City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening.

I'd like to start the meeting with a call to order. Let's begin with the pledge of allegiance.

one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. I would like to continue this meeting with a roll call. So, Mayor Mike DeMora.

I am here. No, I told you. Council Member Margrisimo. Here.

City Council Member Jim Salsweed.

Here.

All right. Council Member Eric Barkas.

Here.

And Council Member Burl Barkas.

Here.

Did I get them all?

You got them. All right.

Thank you. Thank you. All right, the consent agenda, approval of the agenda.

I'll make that motion to approve the consent agenda as presented. And I'll second it. All right.

Approve and place on file the minutes of the regular May 4th, 2026 City Council meeting. Oh, so do I stop here? Add item A to the agenda, MDOT's trail contract award approval.

I'll restart the motion with those changes. I'll support. Call again.

All right, start a roll call. Mayor Mike DeVore?

Yes.

Council Member Barclay-Simons?

Yes.

Council Member Jim Saltsmeedle? Yes. Council Member Eric Varkas? Yes. And Council Member Burl Varkas?

Yes.

All right, we'll move on to public comment for agenda items tonight. Okay, seeing none, we'll move. Yep, okay.

I am Herman Westright. from the Lowell Veterans Center. I'm past commander of the BFWF Post 8303. Currently, I am senior vice commander of Post 8303 and vice commander of American Unleashing Post 152. Last 22 years, I've been the parade master of the Low Memorial Day Parade. The VFW has the responsibility of doing the parade. The American Legion has responsibility at Oakwood Cemetery to do the ceremony. Well, last year I was contacted by the 1st Michigan Light Artillery. They wanted to be in the parade. I told them, you're certainly welcome, but it's kind of too late for me to come before the city council. Well, this year, you've got a whole week to think about it. It's going to be different this year. They have three replica Civil War cannons. And instead of the usual, three volleys from riflemen, I intend to have the cannon go off one at a time. Boom.

Boom.

Boom. Of course, it'd be a lot louder than that. And there'll be blanks, just like the rifles. And because I would like to have them pointed west, but I think it'd be better if we just had them pointed north. So yep, parade starts at, step off time is at 10. We always have a main street ceremony at our veterans park. And then from there we go on to Monroe, go down to Oakwood Cemetery. It'd be a little different since they put that block in the middle of the road, but I think we can get around that. And at Oakwood Cemetery, Dirk Ritsema, I think he has a brother here somewhere. Yep, he again will be the lead speaker. And there will be As every year before, you'd read off the names of our veterans who passed away since last Memorial Day. And I know several of them. Some Vietnam veterans. My tour duty, if you read the Low Ledger Veterans Day every year, I was three years in the regular army, December 1966 to December of 1969. And I was also two years in the 126th Red Arrow Regiment, Michigan National Guard. They were looking for experienced riflemen. I qualified. And my one year tour of duty in the Republic of South Vietnam was January 1 to December 24, 1968. If you ever heard about the Tet Offensive, I was there. Scared the crap out of me. And those of us who were there, we said, well, if we mess up, What are they going to do to us? Send us to Vietnam? Well, my wife and I, after I had my three years in the Army, my last year was at Fort Belvoir, there were riots going on about the war. So my company from Fort Belvoir and another company from Fort Lee Virginia, went to do the riots, but they didn't send me. So I went up to my sergeant. I said, Sergeant, I belong to this company. Why don't you send me? He looked at me and said, we're not going to send a just-returned Vietnam veteran to the riots. Even without rifle ammunition, who knows what a Perry Wright is? where Perry left, because I seen these women putting flowers down their gun barrels. I was insulted. Well, my wife and I, after a year living in Grand Rapids, we moved to Lowell. We raised all of our three kids here. Todd, Tim, and Tara. Todd graduated in 1988, Tim graduated in 1989, and Tara, my sweetheart daughter, graduated in 1994. We all have left county, Kent County, except for my daughter. She married a guy from Cedar Springs, so she went from being a red girl to a red hawk. That's okay by me, because I got two great grandsons out of it. What do you know about Vietnam veterans? We all suffer from what we call AO, Agent Orange. My wife's only brother, when he seen me in my uniform when I returned, he wanted to be like his dad, a World War II Navy Seabee, where the Army has something equal. They're called combat engineers. So I told him if he enlisted, As a combat engineer, he'd only have to serve two years in the Army. That's what he did. Well, who knows where the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans is located? I do. Well, several of my friends, uncle, and my wife's brother passed away there. He was 63 years old, which typically is what's happened to Vietnam veterans. I'm 79. I'm still suffering from Agent Orange. Our second grandson was stillborn from Agent Orange. I can't collect anything about that. And I'm still serving. Because all of my brothers have another mother who served in the Republic of Vietnam. of us were in the Republic of Vietnam, 1964 to 1975. Of that 7.2 million, there are 800,000 of us left because of AO. And I know a lot of Vietnam veterans They would not be a part of what I do. I'm okay with that. We didn't get no welcome home when we came home. We were spit at, called baby killers. Well, we did a lot of things we shouldn't have done, but we stood up for our country when others would not. I had three years in the Army and two years in the Army National Guard. Thank you. By the way, I happen to know Danny's brother. He's a politician. And he joined the VFW Post 8303 last year. Because he was at one of these meetings, and when we walked out, I gave him a rub. I know where you live. Thank you.

Thank you. Anybody else? All right, nothing in old business. New business, number A, drinking water revolving fund. Mike.

The city is in the process of submitting our application for the drinking water state revolving fund. for possible grant or loan funding to replace all of our lead and galvanized lines in the city, along with looping and repair of the water line in the area of Main Division Avery Grove. We are required to have an informational meeting at a city council meeting where we share project information before we submit our grant to EGLE. The information is over 300 pages in length and is on our website, so we didn't put it in the packet. But Jeff Markstrom is here from Rowe tonight to walk us through that project.

All right. Good evening, everybody. With me tonight is Matt Motz. He's from our office. I wasn't sure if I was going to get here on time, so Matt was all prepared to present. So I'll let him go through the stuff. But as mentioned, this is just the public meeting regarding the plan to submit to EGLE for potential funding. You'll find out later this summer, fall, how you score in the rankings. And then from there, a decision can be made if you get money or no money or grant or no grant type stuff, but we need to cover a few items in the project that was in the project plan tonight and Matt was gonna reference those.

Yeah, and before I forget, I have a signing sheet out by the agendas that everyone can sign up for when they leave. That's just for Eagles Records to ensure that we have a public meeting. So I guess part of this application, this project plan, we have two projects in it, as Mike referenced. The first one I'll go over is the water main loop. There's kind of two main benefits to this, is redundancy to the system. If the 700 block of main were to have a break, then everything east of there would move water, because this gives kind of a bypass to that. And the second main benefit is we get rid of long service needs. So currently the loop is going to be on Avery from Division over to Grove and down to Main. And this will kind of get rid of the long needs that kind of stake from Division and Main up to the houses. Long needs aren't the greatest option because if those break, they kind of turn into the homeowner's problem. And they currently run on the road, sidewalks, curves. That could be an expensive fix. So that's the first project. As part of the EGLE project plan, we have to consider alternatives to make sure we cover all of our bases and kind of do our due diligence. Our first alternative is no action, which is kind of a standard part of EGLE's plans. And that just means continued maintenance and operations. possibly a future larger bill than if we do it right now. The second alternative is just do the water main loop, which would provide those benefits that I mentioned. And then alternative three is more of a big picture, longer term planning strategy is regionalization of the water supply. So kind of similar to your relationship with Township would be kind of researching surrounding communities that who has potential supply like if you wanted to connect into Grand Rapids or Wyoming or kind of how some of those communities are interconnected kind of a bigger plan report to look into the the probability of doing that. That's obviously a bigger undertaking than a little water main loop, so that... Our preliminary estimate was about $7.4 million for that, and that was just to provide an alternative to EGLE, to shore and conveyor-based, like I said. And for the water main, our estimate was $577,000 for the loop. Then the second part of the project is the less service line emplacements. For the two alternatives for that one, we looked at copper to the meter and the plastic to the house, where the second alternative was just copper from the main all the way to the house. I guess the first alternative was just under 2.6 million, our estimate, and then the second alternative was just over 2.6 million.

You said the same thing, correct?

Just under the first one, just over the second one. That includes investigation of 366 services that still are of unknown material in the city. Our estimate is that 158 of those Well, 20% of the 366 we're estimating will need to be replaced, and there's additional 80 that are known to be lead or galvanized that needs to be replaced. So that comes out to 158, but a big chunk of that cost is the investigation, because you have to go into people's basements or dig up at the curb stop to see the material. So that kind of heavily weighs on the price. We buy more, it might go up, but our 20% is pretty conservative, so we're fairly confident in that number. I guess with that, that's kind of the main two points of the project land. I'll open it up to questions. Anything else?

One quick question, or one quick comment. So just to verify, of the $577,000, that covers, my understanding, that covers the road costs as well? Yes. So that part of it is in the street plan, so we'll talk about that later, but we should be able to fund that out of our street funds, that part of the project.

So just a quick summary on what Matt mentioned. Obviously the city needs to have the public meeting tonight and then we need, if you're available, we need a resolution from council to approve submitting the plan to Eagle by June 1st. Yeah, thanks.

A few questions. First of all, the low interest loans. Can you give us an idea of the interest rate? Is it 1%, 2%? What is typical for this program?

That varies year to year. I apologize, I do not know the current rate from Eagle at the moment when they do that. I've seen them anywhere from one and a half to three, depending on where they're at in the, you know, what year and such. So I apologize, I don't have an exact number.

Okay. And then these loans, are they similar to the U.S. RDA where we needed bond counsel and that sort of thing as a typical, same loan as that?

Yeah. You'll have, maybe I apologize, you can jump in, but there'll be the whole... If you get selected and you get awarded funds, you'll have to go through a whole process of submitting the part one, part two, part three applications. And some of it is bond council, some of it's financial, some of it's bid contractor stuff. So all that stuff has to happen over the period of time.

It's actually less restrictive than USDA. There's not as many, you don't have to jump, the hoops that we have to jump through administratively through USDA are a lot more. But also, going back to your interest question, I believe Warren said, last time I talked to Warren, around 2.5%, 3% for DWRSF. But he can confirm that when he comes here in a couple weeks.

All right. And then next, I know the Copper Rock construction and rollaway is still in process. What is your timing to do this work for the looping on Avery 2047? So it would be next year? Yeah. All right, well, just let's keep in mind if the copper rock and the rollaway goes through, we want to have the construction first, pave the road second. So just so you know, that's still in the works possible. And then there are at least two, maybe three houses on Avery that don't have water service now. Would they be required to hook up once this loop is in place?

part of that under our ordinance.

All right. Mike, speaking of that, did we come back with a $286,000 set aside either for streets or this water line a few years back?

So we took the set aside for the water portion. We're going to use the cash on hand project for Riverside for phase two. So when we talked about this, changed our minds on that and so the plan is is to use cash reserve for that we have for this project for Riverside this year and then finance as part of it yeah I just want to make sure that was clear any other questions June 1st we do you have the copy of that because I'm not aware of our resolution

We can get you an I-5, we emailed it to you with the original last week. Okay, but I apologize.

I'll give it two weeks to set and then we can approve it on June 1st. Well, no, if you give us the authority, we can draft the resolution and just send it to you. We can just have Justin draft it. All right, then I'll look for a motion to approve that resolution be drafted. I'll make that motion. I'll support. Any other discussion? Sue?

Mayor DeBoer? Yes. Council Member Salcedo? Yes. Council Member Eric Barkas? Yes. Council Member Burrell-Barkas? Yes. And Council Member Ritzema?

Yes. Alright, back to Mike for the Water Asset Management Plan.

We recently The water plant superintendent recently completed a sanitary survey for water supply, and there were four items we needed to address in that survey. Three of them have already been addressed, which include updating our emergency operations plan, replacing an original vent from the Northeast pump station from the 1920s, and providing secondary containment for the phosphate we used in the water softening process. The remaining project is updating our 2017 water asset management plan. We've reached out to Roe to complete this and their proposals in the plan and the cost to complete this is $47,000. I should mention this was brought to my attention after the budget was submitted, so we didn't budget, but we budgeted, but we can use cash on hand to complete this task and not offset it by an increased rate increase for that. But this project does need to be submitted to EGLE for review no later than July 31st of 2026. We do need to complete this task to remain in compliance with EGLE. Jeff's here to provide an overview, and I'm recommending the Lowell City Council approve a cost not to exceed $47,000 to complete the water asset management study. Anything to add, Jeff?

Yeah, we have a receipt of a letter from EGLE regarding the four deficiency items that were mentioned, like was mentioned by Mike. Three are being handled by the city. The bigger one is the update of the asset management plan, which involves looking at your system as a whole, both in the plant, your storage, your distribution system. There's several criteria that EGLE has about the criticality of the pipe and the redundancy of it. So we need to go through and look at your whole system. So Roe, in conjunction with Jones & Henry as our partner in this project, will plan on updating the plan and getting it submitted by the July 31st deadline.

Questions, comments? The only question I have is regarding the five and 20 year plan. If we submit that, how much of that are we held accountable to make those repairs and improvements during that five and 20 year period?

It depends on the repair. There might be things that EGLE makes us do, and there might be things you can put off. Like for example, in our current plan now, There's projects that go out to like 2035, 2036 out on Grindle. And that can probably, if we had to kick that down the road even further, I'm sure that's possible. But there might be certain things that come up that require more immediate attention by EGLE. Like for example, if you have if you have water lines that are deficient or things of that nature they might make you do those but it really depends on what we find i mean i i went through the last asset management study and it was done in 2017 and if you look at the water system it was actually in relatively good shape and granted it's been eight years who knows i'm sure we'll find something since then but We've maintained our system very well and we have a staff that's committed to doing that. So I anticipate we'll be in good shape. I mean, I think we'll be in pretty good shape because I know our staff is, Ralph and David and Cody are doing a really good job keeping an eye on all that stuff. I'm just glad there's flexibility.

Correct, yeah. Yeah, and if I may add to that, your water reliability study that they did in 22, 23, identify some improvements in the system anyways, and we're going to utilize that information to look at the system as a whole. But I agree with the support that Mike says. Identify what's more critical, but then the other stuff can be long-term planning.

Jeff, I'd like to know, are you looking at both the water system and wastewater, or just water?

So for this is just the water system asset management plan. The EGLE comes in and does a, it's called a sanitary survey, which is kind of weird, but it's for a water system. They'll come in every, I forget what the periodic time they come in, and they'll look at your system as a whole and identify what they ask the city to do. And so that, we're currently just looking at the water system.

Okay, and is this more of a paperwork or is this actually in the field digging up, looking at lines? Can you give me an idea, is this more of a, you know, a study on paper or a study in the field?

It's, we'll probably have to do site visits just to get, you know, just as we start to learn your system more, but it is more of a paper. It's a paper report looking at how old all your pipes are, for example, in the system, how old your storage is, how critical it is to your system. And we need to document it into, EGLE has a template that you need to follow. And so we'll document it all in there at the plant to look at the wells, to look at the pumps, to look at the storage there. And we just document on how old it is. criticality to keep the system going and if there's a when a time frame for replacement So it is more of a paper. No should be no disruption in the system.

Okay, then one more question Does this help us identify lead line areas or is that impossible?

I do not believe this will cover that thus the The city has a but obviously we're trying to get used to your system here, but you have very good GIS system in a a really good idea of what's remaining from your previous work that you've done. That's kind of independent of what this study says. Thank you.

Any other questions? All right, then I'll look for a motion to approve the Water Asset Management Study with Roe.

I'll make that motion.

Any other discussion? Sue?

Council Member Salisbury? Yes. Council Member Eric Barkas? Yes. Council Member Burrell-Barkas? Yes. Council Member Ritzema? Yes. And Mayor DeVore?

Yes. All right. Budget memo, Mike, and then we'll open the public hearing.

Yes, so we've spent quite a bit of time on this budget. Obviously I submitted you a draft copy late March, early April. I presented you my recommended budget at the third meeting in April, or third Monday in April. We had our budget work session late April, where we spent about four hours going through the budget. And we went through everything. I have a budget in front of you presented that I do recommend for your approval. That being said, I was asked at the last meeting to look at possible options to reduce water rates utilizing marijuana funds or LCTB funds. So I did start that process. I do have some documents in the packet that I'm gonna refer to you with on this. But what I ultimately did was I looked at your marijuana funds based off of comments I heard from council. Plus, quite honestly, you have more revenue at this time for marijuana funds to consider. So what I did was if you look in your packet, there's a spreadsheet from MFCI and what I did With that information, I added a transfer. If you look on that sheet, if you have your packet online, it's page 35, and there's a line item on that cash flow report that shows an increase from the 2026 budget to the projected 2027 budget, that was an increase of $175,000 in marijuana funds. And I extended $175,000 for the year prior. And then going forward for 29, 30, and 31, what I did was I started reducing those marijuana funds because we have been seeing less revenue every year. And so I did want to be conservative and start reducing that revenue going forward. And so I believe I did $150,000 for 29. In 2030, I dropped that to $125,000. And then in 2031, I added $100,000 to the contribution. We still have the contribution. from the Downtown Development Authority paying their share of the debt service for the loan. And so I used that as a model to see what our rates would look like. One of the things I did take out was I had asked Warren to, there was a project in 2031 that was a water main project, I believe near Valley Vista and Main Street, and so I asked them to push that project to 2032. because it's more in line with, which I'll talk about with the street plan in a second. But the, if you look at the rate, so what I did for the current fiscal year you're in, that you're gonna be starting on July 1, rather than proposing the full 9.8% increase, I, I added only 5% to be conservative. So I created a 5% increase for the current upcoming fiscal year and used offset the remaining amount with the marijuana funds. And if you do that, according to the spreadsheet, it shows that we would not have to raise revenue until 2031. Now take into account, this takes into account nothing with lead line removal. or the water looping project if we have to finance that. It also doesn't take into account anything with plant upgrades for the water plant if we have to finance that. We took that out of the equation for this period. That being said, I've asked Warren to verify that my information is correct. because, and honestly, he's tied up right now. He's actually processing a number of these DWR SRF applications on his end for a lot of his clients, so he's gonna have that information for us when we meet on the 15th of June when we have our work session, and he's gonna have that information. So that is what we did, but what I also wanted to show in the, was if we're taking that revenue, what happens to the streets? Because that's a critical component to this as well. So if you recall, I gave you a list of roads at our April 20th meeting. And there were some questions about why some streets in the Valley Vista sub were added and why they were moved up as headed they were. Well, one of the things I didn't realize when I submitted this was I thought I had them in there, but we didn't have the two streets that probably needed it most, Carol Lynn and Elizabeth Dean, which had been slated for improvements, I believe, in 29. We didn't have those in here and we had the other streets. And really the thought process at the time was we wanted to do the Valley Vista streets first because there's always been this perception that we don't do anything in Valley Vista. So I was trying to be responsive to that. So I went through that plan again and I just went through the streets and I modified the plan. So I have another plan that I put for May 5th. That was in your packet as well. So I added, I added, the first thing I did was I moved all of the streets in the Lincoln Lake area that there was Mercer and those, I bumped those up a year and I moved the other streets back. So I moved, I moved Mercer I moved all those projects to a 28-29 project where they were 29-30 prior. And so, we were able to do that, and then we moved some of the projects in the Valley Vista stuff, Carolyn, Elizabeth, Dean, and Ridgeview, which were the most critical to 29-30. And then in Valley Vista, we kicked the remaining projects out to 2033, 2034. And so I was able to modify the plan to address that. What I did is if you look on the spreadsheet I gave you, there's different color codes. And the projects colored in gray are your small urban projects that we are eligible for every two years. So we can... Like for example, Jameson High are already slated for this year for small urban, and then in 27-28, Haunted is already slated for work as well under the small urban program. The other thing I did in this was there were some projects that I had in green that were state category B grants.

I included those and I tried to include those

I tried to spread those out far enough in the project because the state will usually want you to wait a few years before you apply for more streets, but I didn't realize, actually it was brought to my attention last week, that after this year the category B grant program is no longer part of this. The state will have to consider replacing it or just not providing that program. the state will have to address at some point. So the possible grant funding for those right now is up in the air. But there still are quite a bit of, we're basing a lot of these projects on potential grants which may or may not happen. We've been pretty good about them, but even with the small urban projects, we're guaranteed, there might be some years, it's between us and the county every two years for these projects, and the county's been very good about us taking the funds, but that may not always be the case. There's always a risk in that, where they may want to dedicate the funds to a project, which if they've let us do many projects, we probably have to be fair about that if it comes up, but that remains to be seen. The other thing I did was I did provide cash flows to the local street fund under a couple of different scenarios. And those scenarios are basically eliminating the marijuana excise tax and also only continuing the general fund transfer of $150,000 to the local street fund and a $50,000 contribution from marijuana access tax through 2033, 2034. The other thing I did was I gradually reduced, or actually I eliminated the marijuana access tax in one model by 2030, 31. So in any of those scenarios, you're going to run the local street funds into deficit, meaning if you're gonna continue to do all those projects that you have on paper, you're going to have to offset those funds somewhere. The most severe would be if you completely eliminated funding rose through the marijuana excise tax. At minimum, you're looking at about you're gonna have to offset about $350,000. But in reality, it's probably gonna be closer to $500,000 you're gonna have to offset because these are forecast models These don't take into account any issues that might come up where we have to do more than basic maintenance to the road. Like, for example, a storm bridge. If we have a storm bridge collapse that's unforeseen, that could be significant cost. There's a lot of different things that could happen that forecasts don't call for. But in any one of those situations, you would have to offset that, which then means you would either, as you go forward, you would want to use fund balance. So if you had extra fund balance at the end of the year, you would want to put that aside into the local street fund, or you would have to offset through the general fund, which then you reduce your fund balance percentage if you do that. But you could do that. Warren's gonna walk you through this in a couple weeks. And if the council wants to make a policy decision to utilize marijuana funds for it, that's obviously within your right and you have that ability to do it. Neither Warren or I are gonna recommend you do that. But that is a policy decision of the city council. So we came up with those different scenarios as asked, and we can talk about them more in depth in a couple weeks. But my recommendation is to approve the budget as presented, however, if you make changes, you can always go back and if you want to reduce the water and sewer rate, you always have that, you have that ability as council. So you can do that, but But there's gonna be a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of unforeseen things that could happen that we don't know about, and we're risking on grants to do those straits when we do that, which there's no guarantee you'll get them. And the other concern I have is if we are funding the water fund with funds outside, rates and charges outside the water and sewer fund. My concern is that you might be able to do that for a few years and then when the money goes away, you're gonna have massive rate hikes because you still have to meet your debt obligations. But that is a policy decision for the city council. I can't make that. So that being said, that's what I've done up to this point. and I'm recommending approval after the public hearing. We do have resolution 726, which is the budget for the upcoming year, and I just want to thank everyone for being part of this process. We did things a little different this year, and I thought it worked very well.

All right, given that, at 743, we'll open the public hearing for the budget approval, and we'll welcome any public input, feedback. All right, seeing none, we'll close the public hearing. All right.

I have something. Sure. Sorry, I'm not. This is all me and me. You're all right. So, you guys move along pretty fast, which is pretty productive or efficient, I guess. My name's Dan. I'm with Little League. And I wanted to come here and talk to you guys. about Rackfield?

Oh, this is just for the budget. We'll have a public comment period for that right at the end. Yes, sir. All right, we'll move on to council comments. Who wants to start? You want to start?

Sure. I received an email late last night from a citizen that probably highlighted five or six things that could possibly put money towards the water rate payments, et cetera. So I think it's a little late this year to look what I already do, and I don't think any other member on this council has received that from that individual. As I said, the individual that sent it to me, so he did. I would like to make sure that we take that into consideration for next year. There was a lot of good information in there. So other than that, I think we did a great job. You and your staff did, Mike, and I'm ready to get this thing moving forward.

Thank you, Mike, for looking into those things and giving us some food for thought and really kind of hashing that out. So that's very helpful. I'm glad we're seeking some other options sometimes there's not an easy answer and obviously there's not an easy answer to these rate hikes but it looks like we are trying to move in the right direction so thank you

First of all, Mike, I'm thrilled that you've done this much work in a very short time. I'm really impressed. Thank you for doing that. You've taken our requests very seriously, and you and Warren Kramer, but you mainly have really done an outstanding job. I want to again ask us to think about using some of the cash reserve And I don't know if you've thought about that. I know that you are comfortable with the cash reserve amount. I think it's on the order of 365 days or maybe 350 days. And I'm not an expert here, but from what I've read, cash reserves generally run from six months to nine months. So I'm just, in what you're considering and what we're all possibly considering, I'd be thrilled if we just took three months of cash reserves from the water and the wastewater funds, which would be about $500,000, and we applied that to the Washington and Monroe loan, the debt, I'm not asking to pay for the maintenance or the upkeep or the use of the system. I'm just trying to find some extra money to pay down that debt so that our rate increases don't have to be so high. So I hope that in this work session that we're going to have, I'm really looking forward to that. And I hope that we can have a discussion on fund balance and the proper use of that. And I understand you need to have money in case a storm sewer collapses or something. $3 million and you're bringing in $3 million in the system every year. So I'm looking forward to discussing that at the work session.

So I do want to elaborate on that a little bit. So we have about, I want to say about $1.7 million in reserve and that is equivalent to about, I think the last CAS analysis was close to 365 days. We are going to be drawing down on that with the Riverside project. you're probably going to be drawing down about $300,000 there, plus obviously the project you approved tonight, you're going to be drawing down on that. I would be careful doing any more than that. My concern is you're probably going to be about nine months at that point, close to nine months at that point, but the bigger concern is you need to have money in the system in case of a massive emergency. For example, what happened last week in Oakland County where the water mains were completely, they lost water, they were planning on losing water for two weeks.