words, what you're saying is that the information has not been presented in a meeting, but the information is obviously available now. But just to be clear about the public disclosure of that. I guess I wanted to underscore, I mean, unless there's more of the presentation, I think you've given us what we need. Just to underscore the enterprise nature of golf in Louisville, and that's why we have a separate golf fund. In the old days, particularly after the flood, we had a lot of transfers in subsidizing. Things have gotten better. better in terms of financials for the the golf fund but we this is a pretty stark picture if you look back at at your earlier graph so we've got to wrestle with that a little bit and maybe the first people have comments on either referring or deferring capital projects or exploring fee rate adjustments or other matters

I'm not necessarily suggesting we should do this if it's an option. I'm just trying to understand what the options are. Trust fund. Is this technically something that those funds could be used for or no?

Uh, they could, from an operational standpoint, I don't know what the restrictions are with it being an enterprise fund, I think would be the hangup.

I don't know the answer to that question. I can look into it, but I could say as an enterprise fund, external sources cannot, whatever they are, can't exceed 10%. So on a $3 million fund, you're looking at a cap of external resources at 300,000, otherwise jeopardizing its kind of enterprise nature.

Okay, so again, I'm not necessarily suggesting this should be done, but if that is something that can truly help be a short-term bridge the gap until we can amp up fees to cover more of our O&M and capital projects, I don't know if there's any appetite for that discussion. So I just wanted to throw that out there as an option with the other two that you mentioned.

Council Member Haffner.

Yeah, I just had a specific question. I see we have a CIP for design to expand or replace the clubhouse in 28. And I thought we as a group had more or less taken that off the table. So I'm trying to understand why we have a CIP for the design work.

Director Blackboard, you could probably speak to this better than I, but total later in the presentation, we will get to board and commission requests of which this was one of the ones from Rob.

Yeah, I would just add that it is intended to be a site plan as much as an architectural design review. for the feasibility of even being able to accomplish what the 2021, um, feasibility study suggested that if you recall the three options for either renovating the current building, expanding on the current footprint, using the current building or a complete rebuild or those three options. And so this again to director Bailey's comment is partially driven by a desire from the rec board to continue to see, some type of movement on what is an end of life building that's, um, for all intents and purposes, uh, you know, not in great shape and it's going to need some level of investment similar to some other buildings in this community. Um, but again, it can either, I think I mentioned in an email yesterday, it can either be to put in unfunded. It can, it's at the discretion. It can be moved to an outer year or it can be removed for this particular budget. Um,

I wonder whether we might take that request out of order and just deal with it while we're thinking about it, if Councilmember Heffner raises a good point, because at least the suggestion is to take the replacement of the clubhouse off the table. I don't know how involved it is to explain what the Board and Commission's suggestion is, but we may be able to give direction right now on that.

That's fine with me, and I think I would remove it just given the squeeze we have. I mean, it is a worthy project. It's not a bad project. We're in a squeeze, and why bother designing something that we don't have the funds to ever build?

Yeah, I'm just as a sort of respect for the, for RAB, I just, you know, maybe you can at least describe what it is and then we may decide exactly what Council Member Hefner is talking about.

Yeah, and I think to Council Member Hefner's point as well, this work could certainly be incorporated into a future council's decision to consider a full clubhouse redesign, replacement, renovation project that is obviously not included before you today. And so that message could be relayed as well. But again, the scope from a RAB perspective was a site analysis for a future footprint and have a rendering of some sort that could be utilized if we ever were to get to that point. At a staff level, that's fine.

Thank you. Let me, Council Member Kern and Council Member Cooperman and Mayor Pro Tem.

Thanks. So just to clarify, for the day-to-day operations, we're going to run around $200,000 short with the current fee schedule or the fees that we're proposing for 27 to 28, right? Yes. Okay. And did I understand correctly that there is a way through adjusting that or some other means that we could actually not have the day-to-day shortfall? or is that not an option?

It is an option. We're currently modeling different free opportunities running through RAB right now, so it's kind of being baked.

Okay. So one of the suggestions that I'm going to make and throw it out to everyone is, and I'm sorry because this suggestion actually adds more complexity, Adam, to, I think, the golf course, but it's instead of just having a subset of the REC Advisory Board, we had a tremendous... like outpour from the community of golfers who i think really didn't understand where the costs are where the shortfalls are and that the fees are changing and i think when we're also talking about you know not creating a much of a difference between residents because it's an enterprise fund but now we're talking about how much money is going to actually come from the residents in the form of capital projects I think we need to be really mindful of this, that the community is going to be making significant investments into this golf course in one way or another. And there might be a benefit in engaging some of those golfers who maybe we do it on the people who have the annual passes in this conversation so that everyone can better understand what the needs are, where the fees lay, like how many residents versus non-residents golf. Can we do a discount for them? Can we increase the non-resident fees to be at a balance so that it does justify the community's continued investment in the golf course? That's what I'm putting out there as an option. So it's not just the Rec Advisory Board because I think that still created confusion in the community.

Thanks, Council Member Kern.

I kind of like that idea, too. I'm also wondering to what extent we'll get some of that information from the PRO's long-range plan.

The long-range plan will engage community, I guess, support and engagement with the golf course itself and where it's seen as a value to the community. It doesn't have a specific pricing structure. Right. It'll have some funding recommendations for future investments through granting and secondary funding opportunities, but it won't get into that level of detail.

Okay. And then, so I had a small question. On the chart showing the fund balance for this year itself, that's a projection that we're going, by the end of the year, we'll be below the reserve?

That is the projection.

Okay. Yes. And then, also I'm wondering... Aside from the clubhouse redesign, which I think we should probably drop from the CIP, if we look at the CIPs from the next two years mostly, are there things in there that could possibly be delayed if we're looking for a longer-term solution? Or are some of those things sort of pressing?

I think with the majority of these, there's the potential to delay with an understanding that that has operational impacts. Things like the bunker renovations are partially funded this year. That's the second half of funding for next year. You explore alternative construction methods. You explore expanding lifespans, that kind of thing. But similar to the building... you know, that particular part of the course is about 10 years past a life cycle that it was expected to have after the rebuild. And so with any of these, it's just a balance of operational impact and investment in the course itself.

Council Member Hafner, did you have a comment? no i don't i can make one but i didn't have my hand up no i'm not going to make you i do think we might want to get back to the question here in front of us as to whether to continue to engage rab on the fee adjustments council member

I was just going to say I'm fine with removing the redesign. I think we were pretty clear when we met with RAB last time of trying to reset what their expectations are around that.

I also agree with removing the redesign from the process. I have a question though for Ryder. If a group of golfers were to form a nonprofit, 501 and raise money, how much of that could they only raise $300,000 a year to donate to the golf course?

I don't know the answer to that question, but it's certainly something I can look into.

I mean, would that impact the enterprise fund?

I think my initial reaction would be maybe if it runs through our city coffers, it would look to me like an additional subsidy on top of the enterprise fund. Maybe if it was outside of the city coffers, potentially that would be a way to do this project.

How could they do that outside of the city coffers?

I don't know that pathway right now, so I'd have to look into it.

Okay. Thank you.

Yeah, I I think that's a great idea that we've actually heard a lot of comments from community members And it's not like in the last six months It's been for years that this might be one of the best ways to fund some of the bigger projects that maintain the course is integrity and expand or improve the clubhouse is through donations and we currently don't have a path to So it would be nice to find out the legal path that that could be formed and then advise the appropriate organizations on how that might happen. I strongly support that. But here's just an overarching question. And I do get this from people who are not part of the golfing world but are residents, which is, this is an enterprise. It cannot maintain itself. There are golf courses all across the country that can. So what is it that is different with our golf course and how it's being managed or funded that is done differently with private golf courses or different with other public golf courses that we're not following that same model? And perhaps that's part of... already what the new golf manager has come up with and the reason for some of the changes that we're seeing. But I'd be curious, it doesn't have to be an answer right now, but I'd be, I would like actually for that to come and maybe it comes to the finance committee because this is just such a big piece of it, is figuring out, you know, what do they do differently to stay solvent in other communities that we're not for somehow able to do?

I think we have a consensus to defer the redesign of the clubhouse, and I think we've had discussion about exploring fee rate adjustments. There's a number of things which I don't think are necessarily budget items, but are sort of operational issues for the director to consider about involving community members. I have very... for, I'll just say this, very big concerns about advising, about having our council advise about lawfulness of sort of supporting a 503, but that's something that i think we can sort of deal with separately and if there's a chance to help a group of people move toward a you know that kind of arrangement i mean that's it's all good i think i just want to flag that but i don't know do you need any further

What I'm hearing is we will continue to explore the adjustments with RAB. What the city manager said, and I do agree to, I think it's maybe a goal would be get to covering our operational. I think above and beyond that will be extremely challenging. So if I don't have a decision or direction today on the potential of subsidizing capital projects or deferring or eliminating them for the fund, I would expect that discussion at a CIP deeper discussion.

Okay. Yep. Council Member Haffner.

Just on the RAB point, I think it's really important to continue to engage RAB. I think they need to take a hard look at all of the fee structure, not just the daily green fees, but the annual passes, resident preference, so on. I assume that's part of what they're doing. And then I think it needs to come to us because... In a lot of ways, what we're seeing here is the golf course is in crisis. And I don't think it's entirely fair to put it on RAB to solve the crisis. I really want their recommendation. And then it needs to come back to us to make a hard decision about how to right the ship. It is an enterprise fund. It's meant to be operated as an enterprise. And we should think very carefully before we start pouring capital fund money in above and beyond the 10% a year that's allowed for an enterprise. And I think as part of that, and I just want to say this out loud, I think everything needs to be on the table, including entirely eliminating unlimited golf. Resident preferences only on booking, not on pricing. Deferring any capital projects that can possibly be deferred. Removing any expenses related to clubhouse replacement or expansion. I know the design is a big one. If there are others, I think they need to come out. And then coming back after engagement with Rab to us with a detailed, comprehensive financial picture. If we pull every lever we have, how close are we?

Director, do you have a comment?

Just a comment because to Councilmember Kern's point, we do hear a lot of feedback about comparison course to course, operation to operation. And I would just caution Council on how that message is being given, researched, portrayed. The golf industry is unlike any other business in the city as to where it really is apples to oranges across the board. So there may be things at certain local courses that council or the golfers would find palatable. There may be other things that would seem just extreme. And so I think to try to wrap that into kind of a happy package of, well, this golf course is profitable. Why aren't you? I think that's a very slippery slope. We can certainly do the research if that's something that's requested and bring that back. But I do think that we still have to be able to operate within some of the confines of our particular structure, whether that comes to really high dollar things like utility costs, footing the bill of all capital, providing incentive and benefit to our regular users or our residents, not becoming a membership country club style minimum food and beverage merchandise type of course that offsets their extra expenses by getting that from their members. So I just, I don't know exactly what the answer is, but as we move through this, I think that as we express problems or crisis that need to be resolved, there is this inclination to go straight to, well, I don't think this other course is having this type of a problem without really a full understanding of the history that could have been decades in the making on how they got to that point or what the future looks like. The future didn't look like this in 2014. because all of these bills hadn't come to fruition yet for the next generation of maintenance as it relates to the course. So I just want to say that.

Just to clarify, and Council Member Kern can certainly correct me on her understanding, but I took her point as more focusing on ways in which the golf course could be run more efficiently and and so forth than necessarily. I think she gave one example of how to do that, or how to compare it. I think we all appreciate your expertise and the challenge of saying certain things that are really going to be more problematic than addressing any inefficiencies and so forth. I want to make sure that we are, the next couple of items, city manager operational and personnel recommendation, adjustments the service level reductions those are going to be covered later in the presentation so we can skip over that I think the the only other parks rec open space item is just the recreation debt fund correct and is that

Go ahead. Mayor, I am going to get to the recreation debt fund mill later in this presentation. I've got two more funds before our planned break. They're big funds, the recreation fund and the consolidated utilities, but I am not seeking council decision points for the next two funds. So we can go through them and hit a planned break in a few minutes or we can take a break now. We'll go ahead and soldier on. Wonderful. Thank you. The Recreation Fund. The Recreation Fund supports the Recreation and Senior Center, built in 1990, renovated in 2019. It's world-class. You've all been there. It also includes robust senior services, which includes the Brooks Cafe for daily lunches, has trips, promotes health and community for seniors, and also events like last week's Ice Cream Social. Also within this fund is the Memory Square pool at Memory Square Park. This is all managed under the expert and tenured leadership of Miss Kathy Martin and her amazing staff. Again, recreation funds structurally balanced in 2027, 2028. However, we do fall below the renewal and replacement target in 29 and beyond. This fund, like the golf fund, which I did not mention, has been receiving the allocation of central funds, central departments, in 2025. I'm sorry. In the current year, 2026, that included HR and finance. In 2027, it now includes IT as well. So we're finally getting through allocating all of our central costs to enterprise funds. We did shift the ice rink out of this fund into the general fund. 5.05 FT recommended additions, two full-time positions, a youth and sports coordinator, and a recreation assistant nights at a 0.8 or 32-hour week, a sliver of the parks recreation open space director, and some variables, mostly lifeguards. Again, you've seen this chart. It's above the minimum throughout the model, but falling short in some of the outer years on saving enough for the renewal and replacement. Here are all of the capital projects included within the model and in the preliminary CIP. I believe it's continued on to the next slide. Again, within your attachments, the project names are hyperlinked to their individual pages with one project not being recommended for funding. That's the skate park improvements. That is the recreation fund. I will pause if there's any questions or comments, but I am not seeking council decisions. So if you'd like me to move on, I can continue on to consolidate utilities.

Any questions?

Just to be clear, not only in the recreation fund, but when you cite the additional positions, those have been incorporated into the modeling. That is correct. Thank you.

Any other questions? Go ahead. Good job. Council Member Rafferty.

Just big picture, are we expecting to try and get this fund to a position where it is meeting either the minimum reserve or target reserve by the end of the forecast period, or is that not a goal?

Councilmember, that is, of course, a goal. One of the challenges with the renewal and replacement target is oftentimes these replacements extend beyond the modeling. So in my tenure here, I've often seen a delta between the amount in the bank and achieving that dotted line. It's a little bit of a timing thing depending on how many how much equipment is purchased in each year. It's something that we monitor annually with the finance committee. I think within that dotted line, it's also important to understand that it's factoring in larger components of the building. So part of that dotted line is a percentage of the building's costs. So it's really doing its best to achieve saving enough to replace all the components within its building. A lot of words to say that it's something that we are doing our best to achieve and monitor, but it is challenging to manage the day-to-day and save enough to replace all those facilities.

Sorry, is that no?

Don't have that plan today.

So we're expecting to essentially adopt a budget that probably leaves this fund projected to fall below the minimum?

Not the minimum reserve, but enough to replace parts of the building. The dotted line is place equipment and pieces, components of the building. So operationally, yes, but not all the equipment. Council Member Kern.

Thank you. And can you remind us of what the revenue sources are for the rec fund?

Councilmember, yes, this is what I like to call a three-legged stool. About half of the revenues come from user fees. And then the other two pieces are the general fund subsidy and the dedicated and perpetual sales and use tax that voters approved in 2017. So about 50% user fees and about 25% those other two buckets, sales tax, dedicated, and general fund transfer.

And the property tax component is just to repay for the building that we built about 10 years ago? Correct. OK. And so then we moved the ice rink out of rec so that this would balance. because otherwise then we would not be balanced, but it's still a general fund expense that we're gonna have to figure out how to pay for. So we just moved it so that this.

We did move it, yes. It is in the current general fund modeling as it stands today.

Versus just transferring more of the general fund into the REC, okay. Thank you.

Any other questions on this one? Okay. Thank you.

Go ahead. Continuing on with our consolidated utility funds, notable impacts for 2027-2028 are the impacts of future development, potential drought impacts, fee adjustment methodology. We're seeking smoothing, consistency, and predictability in revenues while remaining competitive. A change in accounting methodology practice in how we plan and budget for TAP fee revenues, switching to arrears versus projections. Bonding, as you'll see in the chart, is likely needed to smooth out some of our large and major capital projects, including raw water integration, salt residuals, and the Sid Copeland Admin Building. Preliminary total capital investment, 27 to 32, is robust at 67.2. It also includes, within the modeling, additional personnel. I talked about this previously on the general fund side. Here is the other pieces of those employees, the construction stormwater inspector, operations tech, and civil engineer. Here is the long-term financial forecast for the utility funds. As you can see, robust capital expenditures projected throughout the model in excess of what we're able to cash flow. So while we're looking at revenues, rates, and fees, we're also going to be exploring financing some of these major projects. The next handful of slides are all of the capital projects included in the model. You don't need to spend a lot of time on this. You guys can click through at your leisure. And a few unfunded projects towards the end. That's what I have for consolidated utilities. No decision points right now, but welcome feedback and discussion.

Are there any council questions? Council Member Cooperman?

So back to the chart showing the fund balances. So in 2028, we're dipping below the minimum reserve. Do we need to resolve that before we adopt the budget for that next few years? Yes. Okay. And you think that we can resolve it through these financing kinds of options or?

Yes, the way I see it, you have two levers. We can spend some time going through the capital projects that are contained, sharpen the pencil, potentially defer, and or look at a financing model where you can kind of spread them out over future years. Okay.

Other questions? Is there any appetite right now for identifying any items in the CIP that are worth considering cuts on.

Sorry, for utilities or in general?

No, no, no, I'm talking about utilities. I'm talking about the one, two, three and a half pages of projects. Yes, Council Member Kerr.

I think unless Director Cower has any recommendations on ways that we could smooth it out a little bit, this has clearly been identified from our community, from our residents, as among the highest of priorities and core service that they would like to maintain the high standards on. And I don't really think that this is the place where we do the cutting. I think that we do the cutting in things that are less mandatory to daily life. And the drought conditions we were in and that we continue to anticipate, I think a lot of these expenses are related to water rights and other things, if I'm not mistaken. And we hear over and over and over again, what about more? What about doing it for ponds? So my concern would be to find a way to reduce some of this. I think we almost have to figure out a way to fund it. Unless, again, the director is able to come up with some good recommendations on how we don't have to cut necessarily, but can maybe postpone to make the numbers work better.

I think Director Bailey summed it up well. I think we're going to smooth some things out with financing. We've moved from a pay-as-you-go model to a financing model. Just costs are increasing faster than our appetite for increasing rates. We did discuss with the Finance Committee some concepts last week. There's a lot of factors converging on us, whether it's climate change, costs, various things, growth. that will come or is planned. And so I think we're going through a pivot point or a paradigm shift with the utility of what does the future look like? So we're going to run a pretty standard rate model that shows financing options for this year. And then over the course of the next two to three years, we're analyzing our tap fees and our tier structure to see how to accomplish our goals in a reasonable way.

So along with that, that would be then taking into consideration some of the possible new development that we're for. And I don't mean Redtail because that's a separate negotiated thing. I mean any of the new residential or other businesses. Yes. Okay, thank you. All encompassing. Okay, good.

Other thoughts? Yes, Council Member Ruff.

I just had one specific question on the Sid Copeland issue. ADMINISTRATION BUILDING. THE CIP FORM SAYS FINAL DESIGN IS ANTICIPATED THROUGH THE

Yeah, I just think that was an artifact that we missed. Okay. So we had 116 project sheets, and we missed it on this one. So we don't need the 428? I don't think we do. Great. Yeah, we're not going to double up on consulting. Yeah. And you guys are always a final check when we bring a contract to you of, like, this is a good use of our money or a bad use. So there's always a filter there if we're not using consultants well. Other questions?

Comments? Yes, Councilmember Cooper.

Yeah, one specific question. For 27 and 28, there are line items for water rights acquisitions. Are those pretty definite? We think we really want to acquire some rights in those years or...

We know from all our hopes and dreams that we have to go acquire water rights, and we try to guess the best year to kind of do that. We also try to have that money balance out cash flow. So if we have a large project year, we might move the water to a different year. That said, and some of you have been on council for a while, we're always shopping for water. And if there's a good opportunity, we're going to come to you and we're going to say we need to go spend one or two million dollars to get this good opportunity. So both things are always in play. But for now, that's a best guess. Balancing cash flow.

I would like to note that RAB requested that we put money in the budget to acquire water rights for Coal Creek Golf Course. We are not recommending that for funding at this point in time. The amount that's in there, you know, water rights right now are so costly. And we have other priorities that we need to fund. So that is a project that we're not recommending for approval.

Thank you for clarifying that. Other comments? I appreciate the Councilmember Kern's comment about expectations. I think This is a high-priority area, as are a number of others. I think we just have to bear in mind that just because we've got high-priority areas, that they're not off-limits to further consideration. At least from my standpoint, I want to make sure we aren't directing council. If Council Member Kern feels differently, obviously. That's a thing that we're not saying, don't bring us back any changes to this, because we don't need to consider them.

I didn't think... No, that's what I said. I was asking the director, like, I mean, and I was, as an alternate for the Finance Committee, I attend every single meeting and listen in on the conversations that usually add my two cents. So I was very much paying attention to the last Finance Committee meeting on this topic, and I think there is... definitely room for a lot more conversation. I think we have to get creative about how we pay for it. My point is this is not a choice in whether we pay for these things. It is we have to find the best method forward versus eliminating. I think the community needs this investment is what I'm trying to say.

Okay. You're not talking about any given one of these. All right. Good. Do you have the direction that you need? Not that you asked for it, because I think you said expressly you weren't asking for direction, but our council is comfortable giving you direction even though you don't ask for it, and that's our job, of course. So let's take a break for 10 minutes, be back at 2.28, and we'll tackle the rest of this. I would say that we're about halfway through, so we're going at a pretty good clip. We're missing one council member. He disappeared, I think, for just a moment. But I want, why don't we go ahead, just in terms of Thanks. Just we wanted to address one issue that didn't get addressed this morning. Council Member Kern. Thank you.

Oh, actually, I do need to wait for Director Blackmore to get back. He's 100% relevant in my comments. So once he returns, then if you both wouldn't mind circling back, that would be awesome. I will do that.

Thank you.

Yes, director.

Mayor, let's continue. I'm going to hand this off to Mahiar, and he's going to go through some revenues. Then James will handle some expenditures. So we'll be sharing it for the next few slides.

Take us away. Thank you all for joining back after the break. We're going to go over major revenue assumptions. These consist of property tax and sales tax. We will start with mill levy changes. In 2027, the city will be suspending the temporary mill levy credit on the rec center debt mill levy as just some background voters approved a mill levy up to 3.35 mills. with a restriction that the tax revenues of this rec center debt not to exceed $1.82 million annually. The rec center debt can no longer absorb any excess revenues. We've updated that. So the changes for the mill levy are resetting the rec center debt to 1.7 from 1.375 mills. Overall, the Louisville mill levy will change to 6.884 from 6.559. In this chart, we're going to show property tax revenue changes. Blue bars are general property tax, orange rec center debt, and the yellow line is the city's total mill levy. Just as a reminder that the mill levy reduction that we had, the temporary mill levy reduction we had done was to offset the increased assessed values In total, our city mills are at 6.559. This chart breaks out the two, went over blue being general, orange being rec center, and the yellow bar at top just showing your total mill levies in the city. This next chart highlights year-over-year changes while calling out 2026 and 2027 property tax revenues, same as last time where blue is your general and orange rec center debt. The yellow bar showing changes year-over-year. This next slide is showing for every property tax dollar collected within the city of Louisville, where does it go? Seven cents of that dollar comes to the city of Louisville. Majority of it goes to Boulder Valley School District, followed by Boulder County, Louisville Fire District, seven cents to the city, North Colorado Water, and UDFC. This slide is basically showing for every dollar that's collected for city of Louisville sales tax, where does that dollar get divvied up? Most of it, $0.53 goes to general fund. The next big one is capital fund. About $0.26 of that will go there, followed by open space, $0.08, parks at $0.05, Recreation Center, 4 cents, and finally, Historic Preservation at 3 cents. This chart is showing sales tax revenue year-over-year changes and total revenue assumptions. Just some notes. In this projection, we do have a few things taken into account, which are King Soopers opening up. Certain things have not been incorporated into this, such as Sundance Film Festival and Red Tail Ridge development impacts. Any questions on the slide? This next slide is basically going over the, when we looked at the dollar slide where it shows for every dollar collected of sales tax revenue inside the city, where is it going to? This is basically showing that year over year. So you can see the major blue bar being your general, followed by capital, and so on. All right. That's all I have for revenue assumptions.

Just to add a little bit of color, just real fast. Going back to property taxes, we've kind of two revenue sources. One for our general fund. It's a little over $5 million. We're at the cap of our mill levy. We cannot go any higher without going back to the voters. At $5 million, this is about one-sixth of your general fund. So material, but not as large of a lever as your sales tax. That orange bar is how we repay our rec center debt fund. Rec center debt. Our... Our mill levy right now is just under 1.4. We're proposing to realign it at 1.7. That will align us with our annual debt servicing payment amounts of 1.74, 1.75 million through 2042. So this is something that we were able to hold down for a few years. We've eaten up the fund balance in the debt fund. We can no longer absorb that shortfall. We really do need to align the collections with the debt. The impact to the median home of that adjustment in the mills is about $20 per year. So that's what we have to do. If you were to go to the property tax chart looking forward, you see it kind of... Petering down a little bit, what we're doing is we're modeling assessed value increases and then adjusting or refining that rec center mill levy to arrive at the amount of the debt payment. So we will talk about this a little bit more later, but really looking for your direction to align the mill levy with those debt payments. Again, then the other thing I would say with the sales tax is it is the significant, the primary funder of our general fund. You can see over half of the dollar goes into the general fund. From my memory, it's probably close to 13 or 14 million when compared to our property tax, which is five. But it's also extremely material to the other funds outlaid here. The general fund is blue, but red is our capital fund. We'll have some time later today and likely at a future meeting to talk about our capital fund. It generates close to $8, $9, $10 million annually. But also the other funds here, open space fund, our recreation fund, our parks fund, historic preservation fund, funds we've sort of talked about are largely driven by our sales tax collections. This is the biggest revenue source, our biggest lever on how we fund city operations. So thank you, Maher. Excellent. Just want to add a little more color to that.

Thank you.

Okay.

Next we're going to get into some person. Hold on. Sorry for interrupting. Just want to make sure if council members have any questions about the revenue piece here. That's yes.

I just have one very general question. What would you estimate is our total revenue income annually for the city, totaling all sources?

I have a spreadsheet for that, so I'd hate to guess. $80 million, close to $100 million. Wow. Again, a lot of it's in the general fund. The next largest are utilities. You know, we do tens of millions of dollars when we fund our utilities. So those are pretty much the primary funding source for what we do. And actually a main component of my job is collecting, and my team's job is collecting sales tax and use tax, but also monthly utility billing. So a lot of what we do is bring money in the door so folks can deliver excellent services to your citizens. Thank you. Residents.

thank you so one of the next things we're going to get into is some personnel and benefit assumptions through those out years in the model aligning with one of the city managers priorities in retaining staff and investing in staff and staff development we've kind of outlaid what our expectations are as far as Salary increases which are a large driver of those expenses that as we've dictated our fast outpacing revenues There are a couple of different adjustments that we make and that we model the first being a market adjustment That would go into effect January 1st for all employees and then also a merit-based adjustment to kind of capture that remaining portion of maybe the difference between the market and what people are experiencing inflationary in their daily lives. In that same vein, the Human Resources Department has done some third-party consulting, and they've also identified some specific targeted adjustments to kind of align some of current staff namely in this instance our police officers to the market surrounding areas so they can continue to retain officers and maintain that public safety that is a priority of Council. Among those assumptions, we have modeled a 2% market adjustment. Again, that's the first day of the year going into effect, and then a 4% merit adjustment max for staff. And then as far as the targeted police adjustment that we discussed that third-party consultant has suggested that to get us competitive and remain competitive in addition to the adjustments made in the end of 2025 we need to bump the Police officers up about 7%. Those would be your non-admin staff in the police department. And then their steps for their pay program are at 5%. In addition to that, we've kind of modeled some increases for variable personnel. We've targeted 3% for that for 2027 and 28, and then some additional costs for benefits as well. Given that the benefit costs are kind of unknown to us now, we've been very conservative in budgeting targeted at 10% for the health insurance and then 2% for dental and vision we're hoping those numbers come in lower but we want to incorporate it's always easy to take a step back then to say oh you guys have kind of closed the gap but bad news these have come in worse than expected so we've also have some history of kind of those assumptions over the years. So this next table is this kind of like a history of the personnel adjustments since 2019 that kind of captures kind of what we historically have been doing for staff to maintain that retainage. If you want to go to the next one. And finally, this is kind of the history of our benefit insurance cost increases. As you can see, the last two years, we've come in flat thanks to a lot of work with the Human Resources Department collaborating with some of our benefit providers. And so we are hopeful that we'll get good news again this year. But again, we have kind of taken a conservative approach and budgeted for a 10 percent increase And these all average out to about an 8.5% increase in the model. Any questions on any of that? Yes.

Thanks. I appreciate you doing this. So you had mentioned that you had already hired a consultant to come up with some of the merit increases, and yet we saw for some of the capital improvement or some of the funding requests was another exterior consultant to do some additional work. And it doesn't look like it's projected for all the years. Is it that you needed it for this time, you'll need it one more time, but you don't need it in ongoing years?

Councilman McCurran, maybe best for Director Monzingo to answer that question, but my understanding is that these are two different ASK, TWO DIFFERENT STUDIES. THEY ANNUALLY REVIEW MARKETS AGAINST WHAT OUR COMPETITORS ARE PAYING FOLKS. I THINK LAST I HEARD IT WAS OVER 30 JURISDICTIONS THEY BENCHMARKED AGAINST US, SO THIS IS PART OF THEIR ANNUAL WORK. THAT IS NOT THE, THAT IS SEPARATE AND DIFFERENT FROM THE BUDGET ASK. WITH THAT, I WILL ASK DIRECTOR MONZINGO TO DELINEATE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THOSE TWO.

Yeah, I just want to have you clarify your question just to make sure I answer it appropriately.

So it was mentioned that you guys had already done, used a consultant to help you come up with the market adjustments, and yet we see in a budget request for additional consulting to assist with understanding salaries and markets. So I just was curious to know if this is a repetitive thing, if it's an annual request that you need, because it looks like it's only a one-time, or what

Yeah, so we use an outside consultant to assist us in determining the market rate adjustments. These are looked at each and every year, so that's an ongoing one. We also use a separate consultant for our benefits as well to go out to market. So it's two separate consultants there, but really what they're looking at is both telling us uh what the market is doing for each of the positions and so we can compare our positions and then that's what we use to determine the adjustments that we recommend so in this case for instance uh there was an adjustment of over nine percent uh in just the police jobs alone so that's largely what accounted for the seven percent additional increase with them so i have

I don't know if that answers your question. I'm sorry. Do you mind? I believe the question is around the compensation policy analysis. We do have that later in our presentation, but since it's up now, would you be willing to speak to what the compensation policy analysis is, the request for compensation policy analysis? Oh, here. Will you run to slide?

Is that for the $50,000 request? Yes.

Okay.

I didn't think we had gotten to that one yet. Sorry. Okay. Now I'm following you. Yeah. Okay. I'm with you now. You're right. This is yet a separate project. So what I found, at least in my first year working here, is that we spend an inordinate amount of staff time working through compensation issues because we lack a lot of resources. solid policies and procedures on how we work through these. Secondarily, probably in the last five or six years, there's been a lot of structure, especially through the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, on ensuring compliance with our compensation practices. So this analysis here is to ensure we're compliant, but then also find ways to save staff time and ambiguity on how we work through and have a cleaner process to work through when we adjust pay, how we adjust pay, how we do reclasses and those types of things. So I completely apologize. You were one step ahead of me and I wasn't quite following your question.

They went together in my mind when I saw the market and I thought they were similar. It's a completely different topic and I appreciate the reason for needing this and it being a one-time evaluation process and figuring out how we move forward. Then we'll go back a slide to what we did discuss. The variable pay, is that for our part-time employees, that kind of thing?

It is.

And it's interesting that we think that we need a higher market increase than we do for our full-time employees.

Yeah, so that's a great question as well. So while you'll see the market adjustment for full-time at 2%, the reason we did a 3% is that we currently don't have a way to adjust variable pay. So when you get hired into a job as a variable pay employee and you work or as a seasonal and you come back the next year, your pay goes up the 2% or 3% that we recommend here. That's the same pay that the person coming in as a brand new employee is also paid as well. So we're trying to build out a structure where we can give variable increases as well to recognize, retain some of those valuable staff members like in our seasonal ranks that come back year after year so that we have kind of a market or a merit increase per se for those positions.

When it comes to the merit increase or the market adjustments for the police department, you were saying it's not applying to the admin staff. Will the administrative staff, will they still be applicable to the 2% that everyone else? Okay, great. And then what about for the leadership within the police department? Is the 7% also being applied or is it for non-leadership officers?

It's just for the police officer ranks, to my knowledge. I don't believe that it accounts for those.

But we do have to check to see if we have a compaction issue because as we continue to increase the sworn officer pay and the management structure side of it, we have to look at the commander's side to see if we're getting into a compaction issue. So there may need to be some adjustments there just to address compaction.

But that's not being considered in this yet? No. OK. So maybe I would agree. I would expect there to be some variation. That's why I was curious about that. Last thing, 10% for a health increase, are we expecting to change providers and service? Because that's a really substantial increase.

Well, we don't have those numbers. Sadly, we don't generally get those, I'm being told, until sometime in early August. And as you might expect, those vendors hold those numbers pretty close to the vest until they're a little more sure about them. So as you can see from the slide up there, over the last several years, I think they did a placeholder in the budget for 10%, but that the increase came out at zero. So I guess one thing that I could speak to is that at least at the end of May, Our benefits consultants said that we were operating an 80% loss ratio. So that's actually quite good where you want to be. It's when you get to 100% and above that is when you're actually at a loss. So while our claims against our health insurance have gone up this year, All indications are is that we're still operating at a level that we need to be. So I don't think that our own usage of the plan is going to drive up the costs. So now we're really going to be seeing what the market does and what that dictates. And just on the research I've done, It's probably the same research you all could do. It could be an increase anywhere between 0% up to 12%. So we really want to get those numbers through our consultant and then have them work with the vendors themselves to negotiate those down to the best price we can get.

Thank you. I appreciate the indulgence. I've spent many years in finance, but also targeting human resources and benefits. And I did benefits for casinos with thousands of employees. So that's why this was my pertinent questions. I happen to have background and experience in it. So thanks.

Other questions from council? Yes, Councilor Cooper.

Can you give a ballpark estimate for like if our health insurance has like a 1% increase, roughly how much that translates to in expenses for the city?

A lot of on-the-spot math here this afternoon. I'm glad I'm sharp. We've got $3 million in our annual benefit costs. So when we project 10%, that's $300,000. So every percent is $30,000 split across all the funds. I spend a lot of time on the general funds, so that would be half of it, half of your personnel is in those funds. One thing I did mention earlier is we use a lot of projections and estimates at this time of the year. We try to be conservative so we don't have a widening gap throughout the process. We have one that's closing. So one thing I'm optimistic about is HR and their great team and our broker can keep these costs as low as we've seen historically. And we can come back to you in September with some good news.

Other comments?

If there are no more questions on personnel and benefit costs, I will hand this over to the city manager. Are you okay driving these slides, or I can keep going and take notes?

Yes. Do we want to circle back to Councilmember Kern now that Adam's back in the room?

Pardon me? Oh, yes, I'm sorry. The question that she raised from before, yes. Now that the director is... I appreciate that.

I forgot to, when we were talking about the rec department and the budget, One of the things that I wanted to ask about and bring up is do we ever separate out the cost of the memory square pool and the swimming pool component at the rec center so that we can see how that cost is different than just all the other services of the rec and senior center?

Aquatics has its own budget lines. Yeah, so Memory Square has a line, and Aquatics has a line in the overall budget.

And pardon me if I don't know, I tried to find it and I couldn't on the website. Are there separate and additional fees to use Memory Square Pool if you already have a rec center pass?

Membership transitions to Memory Square. That's not a separate fee. The daily admission is the same as the rec center.

that's what I was thinking and I was looking at several of the the capital requests and it seems like a lot of the large ticket items are because swimming pools are very expensive everything related to them is just expensive anybody who's ever had their own knows that I I was curious if there was value in us looking at the fee structure that we have to because We are worried about the general fund. A portion of the general fund goes to the REC, which goes to aquatics. If we shouldn't be charging people, because we have lifeguards that are expensive and sometimes hard to acquire, more for the utilization of specifically of the aquatics versus the person who's coming in and just working out on a treadmill or using the baseball or the basketball courts or something. to try to recoup some of that extra, that very specific user cost.

Yeah, I think we could consider that possibly for Memory Square as a starting point, being a seasonal pool. It's pretty low impact probably for what you're getting at maybe as a relief to the general fund. We can explore whatever you'd like to explore. I think the majority of that $30-ish million renovation was intended and went towards a lot of renovations for the pool area. So I would imagine the community is expecting that debt repayment to allow them the same access at the same rate as the rest of the building. But, you know, we can look into whatever you'd like to look into. But pools are expensive. So are senior services. You know, that's less than 5% cost recovery, and the majority of the people coming in to use those services are paying less than $3. So, I mean, it really is just whatever area of the facility you would like to kind of zone in on.

Okay. Thank you. Okay.

Go ahead.

So at this point in time, we're going to go into the CMO recommended operational adjustments. If council has questions about the items, the directors are ready to respond to those questions. But first is the market adjustments for police. I would like to take this as an opportunity for Chief Gutierrez to talk about kind of current state of staffing at the police department and the impacts of the cost or the salary increase that council approved late last year.

Thank you. Yeah, definitely want to send words of appreciation for the market adjustment that was done last year. That made a significant difference in morale and some retention areas. I'm not hearing the same commentary that people are looking for employment elsewhere because of paying compensation. Certainly life circumstances come up and we do have some officers that are looking at other opportunities simply because of family reasons or need to relocate but it's it's really changed the narrative at the PD the police market the police officer market is is steadily increasing and has been for the last several years and I think what we recognize in the slide that was put up earlier is as a city organization you know a two percent or a zero percent for the police market put us in a position where we're now trying to play catch up. And I think that's kind of what's reflected in that 7% recommendation now. But it has made a significant difference. Employees there, they understand, they recognize that the city is definitely trying to take care of them. and supporting of them and it has gone a long way so from a staffing perspective right now as of september knock on wood we'll be at fully staffed in the officer ranks we do have a code enforcement process that's ongoing now we're doing interviews for that and and that that's the extent of our vacancies right now so it's a really good condition to be in and i think again it says a lot to what has already been decided upon and some of the recommendations that are being made

All right, thank you. The next two items are HR requests. And the citywide training increase, I think, is pretty self-explanatory. But Jeff, could you briefly discuss those two items for HR?

Yeah, thank you. So the citywide training increase is really covering two things. So in talking to the city manager when I started employment, one of the things that she really wanted to focus on was employee development and succession planning and making sure that we have the bench strength going forward, recognizing our leaders. and ensuring that our employees just have development opportunities. So when I started, we weren't doing much in the way of all city training, both at the staff level and for leaders. And while we were able to use the funding that we do have right now, it was pretty limited at only $14,000 a year for the entire organization. And that's the money we use for all staff training and leadership training. So part of this citywide training increases to increase that budget by about $20,000 just to allow us to increase our training offerings. What I clearly heard from staff when I started is that training was important to them, that they wanted more, and then the feedback we're getting on the training that we're given is that they wish that there were more offerings and that we could offer longer classes. With the budget we have, we're offering lunch and learns as leadership trainings and two-hour trainings once a quarter. This is just going to allow us the ability to increase that. Then the excess money on top of the ongoing 20,000 we'd be adding to this training budget would be to run an emerging leaders academy in 2027, followed by a leadership academy in 2028. This would just be formal training for those emerging leaders in the organization to both recognize and train those, and then just to ensure that we can have ongoing professional leadership training and academy both for our current and seasoned leaders as well. So that kind of encompasses the citywide training increase. Yeah, so NeoGov perform and policy. This is another thing as I've gone around the organization learning about areas where I think we could both improve process and save a lot of staff time. And this is two areas. So NeoGov perform would be an electronic way of building onto our current NeoGov platform. which is an HRIS platform we're currently using, but it would allow us to do performance reviews electronically. Our current process is done by paper, which makes it extremely difficult to get data analytics as to performance around the organization. It makes it a very manual process for dealing with performance issues that come from these performance reviews. And with this program, it would allow full web access It would allow us to tie these to our performance improvement processes, and it would allow us to tie it to our learning module that's also within NeoGov as well. So a lot of capability there. The second half of this would be a 2028 program. That's the policy management module. This is a more organizational benefiting program in the sense that right now one of the things I'm focusing on is ensuring that our policies are compliant and that we continuously update our policies. And while we make do with our current processes, it is a very daunting process to write the policy, get feedback on the policy, and then approve the policies. And this module will allow us to do that very seamlessly with tracking of both the approval process and the... acknowledgement process for employees. The doubly cool thing about it is that it's not just for HR. We could build this to where every department in the entire city could have a module much like we do with our laser fish system. So we could house internal departmental policies as well as citywide policies all in one place in the same format and using the same approval process. It would really increase our efficiency, save a lot of staff time, but also make these a heck of a lot more accessible and easier to update.

Yes. This is more of just, I guess, a comment or a compliment. So what I'm hearing is lots of cost savings in very expensive staff time for a $25,000 annual investment. I'm assuming we're expected to receive significantly more than $25,000 a year in staff savings.

Yeah, I don't know what the total cost for both would be. It might be a little bit above that, but this is before we've negotiated the price. We might be able to get both programs for that $25,000, but to answer your question, yes, indeed. Lots of staff savings to where we could realize that and recoup that cost in the first year alone.

Great. Thanks for thinking outside the box. That's nice. Yeah, thanks.

Other questions?

Would you like me to go over the last one on the slide, Mayor?

Pardon me?

Would you like me to go over the last one on this slide?

Sure.

Great. So the Hard to Recycle voucher is a pilot program we started in 2026. We have had almost all of these vouchers taken up and over 250 used at this point in time. You might recall this replaced our Hard to Recycle event, which was consistently weathered out. so it's a very challenging event for us to hold we are hearing a lot of positive comments about this program in fact a lot of other cities have asked us for a model because they're very interested in this program we'd like to extend it and we'd like to use general fund funding to extend it i will say staff who is here to answer questions should council have them wood is considering a no match grant through the colorado circular communities c3 waste reduction programs So if Council wants to, they could approve this contingent upon receipt of the grant.

Any Council questions? Council Member Curtin.

Of the $37,000 there, how much of it is actually coming from the bag tax and how much will we need the grant money for? I'm just curious.

For our proposal for 2027 is that no money would come from bag tax. We'd take it out of general funds. Staff would like to seek a grant for the full amount. Correct correct, okay, and I would then the bag tax be going would be still be doing like the hard to recycle program in some of the lower income neighborhoods that we've done in the past that was very successful and really well liked we would still be looking at doing the other programming in the bag tax and I think there's a larger sustainability conversation coming up for this council we talk a little bit more about bag tax that sort of declining revenue and what that looks like we talk about those larger sustainability goals.

Is that one of the reasons the move to the general fund for this instead of the bag is because of the declining bag tax numbers? Correct. Yeah. Okay, great. This is an amazing program. I'm in favor of it. I do really recommend that we push as hard as we can to get the grant money, though, just given how tight things are.

So at this point in time, we are looking for council input on each of these items. So if we could go down the list and get input in terms of preliminary council support, or if you're not supportive of this, that would be helpful.

I will start. On market adjustments for police, I really appreciate the analysis that's been done. It's hard stuff and I absolutely support that item. Training increase, I was To be honest, almost shocked to see how low it was. Having, you know, this is my day job is employment law and deal with a lot of clients with the last, well, the next two. But this is really important and something that employees, I think, across the board want and expect if we're going to keep them. And it's a really good investment in our human capital and in our human resources. The next one, I mean, again, these are, the next three are small numbers compared to others, and I don't want to understate that. We've got a lot of big numbers coming, but those two are the Modules are going to pay for themselves easily. Trying to centralize that data is going to provide so much easy analysis or the ability to do some really easy analysis, complex analysis. And then the hard to recycle voucher You know, personally, I think that's, like, the best. The best kind of, not the best of the four, but it's a great program, and I think we can support it. Others? Yes.

I'm wondering for the rest of us, for time's sake, should we each go through all of them or can we say if there's one that we want to pull out and discuss, otherwise assume we all are agreeable for all the reasons you listed?

Yeah, I was sort of setting a potential set of reasons why perhaps other council members might be supportive of this. That's the reason I went into it. Thanks. But I'm open to whatever council members would like to do.

No, thank you for doing that. I agree to all those reasons and approving all of those that are listed.

I just want to say I do agree with everything the mayor has just said and Councillor Kern. But I want to add that I think it's important to maintain staff rather than bringing in new staff that then have to be trained and don't know the history. And so I think these programs are amazing.

That sounds like a sport. It is. A verbal thumbs up. All right.

All right, we'll move to the next slide and go through the same exercise. So, Samma will address the three CMO requests, and then you already heard from Jeff in terms of the compensation policy analysis.

Thank you Diana. So the Sundance request is a little bit of a late ad here. I had the opportunity to attend one of our coordination meetings and I realized how many unknowns there are about Sundance coming up from the amount of trash pickup to additional signage and notifications. This set aside is really intended to be an if needed. If there are additional costs to allow us to get that information and then in future years we can start anticipating that and budgeting for that. The cost allocation analysis, you might have remembered from the finance committee a strategic planning document, so looking at what we're doing there. As we've been evolving that, using that for cost allocation is something that we think would be really beneficial for this organization to get a really good feel for where everyone is placed. that dollar amount is something that we're working on refining as we refine the scope of what this cost allocation is but this will help us truly understand our programs and the cost of our programs to put council in a place to make those strategic decisions then i'll skip over the community survey so this is a community survey that we have been doing every four years for many years now we are next up in 2028 this is used in a lot of our strategic planning and our budget considerations and departmental considerations when they're prioritizing items it's really a baseline that we'd like to continue okay any questions from council members about these four i do have a question

I do have a question regarding the community survey. From my understanding, there's some pretty consistent questions so we can track metrics over time. We don't necessarily have to get into the details today, but I am curious given some of the concerns and feedbacks around multiple consultants asking similar questions. if this isn't an opportunity to maybe blend some of that into this existing survey to maybe save some dollars in some other areas as well.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor Furtun. That's a great question. And that's something that we have been looking to each time we've done the survey. So, for example, when we did the survey in 2024, we incorporated some comprehensive plan questions. I'll also throw out that one of the things we're looking at is as with updating our KPIs, we're going to take the opportunity to look at the survey and make sure that we're asking what we should be asking. And I'd like to look at making sure that we're aligning with nationally benchmarkable questions. So when we set a KPI, it's not that we expect 100% satisfaction on a question response, which is never going to happen, but that we are measuring ourselves maybe in something more realistic, right? Like we're going to be above the national benchmark.

Councilmember Haffner.

Mayor Pro Tem stole most of my thunder. I agree with that point and maybe this isn't a budget item, but if there's a way on other consultant work that we can refer them back to the community survey and demand that they not reinvent the wheel and rely on Rely on the fact that we know full well people value open space in downtown Louisville and they don't need to go around to focus grouping those questions a second time. And then I also would like to see the cost allocation study refined somewhat. $100,000 seems like a lot for an organization of our size.

Any other comments? Just so that you do have additional comment on that, that was going to be my statement, was that cost allocation analysis seems a little steep for the value it'll add. Thanks.

All right. Do we have, with the qualifications mentioned, do we have a thumbs up?

All right, thank you. We're next going to get into summary of city manager recommended personnel adjustments. All right, this is the opportunity. You've heard in previous slides about positions that have been proposed. This is the opportunity to ask questions about these positions. Specifically, I would ask Director Blackmore to address the Deputy Director for Parks, Recreation, and Open Space. This may seem like a big ask, but there are very good reasons for this. And then also, I would like Kurt to address the Civil Engineer 1-2 position specifically. But if you have any other positions that you would like the directors to address, we can do that as well.

Can I ask one question? As we're going through this, if it's possible, and this is just for my information, to indicate how many FTEs are currently in, I mean, there's three of them for PROS and Recreate, well, four. And then one for operations, two for engineering. If there's any way to, you know, indicate what the current FTE number is, that's just helpful. It's a little data point. It's a little tiny data point which has to be considered in light of a whole bunch of other things. But I'd appreciate it if you do that.

I'll go. No pressure. Thank you for saying I have really good reasons for it. Before I say what the reasons are.

Approximations are welcome.

That's right. First, I do want to just kudos to City Manager Langley and Director Bailey for finding a kind of creative way to get the deputy funds required for salary and benefits incorporated throughout the department to allow for what seems to be a A DECENT MODELING, ESPECIALLY WITH THE DIRECTION FROM TODAY. SO JUST A FEW THINGS ON THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR. I WOULD START WITH THE COST INCLUDING THE BENEFITS. IT'S PROJECTED AT A MID-RANGE HIGHER OF THE PAY RATE FOR OTHER DEPUTIES POSITIONS THROUGHOUT THE CITY. OTHER DEPARTMENTS THAT CURRENTLY DO HAVE THAT DEPUTY DIRECTOR POSITION IN PLACE. So just notating that as a jumping off point that it may or may not be a little less or a little more than that. A few reasons for the request through the city manager for this consideration and now to council. As you've seen during our retreat about a year ago and through these ongoing budget discussions, this department is incredibly broad has a high level of intensity and passion from our community for high levels of service and varying degrees of expertise and wants and needs. And with that breadth comes a lot of individualized attention from the director position, which, as I mentioned a year ago, was known coming into the role. I do think that we have evolved to a place with administrative needs at a to assist me with the day-to-day, to assist with the oversight of the seven direct reports that are currently reporting to the director. In addition to other things like attending advisory board meetings, unscheduled public meetings, potentially task force related to things like golf fees and that kind of thing, that having another administrative level, executive level employee to assist the department would be would be a great benefit. I also think there are a few positions that we put forward for the department that were not put forward in the model, one of which is a project supervisor to assist our project manager, Weber, with an ongoing backlog and a continued growing list of capital projects. that the community and council desire for completion at a high level. And this position would potentially be assigned to assist with those efforts as well and oversee those projects at an administrative level that are currently If they're able to, they're being given to operating staff and supervisors to oversee some of the day-to-day type of capital projects that Brian can't incorporate into his workload, which obviously results in some inefficiencies and some ineffective use of time for those field staff that could now be freed up to allow them to get back out into the field and supervise the operation instead of spending so much administrative time on contracts and working with contractors to get those projects completed. I already talked a little bit about the guest service component of the position, but with the high level of engagement of this community, there are delays in communicating with staff, effectively addressing concerns, that kind of thing, the high level of service expectation, which could also be offset with this position as well. And lastly and I don't know if this is the most important or the least important is the succession planning Factor back to councilmember Fahy's point about making sure that that knowledge is retained You know having that Deputy position that could come in and learn the ropes the administration the ins and outs of how this department works It's an incredibly challenging as I've learned over the last four and a half years acclimation. It's a very unique position, a unique community as it relates to parks, rec, and open space, as we've talked about a lot today. So having that ability to have kind of a number two and having that knowledge in place, I think would also be very beneficial. So at a high level, those were a lot of the rationale items that you'd see on the position request in your packet today, and just some anecdotal information from me.

Do you have an idea of how many people currently are?

I can answer that question. I just ran the data. I do. Go ahead. Should we see if they're the same? It's a tag team. Well, we include a FTE recon as part of our budget materials. We'll have that in September. We have approximately 300 FTEs, of which 122 FTEs are parks, rec, open space, and golf. And when you factor in a lot of variables in there, we probably have closer to 500 employees. And I would say over half are in parks, rec, open space, and golf.

Appreciate that. It's for scale of these changes. I think it's important for the public to know that you're not a three-person department. All right. Good.

We're going to shift to operations. And then maybe real quick before, Kurt, you hop in, you've got 58 FTEs out of 300. So about one out of six employees is yours.

Thank you. Scale-wise, how much of the budget do those 50 responsible for if we mess up budget? What's our risk?

Utilities is a material component of our budget. All the directors know how big the budget is.

Less people, more money. Less people, more money. Right. Good questions.

This was not meant to create controversy, just provide a little- We're just having fun here. That's all.

I'm just trying to give you the lightness in the day. All right, civil engineer. So our engineering department, they run almost all your construction in the city, and they're handling tens of millions, sometimes over $100 million worth of work. some of your most critical high-profile projects. That department has not been fully staffed since 2019. Despite that, they regularly deliver projects and deal with disasters and deal with community expectations. We've done that. We've accomplished that, I think, through dedication of several long-term employees that have retired in the last several years. We've done that through working nights and weekends. And we used to get away with that because contractors would do what they said. Or we had long-term employees that made things that are really complex look really easy to get done. But As the world has changed because of COVID, you can't hire someone and have them do the job well and not have to babysit them. I don't know how many people love the word intrepid right now, but I'm sure you all love intrepid. But that's just one example of a lot of projects we do throughout the year that require a lot of effort to make sure it goes well. Our resident expectations, I think, continually climb of how we interact with them and the, I would say, high customer service nature at which we have to respond to emails or phone calls when projects happen. So everything's taking longer. We've had people that used to be able to make it look easy leave. So now we're bringing in new people. New people don't stay for 20 or 30 years. They stay for three years. And then they go and they get a better job. So there's time caught up in the churn of recruiting, training, getting them up to speed, and then they leave. So we need to make up for that time. And then skill set. We just have a different skill set coming in. We have positions that ask people to do five to ten different things. and run 10 to 20 different projects and do that all at one time and do it well. And the incoming workforce just isn't equipped to do that. So we need to, in this case, split a position we had and the two engineers so that we can keep up and it's sustainable. And a lot of times just cover the churn. So see if I have anything else in there that I'm missing. I do think it also comes down to quality, making sure we keep our quality up in delivery of our projects. And also just, I think, cost responsibility. When we're delivering this much money, if we know we're not watching it well and we know we're going to miss, we need to make sure we correct that so we have the right amount of eyes to be responsible to the taxpayer dollar. I'll stop there. So what I have, you said I have like 50, hopefully I'll have 53 after this conversation. Yes. Thank you for the reminder. The traditional budget process doesn't always match our reality. Our reality is we're underwater now. So we would suggest that this engineer position be filled now with a budget amendment so that we can. We do have current candidates that we could slot in. And if the council feels that's good value, then we would hire that position now and help dig out for the workload that we're currently in. Thank you for the consideration.

As a follow-up question to that, either to you or city manager or the finance director, is there room in current budget for the department to cover an early, or not an early, but an immediate filling of that position should council decide to do it?

Mayor, I would say I would look into this a little further, do some analysis, but it's very likely that you're able to do that. This is one of those benefits of having good fiscal conservatism and some fund balance in case you're not able to generate the current year savings, which I could look into. I would just say at this point, it's likely you'll be able to do so.

I'm going to suggest that that may not be quite right, but it could be right with a

proposal um of some sort not making any decision today about that i think based on the information we have but i appreciate it also connecting some dots that are in different slides the development review fee will cover some of this position in the future timelines for development review can add and flow depending on our staffing levels which impacts our commercial customers and our partners out there in the business world. Also, we do rely heavily on consultants to manage our peak workload, and we've had to rely more and more on consultants, so we'll be reducing our consultant costs as well. So we're not just asking for a new position without trying to offset it and make it a neutral ad in the long run.

And again, I'm going to sort of take the liberty of speaking for all of council. We know that you are working very hard to try to cut and bring costs for personnel and everything else down or steady or with as modest an increase as possible. So just I think to make that clear or express to you I think is worth doing.

So with that, are there any other questions on any of the other proposed positions on this slide? And then we need to know if there's general council support for these positions in terms of the 27 budget.

Council members? Yes, Council Member Kern.

So, Director Blackmore, you kind of set us up for a teaser and then didn't tell us. You said that the city manager had some creative ideas on coming up with the funding for the deputy director position?

I didn't mean to be a teaser, but at the surface level, it seems like it's an administrative, general-funded, Parks and Rec administrative type of position, and we worked to really delegate out to the various funds within the department where we thought a lot of the work would end up going with this position, and so it's just spread out, as you would have seen through the previous slides, at 20% here, 15% there, that kind of a thing, instead of just trying to have it all hit the general fund.

Oh, okay. That makes me understand things a little bit better. And then the rec assistant at nights, it's not a full-time. It's, I guess, a 32-hour almost full-time position.

Yeah, it's a tier two full-time up to 35 hours. No overtime without approval, that kind of a thing maxed out. It's kind of a one and a half.

But a benefited position. And is this one of the things that's going to allow us to have some better night hours instead of, I mean, are we just short-staffed for the current early evening hours we have now?

Part of the hour setup is demand and programming demand after we expand and we constrict and expand based on usage of the facility. But this certainly... If we were to do permanent expansion until the 9 p.m. closure would give us that level of consistency, and it would give us an ongoing professional full-time level employee overseeing the facility in the evenings.

And this is, I think, I remember you discussed this before with us, but just because we're in the budget retreat now and there are people watching, I want to bring it up again. So the youth and sports coordinator position that is new, you had mentioned to us that you believed there was a revenue benefit to this position in order to create programming that essentially that job will pay for itself. Is that correct? Is that still the assumption?

I don't know if I go that far. Okay. But I will say that there is a significant... offset to this position because that most of the role is currently being filled by variable labor that will no longer be needed. Um, and so they'll be overseeing a lot of, you know, weekend sports, that kind of thing. The other thing that I had mentioned in previous discussion was we do have wait lists for a number of our programs and this would allow us the opportunity to explore, um, getting some of the people off of that by an expanded program offering. It also gives us the ability to evolve into things like what we're going to do with expanded programming with pickleball or future sports development as it relates to new parks and that kind of thing and has somebody at a higher level at a full-time position that's able to be retained and trained and that kind of thing.

So it wouldn't be 100% dedicated to just youth sports. It's youth activities and all other sports. Correct.

It's youth activities, which I'd highlight on that as well. There's an assistance with summer camp and our current summer camp supervisor is a tier two employee. And so, you know, this position would help offset, you know, those hours shortfalls. It would also be able to provide a supervisory level experience for, you know, field trips and assist throughout the year with things like our child watch program that's currently supervised by our fitness supervisor. So this may give the ability for the fitness supervisor to open up more time to continue to meet the demand for fitness programming. So there's a lot of kind of hats this position would potentially wear. It was also, I think I had mentioned it, but it was originally approved in 2017. I want to say coming out of COVID. There just wasn't the demand as there was still some hesitancy to get back into youth sports. And so the money was reallocated at that time into golf course maintenance to assist with some growing needs there. So this is being brought back forward for additional consideration.

Thank you.

Yes, council members. Two things. The first is I actually think we should, just since it's before us right now, say yes or no to whether we want something to come back on filling the engineering position in the near term. I'm a yes on that, just given the amount of money that's flying around on those projects. If we can avoid one big mistake, this probably pays for itself. Do you think that's true?

But to be clear, you're not suggesting that it is a mistake going into a decision?

No, no, no, no. Just given that the dollar amount's involved with all of our various engineering projects, I think if we're short an engineer, let's get the engineer hired because, you know, if you screw up a $30 million project, it's going to cost you a lot more than $155K. Okay. Bigger picture, though, I sort of have the opposite point or just something that I want us all to keep in mind that in 2018, we had approximately 240 FTEs. Now we have 300. The population of Louisville has not grown. It's essentially the same, plus or minus a few hundred. And I know we've all talked about there's reasons for that around the rec center expansion and so on. but our property tax rate hasn't really gone up. Our sales tax rate hasn't really gone up a little bit for the rec center. And if we continue to add FTE headcount to the tune of five or six or seven or eight per year, that will eventually consume all of our resources. And I'm not saying any of these are bad hires or not needed, but we can't, I mean, we just can't keep doing it eventually adding FTEs without adding revenue to pay for them and I don't have a I don't have any answer to that question But I just do want to bring it up because we've had enormous growth in the size of city staff without any corresponding growth in revenue sources Other comments questions Councilmember

So I'm going to echo in some ways what Council Member Heffner just said. I brought that up in the past, the concern with the expansion of government and not the expansion of residents. And a lot of it is service related. Our residents every year would like more and more service. With that comes the need for more and more staff. But then again, I think for some of those service positions, like around the rec center, this perhaps should not be the burden of all of the taxpayers, but the users requesting the service. And so therefore, I think it needs to come through the fees of the people who are asking for the additional service, asking for the additional employees, let them pay for it, not increasing property taxes so every community member who may not be asking for the increase in services paying for it. I think it needs to be a fee-based allocation. And hence the reason I was asking some of the questions around how we're paying for these positions. Are we saving in one place and another? And maybe, although we're adding staff, we might not be adding cost because we might be removing some of the costs somewhere else. Thank you.

Comments? I'm going to respond to this because I think I want to be very clear about what I see. I've been, I guess, Council Member Fay and I both have been on council since 2019, which was your benchmark year, I think. Council, after council... after Council, including the people at this dais, have voted to pass budgets that increased personnel. And I don't know that, you know, it's not a matter of going back and debating those budgets. I think we all had good reasons or wouldn't have voted for the budgets that we created. That's number one. I think, too, the point, which I do appreciate from Council Member Kern, and I think generally, is that I think there is no question in my mind that the level of expectation in this community has gone up across the board, and in some cases, pretty substantially. And that's okay. But you can only get so much juice out of the orange that you squeeze. And that's going to be something we're going to have to deal with. I think we are dealing with this as we talk about it. I think we're all trying to do that. But it is something that council members see. But we don't see it on a day-to-day basis, department-by-department basis like the staff do. And we've gotten a lot of feedback, all of us, about that. I think it's great to think about fees. My understanding is that staff is thinking in terms of fees for Sort of technology, for example. There's some ways of allocating costs that way. I think we have to be careful for tax reasons. You know, not calling a tax fee. I think we're all sensitive to that under TABOR. And I know that council members are, too. So I mean, I do want to defend the choices that have been made. I understand the optics of having bigger government. And I think that's something we all have to think about. But it's not the only consideration. And it is our job not just to be very careful about who we add and so forth, but to meet the demand that we're getting. And I know other council members have talked about this, that, you know, considering other revenue sources or potential revenue sources as a way of, you know, addressing these things. But there are tradeoffs, to be sure. And we're working through them. And I have a great deal of respect for the staff. Again, I think others on council share that for how we make do with what we've got. And so I think it bears saying those things, you know, just to make sure. I don't know that any of that conflicts with anything that's been said, but I think it's important to say, just as perhaps the person who served the longest on council, maybe because I'm the mayor too, but I think it's important to say.

Yeah, Councilmember Cooperman. Yeah, let me just add sort of one comment on that. I mean, as we have added employees, right, we have done so within our means, right? We, you know, there are little places here and there where we have added a tax like the bag tax or increasing the open space in parks tax, but by and large, right, Sales tax has been pretty constant over the last number of years. Our property taxes have been pretty constant over the last number of years. And so we have been able to increase the number of employees provide more services and yet still pass a balanced budget, you know, maybe looking ahead that's going to change. But, I mean, even right now we're saying we can add these employees and still have essentially a balanced budget for the next couple of years. So, I mean, clearly we have to pay attention to this going forward, but I feel like You know, I don't know. I just feel like that's worth stating. I mean, you could ask the question, like, should we have not hired more employees in the past and saved, I don't know, saved money or put it to other projects or something, which is a perfectly valid question. But then again, like, another thing which is state constant is the distribution of funds to general and to capital, and that has remained constant over time for a while, too. So it's not really clear that maybe we could have taken some of that money and put it to projects. That's all.

Yes, Council Member Fahey.

I just want to add that for the public works, you have increased the water tap fees, the water prices for all residents. And you are providing a core service, a fundamental needed resource for all of the residents, residential or commercial, in the city. And in order to do that, you have to hire some more people and you have to raise the prices for what you do. Rec Center and Golf Course could do the same. I know that the annual membership for a Louisville resident for the rec center is $207 a year. I'm not sure what the non-resident price is, but I know that the non-resident price for an annual membership at the Boulder Rec Center is over $600 a year. So perhaps the price increase in membership would help balance out and cover the cost of the additional staff needed there. So that's all I will say.

Thanks. Any other comments? Yeah, Council Member Hefter.

I just want to briefly agree with that, as well as I think Council Member Kern's broader point. that there are, and I think the city manager has been looking at this and others have been looking at this, there must be more opportunity for us to do cost recovery on certain things like the rec center and shelter rentals and whatever. And we should be taking a very careful look at every opportunity for cost recovery because we have such limited flexibility on taxes and changing taxes. I mean, as the mayor pointed out, basically unlimited appetite for top tier level governmental services and i mean the rec center is a great example right a private gym membership is often 150 a month uh and we're charging 200 some per year and i'm not saying we should we should benchmark to private by any stretch of the imagination but there's probably some room in between those two things any other comments city manager you have some thoughts

No, I'm just looking for yes or no on these positions. Or if you're not at a point to make a decision on some of them, let us know.

That would be helpful. Let me do that. I hope that we haven't... We certainly haven't finished with the discussion. If... If I could, why don't we take two different questions. One is on these particular CMO recs that are on the board here. Is there agreement to approve all of those? Not approve, but direct staff to continue on including those? Yes, council member.

I'm happy to move forward with all of them. On the first one, I am immensely hopeful that we'll get the parks open space and golf funds to a position where they can support this and I don't think what we saw today Is that yet? But I'm hopeful we will get there and this can remain included, but I would include it provisionally until we see more refinement on those funds.

Do people generally agree with what Council Member Heffner said? Go ahead.

I do, and I don't actually understand what the natural resources technician is going to be doing with the open space, but I was thinking things like that, if we're running short to be able to fund the deputy director position, that seems like a higher priority to me if we're trying to figure out where we're coming up with the new funds within what looks like a very difficult budget past the next two years. So I am curious, though, Director Breckmore, what that job does.

So that position oversees the land management components for all of our open space properties, including maintenance and restoration, rehabilitation, fire mitigation, contracts, that kind of thing. They're involved in things like our invasive weed controls, community education, they do noxious weed education seminars, that kind of thing. It's also a proposed higher, in response to the community feedback we've received to do more in this area. Currently, we only have one of these positions in the open space division. It's also in advance, kind of higher in preparation, as I mentioned. We do have 147 acres of open space coming on board The warranty period is within the next two years. So having that person on board and acclimated to our land management structure would be very beneficial for the Open Space Division.

So this person will have some required background, knowledge, specialty area in wildfire mitigation to assist with this? Or are they just assisting with the program that somebody else puts?

Yeah, they'll be responsible for implementing the program that our department is putting forward, whether it's Ember or me or council-driven. Their primary background for these positions usually revolves around natural resource management, ecology, wildlife management, that kind of thing.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah. I'm generally supportive of these positions. I just had one sort of question. So on the following slides, there are lists of positions that are not recommended. And a few of those are in Adam's presentation. departments. I'm just curious. I assume you had discussions about these being the ones you most want to go forward and those other ones are lower priority.

Yeah, I think they're all a priority, right, to your point. We have certain things that could be accomplished with all of the position requests that we have. There's a significant number of positions that were requested in things like golf course maintenance that just there's no way the fund is going to bear it. So we'll make do in there. I do think that every one of these, hopefully through some of my ramblings here, has shown a level of – importance to what we've heard from the community from a service standpoint, as well as from an effectiveness for how we serve the community through this department.

Good. It sounds like the consensus is to support these positions with some further discussion that may happen. I certainly don't want to tie anybody's hands. We're not voting on a budget. providing direction and appreciate all of the careful discussion and really good comments of all the council members on this one and thanks for the staff's responses. The second question is whether council is comfortable with directing staff to prepare or expedited creation this year of a Civil Engineering I, II position. That's the last one on this particular list. Okay. And we'll see a budget amendment on that and propose, you know, a proposal. Okay.

All right, the next list is for variable positions. And so we have lifeguards, which Adam can explain the need for that. The golf course item, this is to align with what they've been spending. And so this isn't necessarily a new request. It's to align with what they have been spending. And then the museum associate interns, Brandy can address this request if you have questions. And note that this one is not in the model. It would be dependent upon the historic tax outcome.

Thanks. Do we have questions about this? Mayor Pro Tem.

Can you clarify for me more what you meant by what they have been spending that comment on?

Yes. So the golf fund historically has funded extra variables based on kind of salary savings and turnover. The last handful of years I've noticed that they used about 30,000 variable hours out there, but budgeted for closer to 23 or 24. So this is looking just to right-size the amount of hours they are using at the golf course between guest service attendants and maintenance workers. and kind of relying less upon turn back or salary savings.

Okay, that's helpful. I mean, given our discussions we just had, about the Gulf Fund, it gives me pause. I guess my question would be, they've been using those hours. Are they necessarily needed going forward or help me understand this?

A couple of things. We have not adjusted yet. We are working with this model to adjust not having winter here anymore. I mean, like really, like the hours in the past have projected that we would be down a couple of months out of the year with no variable salaries being spent at all. And that just has not been the case. And so part of that overage has been the result of just more hours that we are open and needing to have staff there more often to be able to serve our customers. That being said, with the new general manager being on board now for almost a year, this is certainly an area of emphasis that I've stressed to him to work within our means and or give a realistic projection for the expense. At a maintenance side of things, there has been a turn back savings as it relates to the full-time employees over there just because it is a For whatever reason, it's been a high turnover position, and so we have increased our variable budgets on purpose to account for that additional expenses. But it's, again, that hasn't caught up to the trends yet, showing the overall golf fund impact. If that variable expense is offset, if we could retain full-time employees for longer, then we have less need for a variable hour. So you see some of that offset in the turn back for the full-time and maintenance, and you see some of it that's been primarily driven by increased playable days on the op side.

Okay, that's really helpful. And I trust as the conversations around the Gulf Fund, the capital projects, you know, all of that is happening, you all will have a, you know, risk benefit analysis of whether this is most important or some other projects or staff.

Similar to the lifeguard line item here, it's really a balance between what you want to use your full-time labor for and what variable labor should be used for and the cost benefit for each of those things. There could be a drastic reduction in golf course variable labor at the expense of probably ineffectively using your full-time labor to run your front desk wash carts ranger that kind of thing that we're paying variable salary for so i think that there is a balance in there and i think that to director bailey's point this now aligns with trend and it's modeled to kind of show the true impact of that so that we can adjust up and down on that balance I'll speak to lifeguards while I've got the mic real quick. So again, this reflects kind of a true hours need based on full staffing at only using variable employees at Memory Square and our aquatics divisions. It also speaks to an increase in the number of after-hour rentals that we're receiving and additional hours request that do have a revenue offset for the rec center. We're still using our aquatic supervisors and our aquatics manager to lifeguard, particularly in the off season during the day, more than I would like for them to be out on the deck, not supervising, but actually actively lifeguarding. So this is still contingent upon recruitment and retention, which goes back to Director Manzingo's points earlier about investing in that effort, but that's where that projected cost would come from at a maximum level to attain that cost would be wonderful, but it's not entirely realistic probably.

Okay, thank you. That's helpful as well. And I'll just, you know, rise to the surface once again, the conversations of fees to recover some of this and the rentals associated with the pool that requires those lifeguards evaluating those as well. So thank you. That was all very helpful. I appreciate it.

So thumbs up to these Three requests in our direction too. Thumbs up. One final comment about, let's see, I think are we through all of the personnel?

No, Mayor, I have a handful of slides that I don't need to spend a ton of time on, but I do think it's worth recognizing that significant thought was given to many other full-time position requests that were not able to rise up in the model. largely for budgetary constraints but potentially other reasons as well so we could go through those slides if you have any questions thoughts or feelings on them please let us know but again these are not in the model today please do

All right, so we have a management analyst, a termed position for three years, a procurement and contracts manager. This is a void within the organization. Grant administration manager, and then two police officers.

Going to the next slide, please, Myra.

We have two police officers in 2027, two police officers in 2028, a records lead technician, a project supervisor for PROS, and then a parks technician one. And then going to the next slide, park maintenance technician two, a golf maintenance tech two spring, and then a ranger naturalist. So as Ryder noted, some of these are based upon Well, all of these are based upon budget constraints. And another position, you know, identified today was volunteer coordinator. That could be potential. But, you know, we did prioritize, and those are the positions that you see before you in terms of recommendations. Not that these positions aren't warranted, but we just can't recommend them at this time.

Any questions about... Any of these positions that were not recommended? Yes, Councilmember Kern.

Thanks. It's just the grant administration. We've talked about this, and we've had a lot of grants in the past, and we also had, like, you know, we've seen some come through. We've seen department heads, particularly around sustainability, that handle this really well for us. But you had mentioned in the past we might be missing some opportunities if we do not have this position. I'm curious. I mean, obviously, the landscape has changed state and federal-wise, and maybe that's not applicable right now, but it might be two years from now. So would this be something you would be continuing to evaluate for us?

It would be. And in making that statement, there are a lot of grant opportunities that are out there that we're not plugged into. And so in having a full-time grants person, they would be monitoring what those opportunities are. But I would also say right now, we're not at a capacity to take on a lot more. And so sometimes these grants with good intentions can become curses because when you have to administer them and also come up with the match funding, it can become difficult. And when we get into the CIP discussion, just preview, because we're talking about DCAR projects, this is going to be a key conversation that we need to have. So maybe in the future this is something that we need to look ahead to. But right now, you know, we don't have capacity really to take on a lot more grants, but we are missing opportunities for grants. Okay.

Thank you.

Any other comments? I think that's a great comment, Council Member Kern. I wanted to build on it just to the extent that some of the positions are being proposed do have elements that include kind of paying for themselves or partly paying for themselves. We can't count on the revenue. It's like grant administration, right? You hire somebody on grants and you can't say, well, we know that that's going to pay for itself because that's just not the way the budget accounting works. But I think it's important for the public to know that there's something to be considered there, and I think staff has already explained a bit of that. I think the other thing is that some of the positions that have been proposed reduce the risk of expenditures that either are very likely to occur without that or could occur and have, you know, if you did a the calculation about the percentage risk versus the percentage loss that we might suffer, I think there's an aspect of that, which is something I think most people understand a little bit, but it's not, we don't always know what we don't know, but sometimes we know that We may be on borrowed time on certain kinds of things and I think of that civil engineer position as one of them because there's just a lot that we can do more efficiently and prevent big problems from occurring and resolve the ones that do occur. So I wanted to point that out. You want to keep going?

Thank you, Mayor. That brings us to service level reductions. Department heads and staff have refined and reviewed their budgets. A few reductions have been recommended. None are being recommended to be restored at this time. If you have any questions, we're happy to answer those on these.

Questions from Council? Council Member Cooperman?

So the first one, the commercial sustainability rebates, is that elimination or is that just reduction in the amount of funding?

Thank you, Councilmember. It's reduction in the amount of funding. And those first two are to offset a grant that we've historically received and used for staffing, but we will no longer be able to receive and use for anything but an added item. And since we're not in a place to add at this point in time and the grant wouldn't fully cover the things we would add, we're working to show those offsets.

Okay. And if I remember correctly, we've actually not really done either of those first two things, right? The applications are still open for the rebates and we haven't started the...

the applications are still open for the rebates um and this proposal to bring it down to forty thousand from seventy thousand is right sizing it with the applications it looks like we're receiving right now so right now we have four applications they close in about a week i think august third or fourth um and they cover things like decarbonization efficiency and turf removal we have seen not as much uptake on that as we could and then the The Sustainable Neighborhood Network, we are still proposing to launch this for this year. It's in the works with a launch date in September. We would still run this program, look for opportunities to integrate it with other things out there. I know we've got community groups like Louisville Fire Smart. See what that looks like and wrap it as just a one-year pilot.

And then could you just comment on the last line while you're thinking about eliminating that?

Yeah, that's a great question. So the last line is the community event sponsorship program. This was a pilot in 2026. It did take fairly significant staff resources to work through this. It funded nine events, and I would say it seems very likely that most of them, with a strong exception for one of them, would have gone on without this funding. So as we're looking for service level reductions, this is an opportunity for council to choose that.

And if we did eliminate that, do you have a suggestion for an alternative? I mean, if I think about the turkey trot, we seem to have a lot of interest in supporting them to some extent. So if we did, but... not through this method, what would you recommend?

So I can speak to it, and City Manager Langley can speak to it, too. You know, one of the alternatives is pairing this in the future with a program such as your nonprofit grants. The organization I came from, these things were compared. The scope of that program was expanded a little bit. Did you have something you wanted to add there?

I would just say if Council's interested in funding Turkey Trot, we could put that as a line item in the budget for a specific amount and do it specific for Turkey Trot and then not include other organizations.

Okay. Thank you. Questions?

I just have one question. Is the back tax amount used at all for or could it be used for decarbonizing city facilities?

So that's a great question. I'd want to look at the language again of the tax. I think the answer is potentially under the uses of the tax, so I'd want to confirm that. However, the amount of bag tax is not significant enough to make an impact on those projects. We're talking about millions of dollars of projects for decarbonization.

Any other questions, comments? As to the, thank you for the clarification on the last item, and I don't want to spend too much time on this. What I would suggest, be very interested in other council members' input on this, is I would like to add to Turkey Trout as a line item, but I think we need more information. Specifically, I'd like more information about what the sponsorships of other communities are of that. event Have been We could have a I guess what I would propose is we have a placeholder and we come back to that Sometime when we have more information How the other council members think about that Yes, council member Or excuse me member too.

So when you say put turkey trot as a line item you mean on service level reductions and

No. As an item in the budget.

In the budget. Got it.

Yeah.

Okay. My only other comment on this, staff clearly has thought very carefully about what they're going to put on this slide. And as you continue to, you know, work through the budget, I'm open if you have other service level reductions that you think are needed to balance the budget, let's have those conversations sooner rather than later.

Okay, yeah, Council Member Cooperman.

I agree with Council Member Hamilton's comment. I had one other question. So is this meant to be service level reductions where you look across all funds, or is it meant to be like this is most, I mean, these are all three in the city manager's office. So I just wasn't clear, like, where you were looking for these reductions?

Yeah, Councilmember, we are looking citywide, but I think it's worth a caveat that the direction to all department heads was cost neutrality. So they were asked to refine and make adjustments within their operations to address just the headwinds of just rising costs across the board. Probably why this list isn't so robust. As we've brought to you today a budget that's closer to adoption when you take those things into consideration so that they looked within their operating budgets and were expected to kind of hold the line. And so that direction resulted in not too many other opportunities for reductions.

I would also say that this contributes to the theme of transitional budget, is that we need to set the baseline within the foundation of the community for what we provide in terms of services so that we can have that process with the community and council in terms of what people are willing to accept for service level reductions. If we were to put those forward right now, that we would probably have a lot of conversation about things and we wouldn't have the foundation for people to understand where we're coming from. And so in 2027, we really need to focus on creating that foundation of the why so that we can then start to have the conversation of what can we do.

Thanks.

Okay.

All right. You want to... Continues so maybe before I continue do I have?

Clear direction on whether or not to continue moving along in the budget process with these outside of the city managers recommendation in September So I had one more question so I Think as you said before the the first two reductions are offsetting essentially grant money that we're not going to be getting and That grant money has mostly been paying for a staff position, right? So is the idea that these offsets are going to help us retain that staff person?

That's correct.

Okay. Thank you.

Can I clarify direction on the last item? I heard that you would like us to bring back more information about the sponsorships from other communities for Turkey Trot and consider adding it as a solo line to the budget. Okay, thank you.

Great. And otherwise, are we comfortable with each of these non-requests? Or, excuse me, service level reductions, really? Yes. Okay. Good. With a little side consensus on that one. All right. May we go to the next part? Just to be clear, it's about, we've got about 50 minutes to go through the remaining slides. We've got at least slide-wise about 25 slides out of the whole 102, so I'm hopeful we can get through those, but... I think we're doing pretty well. Long enough to cover the subject matter, short enough?

Yes, Mayor, I think we're in a good spot. We may not get your second break. Continuing on, other policy and fiscal items with significant impacts to the budget. Let's talk about expense growth outpacing revenue growth briefly. This has been a theme throughout the presentation. So while significant progress has been made in the budget development today here at the budget retreat, there still are a number of uncertainties regarding revenues and expenditures. Again, we're seeing slowly projected sales and property tax growth. We will continue to monitor sales tax extremely closely. The preliminary property tax information is expected to be from the assessor in August. And there's uncertainty around impacts of Sundance, Redtail, King Soopers, and other future potential developments. We'll keep monitoring that. Inflation headwinds continue to be strong, so it's something that we'll monitor and will likely impact future iterations of the budget. Prioritizing our personnel and those costs, and also prioritizing our required and contractual obligations, you know, our insurance and legal costs, utilities, dispatch, technology, and other maintenance items have been prioritized in this budget. Okay, here's another council policy decision point. We've talked about this throughout the model, the presentation today, but over the past three years, the recreation center debt mill levy was temporarily lowered to help offset those property tax increases. However, beginning in 2027, we are recommending to reset the current mill levy of 1.375 to 1.7 to align with the annual debt service payments through 2042. The estimated impact to the median home is roughly $20 per year. In future years, the rec center mill levy will continue to be adjusted to align with future debt payments. So I'd like to pause here and seek your support to suspend the temporary mill levy credit and to align it with our annual debt servicing payments.

Is another way of putting the policy decision that we're letting what was a temporary measure lapse? Of course. Essentially. Okay. All right. Other council member questions? Are we comfortable with that decision? Everybody's got a thumbs up on that one.

You all were here last night. I will skip this one. I do not believe we no longer need direction to place this on the ballot. Thank you. Not sure if in the last 48 minutes we can afford a break. So if the mayor is okay, we will continue on to board and commission requests. Five boards and commissions made...

Is that okay? Yeah, I'm just sort of doing a quick head count. Are we?

Two minutes.

Pardon me?

Two minutes.

Two minutes. Why don't we take a break until 4.15? We'll be back and race. And Director, thank you for taking us through the last no more than 44 minutes.

Thank you, Mayor. I appreciate all your time and attention. I know you guys were here late last night and some of you have an event after this meeting as well. So very much appreciate your time and attention today. So board and commission requests, staff, department heads, received... We're getting there. All right, bringing you all back in. Included within today's packet as an attachment are, we've compiled board and commission requests from the following boards and commissions. Recreation Advisory Board, Louisville Sustainability Advisory Board, Open Space Advisory Board, Cultural Advisory Board, Historical Museum Advisory Board. I've summarized this in total and individually by board over the next handful of slides. We've also indicated whether or not they are in our current modeling or not. Department heads are here to speak to those requests if you have any questions. So in total, we received 33 requests across those five boards, totaling nearly $15 million with some additional positions as well. You can see per board those amounts across, and you can see where their funding source would primarily land for Cultural Advisory Board. The general fund, same with sustainability. Open Space Advisory Board would land within the open. and space fund. The recreation advisory board is covering a few different funds, the capital, golf, and recreation funds. And the historical museum advisory board, again, would fall within the general fund. So moving through these, and I suppose beginning with the cultural advisory board, at this time, within the five boards, I'll probably turn to the department heads that oversee them. So if you have any questions or if Director Cummings would like to add some color to these, Please do.

Thank you, Director Bailey. Happy to do a very brief walkthrough. The Cultural Advisory Board submitted a request this year in support of staffing for the Arts and Culture Department. As we know, that department is currently one full-time employee and one part-time employee who are responsible with putting on 29 community events throughout the year, including our banner, Fourth of July, that happened this year with over 12,000 attendees. 1.5 people is not quite sufficient to continue these beloved community traditions and uphold them not only operationally but for safety. So the board is requesting an increase in staff funding to either make our current part-timer full-time or the addition of a full-timer to make the total department two, 2.5 FTEs. In addition to that, as we've talked about throughout the year, events are costing more to do the same. We've seen this with our partners who have come before us with the same sort of asks, specifically 4th of July this year. Next year, without an increase to that budget, we will not be able to have any entertainment in 4th of July. So it'll be fireworks, food trucks, and nothing else because the cost of inflation for events is far surpassing our Our operational budget is part of the operational fund, or the general fund. Lastly, our current allocation for public art is $25,000 a year, which is insufficient for any real gain for the city of Louisville's temporary or permanent collection of public art. And so with an increased desire from the community, the Culture Advisory Board thought it was best to bring forward a request for increased support in that so we can activate programs like we see in our neighboring communities, Lafayette, Longmont, and Superior. Happy to answer any questions.

Council questions? Yes. Mayor Patel.

I just have a general question and I don't know who can answer it, but when boards and commissions submit these requests, do they have, um, do they get information about where the budget is when they submit these requests?

I can speak to that for my boards, if that's helpful. So yes, we talk with each of our boards about where the budget is, how the funding shows up, the difference between being part of the general fund where we don't have costs or fees that we can raise to cover the cost of our services we provide the community versus being in an enterprise fund that might have those opportunities. And then we talk about what goals might align with what the department has set out for the coming years and the goals we hear from city council and city leadership overall. And then that results in, well, to do those things, we need X. And then we calculate what that might cost.

And do they see some of the projections and bar graphs that we see typically?

This information isn't available until we get into budget season. And these requests are due before that information is calculated. But they are able to look back at last year's. We do share with them, or I did share with my boards, that we are expecting a flat budget. budget, which is why this is actually a reined-in request compared to what you might see from some of our other boards.

Yeah. Got it. Thank you. Okay.

Other questions? Yes, Councilmember Kruppelman.

Yeah, I guess the first two items sort of strike me as things that Cultural Services might have requested itself. You know, so I guess I'm curious for the first one, you know, if we left our staffing as it is, you know, do we feel like we're going to have to reduce the number of events that we're putting on or can we maintain what we did in this last year? And then likewise for the second one, right, if we don't put a little more money behind those events, are we going to have to cut back on them in this coming year?

Yeah, so these were also areas that cultural services identified as service level reductions in preparation for a neutral budget. And so without investment, we will have to see reduction in programs offered to the community. We just aren't able to continue to do more with less at this point. Our hope is to find ways to make that as neutrally impactful to the community as possible. Maybe we can team up with other departments to help cost share or people share. We've been continuing to look at ways to activate volunteers, get those into our communities. The city's working hard on updating their volunteer processes and policies to help us with that. But overall, at this point, we are beyond capacity and we remain beyond capacity.

comments or questions yes come to my rafter I think at minimum we should do the the middle item maintaining the same level of fourth and fourth of July and summer concerts I know we would hear I think a lot from folks if those were scaled back significantly from what they are now yes councilmember Kern

So I'm curious, so you're mentioning specific with the 4th of July, there's three primary cost components, the food trucks, the music, and the fireworks. I thought the fireworks were donated to the city. Is there marginally?

No, I'm not sure where that information might have come from. Fireworks cost us $18,000. Okay, so then, and the

Where's like the cost to the city for the food trucks?

Yeah, so actually to clarify what I was saying that this coming year's 4th of July would only be fireworks and food trucks. Because we wouldn't be able to apply any of our music. We wouldn't be able to have any bands. We wouldn't have any bounce houses or family entertainment. It would just be food trucks, fireworks, golf course fees.

And I have that breakdown of those numbers if you'd like me to run through them. And what do you think the cutback is in the summer concerts that you're suggesting if we don't increase the budget?

We rolled back to four when the budget was reduced in 2025. Four is manageable with reduction of maybe other events as well. So things that might be on the table are things like Block Party, the World Music Series. There's some wintertime events that we do. The silent movie that's rather popular at the Art Center that happens in October. So overall, it's that domino effect of trying to figure out what we can prioritize and maintain.

So if we aren't able to afford the increase for this, at least maybe the whole amount, maybe just enough just to do the 4th of July, it is possible though for you to cost shift into maintaining the summer concerts versus some of the other items that you just mentioned? Possibly. Yeah, because I agree. I think the summer concert series is, I mean, we consistently hear how popular that is and what a draw and an interesting thing on a Thursday night. So I would I hear about it more than a lot of other events that the city sponsors. So my guess is that it would be a disappointment if we couldn't continue with it. I don't know if that means the extra funding has to come in, be added to the budget, but instead taken from some other areas, in my opinion.

Other comments? Yes, Council Member Cooperman.

One little question. If we shifted to something like a drone show, do you know if that would be more expensive or less expensive?

The smallest available drone show on the front range is $15,000 outside of our current fireworks budget.

So it would be more expensive. More expensive. Yes. Okay. That's interesting. Yes. That's another discussion, but I was just curious. But I tend to agree with Council Member Heffner. I would like to try to fund the middle item to some extent.

Other comments?

Go ahead.

I would agree with that also to fund the center item, but I would also be interested in at least going from part-time to a full-time on that first position, the events coordinator.

appreciate that i do want to speak to the fact that while funding the additional um costs of inflation for events does not give us the body resources that we need so to to council members point there staffing is is a sort of a tandem situation because there's 29 events throughout the community every year and 1.5 people we tend to run up into our allowance for how often we're able to work our part-timers so that becomes quite a challenge.

It sounds like we have a consensus on the middle one. This is a hard one, I think, because I think having staff there to do events is really important. I think public art, we've heard certainly from the public over and over again about that, but it's not the priority that other items elsewhere in the budget are, and I know that director you've gone through and these aren't in your current requests or the part you're requesting that's but in I guess quite one question for you is this is a board and Commission request You've reviewed these as part of your own analysis, right, in terms of priorities?

Correct. So while these requests didn't come through our budget process, these have been internal requests as we've been looking at department restructuring and what we can do to best utilize what resources we have available to align our resource level with our output. So these numbers are accurate to our pay and to our policies, yes.

I mean, on the public art, there's nothing certainly that stops community members from collectively acting to potentially provide funding that might be used consistent with our own policies.

We are working through those policies. Currently, that level of donation policy for the city is not in place. So we're working through those processes. City manager.

Just something I'd like to note, too. You know, I really appreciate everything that Director Cummings does and her department does. This is a hard conversation, and this is a hard conversation for her staff to listen to. Part of that is because, on the flip side, we approve increases for chamber contract. We approve increases for DBA contracts. We're going to be bringing forward to you a request from the DBA to give them an additional $35,000 for the ice rink for last year. because they are short that amount for that. They're gonna be requesting additional funding for the ice rink for this year. They're gonna be requesting additional funding for street fair. And so really this comes down to is council's priority city events Is council's priority the broader city events that are being put on by multiple organizations? And sometimes I feel like we give Director Cummings mixed messages in terms of what we support. And we're looking for more definitive, if you want cultural services to be in charge of these events, then we need to provide them the ability to do so, or we need to talk about events that we can cut. or are we going to put more funds towards these events that are run by other agencies and then we're we're great with what they can do with what they have and so this is again this is that conversation of these are going back to writer's early slide about some difficult conversations this is one of those difficult items because nobody feels good talking about this i i was going to make a suggestion about this i'd be very interested in how council

might think about this. Clearly, we have, I think, consensus about the second item. I wonder, as we consider those other items that you were talking about, potential requests from DBA and so forth, whether we might maybe revisit this under the perhaps broader umbrella of events. We might be able to conceivably make a policy decision related to that and have a little bit more fulsome discussion. It's one of the things that's hard about this is just the way it works and the time space continuum. I think it was described in one Council meeting is that we're not we don't have all of the like things to compare with right and You've brought it up, and I do appreciate that So I would just suggest maybe we come back. You know we give the guidance That we all I think have a consensus about and then maybe talk about the other two and whatever else relates to events and the balance between city sponsored events, city staffed events, and those sponsored staff outside agencies that get money from us. Does that sound like something first that

That sounds like a good approach. Another option would be if you wanted to fund some of these with one-time funds, recognizing it's just for this budget cycle, as we, during this next two-year period, work through some of these items and gives us time to work through them. that would give you the opportunity to continue provide Director Cummings the resources that she needs for the next two years as we then evaluate Sundance and evaluate these other items that will occur during this budget period.

We might be able to do that along with the other items, no? I mean, I don't want to hold up the process too much. But I mean, we're going to be dealing with that in the budget process, maybe doing all of what we've been talking about together. What you just mentioned, what I mentioned might work. Yes. council member.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think we should fund the first two items here for both years of this budget with the expectation that, you know, we'll revisit them as we consider this from a, from a higher level perspective. Um, but, but these are highly visible, very important events to the community. It's, uh, you know, Delivering water is very important and very good. It doesn't generate a lot of joy or excitement. These generate a lot of joy and excitement. It's a relatively modest amount of money in terms of everything we're looking at. And I just, I think we've got to do it for this budget cycle. And we should have the more detailed conversation about where all of, all of these dollars are going and DBA and street fair and so on. Um, but, I think it would be a mistake to let these dwindle.

So my only concern with the first one, by only approving it for the next two years, is that that actually creates an employment challenge. Unless we're saying let's approve either another part-time person to help with the events, because that's a really easy thing to hire somebody just for a season or two seasons or what have you. I think making somebody a full-time employee, that is not going to change. And the expectation should be then that that's a permanent change.

We could do a limited term where it's for a two-year period. And that would give us the opportunity to then reevaluate at the end of that two-year period.

My only concern is if it's like we have a part-time person, it's as an existing part-time coordinator, if that person has the expectation that they're now full-time, I almost feel like it's an unfair teaser to say, well, for two years, if you'll do it, it's full-time. So stop whatever else you're doing to help you make a living. And then in two years, we come up with a completely different restructure, and then that person no longer has their full-time job. I would... That seems, I mean, unless that individual and the director knows that that individual is like, no, I would love the opportunity to work only for two years full time. But I just, I can imagine if I was that person, that would be very confusing for me.

So that's my only concern with approving the employment. And I agree with that. I mean, I guess I would just, I would go back to what I suggested initially, which is do the second one. I think it's hard to do force planning on the fly. It's just like it is. And I wonder whether, you know, as a function of how we choose to deal with outside organizations that the director may have a sense that, oh, you know, one FTE is not going to be enough or maybe it's going to be 1.5 or something or whatever. God forbid, less. I would hate to push you into that position and then have to re-discuss it later because we don't have to make that decision today. I think it's better to have all the information with us at once. Yes.

Representative.

Yeah, I really quite like the idea of having all events under an umbrella to evaluate it. And the other thing I wanted to say is my initial question about are boards and commissions aware of our budgetary constraints was by no mean directed specifically at this board. You guys just happen to be the first ones. But I just wanted to ask the question up front and really apply that to all the boards and commissions just so we can understand what their expectations were when they submitted all of these requests.

Consensus, how? I mean, are you comfortable with... It sounds like that some of us are interested in putting it all together.

Mayor, if I may, I heard that we want to follow up on the larger picture and we want to follow up on potentially funding with one time. Go ahead.

Just pushing off the whole decision for later?

That's what I heard. I thought I heard fund with one time and then follow up on big picture, but there was a lot of waffling on that.

I was in favor. I like the idea of, at minimum, the event inflation for the next two years so that that's set so the plans can get made. My only concern was saying yes for the next two years from an employee perspective was converting somebody from a part-time position into a full-time. That's a bigger thing. So, I mean, I would be in favor of a second part-time person because that's a much easier thing to do just for a two-year cycle. And then over the next year or so, Mayor, have the big, like this year rather, have the big conversation about all of these events. I thought that's what we would do, but let's fund these, the second line item definitely, perhaps even a part-time person, which is the first one, just for now so that Director Cummings can make plans and move forward. Yep.

I'd recommend funding both. And then as staff, we're happy to work with HR and Director Cummings on the best way to do that position, keeping in mind the HR concerns.

And what I was referring to is not kicking that can way down the road. It was just that maybe when you're coming back with some of these other things within this budget development that we deal with it. But I'm fine. I would like to hear from the director if she's comfortable with that way of proceeding, whether there's some cost to it. I'm not trying to screw up. The last thing is screwing up your own planning and budgeting. That's not my interest. It's efficiency.

No, I think much like Deputy City Manager said, with a one-time allocation for both the first and the second, we could work within our city processes and with HR to determine how that additional, whether it's turning someone full-time or additional part-time coordinator position would work best with our own policy and practice.

Fair enough. Thank you. So with that, is there consensus for the first two? All right. Good. All right. Direction received and process. Go ahead.

Continuing on, we have four more boards. We have 20 minutes. So I just want to put that in perspective. And if some of this leaks to a future meeting, you just let us know. I don't want to rush you, but I just want you to know how much time we have left. Just use nouns and verbs.

So in the interest of time, I'll cover LSAB here. This board was aware of our financial situation and I think they were very thoughtful in their requests. Their first request was to add grants to the sustainable neighborhood networks. This is a service level reduction that council has given us direction to pursue. Water conservation programs in commercial and both residential were items they were looking at. We do know that Public Works and Utilities is doing some water conservation programming, so there might be some work there. sustainability specialists and volunteer recruitment. They wanted this both for support of the sustainability programs and for that volunteer coordination need, which we heard is a follow-up item that Council has been interested in. And then that is it. I was going to start into OSEP.

Thoughts from Council? The first three strike me as fairly small ticket items. That doesn't mean we should be approving them or not, but they are relatively small. The fourth, I'm mindful that There were a lot of discussions with staff about positions. We had a discussion on council about how many more FTEs or even part-time positions we add. guess I'm based on an LSAT request and I think LSAT is I mean I appreciate they're suggesting this I just would kind of expect that that would have been already in the suggestions by staff if it were a priority and so I think that one I would be certainly would want to just take off our further consideration today The others we can talk about if you want.

I agree with your reasoning.

Other council comments about these three? Are they worth, I mean, is there consensus to take off the sustainability specialist as an additional request for funds? I feel like Sam has

presentation to me the way I interpreted it as we already made a decision on the top row line item. The next two can be encompassed in some capacity with some of the work that Curt and his team is doing. I think you made great points about the part-time position. So for me, at this point in time, I don't see the need to designate funds for these particular items.

I agree with that.

Others? I agree. All right. We can move on. Moving on to our third advisory board. This is Open Space Advisory Board. Within this one, you'll note on the far right, many of these are included in the existing model. With that, I will turn it over to Adam or to Council if you have any questions for Director Blackmore.

I'll go first. So to Mayor Pro Tem's question earlier, the reason why you do see a lot of yeses on this, number one, we appreciate the support in saying yes, but we also align our CIP request process internally with OSAB's review. So a number of these are put forward in a memo as a level of support for what staff has already requested. SUBMITTING FOR CONSIDERATION, SO THAT'S WHY YOU MAY SEE AN INORDINATE AMOUNT OF YESES. IT'S NOT JUST BECAUSE OPEN SPACE IS THE GREATEST. THERE IS A PROCESS THAT LEADS TO AN ALIGNMENT WITH STAFF'S REQUEST AND OSAB'S. So you've seen all of the yeses as we've gone through the capital plan as a component of the open space fund review. The no's on here, there are a couple staff positions. Again, the project manager position isn't currently in the model because some of those duties are incorporated into the deputy model. And the ranger naturalist was a... potential push out to a 2028 or a 2029 request as we expand our trail mileage. So it's kind of tied to the need for additional rangers with increased trail inventory that we currently don't have. You see the natural resource technician as mentioned is a yes. The other no was just a prioritization of where to allocate the potential future trail money to and the community connections went over as a priority. in our mind and in discussions with OSAP over some of the regional trail costs that comes along with this. And as our city manager Langley discussed, there's still a further evaluation needed for the volunteer and education coordinator positions. So that's a recap of where we got to with OSAP.

Well, first, are there any council questions? And second, if there aren't, are council members comfortable with priorities that have already been set and discussed? Previously or or at least by implication and not adding these Go ahead council member.

Okay. Thanks I'm actually appreciate that you guys coordinated with the board with a lot of this it Actually really helps with the process. I was curious about its new trails neighborhood connections as part of the 225,000 we're asking for but new trails and it says safety access and road improvements what the safety and access seems like a high priority with the new trails. I'm just not understanding how that's not already built into that.

That didn't move forward because it's not a OSAP purview. It's not an open space purview to discuss crosswalks and that kind of thing. So as a recommended use of open space funds, that wouldn't be something that we would consider.

Oh, that's what that means. Oh, that's what I was trying. I had no idea what it meant, that that meant crosswalk.

Yeah, it's a component of the trail system, but it wouldn't be under the purview of OSAP to provide a recommendation.

It's where Public Works has already, like there's a lot of intersections where they've already handled that.

It's more of a roadway improvement.

Okay, thank you.

Wonderful. Keeping Director Blackmore in the hot seat, we have the Recreation Advisory Board requests.

Okay, so this is the Rec Advisory Board. Again, same kind of a process with this particular board that we just mentioned with the Open Space Advisory Board. So we take a look at the previous six-year CIP and kind of build out the next six-year CIP. RAB has been more inclined to provide resources recommended projects in their memo to bring awareness to a desire of future desires, if you will, versus immediate approval. Hence, you know, the $7 million for soccer and multi-use fields is meant to illustrate that that's a high priority for them as future development and future infrastructure needs. We did fund... Until recently, a couple of these. The clubhouse pre-design, as you can see, was originally in the model per the direction today. That will be removed from the model. We have included, per the discussion and then the confirmed support from RAB, the potential for a puck and stick court of some sort to replace the inline rink that's being converted to pickleball that's built into the model and put into the 2028 budget with a placeholder for funding still to be determined that location that would be a component of that project. And then City Manager Langley touched on the water rights item for Coal Creek Golf Course. We've elected at this point in time not to include funding for site plan review of the park parcel at Redtail Ridge. That'll be a future budget ask with some level of alignment to the long-range plans, desires from the community. and the Centennial Park Tennis Courts, two new courts. Again, that's just not a cost that we're able to bear in the funds at this moment, and will be considered in future expansion, again, based on community feedback from the long-range plan.

I'm not sure I understood what you just said.

Well, there's clubhouse pre-design. That's coming off the list. And I thought water rights were off the list too. Is that not right?

Water rights are listed already in an unfunded list. The only one that was funded initially in the model that we've been asked to take off today is the clubhouse pre-design.

Okay. All right. At any rate. What are thoughts about adding any of these that are not already in, I guess, yeses in the final? Well, is there any interest in adding any of the ones that are not already baked into the draft or baked into the request that you've made? Council Member Kern.

So I don't, I have an interest, but I want to clarify, I don't believe there's the budget. We've heard for years now the request for the tennis courts, and I think it was the number one priority from the Rec Advisory Board when we met with them, was to be able to move that forward. So I would love if there was a way, and we found the funding through capital improvements to do this, because I recognize the community's need and the board's request repeatedly for this part. And the fact that they have presented, and I think this would be correct, Director Blackmore, that the tennis courts could produce revenue for the city if used for the tennis association?

They would potentially, yeah. I also would guess just for your reference that that $1.5 million is a low estimate based on some of the earthwork and the grading that we think we would need to do out there to add these. So it's also not in there because I think it needs a deeper dive into the actual cost of projection.

Okay. Yeah. So I just wanted to say there's not lack of interest. I just realized there's lack of funding. Thank you.

Yeah, and I would just also note really quick that if the desire is for more tennis courts, that'll be reflected in the long-range planning. It could be incorporated into future park site development that may be a little more efficient with the construction.

Okay. It sounds like we have consensus not to add further based on the RAB requests.

Okay, next. Our final board request is the Historical Museum Advisory Board. It's on the screen now. There's some potential impacts with the outcome of the tax. But for additional color, I'll turn it over to Director Cummings.

Director Blackmore and I closing you guys out today. So HMAB also had submitted a request this year looking for staffing support this last year. And actually every year for the last five years, the museum's associates have seen 100% turnover. year after year which brings some continuity issues both in supporting the community and doing our work to support historic preservation so the ask was to increase one of our part-time positions to full-time to again retain some of our local talent or to add one additional full-time position to to the team, should the historic preservation tax pass, this could be covered by that. Should it not, HMAB would still love to see if council has appetite for supporting that staffing increase. We've talked at length about storage offsite. Again, with the historic preservation tax, there's opportunity to offset some of that, increasing inflation costs to museum operations. And then much like our friends at RAB, The staff work spaces and offices and program event space are more of an aspirational awareness, recognizing that in the 2017 museum expansion plan, there was a great desire from the community to see more spaces available for programming for our historical preservation museum and those programs together.

Any questions? It would appear that the first two are maybe sort of premature to include in the budget. We could include it in the budget right now, but we maybe need not. Is there a particular cost to the operations if we don't include those before the tax passes?

No, not if... There is no additional like service level reduction that happens should the tax pass. Should the tax not pass, we come back to service level reduction conversation. So right now that directly impacts our public education and programming. That would be what would greatly reduced.

So I guess my proposal on this would be to, without passing judgment, on the first two, maybe even expressing an interest in those, we wait until the historic preservation tax result and then address these two. And then otherwise, leave the other two off. Yes? We've got a consensus on that one. Did we really finish that with four minutes?

Mayor, I can bring us home now. Again, our eyes were bigger than our plate for the capital improvement plan discussion, development, and prioritization. You have all these materials in the packet. Moving forward, why don't we hop to next steps? We'll jump over the capital slides. We will carve out some time at the, I just connected with the clerk, the August 11th council meeting so we can engage the full city council to go through CIP refinement and development. So now, between now and then, you are welcome to go through the materials to this packet where every capital project is listed, hyperlinked, and the pages. And we can really spend the appropriate amount of time to discuss the capital plan. Beyond that meeting on August 11th, which on the slide is date TBD, August 20th, we'll have a finance committee. We'll have a recap of all of that work. September 1st, we are targeting the city manager's recommended budget presentation, budget public hearing on the third Tuesday of October with adoption plan for Monday, November 2nd. Again, this was a lot of time. I'm truly appreciative of all of your engagement and energy through this process. We'll have some more work to do. That's everything we had to cover today.

Anything else that council members have? Questions? Otherwise? All right. I'll just add. that I really appreciate all of staff, again, the public, for thoughts that they've provided to us, council members, boards and commissions. Look forward to the next thing and really appreciate our... Everybody's working together to hit the budget of time that we... set for this. And hopefully give our Ward 2 representatives time to catch their breath before the Ward 2 meeting tonight. And it's being held where?

Relish.

Relish. We're going to be at Relish, not the Rec Center. Anybody who's there, who's online and here or otherwise.

Grab a bite, grab a drink, and grab a meeting.

Amen. All right. Do we have a motion to adjourn? So moved. second all in favor aye aye any opposed thank you everybody