City Council - Regular Meeting

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

We'll observe a moment of silence. Thank you tonight. We have a discussion presentation of the fiscal year, 2027 city managers proposed budget, Justin Strickland.

Thank you, mayor. All right. We're here same time of year as always to review our proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year, 2027, which will begin October 1st. So our fiscal year runs October one through September 30. We're fast approaching the new fiscal year, and just kind of came off the audit cycle, and now we're going into the budget cycle. So for finance, the cycle really never stops. It's just a never-ending circle of budget and audit, back and forth like a tennis match every year. So let's get started. Let's see.

Oh, the graphics are not.

Hold on.

Is that in the stuff you've handed out?

I'm just looking because some of the pictures aren't in here, but that's okay.

Okay.

Some of the pictures didn't make it in here, but that's okay. So a few years ago, we adopted the vision of uncompromised excellence. We adopted our six values of professionalism, accountability, teamwork, honesty, sustainability, and safety.

Here's Kayla.

These kind of form the foundation of what we want to be as an organization. It really focuses inward to us as an organization, but also we push it outward as well to our citizens. But overall, that drive of uncompromised excellence has been driving us for a few years now. I can't say new anymore. The past few budgets I've set are new vision, but it's been enough time now. PTC, Strategic Five Pillars. Somebody drew on it.

Sorry. Oh, that was me. I think.

Sorry. A safe, family-friendly community, an active, healthy community, an attractive community, a thriving, resilient business community, and a city organization that is innovative, high-performing, and sustainable. And I did put a new picture here, but it's disappeared, so we may have some disappeared pictures as we go through this. know our budget policy the city's top priority for the budget is to exist existing service levels in all divisions and departments so when we go through the budget process and start it for us the baseline is always what is the cost to provide the current services we provide which is the current staffing levels we have, current healthcare levels we have, current amount of equipment, current amount of events that we do, taking care of the buildings we have, all of that thrown in together. What does it take to maintain existing services? Any new services that we add must have an identified revenue source to go along with that. Any new things, new projects, new services, things like that.

All right, let's look at market trends.

So I've been doing this the past few years, kind of showing what CPI has been since 2009. All the charts I do are kind of based off of 2009, which is the year after the recession started when it really started hitting. So you can see CPI here before COVID is a pretty steady rate of inflation. Since COVID, we've seen it just increase and increase. This year it jumped from 22% to 27% since 2009. So you see the buying power there. Just since 2020, something that would have cost you $76 in 2020 would now cost you $100. dollars average just six years later. So the reason we show this is just to show not only does it affect our pockets every day in our personal lives, but it also affects what we do as a city. All the supplies we get have gone up, services, things contractors charge. all that stuff has been increasing more rapidly since 2020 than previous years before that. And this next chart shows a similar thing, but it's not showing CPI. It's showing the actual cost of, well, it's showing the annual earnings of full-time workers in the United States. And this is just a single full-time salary, full-time wages in the United States. What's interesting about this one, to even elaborate more, is since 2009 to 2020, to COVID, in 12 years, so over this period of 12 years, annual earnings increased about 25%. They went from about 30, is that 38? 38. Yeah, 38 to right around 50, right under 50. It took 12 years to do that. That's 12,000. Since then, in six years, annual earnings have increased the same percentage in half the time. And also when you're talking about percentages, they compound. So instead of it being $12,000, it's about $14,000 to $15,000 in that 25%. So same thing with CPI. When you're talking about the job market, it's very different. post-COVID than it was pre-COVID in competition of recruiting people that can fill these positions. You have to stay competitive because if you don't, somebody else is going to pay more. And that's not just true of the private sector. It's true of the public sector as well. We saw that a few years ago when we did our pay study and we were seeing public safety issues. issues with recruitment and we have since solved that. We're still at a good hiring rate with that. We haven't had a massive, we have had turnover but we haven't had a massive migration of employees and not being able to hire anyone to fill them. We've been able to actually turn over and rehire consistently. But I just want to highlight the importance of the market and where it is and how important it is to keep up with that to have good talent all right citizen and citizen to employee ratio this is a new one that I had last year and I wanted to include it again this year this just shows how many how the city has grown population wise with the blue bar chart and then the amount of employees we have with the orange line chart what they show is the amount of employees per thousand citizens we are to call me had a phone call sorry um you can see you know pre-recession they were up here they had to make cuts uh staffing levels went down kind of increased a little bit here covet hit and there was another riff and staffing levels went back down we have since increased back to kind of normal uh normal staffing ratio that the city has had over most years. And so population is about 42,000 estimated right now. Our employee ratio is about 8.82. Looking at like best practices, somewhere between 6 and 12 for an employee ratio is what's recommended depending on what services you're providing. So at 8.82, I feel like we're at a really good ratio for the amount of citizens we're serving. And just another thing is the population since 2000. This graph does go back to 2000, but I only have 2009 on the presentation. Since the year 2000, the population of Peachtree City has grown, I think, 25%. Don't quote me on that. I think I have that in my notes. But it just shows it's not just hiring employees because we can or because we have the money. We don't do that. We look at what we're providing citizens, how is the community grown, new neighborhoods that pop up, new businesses that pop up, new streets, new paths, new service areas for PD and fire as the city has grown. Basically, over the past 25-ish years, we've had to provide about 25% more because of the growth of the city. All right, getting into state legislative impacts. HB 581 passed two years ago in the state legislature. It provides a statewide floating homestead exemption for all homesteads. As of... This past legislative session, the legislator did vote to – it was an option two years ago. You could opt in or out of it. Now they have made it mandatory for every jurisdiction, including schools. So HB 581 is mandatory statewide, and it controls how much the value of a home increases annually. So last year was the year that all assessments were frozen for homesteads. So if you have a homestead, your assessment last year – 2024. This year for 2026, which is the tax year that we're in is the first year that the cap is in place. So homestead bills can grow this year, but they cannot grow more than 3%. And so based on the state, which determines the rate of inflation for this homestead exemption, they set it at 2.7. So homestead tax bills this year cannot increase by more than 2.7%. And non-homesteaded properties in HB 581 continue to be valued at fair market, so they do not get this exemption. So your Gersheimers, your Walmarts, your Hoshizakis, they'll be taxed just like they have been every year. All right, SB 33, Elhost. So we've had discussions around this lately. This year in the legislature, There were tons of back and forth about property taxes, sales tax, income tax. They were talking about all this stuff, and what they ended up passing, the last bill of the session at midnight, was SB 33. It was originally HB 4, I don't know, HB 1116? Yeah. It was originally an HB 1116, and then it got thrown into SB 33. which was originally a hemp bill. What this does is it creates an L-host, a local homestead option sales tax. It allows counties to adopt a 1% sales tax to provide property relief exclusively for homesteaded properties, exclusively homestead. It does not expand revenue, but it substitutes the sales tax for that homestead property relief. It requires a local act of the General Assembly followed by a voter referendum if the General Assembly approves it. And then if it is approved, if the General Assembly approves it, if the voters approve it, it runs for 10 years, which is four years longer than a SPLOST. Basically the SPLOST runs for 10 years as well, but SPLOST automatically renews. It looks like this would require a renewal after 10 years. Distribution is automatically calculated for each jurisdiction. So unlike SPLOST or unlike LOSS, we don't negotiate with the county or with the cities on who gets what. The distribution is determined by the digest of each jurisdiction each year. Basically, the way it works is it's your previous year's sales tax. So if in 2028 we're collecting the L-host, whatever we made off that L-host for property tax year – well, really – Yeah, I'll say fiscal year 28, whatever we made on that property, whatever we made on the L-host would go through and then offset the next year's property taxes. So you have to know what you're offsetting it by. You have to collect the sales tax first, and then you offset the next year's property taxes, if that makes sense. So as we get further in the future, if this actually happens, fiscal year 30, we collect the sales tax. the discount, the exemption for those collections would be fiscal year 31 for our budget. Yes, and then any excess proceeds beyond 100%. So if you collect L-host and it's actually more than what your homestead digest is, it goes to lower the millage rate for all properties, not just homestead. Big distinction between floss, because going back here, FLOST was another part of HB 581, the floating local option homestead, floating local option sales tax. The FLOST reduces property tax for all properties. So the reason that the L-host really for me as a staff person is more enticing is it really helps the homesteaders. It helps the citizens who live here instead of reducing for all properties. So that means more of the discount can go to the homesteaders. And I'll say this, Kelly. Based on what we've estimated our homestead percentages of our digest and what we would possibly collect in an L-host, this is possibly. Because the breakdown is a little bit different than swaths because of the digest. we would be very close to 100% homestead exemption. I'm not saying we would be right at 100%, but it would be somewhere 80 or above, 80% or above, which would be massive for our homesteaders. And I want to explain a little bit more about how Elhost works and why. it's not really a risk for us to run one, or for the county to run one. Let's say you collect 13 million of sales tax and your digest is 13.8 for homesteaders. Then we would exempt that 13 million, and then what our homesteaders would pay is that 800,000. So they would have very, between all of our homes in Peachtree City, that would be a very low amount for our homeowners. The next year, let's say we only collect $12 million in sales tax, which is very rare. It's very rare for sales tax to go negative from the previous year. Not impossible. Then that means, you know, are we stuck with a deficit then? With Elhost, you would not be. So we only collect $12 million. Our digest is still 13.8, or maybe it's 14 now. Basically, the way it would work is we would still exempt that $12 million, but the exemption would be lower than last year. We would still tax the $2 million instead of $8. So basically, year to year, as you know what the exemption is going to be, the percentage for our homeowners changes. So if it's 100% every year, that is what it is. If our sales tax is outpacing homestead, it will be 100% every year. If for some reason it's lower and then it gets lower the next year, property taxes makes it back up. The exemption adjusts based on how much you brought in. Does that make sense? Yeah, go ahead. Ask questions.

That would mean that in one year you could pay them 100%. And if the amount of collection goes down, there's a little bit that they have to pay. So it can go down and up. and down and up as the tax collection comes in. It could. So from year to year, it could vary anywhere. Yes.

So basically, your millage rate and what your digest is, you're guaranteed that amount of revenue. Now, if the sales tax offsets all of it, great. If it offsets 90%, that's still good. If sales tax goes down the next year, then the burden on the taxpayers goes up a little bit if your millage rate stays the same. But I will and Kelly could back me up on this if you need to, Kelly, but it is very rare for sales tax to be lower the next year. I've only ever seen it during the recession. Yeah, not even during COVID like it. It grew during COVID. So It's only ever happened once that I've ever seen it. It can happen because it has, but it's just very rare.

So with the one penny tax that's on there, how much would we get? What would be our portion of that in this county from an L-host approximately?

I don't know. Don't know that yet? It's calculated based on digest, but we haven't even done a mock calculation of that. But based off of lost and splossed, Our, our annual take of sales tax is a little over 13 million and our homestead digest is about 13.8. So whether it's a hundred percent or 80 or a little over 90, it's a lot less than now. You know, what you would be paying as a homeowner would be, would be very small.

And then you're publishing hypothetically that as a tax increase, even though it's a natural reaction to how much you collect in the L host. So say if you're collecting less, your millage rate goes up, we publish it as a tax increase. How would that work? No?

No. The exemption would change. So no, we wouldn't. If we kept the millage flat, then yes, it would. If you keep your millage flat every year, you have to advertise it as an increase because you're not doing the rollback rate, right? So yes, if we did it that way, because we would still be taxing businesses and industrial the same, then yeah, we would still have to do that process. but as far as people's exemptions on homestead, I don't believe we advertise a tax increase because their exemption is changing. An exemption just changes. We don't advertise that.

As of now, we don't have to. There's no telling what they'll require us to do down the road. Touche.

Okay, thanks.

Any other questions on L-host before we move on? It's complicated. I will say, as the city manager, I do endorse L-host. I think it's low risk to the city. And I think it provides what citizens have been asking for in lower property taxes for specifically homesteaders, which is the big issue, is homesteaders. And so I think this really provides that. if we are able to do it with Fayette County and the other municipalities in the county. I think it's good for our citizens without any real risk to the city organization as far as revenue sources. Okay. I'm gonna pass it over to Kelly to go over the general fund.

So this first slide is just a general fund overview. That was me. I'm sorry. I thought it was me because you know I'm clicker challenged. I always mess it up every year. It's a general fund overview. Our revenues and expenditures, we're proposing $60,779,253. showing an increase over our original budget of 4.8%, but if you look at our current projected budget, it's a 2.3% increase over revenues and a 2.4% decrease over projected expenditures. If you look at what we're projecting to end in FY 2026, it's right around $3 million, which is the measure purchase that we made of use of fund balance or reserves. This next slide, I gotta put my glasses on, because I'm gonna read so I'm not all over the place with it, is just a highlight of our revenues, and taxes are approximately 82% of our total revenues, but that's not all property taxes. Sales tax, which is the lost, alcoholic beverage tax, franchise tax, insurance premium tax, are all included in the general classification of taxes. And then in the other financing sources down there, 1.49% is actually the operating transfer from the general funds portion of hotel motel tax.

Do you have a laser pointer?

Yes.

So when you're talking about numbers, we can see it a little more easily.

This one? Okay. So right here, the other financing sources, that's hotel, motel, operating transfer, all except for 5,000 of it is what? I knew. No.

Doesn't it go to the amphitheater?

10,000 of it is sale of fixed assets, and 5,000 of it is the administrative operating transfer from impact fees that we collect. I knew I'd remember it. Then here with the intergovernmental, you can see there's a decrease over projected of 684,000, and that's basically due to the school resource officers. This year we had 100% reimbursement for the six new officers of cars, equipment, supplies, everything except for ammunition, and 80% of their salaries. Going into FY27, I'm budgeting for the same formula that we've always used, which is 50% of the 10 months that they're in the schools. That could change, I think, are y'all negotiating with the Board of Education on school resource officers? But we're just budgeting like it's just gonna go status quo. Then miscellaneous, right here, there's a decrease of $183,000, and that's because we don't budget for insurance reimbursements, which we've had insurance reimbursements this year, and we'll just do that as it comes along next year because that increases revenues and expenditures. Then this slide is about the major revenue impacts, and... I'm budgeting or we're budgeting 3.36% increase in property tax and the Avalorum tax. And the way that I calculated that was 4% for new growth and commercial based on conversations with the tax assessor, Leanne, and 2.7% for homestead because that's what the revenue commissioner allowed us as a cap this year. So that puts our... Estimated property tax collection at about 24.6 million, which is about 969,000 more than budgeted in fiscal year 26. Local option sales tax, I budgeted, it's been flat, but it's starting to pick back up again, so we budgeted for a 3% increase over 26 projections, which comes in at about 13.314 million, and that's 401,000 more than what we're projecting for this year. interest income is down we're budgeting about five hundred thousand dollars less and that's because rates rates have declined and we spent the arpa money because we completed those projects with the with the end of city hall when we're finished with city hall that's the last of the arpa projects then before we transition into expenses here's just a pie chart of our revenues so that you can see Property, well taxes, all taxes make up about 82.5% of our revenues. 44% of that is property tax, about 22% of it is lost, and then there's franchise taxes, the other taxes, and then the rest of the revenues are fines and forfeitures, licenses and permits, charges for services. And that's revenues, I'm about to move into expenditures.

No, I didn't, that's confusing.

And so that's revenues. Well, where is this slide? Okay, all right. Do you have any revenue questions? Okay, this is just a history of our military. And as you can see, from 2012 to 2025, we did do a full rollback. We have reduced our millage 1.34 mills. So what that means to us, in one year, the cost of 1.34 mills is $5,650,795 that the city's not getting. And it's a savings of $273 to the average Peachtree City household. Say that one more time. The value of 1.34 mills currently is $5,650,795. That's a loss to the city and a savings to taxpayers in an average home of $273 a year. Over the last five years compounded, that's $23 million that the city has not collected in property taxes. Thank you. and these are our expense highlights. We have budgeted a 3% COLA, and we'll talk, there's a whole thought on that in a minute, and a 2% increase in technology. We had a 2% increase last year. I feel like that's pretty good with the way technology runs our world, that we're able to keep it within a 2% increase. We budgeted some personnel, the last three of the firefighters. There's another slide that'll go into detail on that. We're trying to keep up with competition for ongoing labor, fuel costs, utility costs, and health care costs. This is the slide. This is Justin's slide. But this is the slide that shows CPI to COLA over the last, since 2022. No, since 2010. We stayed pretty neck and neck with CPI until 2022. But since COVID, we've slowly been losing ground. The 3% that we've proposed in this budget will keep us about 7% under CPI. But also know, we're probably going to come back mid-year, December, and if everything's going well with collection of revenues and finances, and ask for another 1% like we did this year. because we want to keep our employees, we want them to have the same purchasing power year to year, and we want to stay competitive in the market. I think this year we're planning to do another salary survey, another salary survey, and we don't want to be really far behind and have that cost us a lot of money all at one time. Didn't Justin do a good job with this picture? It just makes me so happy. These are our proposed personnel additions. We're looking to bring in the three firefighters that will round out, was it 12 or nine total? Nine. Nine total for Fire Station 85. Then there's a new EMS training officer, and then there are two fire reclassifications. There's a fire training coordinator being reclassed to a fire training officer. There's a fire logistics coordinator being reclassed to a fire logistics officer. The three firefighters, we're planning mid-year, so that's a savings of 173, 174,000. There's a police staff assistant proposed, a planner proposed, there's a reclassification in the library, taking the reference librarian to an assistant director for library technology and access services, and a reclassification in code enforcement, taking a senior code enforcement officer to a code enforcement manager. So all of that comes out to a net cost to the general fund of $508,000.

Kelly question. The planner. Yes, ma'am. In the planning department? Yes, ma'am. That was not exactly clear to me. Sorry.

And I will add. I'll add some context on the planner. When I first came in, there were two planners plus the planning director, and one of the planner positions got riffed during the COVID stuff, and we've never brought that position back. Number one... I think the position needs to come back even with just the workload they have down there. Second is, and Shayla can verify this as well, I forget the bill number, but one of the bills that passed this year, too, actually puts state deadlines on plan review. And so beyond just really needing the planner position back because we had it before and the workload is there, we need to make sure we're meeting the deadlines for our citizens and permit reviews and all that stuff. Plus it's a state law now putting some caps on permit review timelines. Last thing I'll say, and this isn't for next year's budget, but it's something we're going to probably bring before you in July, is With engineering, we're reorganizing the engineering department, and one of the plans is to take one of the engineers and actually send them to planning under Shayla because a lot of the engineering responsibility is plan review. And so to actually have the engineer that reviews plans under Shayla all in one place so she can just walk right down the hall and talk with the engineer and make sure plans are moving forward. Yeah. Any other questions on any positions?

I have a question. Yeah. The firefighter savings, that's a one-time savings, though, from vacancies, correct? So really the annual – We're just not hiring it at the beginning of the year. Got it. Okay. But really the annualized cost of these positions is the 681. That cost to general fund is just for this upcoming fiscal year. Yes.

We've done that. every year with the three firefighters we've only we've hired we've hired him halfway through the year just to save that one year as we roll but yes correct one more thing with code enforcement I want to talk about the code enforcement just a little bit too that's a reclass for our senior code enforcement officer he's technically a senior code enforcement officer but he is a manager and so really he's probably been in a grade too low for too long because Tim does manage all the other code enforcement officers, but he's only paid as a senior officer. And so, you know, this reclass is to bring him up to really what he's doing, which is managing those code enforcement officers.

All right?

Okay. And then this slide breaks down our general revenue expenditures by division, and it gives you the... typical home of five hundred eight thousand dollar property an average home in Peachtree City the tax bill at our current millage is about twelve hundred dollars and so this breaks down that bill dollar for dollar per dollar how much you're paying for each division for each service and so is not if you've Added up real quickly, in the proposed budget, public safety costs to the general fund are $28,446,453. And that's not including capital purchases funded through SPLOST or debt service. And ad valorem tax revenue is proposed at $24,627,347. So that's just under $4 million shy of tax revenue paying for public safety. So what you do pay for public safety, police, fire, emergency medical services for the average home is about $46 a month or $1.51 a day. And that's for an ISO 1 rated fire department and EMS and our police department that gets top reviews across the state

Kelly got a question or comment. Anyway, I'm looking at the percentages on here and it looks like our, our safety side of the business, which is police fire and EMS. Um, they're not all the first responders. I would typically include public works in that, but let's just talk about those two. That's almost 47% of our total budget. It's 46.8. Did I look at that correctly? And if you add in, public works which you know when trees come down they got to be out there that's another 15.8 on top of that so just taking care of the people who are out there protecting us making sure the city works you've got what 60 percent oops did i do that no i didn't i'm showing you in a pie chart oh you got it in a pie chart okay thank you kelly you can see right there the big four which does include recreation in the green up there but recreation public works

Fire and EMS and police make up 74% of our budget. And in public works for fiscal year 27, we're incorporating engineering, stormwater, and building maintenance. So it became even larger than it's been in previous years. And then the remainder are the, The support services, well, the library and the support services like finance and HR, planning and development, but the majority of our expenses are the big four.

Thanks for doing that.

Makes it easy to follow. The reason that finance is so big is is because we do have IT and GIS and municipal court and customer service are all also under finance. So that makes it that nice little green chunk right there. And this is just another view that Same pod, different view. This demonstrates that we're service. This is by category. It shows that we're service-driven. 65% of our budget is salaries and personnel cost, and then another 20% is contracted services, which are things like our pool maintenance service, our tree management contract, IT. And then this, this is just a general fund budget summary and it shows that here it shows that revenues are budgeted at sixty million seven seven nine two five three and expenses are budgeted at sixty thousand sixty million seven seven nine two five three and that we do not plan to use it's a fly fund by

I promise you, that's a fly that just landed on my screen.

He's lying. There's no fly.

There it is. It's a fly. Blame the new guy. It's fine. It's a fly.

It's a fly.

Sorry, Kelly.

No.

But it is the fly's fault.

It is the fly. So here's my five-year model. This is without a bond. And I'm saying this for Suzanne. It is a lot of numbers. You can see down at the bottom, the percentages of fund balance, and they're all pretty healthy. And I'm going to go through my little what a strong fund balance provides. So it's on record a strong fund balance provides financial stability and credit strength that helps protect our bond rating. It provides emergency and economic risk protection and shields us from revenue shortfalls, funding delays, major unexpected costs like storms or litigation, or facility failures. It provides operational flexibility. It helps us avoid the need for cuts or tax increases during economic disruptions. It provides for capital planning and strategic investments. It allows cash-funded projects when advantageous and flexibility to grant match or buy property. It provides a lower borrowing cost. Credit rating agencies view a strong reserve favorably. And the bottom line is that maintaining the strong fund balance is not just conservative, it's strategic. It allows us to plan confidently, adapt to uncertainty, and preserve our financial strength for the long term. And having said all of that, the next slide, slide.

Do I get a rebuttal?

Well. Not yet. You can't after this one. This is my last slide, and this shows it with a bond and with a $6 million investment out of reserves towards our police. Thank you. I'm not good at pointing. With a $6 million... investment into our police renovations out of reserves and then a facilities authority bond for a permanent structure over Kedron and the multipurpose field at the Meade complex. And as you can see, with those two things, it reduces our reserves down to 46% and it stays about steady over the next five years.

Will that affect our AAA bond rating? No, ma'am. The $6 million in the center there, could you run that by me again? That's what we're taking. Oh, that's the debt we're going to go into.

No, no, that's straight out of reserves. That's for the gun range and the renovations and the police department. And then the $1,064,000 is my best estimate on debt service on a 15-year, $11 million Facilities Authority loan.

The bond is right here, Mayor. That's the payment.

Okay, the bond. And so this $6 million, one more time, is?

Cash reserves.

What we're taking out of cash reserves for? The police department.

Police renovation projects. over 15 years is for a 15 year 12 million dollar bond for uh the kedron structure the mead multi-purpose field and then we have yet to figure out the third project we probably would have between one and two million to do another, to do a third project.

Kedron pool. And what was the next thing you said? The Braylon.

Did I say Braylon?

You said me.

I mix them up. I'm sorry. I mix up Riley and eat and Braylon Braylon multi-purpose field.

Thank you.

Thank you. And that's 15 million total.

12 million.

I'm sorry, 12 million. 15-year. 15-year.

15-year amortization.

And this is not included in the budget that we're proposing. We'll come back the first of the year. We'll come back with the $6 million to do the police renovations, and then we'll come back with the facilities authority when we're ready to do that also.

not till the first of the year fiscal year it'll be a budget the reason why we're not putting it in the budget right now even though we know we're probably doing this is because we want to compare our budgets apples to apples every year because otherwise you have this huge jump one year and then it would drop back down again so we want to compare our actual operating costs apples to apples every year

Now you can rebut.

Okay. The only rebuttal I have is please inform us, as well as the public who may listen to this, you know, all four or five of them, including the two who are here, brave souls, where do we need to be reserve-wise percentage of our budget in order to maintain the AAA bond rating?

38.

i think our policy requires us to be at least 31 or better um well for bond ratings it's not it's not just about fund balance i mean they take a bunch of different things into consideration i think it's you know your responsibility are you operating on a deficit which we we will not be taking the six million out for a project is not because we have to pay salaries right with everything that i've read 30 million is really like the

below or 30% rather I didn't mean 30 million 30% is really the lower end but then like you say they look for how much you've increased or decreased any specific item within your budget as being like a red flag 37% is really what they estimate is the maximum that you really should go to before you should start looking at giving the money back to the people

that's that's we're not arguing that today but I mean and that's what there's literature out there that says above 37% is you've taxed them too much and that's and that's what these projects I think are also are doing you know the six million for renovations at PD we have to do it and it's good that we have it and it's a tangible asset to our city I know it's not it's not necessarily money in our citizens pockets but it's It's state-of-the-art training for our police with upgrading this gun range, having the EOC for emergencies, renovating the current PD building, which is over 30 years old, probably approaching 40 years old at this point, for better operations, more storage. They're running out of storage for evidence. And then talking about, I know we've beaten the Kedron Project into the ground, but the Kedron Project, the Braylon Project, those are tangible things that our citizens actually will be able to use. And so that's, you know, I think we are investing back into our community some of these things that our citizens will benefit with for decades to come. So I think... think it's a good time to do things like this especially because we I think we all have agreed we do want to have the fund balance go down some so and you say that it's you see that the projection and of course projections are just guesses they're educated guesses but if we do this it holds steady in the 40s instead of climbing instead of keeping climbing again

I wish that these two pages, the without the bond and the with the bond, were not front and back where I'm having to like, yeah.

Apologies. I will, yeah.

Just a tactical error here on.

Yeah, we can print out. Positions. We can print them out. I know, I'm just saying. We can print them out with no front and back.

I'm sitting here flipping back and forth. But the other observation that I would have made is that where you have the five-year financial model without the bond,

projecting that by 2032 you would have 62% in the fund balance with the bond it's less explain that well because we're also spending six million dollars of fund balance on the renovations for the police department and we're taking on the debt service for the bond right but that's also a good example of if if we were at 37 we wouldn't be able to do something like pay cash for the renovation of the police department by property by property without dipping down far enough to where it would impact our credit rating you know it was it was a relatively easy enough decision for us to make as a as a council

to go ahead and purchase the major building when we did for what we did because we did have that fund balance. I get it. I'm not arguing that at all. I'm just saying that with the bond or without the bond, it's like I still look at the number and try to hone in to get it closer to where I think it's fair to the citizens. That's just my, I mean, as you know.

It's a tightrope to walk.

Yeah, and I'm not trying to put this into financial rack and ruin. I don't think anybody would let me. That's not the goal at all. You know, I'm trying to operate in the best interest of the city and the citizens.

Yes. I think we all are. Oh, I'm not saying you're not.

I'm just saying it's like, you know, I just keep looking at that going, well, is there a little bit we can shave off now? I think our best bet would be the L-host, which is really gonna shave off a whole bunch. And push it off. And maybe perhaps between now and when we can push that forward again, we need to do a better, more long-term education process with the citizens. Because we did get a little bit of pushback on emails. Or at least one was this pushback.

We didn't have a lot of time, though, before we had that. Well, we had two hours.

You can't educate the population in two hours and that's all we had. I got it. Now to explain the difference between the L-host versus some of the other forms of taxation or bonds or whatever and what the advantage would be to the homestead. properties. That's a significant thing. If you can reduce the property taxes for homesteaded properties by even 50% that's significant especially when we look at the senior citizen property tax exemption we bickered about for how long on the dais and that really only amounted to a difference of about a hundred and seventy nine dollars per household you know so two more points before we move on because this is the end of the general fund right yeah I did I think I forgot to mention with the L host that

It starts January 1st, like the soonest you could collect is January 1st, 2028. So even if it had passed with this special session with the delegation or with the legislator, we wouldn't have been able to collect for a year and a half. Like the earliest you can collect is January 28th.

So it's not passed at this point. So it's basically kicked down the road at the state level. That's what it seems to be.

They voted on it on Saturday.

And they've kicked it down the road. So we won't see it until next session coming up.

So next session is 2027. But I will say, it would have been nice for it to pass and go ahead and have it on a ballot and kind of be done with it. But it's not like we're losing out on it by pushing it to 2027 because it can't collect until 2028, no matter what. So that was one point. What was my second point? Oh, I lost it. Anyway, if I get it back, I'll say it later. So I think we're passing to Dustin now.

I think I can explain what you were trying to say, Justin. the difference would have been not necessarily anything we're doing this year, but if it had been on the ballot in November and had passed the next year, as we do the budget, you know, we're going to have to approve the budget before we have the election. So you don't know what's going to happen. So it's, you know, it would have been nice to get it this year.

True. Yes. For planning. Yes.

Correct. All right.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, Council. So, yeah, general fund compromise, I mean, it has most of our operating expenditures, right? But we have many other notable funds that are integral to the city. And we're going to go over some of those now. First, we're going to start off with the amphitheater fund, which, as you all know, it's our 2,500-seat outdoor concert venue, locally known as the Fred, which holds many major concerts every year here in the city. It's an enterprise fund, so it operates like a business and is primarily supported by the revenue that it generates and is not supported as much by taxes like other governmental funds. Profits earned at the amphitheater are reinvested into the facility. each year to enhance the customer experience. And some of the most notable improvements recently are we replaced and upgraded four spotlights, upgraded concourse lighting, installed new perimeter fencing, upgraded the fiber network and security system, and replaced stage roof and stage ceilings. For the budget for the amphitheater, we're proposing it at $1.95 million. On the revenue side, you can see that that's charges for services at $1.59 million, and that's primarily from our ticket sales out at the amphitheater. Next, we have sponsorships at $255,000. We have a transfer from the hotel-motel tax fund, which we're able to do that because this is a major tourist destination of the city. And then lastly, we have surplus carryover at $20,000, which is us reinvesting some reserves back into the facility. On the expense side, you can see the largest portion of this is $1.24 million, and that primarily has to do with what we pay our artists to come out and play at the Fred. Also, our next major category would be purchasing contracted services, which is just basically what it takes to operate the facility throughout the year. And then next we have our personnel, supplies, and capital outlay and contingency. Capital outlay is where we reinvest back in the facility, like I mentioned earlier. And this year we have some ADA upgrades to the restrooms out there. We also have... We're replacing, I think, about 100 or so seats, which we do annually. And then we're also doing some electrical panel upgrades and whatnot. So that's what that $100,000 is. I want to point out that there is no...

supplements from the general fund here so it shows that you know the amphitheater is healthy and it's self-sufficient we're not using any property tax dollars to uphold the amphitheater question for you on the program expense obviously that's all the artists coming in and with the costs that have gone up through the roof for everything including people coming you know, from other parts of the United States to perform here, have you seen a significant increase in that program expense for bringing in top-notch artists? Definitely.

I would say it's, I don't know the exact percentage, but it's definitely gone up for sure. It's harder to get the bigger names, and so we're trying to balance that with, you know, the total shows that The competition we also have at Trillith Live and some of our other venues around, so it's definitely been more challenging. We do have six sold-out shows this year. We were looking earlier.

Are we doing business still with RCS? Do they still?

It's called PTR.

PTR.

Yeah, RCS is part of that three-company organization that we do business with. So, yeah. The other one is Fresh Ticks, and then the last one is Premier Productions.

All right, any other questions on the amphitheater?

Next, we have our Hotel Motel Tax Fund. This is the city fund that we receive our hotel motel tax revenue in, and hotel motel tax is an 8% tax on short-term lodging, which includes hotels and short-term rentals. For FY27, the proposed budget reflects expected revenue of $2.367 million right there, which is a 3% increase over what we anticipate collecting this fiscal year in FY26. So that's what that is. While the revenue is collected in this fund, it's not spent directly here. Instead, the revenue is transferred out according to Georgia law. You'll see that down here we have a part of the transfer out are these numbers here. So we are able to transfer 3% out to the general fund for general purposes at $887,000, and that's just due to what tourism does to our general operating budget of the city. We're able to use it for general purposes. The next 1.5% is for TPD. And that equals this 368, 861, and 75,000, which is 443, 861. So we're able to spend that amount on tourism product development, which is for enhancing our tourism facilities. Like parks and recreation facilities, or most notably like the amphitheater here, where we're transferring out 75,000 to the amphitheater, which is why we have it highlighted separately. And then lastly, we transfer out 3.5% of the 8% to the CVB, which this is the CVB's largest source of revenue, a hotel motel tax, but this is not the CVB's budget. They have their own budget that they will present to their board. I have a question before you move on.

Yes. I heard that you say the hotel, motel tax includes short and long-term rentals. Is there a breakout? No, I see you shaking your head. Just short-term. Just short-term. Yes. Okay. Is there a breakout to what that is brought into the city at this time? If you don't have it, that's okay.

We put it in the same bucket, so I would need to do a calculation on that. We could get that if you would like.

Just an interesting to see if it really has helped us at all.

It has. I believe it has, yeah.

Okay. That's what I was looking for, so you had the answer to the question. Yes, sir. Okay, thank you.

All right, I'm going to, if y'all don't have any other questions for Hotel Moto, I'm going to pass it off to Jonathan. I want to hold the clipper. Okay.

okay so next we're going to talk about the stormwater utility fund it's another enterprise fund that we operate so with the completion of rate studies and the adoption of new rates there's actual significant operating changes proposed to this fund some of those are notably three new stormwater positions also we're going to start having the stormwater bills be included on the 2026 calendar year tax bill in a pretty significant, almost 50% increase to pipelining and pipe replacement. The projected budget is about $4 million. And then this next slide kind of gives a better breakdown of where all the money is going. So you can see With the approved stormwater rates, fiscal year 27 revenues are actually projected to increase by approximately about 1.3 million compared to 26. And on the expenditure side, the most significant increases are in personnel cost of around $300,000. There's some capital purchases with the purchase of a new excavator under vehicles and equipment and also a substantial increase like we talked about earlier with the infrastructure which includes all your pipelining, pipe replacement items. So that's really where the bulk of it is and right now we're projecting that budget to be completely balanced based on the revenue projections that we would not pull any money from reserves from the stormwater fund.

Where are reserves on this? Do we have any?

Yes. Three million. So.

before we go on I think that earlier this year we had after we made our decisions to increase the rates and put them on our property tax bills I think I did a Monday's with the mayor on that but I'm kind of curious to know if you think we should I guess I'm asking you Justin if you think we should focus a little more one more time on messaging to let our citizens know if we want to do a write-up I'm getting pretty handy with the teleprompter to, you know, to put it on a Mondays with the mayor or some other way to message this out and just kind of let our citizens know this change is real and we're going to be seeing it soon. Just a thought.

No, I just wrote a check not too long ago.

So I knew it didn't for residential but you know, businesses are built monthly, monthly, monthly, and they haven't gone yet. So they go in October one, the businesses will have the new rates. residential will go with the property tax bills, which as of the previous years has been like January. So we'll see how that process works out this year. But yes, I guess Yeah. Somewhere around the beginning of the fiscal year, maybe in the fall. Yeah.

But residential is the only one that's going to be built through the property tax office? Yes.

We're going to continue to build commercial and industrial the same.

I have a question on when you're ready. Have you seen much concern from the community, whether it's residential and commercial or industrial, on the rate changes that we've had, which are going to be for everybody's benefit when we get this all done on the stormwater side? But much concern?

I, not to me personally, not to my city email, or I think we had a few when you all first passed it, but no.

Finance hasn't gotten any calls thus far. Yeah, not yet. I wonder how much information they know at this point.

All right, so I'm sorry. When do the industrial and commercial rates actually go into effect to be raised? October 1. October 1. You know, it probably would be a good idea Mondays with the mayor in September.

Yeah.

Or even now. Like, do it, like, I don't know, the first.

Well, we did do one. I mean.

You know, like, do it a different week, different times or whatever. But I do one almost every month between now and October the 1st.

When you all voted on it, the mayor did do, I mean, you talked about it a long time. Yeah. In one of those videos.

Yeah. negative and positive there were people who understood there was a lot of chatter about it so we did get you know i wouldn't say it went viral but it definitely did get the attention of everyone but of course it has died down now so we will be going back before it goes out with sample bills things that we push out because it is a little difficult to explain it but when they can actually see it visualize it it's a little bit different so once we have those we'll be pushing

My concern, of course, is probably the industrial ones can probably weather the storm, but some of the smaller businesses that operate and own their own property, et cetera, obviously they may not be budgeting properly for that increase. Telling them again is probably good. Yeah.

One note with the excavator, the excavator is a replacement. It will be a new excavator, but it will be a replacement of the current one that they have.

Okay.

All right.

One more thing. We haven't talked about this too much, and we're not there yet, but at some point there will be a discussion about a stormwater bond as well with these new rates, not increasing them again, but taking out a bond with the new rates that we have to make payments on to speed up some of the projects that need to happen.

So that's basically a cash flow to start feeding all the projects is really what it is. Yes. Okay. Just wanted to mention that.

Okay, so are there any other questions before we move on from stormwater? I think the next slide is our capital funds. So we have our CIP fund and the major capital outlays. you can see the the first four up there the comprehensive plan the grounds pole barn batteryway improvements and then citywide facility improvements which include some upgrades to the Public Works admin building Glenlock burglar alarm Glenlock roof replacement riley field roof replacements riley field electrical and station 81 led conversions those are all under the city-wide facility improvements but those first four are things that we budget for they're going to be paid directly and after that you kind of see everything where it has a little asterisk financed our public works equipment, the police patrol vehicles, technology replacements, fire and EMS vehicles and equipment, recreation equipment, and other financed vehicles and equipment, Basically, we take those and we finance them over a five-year period. We calculate the first year's payment, which is about $611,000 a year. So we kind of maintain that as a revolving five-year financing plan. Things fall off. Things come back on. That brings our CIP fund to $1,416,491, and that's only $15,000 more than what we did last year. So it helps us kind of keep that fund consistent year after year and predictable. I've got a question.

You have a replacement of police vehicles, and you've got some other front-end loaders and things like that that you're replacing. Where is the capture of the sale of those? Is it in a different part of the budget?

Sale of fixed assets. Other revenue sources?

Okay, it's under the revenue sources. Other revenue sources. Quite a ways back in the presentation.

I just budgeted $10 million.

Sure. I saw that. Last year it was like $128,000 or something like that. Then all of a sudden it dropped down to $10,000. So you don't really know what it is, and this is just a placeholder until you actually get in to start selling that stuff, and then you adjust from that.

I think this year it's already like at $265,000.

Okay, so you've answered my question. It's being tracked in a different area of what we're seeing right now. It's further back in the documents. How much?

yeah it's gov deals is not very easily you're not able to predict how much you're going to actually gain and some of those things depending if we find other uses for them they'll get reallocated to other departments or other places so they may actually not get sold if they can be utilized somewhere else so if it's not if it's not something that is completely You know, a lot of times PD, some of their vehicles, I know Public Works has utilized some fire vehicles. When they get decommissioned, they may not be up to fire standards, but we're able to kind of keep them running and utilize them for certain things. So there are some of that. So it makes it a little challenging to know what is actually going to go to auction. So were there any other questions on the CIP outlay?

the notice the battery way improvements there that is to budget for the restroom because we've talked about this before the the parking lot the right the playground we have funds for spossed But we had to figure out where the bathrooms were going to come from. I kind of knew they would always come from CIP somewhere. So we're finally budgeting for those this year because the plan is for Battery Way to be done in fiscal year 27. Yay.

Good. The style we're going to go with is the compact style that we have on Line Creek, basically that type of style? Something like that.

It'll be probably modular like that, just a single male, single female door. Because like Drakefield, like I discussed with you all, I think really what we're trying to accomplish is everyday use. Anything for like the 4th of July or events that are at Battery Way or Drake Field, no matter how many we put at these places, we're going to have to bring stuff in. So to me, it's more about thinking about everyday use. Yep. And I think a 1-1 at Battery Way is sufficient. I don't think it'll be like six stalls. I don't think it's a huge park. Yeah, that's the plan. 300 is a little conservative. I think it may be less than 300. I think it may come in less. And if it does, then we can maybe put some of that money towards the playground and do more with the playground.

okay so now we'll move on to our impact fees so we collect those from new development throughout the city and they're subject to special legal restrictions including spending deadlines the funds can only be used for eligible improvements within designated areas. And you see those listed up there, the cultural slash recreation, but it's specifically exclusively for new shared use pass or extensions of shared use, but it has to be brand new. And then you have the fire department that collects impact fees as well as the police. department and our total impact fees available this fiscal year is 3,161,000, which is actually about a decrease of a million compared to last year so we have to spend these funds it's on kind of like a revolving five-year plan what came in five years ago needs to be spent this year and and we're we're definitely doing that by reducing it you know we spent a million this last year on impact fees and that was primarily primarily in the past That's where that million came from.

And it's not for maintenance. Is that right? This is only for new.

It can only be for new paths.

So is that a state law on impact fees or is that our ordinance on that?

That's, that's the state law state law. Okay. And so, I mean, a couple of examples, mill farms was that was impact fees when we did that extension. Um, we've used some of it for the Sumner path design, even though we haven't built it yet. And then also, uh, North hill was a big chunk of it as well. Good.

Thank you.

So there's not any questions on this. I think I'm going to pass it to Justin to bring us home.

The reason it's a state law councilman Holland, same as police and fire, their impact fees are restricted to new things as well. Like, we can't buy a replacement fire truck with impact fees. We can only buy a new one, which is what we purchased the engine for Station 85. We've already bought it for when it's built, but we bought part of it with impact fees. The reason that PD is so low is because we took it down to zero. We actually drained it for buying the gun range. We didn't just buy the gun range with impact fees because we didn't have enough, but we drained it down to zero to buy the gun range. And so the $44,000 is what's collected over this past year for PD. Another thing with impact fees is we get impact fees through new development. I'll find that out. That's a different question. So the reason why they restrict it to new things with you get it from development is because the idea is that development is impacting your community. Right. So whatever that impact is goes towards the new things you have to do as these things develop. All right. I'm going to go through these slides again. These are ones that we go through every year. I'll maybe do it lightning this time because nothing really has changed. Everyone's millage rates are staying the same this year. So the graphs are going to be pretty much exactly the same as last year. Ours has changed. I guess when I did this presentation last year, our millage rate was 5.943, 6343. So I've adjusted it. I actually adjusted this like late last year, but I just had to put them in this presentation to show what our current millage is. So if you look at all the municipal maintenance and operations millages, Peachtree City is the highest of all the cities in Fayette County, 5.840. We're getting close to Fayetteville, though, as we've kind of rolled back. We're etching on Fayetteville at 5.646, and you see Tyrone and Brooks are much lower than Fayetteville and Peachtree City, and the reason is they don't provide a whole lot of services to their citizens. The county does a lot for them, which we're about to show.

My bet is on Fayetteville reducing that millage rate over the coming years.

I don't know if they'll reduce the millage, or they'll just do exemptions. Millage may stay the same. We'll see. so this is the municipal and county millage rates combined with no board of education so this is everything of your tax bill except for the uh... the schools so when you actually put these all together tyrone actually becomes the highest millage rate because they do rely on the county for more services than we do that we provide our citizens directly so The red here is the county fire tax and the kind of peach color is the county EMS tax, emergency medical. We all pay the yellowish, which is the county M&O. That's for the courts, for the jail, tax commissioner's office. all their kind of admin operations plus jail plus courts, we all pay that as county residents because they do those services. We don't. We don't run the jail. We don't do the courts. We do municipal court, but we don't do probate and superior. So we all pay the yellow, but when you take into account the fire and EMS, Tyrone's rate shoots up above ours, goes to 10.682. Fayetteville's also shoots above ours. Now, they don't use the county for fire. They do have their own fire, but they do use the county for EMS. And so that takes their millage above ours. The only thing we pay the county is the M&O rate. We don't pay fire or EMS because we provide both those things directly. So that keeps our millage rate below Tyrone and Fayetteville. And my argument would be is that we're able to provide those services cheaper than Fayette County is doing and at a better quality as well.

Question on that slide. I see that the 911... It's a substantial portion of all of us, except for the county. Is that based on population, or how is that calculated? Because I see that Fayetteville and Peachtree City are almost equal. Where did that come from? Are you talking about the purple?

Yeah, that's the 911.

Oh, I'm sorry, did I get the wrong color? Well, purple is 911. Okay, purple.

Okay, so I'm sorry. It's the same for everybody.

I got some color blindness going on, guys. Sorry. I thought that was down at the bottom there.

The purple, just like the maintenance, is set for the whole county. So it's the same everywhere.

Sorry, my mistake. They're all the same on the 911. I just misread the colors on this. That's my fault.

That's okay. So what's your real question?

Is it equal or not? Yes. And obviously in the case of now that they pointed out the top one is the – is the amount, and we're all equal paying the 911.

The yellow is equal between everybody, too? Yep. It may just not look it because they're... They're stacked.

The M&O, that's what I'm calling the purple color. That maybe is blue color. But that's the one that varies, obviously, with the amount of maintenance and operation. Is that the one that's based on population or how is it?

No, it's just based on what they need to operate, their M&O, just like ours is based on what we need to operate. It's based on what it costs them to run the jail and run the courts and run their services. We pay for county roads, too. They don't take paving county roads out because we pave city roads. We're all paying for county roads to be paved, too, because we drive on them. Good. Thank you. Oh. All right. The reason why I separate this out and don't include the schools is because once you include the schools, it's hard to read the rest of it because the schools are the big blob. They eat up, you know, when you get your tax bill, about 60% of your tax bill is the schools. And that's what I've always told people. Even, you know, if we could do this L-host and eliminate homestead property taxes, that would be fantastic. But I tell people we could eliminate Peachtree City property taxes tomorrow and on a $6,000 bill you'd still be paying $5,000. You know, we get about 1,000 of 6,000, and, you know, most of that, over 4,000 of it is the schools on average. The only thing this chart changes is just adding the schools in, the rankings and separation between all of them stay the same because just like the county M&O, the school M&O is the same everywhere. And one of the big points with this one, and I want to make sure I get it right. I have some numbers here. One second. Okay. So on an average house in Peachtree City, so these are based on 508,000, about 509,000, which is an average house in Peachtree City. Your total property taxes due in Peachtree City is lower than Tyrone and Fayetteville. Between Tyrone and Peachtree City, the difference is about $177 a year, and Fayetteville is in the middle there somewhere. Living in Fayette County is pretty close, no matter where you live, whether you live in unincorporated Fayette, Tyrone, Peachtree City, whatever. It cut off here, but per day. I'm going to go per day, what you pay per day. Peachtree City, you pay $16.40 per day. Tyrone, you pay $16.88 per day. Fayetteville, you pay $16.85. Brooks, you pay $15.90 per day. And Fayette County, unincorporated, plus Woolsey, because they don't have a millage rate, $15.27. So you're basically paying $1.13 more per day to live in Peachtree City. Two years ago, when our millage rate was 6.043, the difference was $1.38. So it's gone down $1.13 the past two years. So we've narrowed that gap between what it costs. about a dollar more to live in Peachtree City than unincorporated Fayette County per day. All right, moving on to the actual breakdown of Peachtree City, just to kind of show it a little clearly with the pie chart. And I said 60% is actually two-thirds, 66%. Two-thirds of your property tax bill goes to the BOE, to the schools. About 20% comes to Peachtree City, and there's that about 1,000, about 1,200. County, about 765, and then E911, 42, 73%. And this is a property tax bill of $5,986 of an average house.

That was based on the 508 that you just rattled off? 508.

You did. Oh, yes. Yeah. It's up there in the subtitle. $508,000 property. Oh, there it is. Okay. Taxes due of that property would be $59,000.

Previous slide. Okay.

Yep. All right. Same slides I've done the past couple years, but I've actually changed some of the pictures on this one. So there was my point. It costs just $1.13 more per day to live here than an unincorporated Fayette. But what do you get for that? Like what do you get for that extra $1.13? And even I would argue with Tyrone and Fayetteville, what do you get here? And it actually costs you less. You get an ISO-1 fire department. You get premier EMS services. I say this every year. If you're in Fayette County and you have a heart attack, God forbid you want to have it here and not in the county because we actually do have cardiac saves. We have great parks and recreation, facilities, year-round swimming, which we hope to keep as we move forward with the Kedron project. The special events we have, the years I've been here, we've just added on to those special events and made them better. And it's impressive how many we do and how quality they are. I included the splash pad on this picture because last year you all made the splash pad free. So included in... in your living in Peachtree City and your taxes is you get to go to that splash pad. Public library, one of the most highly circulated public libraries in the state within the Pine system, which is the biggest one in Georgia. hundred plus miles of multi-use pass now the county has passed fayetteville has passed tyrone has passed but not like we do and you know we maintain those as well like we you know we're constantly going and paving cutting grass you're paying for that neighborhood and media maintenance i've i think i've had this conversation with all y'all this is my fourth government I've worked in, local government in Georgia, I have never seen a community that manages neighborhood, like does the landscaping for neighborhood signs and landscaping around the signs. That's an anomaly. But our citizens want it. That's something our citizens have said they want. A lot of the neighborhoods have those signs that make them distinctive even though they don't have HOAs. A lot of the new neighborhoods have HOAs. But a lot of the older neighborhoods don't have HOAs. They're a neighborhood. They have their sign. But the city has said, we're going to maintain those signs for y'all so you can keep your identity as this neighborhood. And I think that really makes us distinctive. And then finally, our CALEA advanced certification for our police department. I mean, that's a big deal. I add the CALEA in there because it's just a big deal, but also just how safe our community is and the resources we spend and give to our PD to make sure that we stay that way.

Top ten safest cities in Georgia, again.

And that's not everything. This is not a comprehensive list of things we do above and beyond other places. It's just the ones that really pop out to really highlight.

Justin, could you just highlight and explain to the residents why the ISO-1 rating is so important?

Yeah, yeah, ISO-1 is the highest, so it's insurance, oh gosh.

Services organization. Is that it?

It's like, what is insurance something organization?

No, it's important to outline it. A lot of people don't understand.

So this is the insurance service office. It is a part of VeriRisk. VeriRisk produces the rates for insurance companies. So basically what you pay for fire insurance, they tell State Farm, well, not State Farm, everybody but State Farm. Progressive. State Farm didn't want to pay them. Okay. But everybody else, so like when you call and get a new policy, when you have an ISO 1, you're going to get the lowest policy. You're going to get the lowest price on your policy. So it saves our residents money on another bill that they're going to have to pay. Yes. Thank you.

Good. Yes. So ISO 1 is the highest you can get somewhere between 1 and 10. 1 is the highest you can get. And it basically means that based on their evaluations, they actually physically come here and inspect us and talk with chief and go through our operations, look at our equipment, look at where our stations are. Based on all that, it means that as an ISO 1, insurance companies are more I've lost the word. Yeah, we get cheaper rates because what we're rated means they have more assurance. That's it. That's what I was looking for. They have more assurance in that we can get there and put fires out. We have good enough fire coverage and operations to achieve that ISO 1 where the risk, basically they're more assured that the risk is less in Peachtree City, and it does save our citizens money. think we've had a couple of our employees that can attest to that that have moved here over the past few years that their insurance has gone down I think car insurance is lower here too who's not paying attention yeah so I say I think car insurance is cheaper here too because we don't have any interstates running through the county yeah it makes a big difference So we're getting close to the end of the presentation here. And as we're getting close, I want to go back to the beginning where we talked about our number one budget policy is to take care of what we have. And that's what this slide is all about. What we base our budgeting on and what we base our operations on is taking care of what we have. And somebody's drawing on the screen again.

That one was me, and there's no fly involved.

No, that's fine. You can draw on them. You can circle things, whatever you want. You want to draw, like, a smiley face on there. Don't tell me.

I'll be the one. No, you won't.

But when we talk about taking care of what we have, this is it. I mean, this isn't everything, but this is a lot of what we do. We have over 40,000 citizens, 14,000 households that we have to provide services for. Throughout the entire city, we have over 380 employees. We have 88 city buildings now, over 400,000 square feet, over 1,000 vehicles and equipment. I always say this. It is not 1,000 vehicles. That's plus the equipment, weed eaters, lawnmowers, blowers. Our vehicles are closer down to 1,000. little over 100 maybe, over 4,800 traffic signs that we take care of. And that's an operation of two people that take care of almost 5,000 traffic signs in our city. 200 miles of streets, 100 miles of paths. When people talk to me, too, I always talk about the path system and say what's interesting about working here is you not only have roads, you have paths, which is just a completely separate and other transportation network that is asphalt that you're having to do on top of your roads, which is already roads can be difficult for just every community.

Justin, can I ask you a question here? Yeah. If someone says to you, how much money do we spend on path maintenance every year, what do you tell them?

3.2. How many? 3.2. 3.2.

Thank you.

But I did that probably more now. I did that like three years ago.

That's okay. That's a good number.

It may be a little higher now.

I would love to, because I talk about this stuff on here all the time, Justin, can we get an actual number of the miles of path? For whatever reason, I had 111 or something like that.

I've got the actual numbers here. Whole numbers are better for the presentation. 100.3 miles. Probably more. This was last year.

Yeah.

Probably a little more with Mill Farms now. Okay. But somewhere between like 100 and 102 miles of public pass. There are more. I think there's more than 110 miles when you add in the private pass.

Correct. Okay.

Yeah, plus the pass around the golf courses. What we maintain publicly is now over 100. We passed that last year.

And I thought we had like almost a little under 400 employees here. Now I see it's 380. Is that the most current number or is that what we're at right now? Not that I'm asking you to increase the number of employees.

I just wanted to know the right number. It changes every day. 380 is about average. Okay.

Fair enough.

uh i'll re i'll read you all these if you want the really specific numbers instead of the um no i'll just go with the slide uh 95 miles of pipe so we're that's where we're talking about storm water pipe that's not water pipes of the county that's not sewer pipes of wasa that's 95 miles of just storm water pipe under the ground in our city that we manage 8,000 drainage structures, 100 detention ponds. Those are public ponds that we manage ourselves. 29 tunnels, 48 bridges. That's another one when I talk with other communities. I don't know of any other communities that have 29 tunnels, especially in Georgia. Like maybe road tunnels, but, you know, I was like ours. They always say, how do you have 29 tunnels? I was like, well, they're path tunnels, but we still have to maintain them. 48 bridges. 40 parks fields and rec areas that's not the acreage that's just we have 40 parks fields and rec areas we own as a city 2,650 acres that are not right away and that's I think I've told you guys this percentage before we own 18% of the land in this city an organization that's a lot of land to manage and that also beyond other talking about other cities that's not usual it's not usual that a city owns that much land of its own city it's almost one out of six acres is owned by the city

And for the record, we're not selling any of it. Yeah. So don't come to us.

Well, most of it's Greenbelt. I mean, some of that's parks and our buildings and stuff, but a lot of it's Greenbelt. And Jonathan will tell you how fun it is to get dead trees or diseased trees out of some of those Greenbelts. Over 80 landscape islands. So that's where we're talking about, 5474, the Parkway, Greenbelt. Yeah, McDuff Parkway, our guys get out there and maintain all these landscape islands. We manage the GDOT highways, not the asphalt and not the traffic control, but we do the landscaping and mowing for them because if we didn't, it wouldn't look very Petrie City. And then finally, I've said this before, but the neighborhood entrances, we talked about maintaining them, but just 280 of them.

280 individual neighborhoods. I love it, but it's just, it blows me away when I look at that number. It is 280. 280 exactly. Yeah. Wow.

Is Plantera one of them? You guys had Pantera Ridge on the last slide.

No, we don't.

Maybe you just used theirs because it was so pretty and had flowers. We don't do that right there.

No, we don't do that one. I don't know who did. So that picture is a remnant from three years ago. I can blame Hannah. Hannah put that in there a few years ago. No, Pantera is not one of them. Now, the ones...

The one that's left at the entrance to Planetaria near the tennis center at the Highway 54, that one is ours.

The one that has nothing on it at Highway 54?

We might want to take a look at that one.

That one's ours. It used to be two, and then someone crashed into the other one.

I was going to say that's the one that someone hit, right?

And it was like, quote, to do another one. I was like, no, it doesn't even say anything. Just take it down. But, yeah, 280. It's a big number. I mean, we have one crew dedicated to neighborhood entrances. That's all they do. All right, last slide. All right. So what is our path to continued uncompromised excellence? This is just my opinion, my recommendation as city manager. What do we need to do as an organization to continue what we do and how well we do it for our citizens. We need to keep our employee pay at the 85th percentile. That comes back to the CPI and COLA that we showed you guys earlier and doing another study maybe this year to look at that and make sure where we need to be in the market. We need to encourage smart economic development. Notice I said smart. I did not say encourage all economic development. encourage smart economic development that fits in our city that is what things that our citizens may want stuff that will be you know businesses that will be good stewards of our city and good partners with us investing in safety personnel that includes personnel and infrastructure which I I'm very grateful to council that we have done this over the past few years we just need to continue investing in maintenance that goes back to the slide we just talked about don't sacrifice our services and for me that's not just funding what we do but the level of services and part of that comes down to me as the manager and our directors where We don't need to just hire who applies for a job. In Peachtree City, we want to be able to choose the best employees. We don't want the bottom of the barrel. We want employees who are going to care about what they're doing and do it well. utilization of our citizen advisory groups. We just created two more this year. I was going to say the youth group, but that's like church. The youth council will be coming online later this year. The public art group will as well. I'm not saying we create any more groups. I think we're close to where we should be with those. I don't know if we have the bandwidth to handle any more, but... the groups that we do have, I think we need to continue to utilize them. And I think they have come. I think they've been pluses to the city overall. Like I've been very grateful for some of the things that the transportation advisory group has done. Like they took on that micro mobility ordinance, um, to, you know, refine some of the things we allow on the path, which really hadn't been looked at in years. So I think these groups we've put together have done a good job in doing some things that help staff and also get some recommendations to council. Continue programs like PTC 101 and our summer interns. We have to keep getting our SPLOST 2023 projects done, especially now that we're kind of crossing the hump of getting closer to running the SPLOST 2029. tip funding we need to be aware of grant applications and apply for those now the tip funding this round we did apply for it and we applied for the bridge to connect the middle school high school which is a swath project but If we can get funding from that from TIP, we could possibly use SPLOST funds for one of the other projects, like more funds for possibly playgrounds or more paving, things like that. So we think that that is a really good application. I can never 100% say we're going to get it. I just hope we do because I think it's what they're looking for where you're talking about connectivity and getting cars off roads and alternative modes of transportation. I think that's what they look for with some of these funding opportunities. ORDINANCE AND POLICY UPDATES THAT KIND OF TIES IN WITH THE CITIZEN GROUPS A LITTLE BIT, BUT IT ALSO TIES IN WITH THE PLANNING COMMISSION, WITH SHAYLA, WITH SOME THINGS THAT YOU ALL WANT TO LOOK AT. I HAVE BEEN IMPRESSED THAT WE HAVE WENT BACK AND LOOKED AT SOME ORDINANCES THAT NEEDED TO BE UPDATED AND MADE SOME CHANGES AND I THINK We're going to keep that going with the UDO and things like that. The boundary study, annexation study, that should be coming up in the next month or so, I think August. But we also want to take that to citizens. So I think we will probably bring it before council to review it and then take it to citizens to look at before you all officially adopt it if you decide to. So I think the idea is council sees it first, you all give your comments if things need to be possibly changed, then we take it to citizens, do a town hall or a meet and greet where citizens can come and look at it, ask questions, and then we come back to you all again, I think is the way that it's going to go. 9-1-1 feasibility study we're finally wrapping that up that's been a longer process than we thought it would be but it has been very thorough and with the 9-1-1 feasibility study we are going to need a lot of agreement and joint work with the county because going back to talking about millage rates the 9-1-1 is run by the county not by us But we've taken the initiative to do this because we've seen gaps that just really need to be fixed there. So it's really going to take a joint effort of the county being on board with some of the things that are going to be recommended. Highway 54 corridor study. Once the DLT comes online, we get our dual left turns done at Huddleston. I think this is another TIP. I was talking about TIP funding. The county put in TIP funding for this, a joint application between us, Coweta, Fayette County, and Tyrone and Fayetteville. I think they all signed on. For a further corridor study once the new traffic patterns start to look into even the future of Because we know the DLT is going to possibly help but it's not the end-all be-all fix so they want to look at further things that need to be done down the corridor in the future and And then finally, L-host. I put this one in because, as I said before, I really support an L-host. And if we can get an L-host, I think it's maybe one of the biggest things we could do for our citizens in a long, long time. So I think it's very important that if we can do it, we need to do it. All right, and finally, the budget calendar as we move forward. Tonight is Monday, June 22nd, so we're here now. The next meeting, Thursday, July 9th, which is our regular session in July. It's our only meeting in July. We will hold the public hearing on the proposed budget and CIP. This is not to approve it. It's just to basically hold the public hearing for a future adoption of the budget. And that will be tentatively August 20th, which is the second meeting in August, to adopt the budget and CIP. And also we'll be bringing the CBB and the Keep Peachtree City Beautiful budgets before you that same night.

And... Stormwater that night as well?

Stormwater is in the regular operating budget. The enterprise funds are all a part of our proposed city budget.

Thank you.

CBB and Keep East City Beautiful are different entities. Even though they're component units, they're not a part of our main operating budget. Any questions?

Is it typical to do just one public hearing? Let me backtrack. The only reason why I'm saying is July the 9th is actually like the week of the 4th of July and a lot of people take their vacation, they go away. And I don't know whether we're going to see pushback on that, having it that week, whether or not that's, you know,

We just do it usually the meeting in July. So it's up to you all. You usually do the second Thursday in July, I believe. So that's when the second Thursday is. So, I mean, the date is up to you all.

The fourth is Saturday. I get what you're saying. I think people have the third off, not the following week.

But I get what you're saying where people may take a week off of work.

Correct.

through that weekend to the next. That's up to y'all whenever you want to have a meeting.

When I was a kid, we always went on vacation the last week of June, first week of July. Just saying.

Y'all decide the meeting dates.

Last week of June, first week of July, I hear you, is the 29th and the 30th and 1, 2, 3, prior to Saturday the 4th.

But I've already advertised that the public hearing is going to be on the 5th. That's true.

I'm not arguing that I'm just saying I think they'll be a little bit of like well we have two people who are interested we have two people I want to sincerely thank you for being here because if you weren't here I would wonder if we really did advertise this meeting and it's nice to see the two of you here thank you and if it was optional I wouldn't be here either Council, do you have any questions on the budget? Is there anything you're concerned about? Ask away. Tonight, this is the time to ask those questions.

I did have one. Well, I mean, it doesn't really pertain. I have some questions, but they don't necessarily pertain directly to this budget. I was just curious with the stormwater bond, what projects? Is there a list of projects?

There's a list of recommended projects from ISE, but it can be tweaked. I know you're going to ask about Luther Glass.

Nope, I'm not going to ask about it. That's not the one I complain about. That's the one that Kim complains about. I complain about the other two.

Which, Huddleston?

Huddleston and Lake Peachtree.

Yeah, the lagoon.

Two, two lagoons, hey? Yep.

Well, the one...

I've heard about the north and east. I've heard from people on that one too.

The east lagoon is the one that has a lot of silt. I know there's two lagoons, but the east lagoon, does the north lagoon have a lot of silt too?

A lot, defined a lot, but it's something we need to take a look at.

The east lagoon has dry land.

Yes, it does. Are those projects ones that would be included in that bond, or would they be done separately?

I think the lagoons on Lake Peachtree, when we're talking about those, it would make sense to do that when we dredge the whole lake.

Which is until, what, 2030?

2030. Those would be our responsibilities because the county is only going to pay for the main body of the lake. I'm just saying cost-wise, when people are already mobilized out there, that makes the most sense.

It does make sense, but they're also really bad. Someone else can ask some questions.

Yeah, I have one that I'm going to be a broken record again. You know, we're spending an awful lot of money on maintenance. You know, you've done the city hall, which is 35 years old. We're now going to be doing the budget for the police station, which is also 35 years old. But don't forget you've got a recreational facility called the hockey rink that's 35 years old. It did not show up. At least I haven't analyzed it, but it doesn't look like it showed up in the budget. And I know that we need some consensus on that to be able to have it in there. you know, if we're going to be taking care of buildings, we've got to take care of all the buildings, and that includes that one too.

So the reason that it wasn't showing up in the 27 budget is because the budget amendment was already for this year. So money has been – that half a million has been allocated for that project now. So it's there now. Any further monies allocated to that I think is a part of looking at and closing it like you had requested, which we are moving forward with.

Right, and actually the whole structure itself for the building – And we want to make sure if we can keep it for another 35 years.

Yeah. Yeah. Part of the half a million was shoring up those issues that were pointed out by the structural engineer.

Right. Those are inside type buildings. I was looking at the ones that we talked about at the last meeting, which is the roof and the actual, the big pieces of metal that control the, uh, uh, the weights on the, the, the roof. We want to make sure that those stay in good condition. maybe add more as necessary to be able to withstand putting up siding on that on that building but again I'm being a broken record you've heard all of this before deja vu any other questions yeah going back and first of all thank you for the work I know it takes a lot of work to put in a budget

in the presentation, so thank you. Going back to the proposed personnel additions, just to confirm, these are the only additions to the budget or just the personnel? There's no program enhancements or anything like that?

other areas we there there is um through cpac we're adding a technology person that split 50 50 between fire and pd because so much of everything that they do now is technology their cars their ambulances or yeah pd and fire professional services are going up a little bit okay and pay for an outsourced position

Outside of the firefighter savings, there's no other savings or cost reductions that we see in this budget? Are those the savings? Is there anywhere else that we've captured savings or program reductions?

Yeah.

I budgeted 2. We budgeted 2.25% budget savings. So in an expense account, I budget a negative amount that's to 2.25% of the departmental cost. And every year we've made that. So it's already accounted for that we're going to have savings.

We always budget some percentage of savings off the top. It can change year to year. But that is because we know that not every – we have to budget that every position will be filled, but we know they won't be. And then we also know that our departments are very good about not spending money unless they need to, you know, being very diligent. with the budgets they have and most the time we most the time every department comes in under budget and so we try to budget for those savings instead of budgeting a little higher. We also, I mean, just a little inside glimpse of the budget process when we first got the budgets back from all the departments, and it's no fault of any specific department or anything, but it just happens every year. The difference between what ended up happening here Well, the difference between our projected revenues and what expenses were being asked for from departments was about $5 million. And so we had to whittle that all the way down to make a balanced budget. Part of that was us betting on the economy, you know We had our gas prices estimated pretty high and we brought them down close to this year's levels because we're just kind of banking on the economy You know gas prices going back down, right? Some other things like that like when I go through the budgets I find things here and there that I look at previous years and I see what the actuals were and there's a big jump, and those always stand out to me. And then we end up having to talk about it, and then most of the time we end up reducing it down. So I think we reduced electricity down some this year because I noticed that it was a good bit higher. So electricity costs, we kind of went down. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think, but it's hard. So what really drives the increase in a budget, like our departments do a really good job of staying as flat as they can. And they know that that is their, the expectation to me is stay flat. And if you can't, you've got to justify why you can't on what's going up. Software, price of ammo, you know, whatever it is, they have to justify what that is. Um, but sometimes it, you can't like healthcare goes up every year and healthcare, that increase, I would venture to guess is over 75% salary in healthcare.

Like those two things.

Would you agree with that?

Yeah.

So they do a really good job of keeping their supplies, their contracts, of keeping all that stuff as flat as possible. And I'll back them up on that too. An example is our pool contractor. Last year, this is not this year, but last year they wanted to increase it and Harold came to me and I basically just said no. Like I said, no, we're not increasing it. And then they stayed flat. So that's the biggest goal is to fight as hard as you can to keep it flat. And if you can't, be able to justify it. Really, year to year, the biggest cost of increase to our budget are salaries and health care, like just personnel costs. That's always the big driver. And it's hard to fight that because of the market. Going back to the market and competitiveness, it's hard to justify keeping salaries flat every year.

Yeah, and a lot of times, I mean, when we formulate a budget, I know at the state we always said, You can see the values of what your budget are, but based off what the values of your state, what the state is based off looking at the budget. And here I see public safety and fire and public works and parks, which is when I think about living in Peachtree city, that's exactly what I, where I want my tax dollars to go. You also transitioned to my second question. About pool maintenance. And I know we incorporated the potential of the bonds to cover and the cash reserves to cover the, the, uh, Kedron pool house. What's not captured anywhere is the potential for additional maintenance costs. of the Kedron pool. I know we had discussions that that might double, uh, and what kind of the plan is. So I guess my question is, how does that play into your budget calculation for next year?

That'll be fiscal year 28. Okay. If we start in March, that'll be, yeah, we won't reopen until fiscal year 28. Duh. I knew that. But we did account for being closed in the budget for, for a good portion of the year. Okay. That's all my mirror.

Piggybacking off of what Michael was just asking about, is there any way to predict with Glenlock and heating it and trying to keep that open as one of the options? What the power bill would be? What the cost of heating it is going to end up adding and how that's going to impact anything. I mean, where is that number-wise in the budget projections?

Do you have to buy a cover? Yeah, to your point.

Well, I think there's a cover, but there's the heater. Mm-hmm.

Right now you're currently paying your utilities for Kedron. Kedron's going to be closed, so we're going to have that savings and those utilities up there. We will be utilizing them, but since it is a small quality of water, it should be less than what we're paying for Kedron. So we're keeping that same budget number for Kedron for FY27 with the thought that we'll be able to operate underneath that number.

Okay. Thank you, Harold. That's it.

That's a good question.

I didn't come to that conclusion eventually, probably, if I looked at it. But with the position additions, the personnel additions, to summarize, four of them are reclassifications, correct? There's two fire reclassifications.

Go back to that slide.

A librarian reclassification and a code enforcement reclassification. Okay. So that's not new people, that's just changing their designated code, what they're classified as.

Correct.

And then, so there's the three paramedics, one EMS training officer, one police staff assistant, and one planner. Correct. So we're looking at six new positions, of which three of them are, you know, the fight that we're delaying half a year.

Yes, and we will not have them next year. Whew. So there's, you know, for me, we've been funding these firefighters every year, you know, a million dollars basically over three years, and we won't have to do that next year. This is the last one.

But, yes, correct. But essentially it's this.

You're looking at five public safety positions.

This adds six positions.

Yes. Of which five are public safety. Correct. Correct. And I'll have to get Janet up here to talk with you if you want to take that police staff assistant away.

Nobody's suggesting that. I didn't say anything about that. I was just saying that to joke.

I was like, I'll have to get the chief on you.

Nobody's suggesting that. I'm just clarifying. The police? No, no, no. Because here's the thing. Because when people look at this list, it's like, oh my gosh, they're adding all these. There's 10 positions designated on this list. Right. I'm just clarifying to help you out. Well, yeah, we always want to be up front even if it's three classes. That six of them are additional positions. Four of them are reclassifications.

Yes, and if you look at the reclass total.

And five of the six are public safety.

Yeah, and when you look at the reclass totals, they're very, you know, minor. Just a little elaboration on the police staff assistant. That is for really open records. I mean, that's what Chief and Assistant Chief Myers have told me is they are getting so many open records requests now, and they have so much data now, like the cameras, all the cameras they have, all that's open record. And so it's taking so much time to go through all the stuff that's being requested that they really need a dedicated position at this point that just does open records requests. Now, if it is a slow time, I'm sure they have other stuff they can do as well. But I know what's driving this is open records requests.

Yeah, and some of those open records requests with the police videos, I've actually seen show up on some of the YouTube channels that I watch. And our officers did fine.

Questions? Any other questions? Great budget. Great presentation.

I did remember what I was going to say when we were going over the... No, we were done. No, when we were going over this... When we were, I know, when we were going over this, we were talking about council not wanting to, you know, go. I'll say Kelly and I are that way, too. Kelly and I would not recommend this or this unless we thought.

What do you point to? Wait, you went too fast. Would not recommend what?

This, $6 million, or a bond. We wouldn't be recommending these things unless we knew that we would be fine. And, of course, in future years. You know, we will not let us run operational deficits. We won't. You know, I'm okay if it's like one year and then we know we'll pick it back up the next, but we are not the kind of staff that's going to, you know. We're not the staff that's going to let, you know, the fund balance or a consistent deficit be the normal in the city.

Well, I am glad that you outlined the reason for separating out and showing it as a separate item and not as part of the proposed budget because I think that some people would look at the numbers with the $6 million in there and just compare it to current year. And I know as a citizen, I'd have been coming up here saying a few things, so.

And it also makes it easier when you have your original budget and the original budget doesn't include that, then your amended budget, it gives you a good reason to explain that. To the auditors.

Yes, to the auditors. I do like the fact that for continuity from year to year, it's easier to explain that, you know, what's going up as relates to cost of living and some of the other adjustments. It is adding... 60 positions, but you know, it's. And I spelled librarian wrong, I have to confess. Huh?

Yep. I spelled librarian wrong.

yeah I want to have just a couple closing remarks um you know this is a massive undertaking every year and we do like I've highlighted to you all we actually do this a lot earlier in our cycle than a lot of cities or counties do this we're at a We're having meetings right now the same time as Fayetteville in their fiscal years, about two months ahead of ours. And part of that is because, number one, we've kind of done it this way a long time, so we're used to it. But I think it comes back down to the Peachtree City, too, where we want to get stuff in front of our citizens and our council as soon as we can and not try to rush things for if there are questions or citizens are interested in looking at it. so I'm very proud of the process we have with this I'm proud of our departments for you know being diligent with their budgets for coming in under their budgets most years you know for taking public finance and public dollars very seriously and and doing what we need to do to serve our citizens and not no more than we really need to do I'm very proud of Dustin and Kelly here who put this whole thing together. They go through and help me with the PowerPoint. They put the big books together that are in front of y'all. They make it balanced, which is harder than it sounds to make the revenues and the expenses balanced together to make a balanced budget. They spend a lot of hours on putting this together to make sure that everything is going to work, that we're going to be as accurate as possible in our revenues, that everything is accounted for for what we need to do every year operationally from sunset sounds to motorcycles for police. So it's a big organization. It's a big budget and different funds to handle and look at and manage. So I'm proud of the staff I work with and proud of especially our finance department for what they do every year with the budget and with the audit. So couldn't do it without them.

Great work.

Is this being released on our website or how does it go out to the public?

Yeah, it's available today. It should be up.

Okay.

So if you want to view it online, it's there. I will also send a digital copy of these slides to you all as well, either tonight or tomorrow. That's it.

Thank you very much. Motion to adjourn, please. So moved. I need a second. Second. I have a motion and a second. All in favor say aye. Aye. We stand adjourned. Thank you so much for your hard work.