Council - Regular Meeting

a documents. They're like, what the heck is going on in Las Cruces? What's up with the murders? What's up with the everything? This is not working out. It's just not working out. And three minutes of public participation is absolutely not enough time to engage with you all. To let us to let you know what's going on.

Good afternoon, City Council and mayor. My name is Albert Lee. The topic we are discussing today is the Women's Health Care Center and the boycott against its construction, which you, Mr. Mayor, have endorsed. Given that those who oppose the center do primarily on religious grounds, it would be appropriate at the outset to refresh our memory on the Mexican Constitution, which I am not going to do since it has already been quoted today, which was article two, section 11. But I have to say, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that if those were citizens who organized a boycott against the women who have abortions, they will be guilty of molesting them for their religious options opinions. So it seems to me that those who boycott contractors who work on the Women's Center clinic are likewise, likewise guilty. Those. Please bear these words in mind as we present our ideas on the Women's Health Center and the boycott against it. Apparently that the mayor has supported. Now I'm going to give you a little story. I met a woman, one of my child's classmates. She was the 13th child of a woman who was in the result of rural area of Texas. Her mother started having children at the age of 15 and gave birth every single year for the next 30 years. There were no duplicates, no twins, no triplets. They were single births. She never got to meet her mother because she mother passed away after delivering

her. She was the 30th child. She had no hospital in that area. So I want you to consider when we had our talk about women's health, that these kind of things happen and they are in every state like New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. Thank you for your time.

Afternoon. City Council. Mr. mayor, my name is Jim Hurst. Lead, follow or get out of the way. The people of State of New Mexico have decided by law to allow abortions on demand in this state. Pursuant to that decision, they have authorized and funded the building of a facility in our community. Unfortunately, our mayor disagrees with that decision. It's against his religion. It's against his principles. Mr. mayor, you answer only to your conscience. For your religion. I would have it no other way. I'm glad you have principles. I wish all politicians had principles. Apparently, our president doesn't have any principles. It would be nice if he did. The question is not whether or not we have a right to your principles. Certainly you do. The question, Mr. Mayor, is what do you do when your principles conflict with your constituents principles? And you seek to deny them rights which our laws grant. The people who want an abortion clinic. And you don't agree? Who wins? Who loses? Mr. mayor, if you are true to the Constitution and your state, the people should win. We the people have the right to our principles too. One of those principles is that a woman has the right to control their own bodies and their reproduction. Mr. mayor, I concede that you

cannot lead on the construction of an abortion clinic and remain true to your conscience. Perhaps you can't, in good conscience, simply follow on the issue. That leaves only one option. Get out of the way. Your participation in the Right to Life event was an act of obstruction. If you consider JFK's prescription that an elected official should resign if his conscience should disagree with the public good, then he should resign. But obstruction is not an alternative open to you. That leaves get out of the way as the only other option. That means, among other things, renouncing the boycott. You can do that today. Mr. mayor, please get out of the way.

Good afternoon, Mayor Enriquez Council. My name is Eddie Thomas. And the reason for my getting up to speak with you, particularly mayor, is because of. I have been left wanting for a resolution or any progress made on a promise. Well, maybe not a promise, but some kind of a resolution for the situation in front of my house, which I bought for your attention. Almost two years ago. I talked about the flooding and ponding issue where my house is on Calle del Encanto. My house is at the lowest part of that street. I brought to your attention and my Councilor Bencomo back in July of 2024. I have replies to prove it. The reason I didn't send any recent pictures of what my situation is, because you already have them in your email. If you. If you search my name, you should be able to find all the letters, all the emails that I sent with pictures of the situation at my house now finds it pawns in front of my house. Okay, since I live at the lowest point part of that street, I walked all the water, which is fine. I love running as much as the next guy, but it stays there and mosquitoes and tadpoles form there. Okay, and I know you know what brackish water is. That's what it turns to. After

about 3 or 4 days and it stinks to high heaven. Okay. And this. You, you and Councilor Bencomo gave me some kind of a hope that something would be done. Okay, here we are. Two years later, nothing has been done. Okay? And we're here on the rainy season is coming. This is April, May, June, July. So we're going to get some rain. And there's going to be some days where we're going to get an accumulation of rain. And like I said, I love the rain as much as the next guy, but not when it causes problems like this. I've been filled, okay, nothing has been found and we're going on two years here, and I just want to remind him of the promise that that or the hope that was handed out to me back in, in the those days that we were communicating about that. So please. Please do something for it. Okay. Because it's, it's, it's not a, it's not a perfect situation. And I, I don't think anybody would put up with it as long as I have. Thank you.

Good afternoon. Mayor and council members. My name is Dan Romero. I'm a Las Cruces resident. I'm here today to speak about the pavement evaluation report that was commissioned in 2024 and released in 2025. The report was conducted by IHS Road Asset Services. While canvasing for some state legislative representatives, I noticed a poor conditions of the city streets and the planning area offer road Runner. I was able to contact the Community Development Director and that led to contact with the superintendent and I was able to get that report. I asked one resident along the way why his road, how long his road had been poor, and he stated that he bought the home in 2009. It was bad and that it has deteriorated drastically since then. It's 2026. There are 501 miles of paved road in Las Cruces. There are 41.5 miles of good road. That's a rating of 186 on the pavement condition index, 210 miles of satisfactory road, which is 7185, 175 miles of good roads. That's 70 to 56 on the scale and 70 miles, 75 miles of poor or very poor or serious roads. It seems like raz did a sampling of the roads for, for instance, they didn't do all of them. The good roads are 83% of the roads in Las Cruces, but they sampled 18.8%. The

satisfactory roads are 41.8% and they sampled 28%. The fair roads were 34.9% and they were sampled of 26%. So it wasn't a real complete part. The road condition for the cities should be 70. Las Cruces is 67. Ra said that there should be at least $12 million a year spent for the next five years on the roads, to keep them at 67%. The city has budgeted 4.3 million, which means those roads will end up being at 63.4%. That's going to go down. If you spent the 6.23 million will end up being at 64.8% of the of the score. I know it's a hard thing to do, but I would request the Council have discussion. Published a pavement report. Earlier you talked about 11 EV busses at 2 to $3 million a year per bus. Spend some of that money in our roads. We need quality of life in Las Cruces. It starts with our streets. Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, Tim Jenkins. For the record, I've been coming to City Council for almost two years now since Officer Hernandez was murdered, and I have had her for two years. It seems to get worse and worse that there is a certain demographic of people that come up here in the mayor and the police and bash Matisse and the council members, and I apologize for that behavior. That was unacceptable. You guys do not deserve that. If the public has a problem with any members of city council, I suggest that you send them an email and do it behind closed doors, personal, like you would want that to you. You guys do not deserve that behavior. And I apologize for that behavior and I cannot change that. Thank you and have a good day.

Okay. Acceptance of agenda. Move to accept the agenda. Second. This is on the motion to accept the agenda as presented. Councilor McClure. Yes. Councilor Matisse. Yes. Councilor Harris. Yes. Councilor Bencomo. Yes, councilor Karen. Yes. Councilor Munoz yes, mayor. Yes.

Item 7.1, resolution number 20 6-1 22. Resolution authorizing a contract amendment to extend the term and increase of total compensation of electronic fuel card services. Move to approve second.

Good afternoon, mayor, councilors and city staff. Donny Prosise, purchasing supervisor for the Financial Services Department. And before you is a resolution to authorize an increase and extend the term for our contract for electronic fuel card Services. On October 16th, 2023, the City Council approved resolution 20 4-040 authorizing an existing contract purchase agreement for electronic fuel card services, with Wex Bank doing business as Wright Express f C of Carol stream, Illinois via a New Mexico State Purchasing Division statewide price agreement in an amount not to exceed $350,000 annually. The city's Fleet Services program requested authorization to increase the annual amount to $1 million via resolution 20 5-075, which was approved on January 6th, 2025. The state's contract was originally set to expire on December 31st, 2025. The New Mexico State Purchasing Division has exercised their option to extend the contract for an additional one year term through December 31st, 2026, in alignment with the state's extension, fleet services is requesting authorization to extend the existing contract purchase agreement through December 31st, 2026 and increased the annual expenditure limit to an amount not to exceed $1.5 million plus applicable taxes, subject to approved budget appropriations. Before you are your options and I will stand for questions.

Thanks, Donny. Any questions? Seeing none. Christine. This is on the motion to approve resolution 20 6-122 Councilor. McClure. Yes. Councilor Mattis. Yes. Councilor Harris. Yes. Councilor Bencomo. Yes, councilor Koran. Yes. Councilor Munoz yes, mayor. Yes. Thank you.

Next item 7.2, resolution number 20 6-123, a resolution requesting budget authority for the revenue received from the gross receipts tax. Move to approve second.

Good afternoon, mayor. Council. Before you you have a resolution to approve the budget for the gross receipts tax that was passed in November of 2025 through fiscal 27, approximately $15.8 million will be received beyond what we will be paying in debt service. So the request that we are coming up are requesting approval for is for the funds that are not obligated to debt service. So the projects here are based on, excuse me, both what we have feedback we have received both at the budget retreat as well as the work session. So this would be 4.5 4.3 million for deferred facilities and asset maintenance, 1.5 million for the Hoagland Alameda intersection improvements, 5 million for the fire department apparatus, 5 million for the police fire department driving track. And as you can see in orange, there's 2.09 that was received in capital outlay funding separate from the funding request that I'm speaking to you now and then vehicles for one, police vehicles for 1.5 million. And with that I will stand for any questions.

Councilmember Clark. Thank you mayor. I'm not sure how to rightly do this, so let me just flounder into it. So deferred facilities, can you talk a little bit more about what that's going to look like specifically? Mr. Mayor? Councilor McClure actually, I'm going to turn that over to Jimmy Moreno. He's got far more information on this than I do.

Thank you. Leslie. Jimmy Moreno with Public Works. For the record, mayor, councilor McCaw, the deferred facilities asset maintenance is is the maintenance that we'll be doing on all the facility buildings within the city of Las Cruces. So I spoke to it on the last work session, a couple of the slides there that showed a lot of our abatements, roof replacements, roof rehabs, parking lot rehabs. Do we feel that rehabilitation of a building is part of that?

Mayor? Councilor McCaw yes, that wouldn't be included depending on the nature of of the maintenance. So if it's and if any of the facilities or portions thereof are end of useful life, we can replace them and rehabilitate those those as as needed, depending on priority. Were or any of the design planning issues for the library included in the deferred maintenance. Councilor record. No, no, none of the library unless there's some specifics. Not as. As far as any of the design or rehabilitations. That was a separate project.

Okay. Thank you. Just to feel a little bit like a lawyer asking these questions like this. Let me give just a background of how I saw GR unfolding for the public, just to give you a sort of sense of it. And I don't mean to go sort of half and half, because I know we have two resolutions at hand. Chris. I'm sorry. I'm trying my best here. So part of it was we know that senators and Representatives have a small amount each, right? Every year. What do we get about $1,012 million for some of these larger projects? It's really hard to fund these things in. And we have, you know, our housing department, we have the burger, we put it together, we leverage what we can, right. So this was part of the the question is, how do we leverage these large projects? And I cannot follow Jennifer's kicking the can down the road. Love that. And that's where we've gotten with a lot of things with our parks, with our library. And I'd like to ask whether or not we add specifically the library to deferred facilities to kind of bump up where we're going with this. I know that we're looking at it strategically with the go bond, but we got to be a little bit clearer with people who are invested in these spaces that make sense in that way. And I would just like to see that we, we, we put our money where our mouth is. We're, we're the library is and help kick start that. I hate to throw the wrench in right now, but I think it's correct that we look at it that way. What we have deferred crucial things in the library is one of them. A lot of this term of how do we leverage it's starting these small things. So when we go up to the legislator and they have to make really hard decisions, they go, okay, we can give more. And we did. We got almost 2 million for the library this year, but when we have a $45 million project, it's really, really hard. How do we do that?

Yes, the go bond will be a big component of this, but we also have to show that that is what our value is. Right? And I think at the budget retreat, a lot of us spoke to that. But I think one thing that kept kicking in my head was Councilor. Bencomo said, we all take the library support for granted and we shouldn't. We should be explicit in that right now, especially with how we're doing this. I made notes, let me make sure I got all my notes. If I think of anything, I'll come back. But that's kind of where I'm at right now, is that I think that we should think about even kickstarting some of the design issues so that we, when we say we are putting our money where our two, three, 4 million ask that it is very specific and very clear on where we're going and what our values are for this city. And I think the library is one of the top ones right now. Thank you. That's all I got right now.

Councilor.

Thank you, mayor. And yes, whether any of that 4.3 million could be directed towards the library was the top of my list as well. So so I'll echo that. I think that there's definitely some justification there, maybe even a branch libraries, you know, that's those are definitely facilities and I'm sure they'll be benefited. So I would like to see them benefited. The other thing is. On our fire department fire apparatus 100%. We need to order those. We won't get them for a while, but be there. Alameda. Ever since I've been driving, it's been a pleasure. Ever since my parents have been driving, it's been a problem, so I think it's a good time to get that done. Yes. And then so. So my other question is on the police department vehicles. I think we also on the next on the bonding section, we have some stuff for vehicles as well. So how does how does this work and what does that get us? You know, plus we're also talking about another 1.5 million basically in the next thing. So that's like 3 million bucks for police vehicles. That's a lot.

Yes. Mayor. Councilor Harris, what this 1.5 will get us is about 18 new police vehicles. So this is this would be now and then, as you mentioned in the information that Chris is going to be presenting, we will also have 600,000 every year for both police and fire to continue to upkeep their fleet, because as you know, those vehicles do take quite a beating. So I don't know if that answers your question. Is there additional information you'd like?

Sure. So I think for for the public's benefit and for ours, $1.5 million for 18 vehicles is a lot of money for vehicle. So maybe some more info on what all those what goes into those vehicles? Are they going to have the list of employees? I know that was a retrofit thing that came before a previous council. Any more info on that would be helpful. I will defer that to chief story. Okay, chief.

Thank you. Mayor. Councilor Harris, Jeremy Stewart, police chief, for the record, the update on that standard across law enforcement agencies across the country. So the base cost of the vehicle is just under 50,000 for the police interceptor. That's the SUV that's, you see typically or a Ford Explorer. When you put in a cage, the radio radios are up to almost $10,000. For radio. You have the light package, obviously for visibility, which is very important for the safety of the officer, but also the safety of the public. And when you factor in everything, it's about $87,000. Now, I can't say chief is a very frugal person, and he's been able to find a way to just spread that money out better than we ever have by being competitive and going to other vendors and, and making sure that he's getting the best price possible. And they're essentially competing for our business. So we've been able to reduce the cost, even though our keep the cost where it is, even though prices have gone up drastically because of inflation in the last 2 to 3 years.

Okay. Thanks for that clarification. I have other stuff that happens for the next item, so thanks. Councilor. Bencomo.

Thank you. Thanks again for the presentation. And the next one, I before I ask my questions, I want to zoom out a little bit because I think it's important to name a couple of facts. I think there's been very intentionally well crafted narrative in the last few months about what this new GR funding was intended for. So I wanted to remind the public about the question that was actually asked on the ballot. The question actually read. And if you have any updated language, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty certain this was the actual language on the ballot. Shall the city of Las Cruces impose a municipal gross receipts tax in the amount of 320 thousandths of 1%? Parentheses, 0.3250%, and the revenues of which shall be used for funding capital improvements and maintenance for public safety streets, parks and other public facilities, facilities and critical infrastructure. That sounds correct, right. I'm going to repeat the last part of that, which shall be used for funding capital improvements and maintenance for public safety streets, parks and other public facilities, facilities and critical infrastructure. I think there's again, I think there's been this like very carefully crafted narrative that this funding was intentionally for just two departments, which are our public safety departments. And that is not that is wholeheartedly actually inaccurate. That is not what the question asked. Fact number two, and the reason this is important is because I actually it took a very long time for me to come around and support this initiative initially, because the second fact is that GR is a regressive tax, meaning that it is it is structured so that the tax rate effectively decreases as the taxpayer's income increases, meaning lower income

individuals pay a higher proportion of their income compared to wealthier individuals. This is a regressive tax for me. It was very hard to support. However, the third fact that I have, and the ultimate reason that I did support it is because in New Mexico, municipalities have been left with very limited avenues to increase our revenues, making it harder for cities to run efficient services and programing. So it is very difficult for cities like us in New Mexico to just say we're going to increase our revenues for our general fund. In other ways. It is not difficult. It's impossible. It's the only avenue we've been given. So given that and given the fact that we have 82 miles of roadways that need to be repaved, that we have failing parks, that we have failing infrastructure in terms of our current buildings? For me, it was important to ultimately advocate for this on the ballot. When I spoke to people about why they should vote for this, that's what I talked to them about. So I just want to remind folks that the initial intention, the initial intention, and what the intention we should continue with is that we are trying to catch up. I am so sad. Jennifer is gone. Is she gone? Where's your bucket? Oh, there she is. The bucket is really on many things and the library is absolutely one of them. And you can see that on the outside, on the inside. And that is accurate. And then what we then have then what happens is that the public comes here and says, we want to see these things, and then we create this dynamic where advocates, for one thing, are sort of fighting against other advocates for other things. Like, I don't think we should ever be in a place where folks who are here to advocate for Ada parks should be throwing unhoused people under the bus. We shouldn't be in a situation where people

advocating for transit for better roads should be throwing transit under the bus, no pun intended, but it happens because we've created this, this scarcity model, and I. The other fact is that the most well funded department in our budget is the police department. It is the largest slice of the general fund. And in the time I've been here, in the seven years I've been here, it is. There's always there's always money for PD. And I'm not making that wrong or right. I'm just. That is a fact that there is always money for the police department, real time crime center, park rangers. And so and I think if we just zoomed out and really what this gr what the public said. Yes, even poor folks. Yes, you can text us more so that we can get the services we deserve in our community, that we look at them equitably. And when we don't do that, that's when we create this, like this scarcity bucket where communities and advocates are fighting against each other when they shouldn't be on quality of life issues and quality of life issues that are evidence proven to improve quality of life, to improve safety. We keep kicking those down the bucket. And I'm going to be very frank. I was when this final iteration came out for this item. And the next item we're voting on. I was very surprised at the numbers for fleet. I feel like this isn't a conversation we've been having with a matter of urgency. And so I was very surprised that the high numbers of fleet, and I understand that one apparatus for the fire department is $1.2 million. I understand that that's a incredibly heavy burden. And I also understand that we've in every budget, I. I believe there's been an increase in in amount for PD cars. And so I just, I don't want us to fall

into this narrative that somehow PD hasn't gotten what they wanted because they have. And so then the things that are left, right are the striving track, which we got a ton of capital outlay for and is on this, but is on this list. And then in the next item we have that number for the public safety facility. So those, those things are, I think as much as doesn't matter, I what I'm trying to say is that often I think what happens is that we place this. We place inequities in our own departments. And perhaps it's whoever has the most political influence or whatever it is. But again, we're here and I kind of feel like we're doing the same thing. And the public gave us this gift. They gave us this huge opportunity to actually go into deferred maintenance of so many of the things in our community that people want to see improved, like their libraries, like the roads, like drainage in their neighborhoods, like these things that often feel boring, but they're not, they improve people's quality of life. So I, I just, I want us to approach this in the spirit of that and the spirit of what we went to the public with this very hard question. And 55% of our community voted and supportive. So I want to say that I. Leslie, can you talk about I, and I know I have a bad memory, so maybe I forgot, but I really was shocked that the number at the numbers that you all came to us regarding fleet, because it's not it has not felt like this is something that we've been talking about in the last few months. At the budget retreat. I don't believe this was an item that was discussed heavily.

So, Mayor Councilor Bencomo, this was something that I you know, that as a team, we determined was a priority based on what we had heard from you. At least that's how we interpreted it. Now, that does not mean that it has to remain that way. But I had heard, you know, from our fleet, you know, our fleet administrator, I'd heard from, you know, chief story, Chief Daniels, that this was something that they really did need. And so that is why we are bringing it before you as they advocated for their departments. That's why we are bringing it before you.

I mean, I.

I'll gently push back on that, right? Because everything on the list is something we need from every department, right? Every department presented things that we all need. And I think it's a matter of how we ended up internally choosing what rose to the top and not. And I think my hope would have been that it would it could have been easier for staff, because I understand. I can't imagine how stressful this was even, you know, in my little bit of like Hunger Games conversations, we've had the budget retreat, for example, or work sessions. And, you know, as I think about when we went to the public and we asked the public the kinds of things they wanted, and I don't want to just pay lip service to that, like the public was. Also, I was hoping that when the public, we engage the public that it would make it easier for staff to say, okay, these are the kinds of things that we need to be funding. And so I not sure if. Councilor McClure was going to present some sort of amendment here, I, I. I just and even in the next item, which obviously I will wait for, I just even the next item, the, the amount that we're putting towards CIP projects is incredibly low, like I just. I understand, I, I, I understand wholeheartedly how hard it is to say no to PD because I guess so much pushback on that. And I, I get how hard that is. And I also understand the facts are in front of us that we have deferred maintenance on so many other things that we have an opportunity now to do some of those things a little bit more equitably and still support our department. I'm not saying don't worry. I'm not saying defund. I'm not going to say this defund word. I'm not

saying that. I'm just saying that we do this a little bit more equitably so that we can get to. I know I'm renting, I don't know if there's going to be some sort of amendment, but I, I think we should have that discussion. Councilor. Thank you. Staffs had a very difficult thing to hear because I see a different outcome in this field, because I've been here for years and but I was. Watching how the.

City of Los Costos has actually neglected a lot of things. You know, not a lot of departments have been neglected facility with the parks, public safety, the police department, fire department stations, maintenance, roofs of buildings. But that occurred over the last 12 years. Whoever was on my board, that neglect came about to actually present what we're saying today. And that is we have high crime. That's that's obvious. The numbers go full time. We have a lot of poverty. And that's why the community has such a. You've seen that in our slide. Without the budget that that we hope. And we have to do that. And of course, the grants. Don't forget the follow up. But still there. The needs of the poor and addressing the need for shelter. But back to my theory that we we need to spend money on those people that get the most benefits from it. And that number one would be the library, because they deal with thousands of people, thousands of adults move the library. Again, we need to spend a lot of money on public safety because again, they're impacting the entire 113,000 people. People want to be safe. And there was a gentleman that got up and spoke, I think of Mr. Hill, accessibility for disabilities for children and adults that have disabilities to their plans. But one of the comments he made when he. I don't even want to bring my kids to the parks because they're not safe. And then the

second was accessibility and the equipment that had to be built. So he was concerned with the safety of our parks, and I don't face any. Has helped with the ranges, but every time we add something to our public safety departments, it does cost money, but it's impacting and it's keeping 113,000 people safer and with a safe city, other things start to get better. More businesses come in. More companies want to look at our industrial park. You have to think of where we're putting our money to attract more seats, tax. And if we have a good library, we have a good branch. We have a facility that's really appealing. It has the books and the equipment that's necessary. That's going to attract people to live here. So I would like to again support what McClure said, and that is maybe. Mr. Moreno, could you explain on the facilities and the 4.4 million specifically on the building? Because when when I was mayor and city council, we put into the funding, when the building was built, we had a depreciation, I don't know, 5% or 10% annually, but the depreciation amount went in there, just like we do with the police cars we have. Is that gone or has that built up or where is that now? I mean, did that in 2012? Is that.

Mayor, Councilor Mattis, we don't have a deferred most of our facilities maintenance comes from the general fund. And so typically what's currently currently budgeted or has been budgeted in the past few years, the cover of General Maintenance. However, if there's large impacts like water costs, like roofs, full system rehabilitations, Hvac, anything that's a large cost that doesn't cover it. So it gets us through on general maintenance, but not on whatever costs associated with some of our older facilities.

Yeah. And I bring that up because let's say we go in and we get this $45 million. I hope someday we will see that. And, you know. Will there be a factor will be something built into that funding to, you know, have the maintenance covered and maybe replacement of our. Put that into the funding of it.

Mayor Councilor yes, that could be programs within our CIP budget that can be funded that way, like a roof replacement program or different types of programs like that. We try to increase our budget based on new buildings, fire station nine as it comes, and new buildings that get programed into the facilities. We try to increase our our general budget for that. And then we try to utilize the leverage of the CIP for like roof replacement programs, parking lot replacement programs that can be funded separately to, to supplement that.

And then Jerry, I was going to ask for in supporting the clinic and Bencomo for what, where are you going into that file? What happens with your 4.3 million? That's an amendment. So I trust.

Mr. Mayor, councilor Mathis. Chris Faber, community development Director. For the record, I would just like to jump in here and say that there could be an opportunity to look at some of those other projects when we get into the bonding discussion and maybe some of those other projects that you'd like to discuss, that might be an appropriate place to see if there's some money under, say, the 40% new project bucket that we could look at. Maybe for that, if you take anything away from the 4.3, it's going to come away from basically the the pot that's going to go to any of those projects. So if you, if you take it away and put it specifically for the library, it's going to take that money from basically the larger pool of city facilities. So my recommendation would be to have that discussion and the next presentation specific to new projects, and maybe look at the library from that perspective.

Thank you Chris. Thank you. Council. Thank you. I just had a follow up to that and that was kind of my question is where in which resolution might be a good amendment. But crucially, here's where I'm thinking too, in terms of strategy, right? If we do some of the design work now with some of this deferred maintenance money, will we be better prepped when we go to Santa Fe and ask them for the bigger amounts. Mr. Mayor. Because the other one's not going to be there until October, right? We're not bonding out until October.

Mr. Mayor. Councilmember. Clear. That is correct. I do believe that the funding for the design of the library was paid for out of the tid. I'm I'm not sure if there's a gap there or not, but that's how the city was using the Tid funds for the library design. So that's where that preview. And if you're talking design for the new project or the new upgrades, that's where that funding came from.

So I don't know how everybody else feels on that, but I would be happy either way. But I do think not to jump ahead, but yay, you put traffic calming in the next one. So happy about that. I think we just need to see that support for the library. And I don't know how everybody else feels in terms of comfort of where that might go, but we just need to be very clear about that right now.

Councilor. Thanks. I also kind of echo the the hesitancy on the fleet in general. And so a specific question I have before I get too ranty is in the general budget, the general fund budget, how much is enough for police vehicles, if any, or is it all coming out here and we're freeing up some general fund for that?

Mayor, councilor Harris, yes, there is nothing in the general fund for police vehicles at this time. Typically, what I've seen in the past is that there's an amount that has been transferred, and by and large, it is spent on police and fire. This is a way to free up the general fund so that the vehicles for the other departments now can actually move forward.

Okay, I. $1.5 million is still a lot and vehicles don't. Well, depending on the visibility, protocols don't stop crime. But at the same time, I don't see one on the back of a flatbed tow truck the other day. So I understand that there are maintenance needs acutely. So. So that's good. So just to be clear, we're not trying to triple dip and get a whole bunch of police vehicles by including them in a bunch of areas of the budget.

No sir. What we would have budgeted at this point would be the 1.5 million for plus or -18 vehicles. And those are replacing the the very old ones that are in pretty bad shape. I would if I, if I might maybe address a couple of other things that hopefully would maybe give you some, make you feel a little bit better is that while this list here is based on money that we have received because we've been collecting the GR, and then we're going to talk about the bonding going forward, we do expect that there is going to be about 4.4 million a year. That is not going to be specifically related to debt service. And our recommendation is that that. 4.44.4 be specific for facilities maintenance. So that is an additional amount that they would that would be available every year. And then I also we have historically done a bond for about 5 million for the fire department and their apparatus. As you've heard me say before, we are doing everything we can to bring back that, you know, the bonding because the debt service is so high. So this is also like a swap for the the bond that we would have typically taken out for this.

Okay, that that bond swap is actually extremely good context because long term I'm in favor of fire apparatus anyway, because I know we have there's lead time issues and stuff, but if it's a if it also swaps a bond, then that's icing on the cake. And then just kind of another question is there's obviously for the library. Does, does the action item that we take, and this is maybe a procedural question actually have to say library on it? Or when we say deferred facilities maintenance, obviously that's quite flexible. It goes towards a lot of city things. You know, is the understanding of, is it good enough that staff understands that the policy direction of Council is thus.

I'm sorry, Christine.

Jasperharris mayor, mayor pro tem Councilor Harris city manager it doesn't have to doesn't have to be. If you're asking is it required? It. It isn't. But obviously any direction helps that we can delineate at this at this point in time. Now there can there can be changes. If we need to make changes in the future on any specific project. The challenge is, is once those funds are spent on a project. So we would ask if there's any changes that no funds be spent on that project, because sometimes the runway is long, it takes a year or two for things to start. But I, I would just say options are available to change and amend, but the more direction we get at this time, the better.

Thank you. Okay. And then to follow up on that, this pay as you go stuff is more flexible than the bonding stuff because if we go out for a bond, like we have to include certain language for an MFA and we're legally bound when we issue those bonds that we're going to spend it on X, Y, and Z. Right. Mayor? Councilor Harris, that is correct. That said, there is some flexibility in in those projects, but as the city manager mentioned, once we get started, we need to ensure that we have that funding available. Understood. Thanks. Councilor. Bencomo. Oh, did you have your line? I did.

Yeah, okay. I did have it before you. Sorry. Thank you. Okay. Thank you for that clarification. That's very good. I'm glad to hear that this is more flexible. Just so I'm clear, I'm not suggesting the 4.3 be reworked. I'm suggesting we increase the 4.3. That's what I'm suggesting. So follow up a couple of questions. On the driving track. Do we have a total cost for that already?

Council Bencomo. We have that. The county is the one who initiated the project and did the initial schematic design and site selection. So based on the schematic design, the estimate is around 7 million. Now, until we have the full design, it's hard to have a I mean, that's that's still a ballpark estimate because we don't have full design done. So 7 million and we're putting in 5 million. Well. Capital outlay came from the legislators. Right, right. So it'd be 3.5 County commission I believe we're going next month, early next month or at the end of this month for another 2 million from the county.

Okay. So okay, so what I'm going to say is that I think this could be reworked. What do you know what the timeline is? What's the ideal like? When do you want to have it done? So we should have for design because the county is moving forward with that by October when we receive capital outlay. So we should be ready to break ground by the end of the year. Best case scenario.

So if there's still gap, we could always go back to the legislature. And so here's another thing, right, that I think about when in terms of some of these projects, like what, what do we know always gets funded by our state legislators. And I feel like PD projects will always have high favorability. So if there's any room to rework some of these numbers, I feel like it's here because we know that one, it's a partnership with the county, and they'll have their responsibility to. We're already saying we want to commit to these. Some number and three legislators are saying they're committing to some numbers. And so that is my suggestion. I don't know if that needs an amendment or not. And I'm also and I think if Chris, you're saying in the next item, we can sort of rework how we figure out deferred maintenance of some facilities to include the library. I'm okay with that. I just I'm my suggestion is that we increase the 4.3 million and not simply rework those numbers.

And your suggestion would be to remove it from the 3.5 million. Right now, yes. My suggestion is, and I'm happy to make an amendment if that is what's needed, but I think it could be open for discussion, is that we lower the 3.5 million for the driving track to what? I'm sorry, what chief story. What did you say the county is doing? I believe the county has already put in 300,000 and they're doing another 2 million is. 2 million for it. I mean, is there a reason we're not sort of doing trying to match? Is there like equity issue? Like we're going to use them more. They're gonna they're gonna use it less.

Mayor Councilman priority for sure. We have more officers. And of course, this would be in combination with the fire department, which has a larger department as well. I just think that there is an opportunity here to maximize dollars for many different kinds of things, knowing that we can also go to the legislature in 2027 and ask for any gap funding that might be needed here. And hopefully with a driving track, we'll have less need for more fleet because they'll be less accidents.

So win win. Councilor did you?

Sorry. Now I'm pondering what I'm trying to do. Math in my head. But so for this, again, we don't have to explicitly say, but I think I would like to say I have. I know that there are some things on the list of the 4.3 million. What I was going to say is I don't want us to. Take away from that. As it relates to the library. I also wanted to just echo all of my colleagues that I don't think I think whatever, wherever the investment investment in the library is, even if we know that that's our hope for the geo bond. I think we also need to respect the community inputs that that we've heard from very, very wide diversity of folks to, to include the library here and as part of these critical investments. So I echo, I think everyone that's spoken so far to, to put that somewhere. I, I, I also wouldn't want it to come out of the 4.3 million in deferred maintenance, I was going to propose that that comes out of the municipal court study because I don't I don't see how that has any primacy in what we're talking about. So that's in the next that's in the next conversation. But I'm also open to hearing this idea that I wouldn't want us to contribute more to a any joint city county thing than they would they were willing to commit. So I think for me, it's a parody issue. And I think I have experienced this disparity in a number of actual infrastructure projects where we invested an enormous amount of our public dollars, and they didn't match that investment. So I would I would support, you know, shifting that, but I don't to deferred maintenance, but I don't know if that would be supporting the library or I will still make my proposal to the next in the next thing to support the library and perhaps

the rec center in the, in the following thing. So but I would support if that was an amendment or a direction, I would support that as well. Thank you, city Councilors.

My. I just want to share the thought that, you know, costs are going up, expenses are. Expenses are so high now. The cost of housing, cost of gas, of food. It's a reality right now. And, and I also want to share that, you know, it isn't necessarily as competitive or pitting people against each other. I agree with that comment. I think I think we can creatively look at this and try to work together. You know, if it's if the language isn't as such in the initiative. So I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking in general. We're talking about budgets. But you know, creatively, maybe, you know, maybe that isn't a you guys know how important a all inclusive park is to me. Maybe it isn't creating a brand new park, but retrofitting and really working on an existing park with foundation. Again, just looking at things creatively, you know, maybe, you know, with other funding mechanisms, we look at the library and accelerate that to save money and look at making that happen sooner rather than later, or possibly even look at a temporary building to house a library. So there's no interruption of services. And we can it is a gem. I get that, and it's important. So again, looking at creative things again, I know the language isn't in the initiative, but as a holistic discussion, we also need to talk about economic development, you know, to fund these services and what we want to do as a city. We need to create. Jobs are just not livable wages, but thriving

wages that run a lot of income. And then consequentially later, GR to our coffers here in the city of Las Cruces so that we can do more. I like Councilor Karen would be willing to look at the municipal court study and see what we can do to look at funding there. Thank you mayor. Council.

Sorry, I'm taking a lot of time today. I would also support the municipal court. I think it's hard to say. You know what? Deferred facilities were coming into this with some real ideas for. And I'd hate to have public works mad at me. Please build a slide on spits just. And that's that's park. Sorry. Get with them. So I think that if we look at it in the next one. But I think there should be a very clear. Much like we had to make it very clear traffic calming the library, the shirt thusly. We'd like to see it. I think that you're hearing it from everybody on the dais today.

Councilor.

Thanks, mayor. I just wanted to echo that. It's a very good point that the state delegation and the federal delegation really like the funding for public safety stuff. And, you know, they funded the real time Crime center, and they've given us money towards the driving track. And I think that those programs should be fully funded. And if we have other agencies and other governments who are willing to help us fund them, then I'd be in favor of leaning into that and then using our own indigenous funding to do more of our deferred facilities maintenance. The disparity between the county ask and our ask does seem a little much. That's a little bit more of a break than I was expecting, especially because like, yeah, sure, we would have primacy on it, but there's a lot of other agencies in the county then numerically than just Las Cruces. So it might be nice to see see a little more input from there. So, you know, I would also support, you know, support moving a little bit of money away from the driving track towards different facilities and stuff. So that, so that we can maybe convince the county to pick up a little more of their share or, you know, get some more funding from the state to, to make up that gap.

Mayor, councilor Harris, do you have a specific amount that you are? Wanting to. Where the county's was going to be? 2.3 maybe if we need if we want, you know, privacy on if we're going to be using it more. 2.5 I'm open to other suggestions, but. If that's a motion I second it. Let's let's further discuss before we get to any amendments. Council.

Okay, so what exactly if we move that money around, what are we getting for the library at that point? I don't know who can answer that here. Sorry, Chris. Mayor. Councilmember. I'll jump in and just ask the question, are you looking for that money to go to the future design, or are you looking for that money to go to ongoing maintenance, specifically of the library, even while the renovations are going? So just a little bit of clarity on where Council is looking to put additional funds.

This is where I kind of lean on staff to say, tell me, what is the best method of spending this money? And that would kind of lead to whether or not we pull from other areas at this point, if if we take 500,000 from the driving track and link it up over under deferred facilities, what do you get out of that? That's not I mean, we I don't get a real sense of that. What I'm trying to say is that I don't think as using a budget as a value value, value statement. We're not saying that right now, but we're also not clear on what that looks like, because I don't think we've been clear on what the future for the library is specifically.

Council. Mayor. Councilmember. I was just talking with Mr. Moreno on, you know, if it would make sense to put some money towards the existing facility or put it to, you know, the the future design of the facility, it probably makes more sense to go that route since once the building goes under construction, it'll cease to be operating and needing that sort of ongoing maintenance stuff. So if your recommendation or your is to which pocket or which bucket that should go to, I would say probably makes more sense to put it towards the future of the library.

And to me, the future of the library would come out of this bond, right? That to me, that makes more sense than what we're looking at here is, is I think part of the GR too, is how do we do things fast, right? How do we do things to fix things that are I don't, I don't necessarily say that some of these things are fast, but we're also planning ahead, say the fire department, right? We're, we know we won't get that for another two years. Two years. Yes. So things like that. But Hoagland, I mean, I drive that one too. That is a beast. If we can make some changes that people can see. That's what we were aiming to do. The the library is a bear. It's it's a hard one that we. But. Okay, maybe I should say it's an elephant. What do you do with an elephant? You. One bite at a time, right. What are we trying to do here? So. And that's with some of these other projects. They are elephants. And we're trying to do the best we can with those elephants right now.

Mr. Mayor, Councilmember Claire so to that point, if you are looking to put more money towards the future design of the library without jumping ahead and talking about the next resolution, I would say if you're looking to put more money into that 4.3, it would be for additional facility maintenance and upkeep independent of the library. Then you can have a larger discussion on putting some of the proposed GR bonding towards the library's renovations in the next resolution. So that's what my recommendation would be from that standpoint. Thank you. I'm passing it back to everybody else. Council.

Thank you. Thank you. Chris. I guess I'm I don't think it should be either or. I think it can be both. Again, I appreciate what Councilor Corrine said around like respecting the incredible support the library has had in order to get us here. And for me, it's not 500,000 because you're right. Like, what does that really go to? To me, it's $1 million that can go towards the deferred facilities bucket in order to start moving some things along. I agree that it would go towards the future. It would make sense to. Us to put any money towards a building that's going to be renovated. And, and even if we say, well, whatever, we're going to do that in the next item and we're going to give, you know, like really put some money behind the library because we know that maybe the go bond isn't going to complete the entire project. I still think deferred facilities is deserves a little bit more money. And I still think there's parity issues with the county with the driving track and 2.5 million is significant. That is a significant investment in what that could look like and $1 million in in that deferred facilities item could go a really long way for something like the library, whether it's here or in the next one, another million dollars in deferred facilities could go a really long way for those facilities. So that's, that's, that's where I'm at. I'm, you know, I think this to me makes a lot of sense. And I think it. Like we will be able to leverage other dollars that that's going to be completed. I have full confidence that that will be a completed project.

For the city clerk or city manager. It seems like these two resolutions are really tied into each other. I know I mentioned the municipal court study, so Councilor Karen would make sense too. Do you understand my question? Yeah. Postpone it.

Mayor. Mayor pro tem. If we wanted to suspend the rules, we should have done it at the beginning to listen to both of them. Concurrently, we did discuss this topic this morning, and we didn't want to confuse the two pots of money. And so we wanted you to vote on them. The separate pots basically. Okay. Thank you. Councilmember.

Yes. You gave us some surprise money, right? Coming down the road, you mentioned 4.5 million. Can you explain more about that? Maybe we could just build everything around and work on the 4.5 million.

Yes. Mayor Councilor Mattis, excuse me, this 4.4 million is going forward. We will have once the bonds sell, we will have to pay about 8.8 million in debt service. Beyond that debt service amount, any money that we collect in the GR, we can use for whatever in whatever manner we want. The recommendation would be that it would be for or that we have discussed, would be that it would be for deferred maintenance. So it's it's an ongoing, you know, we continue to collect the GR and we collect more than we would have to pay for our debt service amount. So that's the pay as you go, the residual amount beyond debt service that we would have every year.

Thank you. Councilor. Thank you. So. I guess I wanted to clarify.

A little bit. So if we if we say for now that we want to have 2.5 million toward the driving track, that kind of puts us on parity with the county and the project completed one way or the or another. I think I'm pretty confident in that. There's enough interested stakeholders that it's going to happen, and it also flows into the next item. And then if we put that into different facilities, asset maintenance. While. So there's a lot of talk of trying to put something towards the library on this slide, I'll say. But I think also the library has to go somewhere while it's being reconstructed. We have a lot of facilities in the city that require maintenance. And so if we, you know, if we're taking care of other facilities, I, I don't know that we need to I think there's strong enough direction that, you know, if we're, if we're just generally maintaining our facilities, like it's going to benefit the library in some way. It's just a statement. And then also, since you mentioned the 4.3 pay as you go, if we, you know, if we put 2.5 million toward the driving track and come around next year and there's this funding gap and the state's like, hey, we already gave you 2.9 million. Our federal delegation has no, we've got 4.3 that we can still allocate next year. And if if it comes around and we still need it after the final designs and everything have been completed, that seems like an easy time to have that discussion as well. Whereas we're not going to I don't think we're even a year and not having that million dollar direction for for years is going to really put that is

going to significantly impact that project in any way, especially since I'm hearing we won't know the final cost till the design documents are. And, and we know we've got a lot of stuff, we know that we could use that under line item one immediately. So that's my thought for for the discussion.

Now I just wanted to go back to, let's go to the beginning to Richard's presentation with transit. What would you show with 1986, about 56,000 the population in 2026 were 116 to 119,000 population. So that has been some growth. There has been some neglect. There has been some issues and and some concerns. And along the line, when you have that growth, there is an increase in crime. There is an increase in in other things that take place and things have been neglected. And when we talk about the police department, we'll look at our car as we looked at transits, routes and passengers. So it continues to to to grow what we can't neglect. And and so we have to look at those things. I believe we didn't get the request for vehicles last year. It was very minimal. There's nothing in the general fund for this year. So again, we're catching up. We're catching up. And and this is an opportunity. And what I wanted to say about the driving track was if it became urgent, it became urgent because what I told before.

Is right there anyway. So I will drive to Santa Fe.

So that's why it became urgent. And I'm all about leveraging money and getting people to help us and get external money to pay for those. But the urgency is now. So I, I'm, I'm not in favor of cutting it back. I'm saying we got to move on forward because otherwise we're we're having to spend money to go to Santa Fe for our cadets and for continual training, which is is not good management of our finances. So I think that's where we're at with that. And Christine has an update on what we can do to move forward with these two items.

Mayor City Council discussed it with Brad. What we could do. If you want to hear the next item, we could basically table this for now until after we hear the next item, then come back and vote on it. So it's up to you. Move to town. Second. Okay, so we're going to table resolution 26 123 until after we listen to 26 124. Councilor McClure. Yes, Councilman. Yes. Councilor Harris. Yes. Councilor Bencomo. Yes, councilor. Koran. No. Councilor Munoz. Yes, mayor.

Yes. Okay. Motion passes and we'll move on to the next one. So next. 17.3 resolution. Number 20 6-124. Resolution authorizing the. Submission of. A. Completed application for the financial assistance and project approval for the New Mexico Finance Authority. Move to approve. Second.

Good afternoon, mayor Council, before you as a resolution to approve the submission of the MFA application. So this is actually going to be associated with the bonding. Whereas the resolution that you just heard was related to pay as you go funds that we already had available to us. So for some background, this program is for financing public projects. It's not to exceed 22.15 million to include cost of issuance. So what this means is that the bond will be sold to the extent that we can get $20 million in proceeds. So this amount here does include the cost of issuance maturity date not to exceed 20 years. And this is pledged with the new GR of the 0.325 municipal GR that was passed in November. Again, this resolution is specifically to authorize staff to submit the application for bond financing, and MFA requires Council to approve the application before we can proceed with bond financing for any of these public projects. And based on the feedback that we have received, you will need to approve projects for the 60% maintenance as well as the 40% that will be for new projects.

Thank you. Leslie. Chris Faber, Community development Director for the record. So I know we kind of touched on some of these in the previous discussion, but I just kind of wanted to to recount where we are. As I was putting some of these slides together, I realized it's actually been almost exactly two years since we started this process for the GR increase. We did a community opinion poll in March and April of 2024, and I'll touch on that here in a little bit. And then we went to the voters in the fall of 2024 for their approval. The it was obviously it was a past. The collection started July 1st. Last fall, we did a series of GR project public meetings in each of the council districts, where we gave the community an opportunity to weigh in on some of their priorities. CIP projects both that could be used for GR funding as well as potential Go bond funding if. If so, approved by the voters later on. We also followed that up, sort of recapping what came out of those meetings at a couple of work sessions in August and October. Of course, we had the budget retreat in January. We had another work session in February, and then here we are in between the first read of the bond, which was March 16th, and then adoption, which will be on June 15th. And so we're kind of sandwiched in the middle of those two. And then moving forward, bond sale will be coming to council for an update in October. So all in all, two years long process kind of wanted to bring everybody up to speed. I did want to mention that when we kicked this process off in the spring, we went and hired a public opinion company to do a survey of registered voters in Dona Ana County. And we were

basically trying to gauge support to do the increase based on public safety, streets, parks, quality of life facilities, and gauge the level of support. And as you can see across the board, we did have tremendous support for all those different areas. And so from that, we move forward. Councilor Bencomo kind of addressed this previously, but this was the question that was on the bond capital improvements and maintenance for public safety streets, parks, public facilities and critical infrastructure. Overwhelmingly the community supported at 55%. And you can just kind of see those tallies there. So all that's to say, it sort of brings us to where we are trying to make a decision here on projects for both 60% maintenance and 40% new projects. And that was sort of the direction that came from the budget retreat, where Council definitely wanted to prioritize maintenance of city facilities and various things over the new projects. So before we get too far, I just did want to point out that I put all the stuff on the slides, and in the bottom corner you can see the money we received from the legislature this year. That way, if you don't have to keep jumping back and forth between slides to kind of see, you know, the information that's on these next few slides. So CIP project recommendations under the 60% maintenance, we had $5 million for fire station in fire stations improvements, not specifically one, although there's probably 1 or 2 that that need it more than others. Heating, cooling, plumbing, utilities, roof replacements, a variety of maintenance. And I did just want to point out that we did get $72,000 in capital outlay for fire station improvements. We are recommending $4 million for street maintenance and traffic calming, specifically in working with public works. They recommended $500,000 for

traffic calming. They felt like that was a good amount of money to move that project in various places around the city, and then ultimately, the street maintenance would be dictated by the pavement condition index, and they can prioritize those streets for the various improvements that are required. Again, we kind of spoke to this previously, but $2.4 million for public service fleet upkeep. I do believe that over the last few years, some of that money was kind of not put towards those. So this kind of gets them caught up. Some of the money from the pay as you go. Combined with this, we'll sort of get both police and fire where they need to be. This is for two years. So it's basically $600,000 a year for each police and fire for the next two years, which is where the 2.4 comes from, and then $600,000 for facility maintenance specific to Ada compliance in a variety of city facilities. So that's all the projects sort of recommended for the 60%, which equals about $12 million. So moving forward, CIP projects for the 40%, which is roughly $8 million. So these were some of the ones that were high priority identified on the CIP. More money for road reconstruction. There was a $3 million initially for the Joint Public Safety facility training. And that was mostly for like the design, $2 million for Bruins and Motel Boulevard road improvements, $2 million for Muni court design park projects, $2 million for funding gaps of current CIP projects, and then Engler Road Extension. So those were just, again, just a list of all of them together. And coming out of that work session in February, this was sort of the direction we have and a little bit more input from

staff here. So again, we were recommending $1 million to go to the joint public Safety training facility, and that would be used in conjunction with the money that we both put for pay as you go and for the capital outlay. Originally, we had discussed putting money towards Bruins and Motel Boulevard road improvements, but after talking with staff timing capacity, we're recommending that if you, you know, to put that money towards potentially a future rec center just in general. So that's just a recommendation from staff. But obviously we've had other conversations related to the library. So again, that's an option there as well. I know there were similar conversations about potentially using the money set aside for the muni court design for other projects as well, funding gaps for the CIP projects. I know there were some questions about specifically what those could go for. Cynthia did provide some information. It is on your sheet, but some of the high, high priority ones she had mentioned in her department highlight drinking, fountain improvements, community recreation site improvements, East Mesa outdoor pool, stabilized ground stabilization, and then just sort of a pocket of money for some of the other little projects that could pop up. So that's a good use of how that $2 million in CIP gap funding. And then Engler Road recommending $1 million. We did receive $1 million in capital outlay. And and we are trying to use this as sort of a multiplier in that, you know, the road is is a very high priority road as the East Mesa continues to grow and more residents move out there having access in and out of those neighborhoods is, is increasingly important. Putting some of this money towards that project and then potentially going after future state and federal funds to sort of expedite the creation of that road would be would be

essential. I'll go back, but just want to point out that technically what we are voting on here is the approval of the resolution. So that's why there's only the option to yes, no and to table. And we do need to have consensus on the projects. But I just a reminder that specifically the resolution is about the approval of the MFA application. So I guess now we can pick up our conversation before. And if you guys want to go back and we can start with the 60%, or if you want to start with new projects at 40%, I'll kind of see which direction you guys want to go. But I just want to reiterate that I put everything here just to make it easier for you to reference as we're going through this process. Thank you mayor.

All right. Thank you. Chris Councilor.

Just the staff capacity question. I, I guess I'm wondering like, first of all, do we do we do an amendment process of this that feels like we if it is for the rec center, then we should just say that it's for the rec center. I'm not sure if this is about communicating that we aren't doing those. We aren't. We don't have the capacity to do those road improvements right now, or the rec center is separate from that, because that was sort of related to the park that I think we were talking about in that area as well. So I just had a logistical question about that. Like, can we assume that that's what this means, or do we have to be more clear in saying, yes, that's absolutely what we want?

Mayor Councilor correct. So our recommendation was to not obviously put it towards the specific route road improvements because of capacity and timing. Our recommendation was if you agreed with not putting it towards that, one possible use could be money for a rec center. So ultimately, when you guys are voting on on this resolution, you could say, no, we still want to put it towards the road, but you could also say we would like to put it towards a future rec center. And then, you know, we can kind of work with Leslie and her team on the language that needs to go into the application as that moves forward. So again, the rec center was a pivot from staff, just saying, we don't think we're going to be able to do any of these things in the first cycle. I also just kind of point out that this is just the first two year cycle. So we're looking at what can we get done in that two year window and what makes sense to, you know, sort of prioritize from a staff standpoint. And that one just felt like probably weren't going to get to it in these first two years. And there was a better use for that funding.

Thank you. Councilor Harris. Thank you. So that was also a question of mine. So I guess we just need to. What we're voting on right now is to direct you to apply. And you just need consensus on the specific things. We're not making motions to change this line item or that item, right? Like we're not amending. There's no amendment to make. We just tell you kind of what we. Okay. So Mr. Mayor Councilor that is that is correct.

Yes, yes, thanks. I was saying. Nods okay. And then what often is appreciated. Okay, so to that end, I guess my input is I like the million dollars for both public safety training facility that that is appreciated that that was reduced based on our last work session. And I appreciate the cooperation between Chief and Chief Daniels and coming up with with the proposed last time, which was, I think, a lot more efficient and and still gets done a good training facility in that can be built a little quicker. I agree that we should probably put that $2 million towards the rec center. I understand that there's several possible locations for said rec center. So putting it towards a specific street, you know, doesn't make a lot of sense. And the meeting for design, I also am skeptical of that. And I think that there's too much unknown about that future. And there's places and things that we can get done in the next two years. So I would also agree to that. I'd like to see that moved somewhere else, perhaps the library. I also wanted to point out, because I think it came up the previous discussion, that we got 1.7 million for the library and capital outlay this year. So my understanding is that the design is like taken care of, like we don't need, we're going to find the design that's already paid for. Now we're trying to put together money to actually like move dirt or move drywall. I guess we're not moving that much dirt. And something else I'll talk about in favor of that. That's, that's a pretty important thing.

It's not my district, but people I talked to mention it all the time regardless. So. Yeah, I think that's that's my input for now. Thanks. Councilor.

I think I also, if there's an option for rec center, I, I think I would go for that as well. The road improvements because, you know, and I've told people too, that a lot of times we have to think about road improvements and fundamentally doing some of the upkeep. But if we can kind of make do and start the process for something that people really want, and we only have one just like we have only one library, I think I'm going to get that in there every time. I think I'd be interested in that. I'm also interested in really examining the design of the municipal court. $2 million does seem like a lot, but if you guys can justify it, that's. But I don't I don't know, that's where I'm at too.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I appreciate the staff adding the comment of capacity project timing because you are the subject matter experts. I mean there are things that we want. There are things that we're requesting. There are things that the public wants, but it's also important to to set expectations and add some reality. So so I appreciate that. And so I actually would want to look at the municipal court design, maybe go through the library library. And I would probably, you know, see if there's a way to. You just.

Got to go through this way to direct to some of that, to deferred maintenance as well. I just the deferred maintenance never works. It, you know, you say I might put oil in that by six months from now. That's not a good you know. And that was supposed to be maintenance three months ago. That's just not going to end up well. Right. The other piece with that is that, you know, our, our employees, our city employees, they work hard. They're good, hard working employees who care about what they do, care about their facilities. It's important that they go to a functioning, safe, pleasant facility so that they can provide good constituent care. So. Those are my thoughts on that. And again, thank you for putting this together. I know it wasn't easy. I know it's difficult. And most importantly, thank you for your honesty and transparency and capacity and project timing. Thank you. Thank you mayor.

Councilor Bencomo.

Thanks, mayor. Thank you Chris, appreciate all of the work on this and and the responsiveness to, you know, budget, retreat and work session. I. Yeah, I think I'm also, I think I, I also accept the recommendation from staff on, on moving that towards a rec center. I think rec center also placed really high in when we went to community input number one. Number two, I think it also goes to the conversation we're having about young people. I think that's really important. And, and $2 million, I think, can go a really long way into helping us, you know, build that ramp into what that can look like. I am curious about the $2 million cap. Projects. I think, you know, some people may think, well, like, who cares? But I actually think about, I, I hear about drinking fountain at parks all the time from people. It's like these little things that make our quality of life, you know, just so much better. Like the little things that people can see immediately, I think are really important. And, you know, Cynthia, earlier in the in the department presentation talked about how even a little bit can go a really long way for to get projects off of the CIP list. So I, you know, for me, I think there is space. I would hope to see space for this to grow. Even though. So. Oh, okay. This is what my question here, I, I see this under new projects. How come this isn't under. Or am I confused now? Actually, no, it is under new projects. How come this isn't under the 60% deferred action? Sorry. Excuse me.

Mayor Councilor Bencomo. So are you talking specifically about the 2 million? So some of those on the CIP could be a project that maybe hasn't started yet that just needs a little bit of money. So, you know, it could go towards, you know, an ongoing, you know, I guess maybe there could be some overlap with the maintenance side of things for sure. But there could be other things there that would technically be a new project that we just didn't have the money for on an existing facility or some piece of infrastructure that needs to have some work done. So maybe a little bit of Venn diagram there, but okay.

Yeah, that that was my biggest question here is wondered why this $2 million pot was under the new, the 40% of new projects, given that it seems like they're maintenance projects. But again, for me, if this grows, I think this was the full sort of like goes to the spirit of so much of what asking the public to vote for the GR increase meant for us to just deliver better services. And Cynthia just walked down to the front. So I don't know if she wanted to say something in regards to this.

Mayor Councilor Bencomo, City Manager and you're right in identify that a little bit of conundrum, whether it's this brand new or is it a maintenance or repairman repair project? So as you mentioned, Parks Drinking Fountain is a project that we need across multiple city facilities, especially parks. Parks has a master plan. So there's a lot of things that can be as an actual brand new improvement where it's an improvement. So we want to have that flexibility to move projects forward. So the main intent in the selection of the 2 million for the capital projects were projects that have scored high in in the CIP process, and also that do not overlap with the current categories that we are funding with the GR. And lastly, that a small funding could give us a strong head step. So if you put all that three tasks in a way to identify projects, it was also a challenge. But we have a large quantity of projects that we know that a little bit of funding can help us move in the right direction. So to go back, it is a little bit of a back and forth, but these are projects that can help the community at large.

Yeah. Thank you. Cynthia, remind me, you had a great presentation at the budget retreat where you made us guess. Yes. Some of the things can you do you are those numbers at the top of your head? Can you remind us the total number of the CIP list in terms of the number of projects and the number of dollars it would take to get them all done? Yes, yes. Of course. Do they haunt you at night?

Yes, a little bit, yes, because our intent is to help departments close out as many projects as possible. So currently we have 290 projects in the CIP. The CIP is has a range of five years. If we decide, you know, we're going to fund all of the projects that we have in place, we're going to give departments all of the funding needs that they have identified. We will need $1.1 billion, and that's only for the next five years. As you know, we have a lot of projects that need capital needs on a routine basis every year. So after those five years, we have projects that we know that we need to replace. That includes significant projects for all of our legacy parks, bathroom replacements, drinking water fountains, generator replacement, Hvac program. So we have a lot of those that we know that we should expect that they're going to come.

Yeah. So we always need to try our best to stay ahead of the curve. Thank you. I appreciate that a lot. So 290 projects in five years and $1.1 billion in order to get those done. Yeah. And only we have about 185. Who I lost it. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Who have no funding at all. How many? 185. So that's majority of our project. The projects that have some sort of funding, either partial or complete is 106.

Yeah. Thank you. And look, you know, for Council like this is to me why increasing deferred maintenance buckets is so important. Like this is not great. 185 projects that have zero funding, right? Like I think that that's there, there is urgency in that. And I think we can do things creatively and we can do things better. And ultimately, that is why we ask the public to raise taxes on themselves so that we could pay for more things and and provide better services to our community. So that's why I just feel so strongly about increasing those, those kinds of funds ultimately, because it's just better customer service. So, and I know, you know, that staff are working magic every day to try to, you know, get things done. And that goes for all departments. My last question, Chris and Christine may shut me down on this, but I think it is important. I think one of the biggest things that is missing is that we haven't really talked about the go bond and sort of the like vision behind that, and I think that that's important part of the conversation so that the public understands like just how much we're thinking about the library and the go bond and like specific numbers. Are we able to talk about that? Please say yes.

Christine Councilor Bencomo we're actually going to bring that to the work session on May 11th, because we're actually working on that right now as a staff. Okay. May 11th, but. Can we.

At least talk about I'm going to say it before you tell me to be quiet. We like the the the plan is here's the thing, right? The go bond has proved proven very successful for Las Cruces, right? Like we've been able to get so many really amazing things done, like new fire stations, new parks, housing. My mind's going blank. We've been trailed the animal shelter like we've been in, like they get done, right? Because they not only because they have to, but because their staff is great. And those kinds of projects get done. And that's why they've been successful. And that's why the public keeps approving them and putting the library on the go. Bond is a really good idea, and I think it's an important idea. And so I just want to put that out there because I think that's just missing from the conversation. And I think the public needs to know that. Sorry, Chris, I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that unless you're afraid of Christine also telling you.

To Mayor Councilor Bencomo. We're all afraid of Christine, so I'll just say more to follow at the May work session, but I agree with your comments. Thank you. So May 11th work session on the go bond. Awesome. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem.

Cynthia Chris, I you guys are subject matter experts and you know this, but I just wanted to make sure since we're talking, we just Councilor Bencomo got me thinking about water fountains. So you guys will do this in conjunction with with the park's master plan, right? Because it doesn't wouldn't necessarily make sense to unless it's in complete disrepair to repair replace a water fountain and then later on, you know, spend, you know, 25, $30,000 on it. And then later on, you know, upgrade the entire park and tear that up again. Right? It wouldn't be good use. You guys are coordinating that.

Cynthia, the funding for the park drinking fountains, it's we want to have some flexibility because it will include actual fountains. It will include the dog bowls. So we want to make sure whether we have that capacity and flexibility to replace as needed to bring in new fountains as well, or water resources to call it across the city, because we know that that's a an amenity. We need to make sure that we have always working. Wonderful. And that'll be in conjunction with the park's master plan and working in.

Yes, yes, majority, majority of the projects that have a master plan associated to it. We leverage that because we want to make sure that we actually helping the department implement their master plan. So this is only Parks and Rec, but there are some other departments that also have master plans. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you mayor. Council. Thank you. So I wanted.

To go. To the 60% because I didn't mention any of that. And since you're looking for support and direction, I just wanted to say that I support pretty much all of those. Personally, I think I'd like to see maybe a little more money in terms of traffic calming measures, but otherwise, just wanted to throw that out there since that's the ask right now. Thanks. Councilor.

Thank you. Thanks. I just want to support the rec center. I do want to talk about this in context. I know that that's what the community is looking for. I also want to just think about this a little bit from a geographic equity lens. I know that there's a lot of discussion about where we can situate new rec centers, and this people in my district might roast me for this, but we should not put the rec center on the East Mesa. I'm asking us to please put a rec center on the west side of town, where folks have been historically underserved. My district has 27, 28 parks, something like that. So we are overserved if there is such a thing. But I just want to speak to the need for rec center. My hope that we can do that in a place that's historically been not not necessarily served by recreation facilities as much as our east side has been very lucky. We're we're very fortunate to have that. So I just want to mention that as as something that I hope we can think about. And then also, I just want to speak to the Angler road extension, which is driven by a. The Nmdot has put the angler road exit from 25 on their 2027 start date plan. So they will be. I know every literally several people have said to me that my predecessor promised them this for ten years or something, but it is on Mndot's plan of action for the angler road extension from 25 to happen. And so that's that's what this commitment is to, to thinking about that traffic flow issue that we have in that part of town, Sonoma Ranch Boulevard as the main outlet right now. So I just want to name why that appears now, because it's a time related issue that we're that we're facing. And that is really going to happen in M.dot,

I think has a lot of money. So I just wanted to say those two district five related and or not district five again, maybe I'm not doing a great job of this, but I really hope we can put a rec center on the west side. When we think about using that $2 million as initiating that project.

Councilor I would concur with West Side. I would also concur with traffic calming a little bit more. But you know what? I'm going to defer to experts on this one if we're talking about deferral. But I am confused about the CIP project options for funding. There was 2 million for park projects design, construction. Where did that get moved? How did that get what did that how did that go?

So mayor, councilor McClure. So those were some of the original things that staff brought at the work session. And then from that, you can see they're on there. And then from that, basically what came out of the work session was that that one sort of didn't rise to the top of sort of the consensus from that. But I mean, it's there on the list. It's obviously a project that you guys could certainly fund and put money towards. This was just kind of bringing you up to speed as to where we left off on the February 9th work session. But again, the full list you can see far exceeds the $8 million that we had for it. But it's, it's very much still an option for Council.

Just to clarify, sounds like some of the CIP smaller projects might be included in. Maybe that. Maybe that's something she could speak to to show. Yeah, we are going to try to get some of the like drinking fountains or a park thing, right? That's that's what what other things could we be seeing that might be included with parks that we might have lost in that 2 million?

For the parks projects right now, what they have on the CIP and it's fully needed. I mentioned Villa Park. They currently have funding, but they need a little bit of a gap funding to move forward. They also have multiple needs in terms of park restroom improvements, playground renovations. The city has, if I remember right, 86 playgrounds. And we know that's a constant need that we need to take care of. Ideally, we will be renewing 5 to 6 playgrounds every year. We also have parks, parking lot improvements. We know that our fields, our rec centers are very well used, but then we need to ensure that the parking lot still is up to standards. So those are some of the parks projects that come to mind that I do know that they need funding.

Thank you. And within deferred maintenance are the restrooms through kind of managed through public works in that way. In terms of can we give money to that? Because I hear that a lot too. The where are we getting the money for making sure these restrooms don't look a little weird? So I'm wondering if the if we have built that in to make sure that some of these needs in terms of restrooms are also being allocated for in. I don't know if that's a public works question or not.

Mayor. Councilor McClure. The restrooms are. Parks facility. However, the restrooms are located within a. For example, like Mierscheid that is a. Facilities and public works would handle that, but we. We work together with our partners in parks to make sure that that some of those are taken care of appropriately with appropriate fund funds. There's overlap. And that's that's what exactly what I wanted to clarify is that when we remove stuff like this, that there's embedded into other things, I think other people have kind of made that point too, but I just wanted to clarify that for the parks.

Then definitely another example as well is the parking lots. Most of the parks parking lots are actually facilities within public works. So that will be part of the 4.3 funding will be utilized on those areas as well. Thank you. Councilmember. Thanks. Back to the municipal court, I, I guess I'd be okay reducing this as well, but probably not taking it off completely. I am curious about the status of municipal court. Did they move back to their building? Do they have a safe working environment? I'm curious if you could give us an update on that.

Jimmy May, mayor Councilor Bencomo Jimmy may have a little bit more information, but yeah, they are back in the building. But beyond that, I don't have any specific details. They're saying it's going to be 25.

Mayor Councilor Bencomo Jimmy Public Works. They are back in the building. We finished the Hvac renovation project to get them back in there. That building is old. It's historic. There is a lot that that building does need. I think the intent of this $2 million for the muni court design is for a new muni court, because the the cost of muni court for rehabbing the existing building is almost equivalent because of its historic nature of the new building. So that building has is at it's end of life. So we're putting what we can to, to maintain it as a safe facility. There's going to be some Ada improvements that will be utilizing some of that 600 K for in addition to that. So we're doing smaller projects to make it at least a viable safe place to to work. However, a moody court is at it. It's at its end of life.

So yeah, and I mean that that does happen when you defer maintenance for so long. So I think cautionary tale for municipal court in that building. And so I mean, it's obvious that they need to go somewhere else. And. I just I think that needs, you know, we need to put something towards making that move forward. I, I don't know, like obviously you're again, the experts in terms of thinking about that, but I, I do think it's important that we consider. That they need to be moved and that they need to go elsewhere and that there needs to be a new facility or whatever. Because I think I don't think it's appropriate that we keep people in safe, unsafe conditions. And and that's also highly used by the public. So that's, that's, I guess the only thing I will say, I think I'm okay reducing that. I don't have any proposed number in my mind and, but I just wanted to bring that up. Given that we had been talking about municipal court for quite, quite some time, especially because they were, you know, operating out of the second floor of City Hall for a while.

Mayor Councilor Bencomo. And just as a point of clarification, the $2 million is an accurate design cost for that particular building in the scope and the size of that building, it's usually design costs are about 10% of the building cost, which we're looking at about a $20 million cost for that building. Okay. Thank you. I'll let the city manager add to that.

Thank you. Mayor Councilor Bencomo and City Council city Manager. For the record, I just wanted to to share on this as we're splitting up. If if the recommendation from council and obviously we'll take your direction on the municipal court design is to be reduced. All I would ask is to confirm, and we can confirm with staff later that whatever that money is reduced to, that we could actually do a design with it. Because if we can't, then I would recommend that we appropriate it to something that can get done on that. That's all. Thank you. Councilor Karen.

I, I would ask that we take the $2 million and put it to whatever we can do to move the books out of the library to get that moving so that we show that investment. I would like us to have more beyond just a building conversation. I don't know if Metro Court is on our future horizons, but I would not want us to embark on designing a court building that couldn't accommodate an expanded version of municipal court. If that is something that is an inevitability in our future. So for me, that ambiguity in our in our potential future, I think it would be important to consider that. So I, I would like us to think more critically about where municipal court is going. I don't want people to be functioning in a historic building that's falling down. That is at the end of its life. Very interesting way of putting it any more than anyone else. But I also don't want us to invest in something that will become obsolete in a, in a finite amount of time. So I would ask that we get more information about municipal court, what's happening with it, what's what the possibilities are. And I would like us to see us have a conversation about where that's headed and what that kind of investment would mean for the future of municipal court as it exists. So I would ask that that $2 million just go to moving, showing an investment in where we're going with the library. I don't know if that could be applied. I suspect it could be. I've heard from from the folks in the library that they have a number of phases before even the first phase of construction that could could benefit from increased investment. And so I would ask that that $2 million go to the that instead.

Councilor Harrison. Thanks. Yeah, I think I mentioned the municipal court thing too. And I also am unclear about what the future of that building is. You know, if it's going to be $20 million to rehab it versus moving it to a new building, I don't know that it makes sense to put $2 million towards a design to rehab, something that we're not even going to do. So I just think it's a little premature to have that on a list of projects right now. We have plenty of. Stuff for our facilities. I'll keep to make sure that the air conditioners work through the summer, at least.

Mayor. Yes, Chris. Question is the tid available for any sort of projects for municipal court?

Mayor Councilor Bencomo. So certainly it's up to the Tid board aka Council to make, you know, determination on how to spend those funds. We're hoping to get the phase three back on the master plan here soon, and then bring it to the Tid board for a work session and future discussion. So those are certainly conversations you guys could have with those Tid funds in the future, whether it's, you know, an alternate location, which there may be options downtown to explore that. But certainly if that's what the board decides they want to do, that would be within their purview. Certainly.

Okay. Thank you. Again. I think we have to look at all the places to leverage dollars. And so I think those are just those are important pathways to consider when we're thinking about how to best extend the life of this of this money. So thanks. Mr. Mayor, if I could just make one more comment too here. This is just a reminder that this is just for for two years. So we, you know, so if that is the conversation there, we could revisit some of these in two years and see where certain projects are at that time.

So I just want to clarify, mayor, city Council's city manager. And I believe Jimmy mentioned this as well. So for the study for municipal court, it does take it will take $2 million. Yes. Or. Our mayor. Councilmember. Yes. For the design. This is for the design.

Gotcha. Okay. All right. So it wouldn't necessarily make sense to split that up. I, you know, I, I'm consensus that we could use those $2 million to help phase the library work. So thank you, thank you. Thank you all. Again, a. Good reminder of.

Why we move to increase the GR was there's a lot of catching up to do. There's a lot of things. And I agree also with moving towards the rec center when we said that we've neglected a lot of things. You know, again, I go back to the increase in population and their site is still the rec center we have. So increasing another rec center for that. The library has been neglected. We've all talked about that. We all support the library and the increases there. So I would agree with that. The other thing I just wanted to point out again, the driving track again became an urgency. And the reason that we put in more as opposed to the county is because it's supposed to be at the future site of the public safety training facility. So it's going.

To be our location. It's going to be our training. Facility used. By the. Police. And fire. But all. Our employees that drive vehicles. So so. We'll.

Get more use out of it. And again, I can't stress it. It just became urgent because of the track that we used to use is no longer available, but I. Might want to speak to this issue so I can open it up to public comment. If anybody would like to come up and share their thoughts. And yeah, give me two minutes. Anyone that wants to come up. Tim Jenkins.

One of the main reasons that GR increased was created was for public safety, the very core foundation and building blocks of any school, house, city, or community is safety. Without safety, you don't have a city without safety. You don't have a community without safety, you don't have confidence. You don't have trust. You literally don't have anything of value. It is a core fundament of life, liberty, and the pursuit of soundness. I would like to clearly state for the record, our six town hall meetings were clearly sabotaged on purpose by a certain very vocal group of individuals who made sure they were at every single one of those meetings to stack the votes against public safety, to vote in districts that they were not even belong in, to make sure that they had the power and authority to come back and throw this in City Council's face, when in all reality and in all honest truth before God, they don't really, truly, sincerely care about the health and safety and well-being of our children as long as they can defund the police. The vile hatred in these council chambers about our police officers is despicable and absolutely disgusting. So in all truth and in all honesty, the votes that were gathered have the result as a result of the six town hall meetings about the GR should never even be counted or considered, because those numbers are a lie and a fraud and not honest or true or upright or in any way. Not. As for me and my family, we stand behind honesty and truth and justice, not a system that lies to skew the numbers, to get what you want and then come back and scream and yell when you don't get what you lied about. The enemy is at the gate and the gate has been left wide open. The real question is, what are we all going to do about facts? This is not a you problem. It's a we problem and we all need to come together

and help each other. There is a pure evil that lurks here that we need to combat and get rid of. Thank you.

My name is Lucas Hana from district two. For the record, I've been in nearly every council meeting on here since last summer. I've shown up meeting after meeting because I respect this process. I respect the work that you do, and I respect the voters who made this GR increase possible. But we need to talk about respect because it goes both ways. We respected the process. We showed up when we were asked to. We filled out surveys. We spoke during public comment. The message was consistent across neighborhoods, across demographics, and across this entire city. Invest in our communities, parks, recreation centers, roads, libraries. So I have to ask, where is the respect for us? Where is the respect for the voters who trusted you with their money? Where is the respect for the families? Who told you what they needed? This resolution or these two combined, continually applied more money to the best funded department of this city. The cops. By contrast, things like the fire apparatus replacement make

Firefighters.

Respond to medical emergencies, fires and across our community. That is community infrastructure. But a police training track, a training facility for a department that already has the largest budget. That is not what we voted for. That is not community safety. Director favors comments suggest redirecting road funds to recreation centers, pitting neighborhoods against each other, making us choose between fixing our streets or building a space for kids. That is not respect. That is not listening. That is not honoring the process you asked us to participate in. Here's what respect looks like honoring the public input you received. Understanding that we didn't vote for a GR increase to build training centers, we voted for infrastructure that serves every person in this community. Stop asking working families to choose between basic needs when there's already money being spent on the wrong priorities. I'm asking you to reconsider the millions and millions for Lcpd. Keep road funds intact. Redirect these police funds to the community projects if you need to find more funding. We'll be watching. Will be the next meeting because we have respect for this city. And don't you tell me my time is up. You have made us wait for hours to talk after we tried to speak earlier and you told like. No, you told our community that you couldn't speak during public comment because this was on the agenda. And then you took four hours to get here. So we will take as much time and as much space as we want.

I'm telling you, your time is up. Respectfully. No. Thank you. For the.

Record, Jim Hurst. In my mind, prevention of crime should be the top priority in my mind. Recreation facilities and the like are crime prevention. And I think crime prevention is much more efficient than. Other remedies. I don't think a cop. A cop command post or whatever it's called is likely to prevent crime. It may help crime response, but it's not likely to prevent crime. Thank you very much.

I think that on this item, as some of the councilors have been discussing, and we should we the people who spoke at the community meetings have pointed out, and we should really consider what RT has pointing where we are and where we're already spending money. The GR is something that we voted to do as a community, and we're looking at it in terms of, you know, what are things that don't get funding regularly? You know, so the police, if I understand correctly, have about 25% of the general fund, whereas library gets like 2% if I know my numbers are correct there. But this is what this is some general research I was doing back up in the seats. But we know that the police gets a lot of fun, right? A lot of funding. And this GR situation, you know, it's like we're discussing, are we going to move a little bit from the municipal over or are we going to move this over or that over? Are we going to take the 4.3 some of that to the library? We're kind of moving peanuts around. It sounds like for everything else, like the GR is a situation where I think that we could draw on that to do what we for, which is community projects, things like, you know, rec centers, library, water, etc. all those types of infrastructure create not only like more safety and immediacy, they create safety in the long term. They create social emotional learning amongst community members, bonding amongst the community members. They create interconnectedness, things that reduce crime. These are things that it's not just short term benefit, but it's long term benefit. So thank you.

All right. My name is Sylvia. I'm from district two. So the Water Las Cruces community voted you all in to be your voices for our making decisions. So when I see Mayor Eric Enriquez speaking at anti-abortion rallies and police Chief Jeremy Story attempting to get social media famous, I don't see our officials doing their jobs. So back in December and October, the citizens of Las Cruces voiced their opinions on how we should be spending our budget. And our biggest priority, from what it seems like, is to provide renovations to the public library, new recreational center, new wastewater treatment And those were the big three. It was number 12 in order of priority. So it is clear what the Las Cruces community has voiced their needs for. I found it very suspicious that Jeremy and the police department are trying very hard to push this training facility for our police department, despite the fact that the public has voiced their opinions. And as Bencomo said, the police department will always have funding. I think back to June of last year, when an activist group in the community planned on an explicitly peaceful protest in downtown and LCT Lcpd responded with snipers on top of the library and another neighboring building. I also think back to the time where we have or I also think about how we have citizens murdered by Lcpd two times more than the national average. So I don't trust our police department to help our community. When we have shown time and time again that their will that they have been the antagonizers. I don't trust our police department when we have flock cameras on almost every corner. When these have not shown to decrease crime, but to actually help ice track immigrants and to help police track women fleeing other states to get much needed reproductive health care. So I don't trust our police with more funding and more toys and

gadgets to train with in a new fancy facility, what does help crime decrease is to get kids active in their community and to get back to the public voting meetings back to September. We have voiced that we want a rec center, library, renovations and such, so please listen to your constituents. Thanks.

Hello, my name is Sarah Edmister. As someone who's been an active witness to the Project Jupyter mess and having elected folks make decisions very opposed to the popular one of the public, I'm extremely tired and disappointed to be here today to ask you to not make a decision that is very opposed to the popular want of the public. Why did you make us all drag ourselves out to these public meetings if you planned on ignoring what we had to say? I've already shared here stats that show more funding for police is not only ineffective in helping reduce crime, but also has many measurable consequences for communities. There are people from older generations that come here because they make a big part of the select few that have the privilege of being able to make these meetings regularly. And I hear meeting after meeting about the terrifying delinquent youth. Okay, fine. These kids who are trying to exist as best as they can to survive the conditions they were randomly born in are so scary. But if you are really so terrified, wouldn't you be desperate for changes that would actually solve the problem? Throwing money at a system that is statistically failing to solve crimes is a mistake that we cannot afford right now. If you find yourself passionate about more policing and harsher punishments for young folk, maybe there should be a reflection on what you actually want to see. Are we afraid of crime or are we afraid of the uncomfortable truth of our own community? There are real material reasons for crime, and these reasons can be addressed and mended. Do you want a safer community or do you just want punishment and exile for the youth who are also a part of this community? A lot of the same folks who will be so vocal on being pro-life and quoting the Bible, turn around and want to cast out the troubled youth in the homeless. The hypocrisy is jarring. There's no place in public political decisions for specific religious belief, period. But what we definitely don't need is the presence of this existential dissonance, where calls to action contradict the very teachings you claim to hold sacred. These funds should go directly to the community, specifically to programs that support our youth and address the root causes of crime. We should fund solutions that work, not strategies based on fear. I don't believe this. Fear is the popular narrative

of Las Cruces. I think for people that are involved in the community and actively a part of things that make it better, there is a huge, welcoming attitude. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mayor and City Council. I'm Erin Cabello. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I live in district two. I'm here to promote public safety in Las Cruces. And because I want more safety and not less. I'm here to ask this council not to give a single penny of our funds to Lcpd. Research has long shown that the safest communities have high levels of investment in resources, infrastructure and social services, and that addressing root causes of behavior that's criminalized root causes like lack of jobs, access to health care and housing instability is more effective for safety than policing. Research from the Brookings Institution in 2020 showed that providing jobs and educational opportunities in high poverty neighborhoods is a primary factor in preventing violence. A well funded neighborhood is a safe neighborhood. Cops don't keep us safe. Never have. This is not a new insight. They create fear and violence and perpetuate lies about our own community, and then present themselves as the singular solution to violence of their own making. To quote Melanie Brazell, research fellow of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, when speaking of police violence is both their alibi and their outcome. In 2025 alone, cops killed 32 people in New Mexico. Again, per capita, that's more than in any other state. Meanwhile, Lcpd loots the resources of our communities that should be used to actually address safety programs that meet human needs. With the GR increase, we have the opportunity to fund those community projects supported by the community that actually result in improved safety. Rec centers, community centers, Ada compliant parks, skate parks, libraries, affordable housing, public transportation, safe streets, safe roads, safe water systems. So much basic needed infrastructure. This council should be supporting policies and investments that make real safety possible. It's time we stop accepting the violence of policing and start instead to build safety through life affirming, community based programs and practices. This is

difficult uphill and collective work, and we can start today. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Giovanni. Holy hell. How do you follow that? Right. I guess I won't really take much of your time. I'll just ask each of you vote with the community in mind, remembering what it is that people came out to do whenever we were. Whenever y'all held these community listening sessions, voting sessions, and everything like this, and the continued engagement of community in this process, there's a lot more people here earlier, and I think it's really says something for the folks who stuck out and have been through this process. GR is not something that's particularly. I don't know, it's not like a super sexy thing that happens in the city administration, but it's important to us. And we know that this is where the future of our community lies. Thank you very much.

Hello. For the record again, my name is Albert. Many of your constituents are living on paycheck to paycheck state of survival. The fear of being unhoused looms over their day to day, knowing that what follows is further criminalization. Many people feel so disconnected from local governance that they don't even make the effort to participate. I've talked to people. They say things like, what's the point? They always do whatever they want. They always do whatever they want. There's always a day. Elected officials are seen as separate from their constituents. You and many others who shape the future of Las Cruces are seen as the elite who hold power and will utilize it to further their interests or their interests of private investors, or the interest of millionaires or billionaires, not the interest of your constituency. You must remember the structure of this pecking order. Your constituents sit at the top. That is who you serve. On September 30th and the following weeks, you asked for your community's input on your project that would fund our community showed up many rearranged workshops and engage their neighbors to participate in this public input opportunity. Even though this gets presented as like a group of people who were there to, I don't know, prevent the process from happening equitably. That's that's not true. That's just people showing up, our community voice their opinions and went to the extent of carefully documenting their votes, which is why we were attending multiple ones. To vote multiple times was to be witnesses to, to this vote. In the months that followed, we've seen the gross misrepresentation, misrepresentation of the public's input. Projects involving the police barely even made the top ten. When you look at the votes, the city has reported continuous increase in crime. At the same time that we continue to increase police funding. There's an obvious trend there that speaks to what happens when we continue to prioritize and defund our community's direct material needs. Crime goes up when our living conditions deteriorate. You're being asked to keep an eye out for funding opportunities for our libraries. All abilities park our roads, wastewater treatment facilities, alternatives for Council policies that work at

addressing crime to the root. This is what people want. The expertise required to meet these needs exist and is likely in the room with us right now. Thank you.

Greetings mayor. Council. I have my phone so I don't ramble too much this time. So you know I'm here to express the same concerns that the community members have. You know, listening to the community in my mind, like I'm studying public admin areas I care about is. Oh, my name is district five. Apologies. I'm studying public admin. And two of the areas that care a lot about is community impact and ethics. And a part of that is for me, there's a big lack of trust in the government right now across the country. It's present here in the city too, right? Obviously, people worry about what the government's doing. And when you have these events, you reach out to community, say, hey, what do you want? If you do that outreach? And they decide, well, we're going to prioritize other projects instead anyways, I feel like that sends mixed signals to a lot of people. At the very least, some people may be active in the community. I know when I went to those meetings, I wasn't influenced by other people to vote how I did. I voted on what the community genuinely needed or what I felt community needed. And so I just hope that we can prioritize what the community actually expressed. That was to me, that was the whole point of those meetings. And if we're not going to listen to them, then what's the point of doing those meetings in the first place? Beyond that, if there is such an outsized need for some of these projects that the community didn't listen or didn't list out on the posters that you had there, then I feel.

Like the.

Proof should fall on the government to prove why we need to go out of our way to fund these things, and there should be a lot of evidence and a lot of community engagement about that. And furthermore, I appreciate some of the points councilors raised earlier. I was thinking, well, why isn't police just approaching through other funds or going through the state instead of trying to go through here, which is often it's harder to get some of these projects funded through those other avenues because they look a little less flashy. It's a little less impressive to say, oh, I funded this thing because it's those small incremental improvements make a big impact in our communities. And I think that's pretty much everything. I just let me double check. Oh, yeah. And then really just focusing on that and trying to figure out where we can diversify our funding so that we are approaching through the best places that can actually get funding to projects that need to impact our community the most. So thank you.

Thank you, mayor, councilors and city staff who are here. I am Linda Sinclair. I am the president of the Friends of Thomas Brandon Memorial Library. So you all know that I'm here to say the library is very important for me. A key issue is in a former life, I was a CPA. The idea that there is not a line item in the budget specific to the library. I find very concerning the fact that I was one of the people who attended all six of the district sessions. I don't even live in the city. I live in the county, but I hear from the members of the friends and I hear from the people who come to the library all the time that it is a very important part of their life. It does so many things for so many people. And I think that the comments here today have suggested that. I likewise think that there is a time and place for a lot of different services for the city. I actually sent an email to Chief Story about a program that was in another city that was very successful in reducing crime, and I said, hey, maybe this is something that the friends could work with the police department to try and do these kinds of projects too. So it's not that I'm opposed to looking at different problems and solving them in different ways, but at the end of the day, I do believe that supporting the library is supporting public safety. And I understand that there are a lot of different demands here, but I'd be happy to sit down and talk with any of you about why I think that the library needs to be at the top of that list. When you look at what the priorities of the community are, thank you very much.

Okay, Christine, you want to walk us through this? So first, it sounds like we have consensus to move a couple of the funding. Municipal court design. We're moving to the library. Yes. Okay. And then the Bruins motel. We're moving to a rec center. Okay. So if we have consensus to move forward to change those items, then we can call for the vote for the resolution. So. Oh, is somebody going to say something? Mr. mayor, I was.

Point of clarification. So do we need to go the prior resolution first the item to bring that off the table. We will go back to that one after we vote. After this one. Okay. So not sequential. Okay. Thank you. Christine, do you want to go over that really quick?

Mr. mayor, I was just curious, do we need to discuss the 60% projects before we vote, or were we just voting on the 40%? Okay. So do we want to have a conversation on the 60% projects? And if there's any adjustments there, again, we've got fire stations, 4 million for street maintenance and traffic calming. And I just again talked with Mr. Moreno from Public Works and he, you know, he said $500,000 is an adequate amount for the for these first two years for traffic calming. So I feel like we can get a lot done with the cost of the average, you know, traffic calming project. So 5 million for million for streets, the money for public safety, fleet upkeep and then money for Ada facility maintenance. So those were the ones proposed for the 60%.

Okay, I thought we okay.

I have a question about that. I don't have a question. I just I will have something to say about that. Thank you. I. Thank you, Jimmy, for sort of affirming that. That's enough. I will always talk about the pavement condition index and how I don't think it's enough. I think, you know, to Mayor pro tem analogy about the car and like waiting for, you know, six months to oil in your car or whatever, some of these cars are dead, some of the, some of these roads are at the end of their lives and they are mostly in lower income neighborhoods and lower income communities. And so I think, again, there's just never, never enough for these things. And to me, that's disappointing. So I, you know, if there's ever a workaround in getting more money towards street maintenance, I will always go for that. And when we talk about public safety, I think, you know, just today we talked about road safety and having folks here who came to talk about. Distracted driving and the number of casualties that we've seen in Las Cruces. That's public safety. And often that has to do with design. And so I just, you know, when I talk, yeah, I'm just I'm going to ramble at this point, but I think for me. I just continue to feel disappointed that there's just not quite ever enough to go towards the projects that would help low income neighborhoods the most.

Okay. Christine. This is on the motion to approve resolution 20 6-124 Councilor. McClure. Yes, counselor. Mathis. Yes. Councilor Harris. Yes, councilor Bencomo. Yes, councilor Karen. Yes. Councilor Munoz. Yes, mayor. Yes. I move we bring 7.2 off the table.

Second. Wait, I need to call the vote to remove it from the table and then we can go back to discussion. So this is on the motion to remove resolution 26 123 from the table for discussion, councilor McClure. Yes, councilor Mathis. Yes. Councilor Harris. Yes, councilor Bencomo. Yes, councilor Karen. Yes. Councilor Munoz. Yes. And mayor. Yes. And now, you.

Know, we can discuss Mayor Pro tem. Councilor Bencomo. Thanks, Leslie. Chris, I don't even remember who was presenting this originally. I'm so sorry. Actually, this will be for Cynthia. Actually, my question on the 4.3 million. Cynthia, is, are any of that 4.3 million deferred facilities asset maintenance or is that going to go towards, excuse me, the 290 projects on the CIP.

Cynthia. Ideally, the first round of projects that will be selected or will be from the CIP because it will be existing projects. However, we do have to have a little bit of flexibility to identify those emergencies or unexpected situations that happen, and we want to make sure we address them. So it will be a combination. Great. Thank you for that, Jimmy. Did you want to add something? Mayor Councilor Bencomo there will be some overlap. So there are some projects on the CIP, for example, re roofs and parking lots and things like that. Yeah. So there's definitely overlap and and that will be included as well.

Thank you. So I think a million more dollars in this fund could go a really long way. And I think for us to be responsible and responsive. And I just want to say that framing the community input meetings that we had is fraudulent is deeply problematic. There's no evidence for that. And I think when we go to the public and we ask the public to tell us what they want, we have to trust them. And this narrative that they're the that they should there should be cast that doubt should be casted on them is, I think, is really responsible and really quite shameful. So I'm sad to hear that being spread around. And that being said, I really want us to be responsive to what community is is asking us to do. I want us to be responsive to the serious needs of our community. There is urgency in many places, and I think ensuring that we have the most. The the biggest bucket is possible in order for deferred facilities and asset maintenance is important.

Councilor. Yeah, I guess I think we we talked about this quite a bit. I think that we'll have plenty of opportunity to complete the budget for the driving track as it's being built. If we need to make up some funds, we can absolutely do that. So to that end, I guess if if there's other no more discussion, I have a motion to make. Then. Christine. Good. Okay. So I. Moved to reduce the proposed budget for. The driving.

Track to 2.5 million and redirect that 1 million to the deferred facilities and asset maintenance line item second.

Okay. So this would be to amend the exhibit to reduce the driving track to 2.5, and then apply the 1 million to the deferred maintenance. Correct. Okay. Councilor McClure. Yes. Councilor Mattis no. Councilor Harris. Yes. Councilor. Bencomo. Yes.

Councilor. Kiran. Yes. Councilor Munoz no. Mayor. No motion passes. Okay, so this would be two approve resolution 20 6-123 as amended. Councilor McClure. Yes. Councilor Mattis. Yes. Councilor Harris. Yes. Councilor Bencomo. Yes. Councilor Karen. Yes.

Councilor Munoz. Yes, mayor. Yes. Okay. Next is item number 20 6-07, ordinance number 3109, amending chapter 24 for general of the Municipal Code. Move to approve. Second.

Good afternoon, mayor city Council. My name is Alicia Hernandez, purchasing manager for the City of Las Cruces. Before you today is an ordinance approving an update to the procurement code. The procurement code lies within chapter 20 4-1 of the Las Cruces Municipal Code. The purpose of this chapter is to maximize the purchasing value of public funds, and to provide safeguards for maintaining a procurement system of quality and integrity. Procurement is defined as the buying, purchasing, renting, leasing or otherwise acquiring of any supplies, service or construction. Governments often have departments and laws for procurement, usually with strict procedures for how purchases can be made. This ensures the process doesn't become corrupted by bribes, kickbacks and favoritism. These laws are designed to ensure fairness, transparency and accountability in how public money is spent. We are recommending one change to the current code in article two, section 24 dash 31 of Las Cruces Municipal Code to clarify direct contact as it relates to the ethics portion of the code, we are requesting to add the following language. Direct contact includes but is not limited to, inquiring about project specifications that are not subject to public record responses submitted by other competitors, compensation details, or any other information not available to the public. And with that, here are your Council options and I stand for any questions.

Councilor. Thank you very much. I do always have a question, so. Can you go back to the slide that you're changing the definition? All right. So just to clarify the responses submitted by other competitors, compensation details like was this during the bidding process. So this isn't those things are like during the bidding process. Councilor Harris Yes, you're correct. It is during the open bidding process. Cool. That's it. Thank you. Okay, Christine.

This is on the motion to approve ordinance 3109. Councilor McClure. Yes, Councilor Mattice. Yes. Councilor Harris. Yes. Councilor Bencomo is absent. Councilor Koran. Yes. Councilor Munoz. Yes, mayor. Yes.

Okay. Is next. Read into the record, councilor. Let's go ahead and skip forward to the Parks and Rec Council. Mattis will appoint will be appointed to the MPO Policy Board. Now, I need a motion on the second. Reappointment to the Senior Programs Board. Move to approve second. This is on the motion to reappoint Larry Altamirano to the Senior Programs Board. Councilor McClure. Yes. Councilor Mattice. Yes. Councilor Harris. Yes.

Councilor Bencomo is absent. Councilor Koran. Yes. Councilor Munoz. Yes, mayor. Yes. Next is notice of proposed ordinances. There are none. City Council member board reports and comments. Councilmember Clarke.

Thank you. Mayor. I'll keep this quick because I ate a lot of candy that was so nicely supplied because. Okay, so I just want to quickly say that I, I would be in full support of an all inclusive park. I feel like I'm back to my parks and rec days here. I think the idea of equity in terms of play is a, is a conversation we haven't had yet necessarily in the city, and I would be in support and I would hope also my councilors, fellow councilors would be in support of something like that as well, to at least point staff into that direction. And I think anybody who watched today will know that the budget for that is going to it's going to take a couple cycles to get to it, but at least to to start planning out what it would look like here for Las Cruces, because it's. And as I understand it, our Parks and Rec director already has experience with something like that. Super helpful in this situation. And I know a lot of people feel that impact of not being able to play in the ways that they could. And I think we can definitely look at that in the next upcoming months if everybody else agrees to that. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember. Comments. Thank you. Thank you. Councilor House. I just a.

Couple for me first, I was at the Farmer's Market this weekend and it was great, but I was also noticing that kind of the only barricades between people and the street are just signs that'll stand up barricades. And then we just had an incident, not we, but over the weekend, there was no plan Las at a parade where somebody drove through a crowd. And so I think it would be worth looking at to see if we can maybe improve downtown or some pop up bollards or something to better protect areas where crowds gather. Second, just to shout out to Charles, thank you very much for checking Go transit. You know, busses keep cars off the roads, which reduces maintenance and traffic and and everything for that. So, you know, I want to see that keep on continuous improvement. Then I am also in favor of looking at an all inclusive park. I think that's a very interesting idea. Also regarding maintenance, I saw something very interesting this weekend on the use of bricks as paving material, kind of more of a deep dive into how that's done in other cities. So maybe public works can look at that. And then last, since, you know, the conversation around rock and stuff comes up, you know, I think there are plenty of ways that the community and the police department can work together. And I have personally submitted video from some cameras that I own to the police department to help in their investigations. We have a system for that and we already pay for it. We have an evidence collection system, and if if things crying to me that we have corporations coming in and

trying to wedge themselves between police departments and our communities in order to make some profit where they they really have no place. You know, I think the city and the police and our first responders can work directly with the community. And that's a lot more effective for everybody. So thank you. Councilmember.

Thank you. First and foremost, I want to really deeply thank Katrina and Scott. They're gone. I'm sure they'll hear me. I we had our district four meeting last week and it was very, very well attended and very well organized, all things to them. So just deeply grateful for our constituents team. I think they're wonderful. I want to thank fire housing, economic development, community development, utilities, public works, sustainability codes, PD, our CM staff for being there. If I missed anyone, I am so sorry. I am very grateful for everyone who's there. Every time I looked up and I looked around you were you guys were talking to somebody consistently? So I just really appreciate that. I got really great feedback about how that meeting went, and it was just a wonderful meeting. And, you know, often public comment can feel like this one, a one sided conversation. And then now I'm having a one sided conversation. And so just being able to have the support from staff to create those kinds of spaces, to have really meaningful conversations with residents and answer questions just means a lot. So thank you very much to everyone who came and again, to Scott and Katrina. Thank you to Councilor Harris for leading on the issue. I think this is an issue I had not thought about enough. But the more I talked to people who care about surveillance, the more I see how deeply intertwined it is with the safety of the most vulnerable in our community, especially. So thank you for that. And then I think that was all I had to say. So thanks, everyone. We haven't had a long meeting in a long time, so.

Councilor great.

Thank you. I will also try to be brief. I do want to thank the folks from America's Job Center for the rocket. I think Councilor McClure was there on an opposite shift of me, and a whole bunch of city staff participated, along with a bunch of other people, and it was really cool to meet a lot of students who are planning their future lives and talk to them. I only made one cry, which I still feel bad about. I'm so sorry. I, I, I hope it wasn't me, but it was a really great experience to see students, the future of our workforce, the future of our college classrooms, the future city employees really enthusiastically working on their resumes, which were great. So I hope some of them will come join us at the city soon. So thanks to everyone who went to that and participated and shared your gifts with those with those students. Hopefully none of you made them cry like I did. I also have been visiting a lot of fountains or parks lately, and in some. In many parks the. As I always do, the fountains weren't haven't been on. And so I just wanted to sort of speak to this. I know we have sort of a system and we don't want these things to freeze, but if climate change is happening, and I think the time when things freeze is getting smaller and smaller. So I would just ask that we consider when we turn the fountains on as a fundamentally important part of our city life or as part of our public life. I don't know exactly how that conversation goes in Parks and Rec, but I do know that I was at a park where it was about 90 degrees, and there were folks trying the fountain, and that was really like telling to me. So we might have to rethink something in our in our timing of the fountains coming on, I, I also just want to speak to two other things that were alluded to at different times. One is the CBP station, which a number of us have spoken out against the three proposed sites, some of

which are in the city, some of which are not. A lot of folks gave public comment. I've heard from many, many, many residents who urged CBP, if they're watching, to not consider putting their station in a neighborhood near elementary schools, people's backyards, our animal shelter, parks. And so I hope that that feedback has been heard in, in, in the ways that it has, has been expressed. And then the other thing that I wanted to speak to is someone alluded to the El Paso electric rate case. And I just want to say really quickly that the city and the county have joined together, again, to intervene on behalf of residents so that we hopefully can fight the rate case so that folks don't necessarily have to pay as much as El Paso Electric is proposing. The last time the city intervened in the 2020 rate case, which was ultimately resolved by 2023, the city was able to save somewhere between 16 and $17 million per year for ratepayers because of their intervention in those cases. So I really want to thank city management and our attorneys for investing in that intervention. As mentioned, it's thousands and thousands of pages. It takes legal expertise, and it's very hard to fight for the residents to not have to pay into private equities, profit margins. So I'm really proud of the city that we intervene in this in this conversation. And I just wanted to say the city is is tracking on that and that we're here and we will be advocating for for residents as this moves forward. So we'll keep you posted and I'm sure you'll hear more as time goes on.

Mayor Pro tem. Thank you mayor. I only have 20 items to go over. I'm kidding. Thank you. Thanks, Jen. Actually, thank all of you for hanging in with us. And those were previously, you know, democracy is messy. If it were easy, there'd be more democratic republics around the world. And they're not. And it's about discussion and different viewpoints, different approaches to solutions. And, you know, for the most part, I'm glad that. We're.

Had really good discussions from the public and good discussions here on the dais with our our colleagues and whether we agree or disagree. I think the the intent of the policies and to do our best for our community. So I appreciate that. Whether it's it's a. Funding the library funding, an all inclusive partnership, I would encourage all of my peers to help out with that, whether that's the park or our operation center that is more user friendly for folks of all different abilities. Thank was appreciated or funding things for public safety or CRM. There's so many priorities, so many parties that we have. And so to fund. But we will follow that. I also wanted to thank the our sign language professionals. I know we threw them for a loop. Sometimes when we throw sponsored art, but I was worried about that, obviously, but I, I did not miss a beat though. So thankful. Gracias, gracias. I will try to keep my Italian and German for not performing my reaches, but thank you all. Thank you for sticking with us. I'm sure you're very tired, but that's definitely something that's appreciated and I wanted to call that out today. Thank you. Oh, and library card, please get one. This is the all access, by the way.

There are cats. On them now. Yes. Is this really old or are there actually. Cats on the. No, I'm not that old. I don't I don't know, this is well, fairly recent. All right. This isn't what mine looks like, but now I'm gonna have to go. I mean, I go to the library anyway, so I better get on it. She's jealous. Now I have to find mine. There's a neurons. Oh. Oh, wow. Okay,

Okay, well, thank you, and thanks for saying that because it is correct. It is challenging, but it is great to have the involvement in everyone take part. The beauty of it is, is we'll get to do this every other year. You know, it's like I said, it's a good dilemma to have. But but that's why we increase so that we can catch up and do things and add value to our community. And we'll continue. You don't get everything that we want the first time around. That's that's fine. And I'm looking forward to May 11th so we can discuss the the geo bond and look at that avenue for funds as well. Just for this week, just wanted to mention the Las Cruces International Film Festival is here this week from April 8th to the 11th. So thank you again to Ross Marks and Senator Steinberg because they put a lot into that. And it's really helps our economy and our our students at Nmsu with filming. So it's a great thing to, to, to be a part of and also organizing high school will be the host for Shattered lives this year. Again to discuss with, with health and safety on impaired driving for our students. So thank you police fire. I know some of our hospitals will be there as well to partner up with with that event that will take place later this week, Thursday and Friday. And with that city manager.

Thank you, Mayor Enriquez, Mayor pro tem and city councilor, city manager. And I just wanted to say thank you. I've been out for a bit. I appreciate Assistant City Manager Sonja and and David helping to run the show and executive team and all the staff who continue to to run this organization. So thank you so much. I have a few announcements. Just three and I'll keep it brief. So for police, something I brought up last time, but we the department completed the assessment and it went very well before commissioners. This will be presented before them in July. Answer a few questions, do an oral assessment and. This process has been underway for over three years. And we're very close to achieving this accreditation. So thank you to chief and to all your staff. So please pass that along. Airport on April 2nd, which passed the airport, hosted the United States Marine Corps and the center for Countermeasures at White Sands Missile Range. Marine Corps pilots flew a CH 53 sea stallion helicopter from Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, to Las Cruces International Airport to conduct flight and system testings. The airport offered both the Marine Corps and CCM Contingent's immediate airspace, ground facilities and supporting for testing that would otherwise require months of planning and preparation. It was a great day for training support of our military partners. We appreciate the work of our airport staff for making this happen. So thank you to Blake and to your staff. Last so I lied. There's one more. So two more. Ted. There was a a question or a comment

made about sharing safety for downtown. I wanted to share that this is something that has come also previously before from the dais. I appreciate chief he's brought this up a few months back. He brought this to my attention that this is a priority as well. So in line with what I've been hearing from the dais. And so I just wanted to share that staff, community development, VLC and police have been working together to, to look at bollards for this. And so that is something that's being prepared as we speak. So we appreciate that. And that is something that's in its that's already occurring right now. So I just wanted to give you an update on that. So perfect timing. And there was also a comment today on the skate park and what that, what, what is happening and to divert funds, if we can, for all those that may be watching or, or sitting with us. This is the update of the skate park. The city's legal team has been in constant communication with the with the legal team from the contractor associated with the Walnut Skate Park. We have been in communication and our. We have sent our list of demands and look forward to further meeting with the contractors legal team. We reiterate our desire to continue productive negotiations. However, the city will not accept any resolution that does not make the city whole and any resolution must deliver a quality skate park for the people in our community to enjoy. The city will continue to vigorously pursue all remedies available to it under New Mexico law and contractual principles. Thank you mayor, that is all.

Thank you, City Manager. And I'll just. Second. This is on the motion to adjourn the meeting. Councilor McClure. Yes. Councilor Matisse. Yes. Councilor Harris. Yes. Councilor Bencomo. Yes. Councilor Karen. Yes. Councilor Munoz. Yes, mayor. Yes.