City Council - Regular Meeting

steady session for september 15th please join me in the pledge recording in progress All right, I'm gonna jump right into it. We got a lot to cover, budgets and important things like that. And we have some special guests. We have our Municipal Chair, Kim Drury, and our Court Administrator, Sharon Ells here. And they are gonna give a presentation that the Finance Committee saw earlier this evening about a new software system that they're needing.

Yes. Well, thank you for having us. I appreciate it and hearing us out on this request that we have for a new system, a new computer system for running the courts. And kind of the background of this is that the legislature has kind of given a drop-dead date for the administrative offices of the court, which is they oversee the court systems throughout the state of Washington. And they were for a long time trying to figure out what they were gonna do with this old jab system that's been around since 1989. And it's outlived its usefulness and they've been trying to figure out what they're gonna do and trying to figure out what they're gonna do and then all of a sudden the legislature just said, we're not funding jabs after December 31st, 2027. And so you're gonna have to figure it out. Well, then they came up and are rolling out this system called Enterprise Justice, and it's not going too well. And it's been not very well received by the courts that are being forced to go into it. Now, in this area, in Kitsap County, The Kitsap County District Court kind of foresaw that, because I don't know if you know Judge Johns, Jeffrey Johns, very big computer savvy judge who put together the prosecutors. When I was in the prosecutor's office, the prosecutors went to a new system and he dedicated a lot of time for the new computer system for the prosecutor's office. He kind of looked at the enterprise justice and what was going on in the state and said, this isn't, a good solution. So they kind of went their own way and they did a journal system. And at the same time, about that same time, King County kind of followed that same logic and they went to the journal system as well. And then Spokane Municipal Court is also a big court that's doing journal. And journal is the one that we're requesting to go to rather than go to the state mandated system. The journal system works really well. It is a basically 95% paperless system. which we think is a good thing. And in this world that we're living in that is going paperless and going digital, to have a system that is basically a paperless system would be the best way. The enterprise justice system is not that. It's a lot of PDFing things and uploading things from paper. And it just seems to be a very, The experience that other courts have had is it's a very unwieldy system that creates more work and more work for the people that are utilizing it. So for those reasons, we're thinking that the journal is a better system for the Port Orchard Municipal Court to go to. And when we look at it, I think we've got a track record in the court of being pretty frugal with the money from the city. I was telling the finance committee that when I came on in 2018, that about eight years ago, eight and a half years ago, our court was running with an administrator and three and a half people, bodies. We're right now running with administrator and one and a half bodies. and so we've just recently as a part of this request that we have have also agreed to give back a budgeted position and uh that we're giving back and taking out of our budget at this time so um the other reason that i think it's a good idea is that like i said kitsap county runs this system The prosecutor's office that is our, we have a contract with the prosecutor's office, the Kitsap County Prosecutor's Office for our prosecution services in Port Orchard Municipal Court, and they run the journal system there. The defense attorneys that are the public defenders in Port Orchard Municipal Court, they also practice in Kitsap County District Court, so they run the journal system in Kitsap County District Court, so they know that system, they know how to work it, they know what it's all about. And I foresee, I'm not confident, not for sure, but I foresee that if we were to go to the enterprise justice system, that the prosecutor would be coming back to the city saying, we need more people in order to run this different, completely separate, unusual and unwieldy system. We're gonna need more money from you and the defense attorneys who are our public defenders are gonna need more bodies, more people to be able to run the system as well, or more money, I would imagine. And we would likely need to have more bodies, more personnel to be able to deal with this system. We've put some numbers out on our funding request about what is going on with enterprise justice in the state of Washington and what its impacts have been. And the efficiency, I think, is one that I'd like to key on is that when you see that a guilty disposition that now takes 10 minutes on the current JIS system, which is the one that's going out as of December of 2027, and under journal, it takes about 10 minutes, and under the enterprise justice system, they've got it down. It was way over 30 minutes before. Now they've got it down to right about 30 minutes. Well, and I'm like, I do 25 to 35 cases on a morning calendar. Um, and if it took me 30 minutes to do one case, I can't imagine how that would impact, um, what I, you know, our court going forward. And, uh, even, you know, if there was 25 cases on the low end of what we do in the morning and it took even 10 or 20 minutes longer per case, that we would never be able to sustain that. Now, like I said, Kitsap County is doing it, the journal system. Sharon has been working with the other cities in Kitsap County, Paulsville. Bainbridge Island and also Gig Harbor and have kind of gone together to see what it would be like for to go into the journal system and if we all work together and as you can see on our submission as well the money right and the request at first was for this 339,000 number, because that was if we were the standalone, if we were the only one going to the system, it'd be $399,000. Well, since that number was thrown out, Paulsbo has had the thumbs up from their council to do the journal implementation, and so that means we are looking right now at the 270,250 number. And if Bainbridge Island or Gig Harbor goes, you can see it goes down to 233 or 225. And I think from what I just through the grapevine hearing from, especially from Gig Harbor, is that 399 number was a number that they were not very happy with or did not believe was something that would be workable. But I think if they see it's gonna be 233 rather than 399, maybe they jump onto and maybe Bainbridge Island. I think it's a little bit closer to jumping onto this. So I think it's just the right thing to do to be like the rest of the county, to be with our criminal justice partners in this county who are on the journal program and not deal with the mess that is the enterprise justice system. And Sharon can talk a little bit about the impacts of the enterprise justice that have been seen by the other courts that have been dealing with it.

Well, I want to talk about the operational impacts for one. When somebody doesn't appear in court, we issue what's called a failure to appear. And that gets reported to department licensing. And they can't get their license back or renew their license. It does several things for them. Department of Licensing, the system that the state is throwing out is not speaking to Department of Licensing. It's not up and running. Court dispositions are not being reported timely to the Department of Licensing, and some court dispositions are being incorrectly reported on people's criminal history. If a case is dismissed, it's being reported as the defendant is incompetent. So that messes with their restoring their firearms and several different things. So it creates a lot of work for a lot of people. It is the staffing alone, talking to other courts, they're saying that their staff are working 10 plus hours of overtime a week on this system. The court administrators are working 60 to 70 hours a week. And we don't get paid overtime. And I don't want to work 60 to 70 hours a week. I got a family and I have other things outside of my job. Really? Yeah.

And what they've heard or what we've heard from the other courts that have been pushed onto that system is that they're now making budget requests for more people to be able to do the workload that they used to be able to do with the employees that they had. That they're now having to request more budgets to be able to successfully or semi-successfully work with the enterprise justice system.

They're so far behind that the state has even issued an order that courts can throw out to close their courts for up to five days just to get caught up on their work. So you're going to lose counter time, people coming in. We're not answering phones. We're not doing anything. We're not serving the public that way. Yes?

Judge, you had a comment. Sorry to interrupt you. At the beginning of this, you said, I heard the word mandated by the state. And I took that to infer that they were mandating what system to buy. to purchase, all they're mandating is that you can't use the current system. That you can't use the current system.

It sounded a little, I heard it a little differently. The system that they are pushing out is this enterprise justice system. Right, but we're not mandated to. We're not required, there's nothing that requires, I mean, even, you know, earlier at the finance committee they asked about Remerton and why is Remerton not in this mix? You know, they're a city that's in Kitsap County. but when a long time ago before even this all started they went to their own system which was ocord and spent a lot of money on it and so they don't want to go to the new system but they don't also want to go they want to keep their system that they have and so they're in the old court system which is a little bit clunky in my understanding but it's the system that they've been running so

So just a quick follow-up, then let's see, is there any required interface between the system that you're requesting and the state system?

There is, and it has been working with Kitsap County District Court, the whole of King County is on. It's on the journal system and the Spokane system. And one thing I explained is when Judge Johns decided he wasn't gonna wait around for the state and they were gonna do the journal system, when he made the system up there and he spent two years off the bench doing all the implementation for Kitsap County and making all the forms and doing all the legwork, that he made it with this kind of thought in mind, because we had been talking and I had been talking to him, that he made their system so that all you had to do was change the caption from Kitsap County District Court to Port Orchard Municipal Court and everything else comes automatically. And so we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We don't have to start from square one. We don't have to make forms from square one. We just utilize the forms that they have and put our name on it. Thank you. Yes.

Just have a general question. Maybe you've said it and I missed it, but so the system that the state put out that has been problematic for other courts and why we're looking at this, why did they, do you know what, the process was behind, like, because I assume it was a contract, they went out and got a company and all of that. Do you know how they?

They ran out of funding. Okay. So it wasn't, it's still not completed. Okay. They ran out of funding and they're just giving the courts what they have.

Oh, I see. Okay.

Well, and there was a mess, you know, I'm not privy to exactly what all went down. I mean, I kind of was around when Kitsap County District Court was looking at what they were going to do if they were going to follow the state or if they were going to go out and do this other system, this journal system. And it was a lot of seeming to me to be like politics, you know, and a mess and people's toes getting stepped on and then deciding we're going to do this. And because I think Journal was in the mix for that, but the state decided to go this other direction.

So Enterprise Justice was not an out-of-the-box program, like from Tyler Technologies or something. They went and got someone to build.

Well, it is Tyler Technologies.

Oh, it is Tyler Technologies.

It is. Wow. But it's been problematic not only in this state, but in other states.

Okay. And Google search.

Yeah. That other states have been suing enterprise justice because they're not getting delivered what they were promised.

Okay. Yeah. I was just trying to figure out like, why is this not working? But it's not working. And so the important thing is, is that what we want to do, what you guys want to do will theoretically work.

You know, and I think the biggest thing to me is it will save the city money in the long run, you know, in overtime, because once we get through with this initial like 270,000, hopefully a little bit less than that, then it's 35,000 a year. and which is probably comparable to any system that you're going to have with a company to pay a yearly fee for. And so once we get through this and it's up and running, and then I think we can, I'm pretty confident and pretty sure that we can run with the staffing that we have right now.

That's what we're up to.

Sounds like a no-brainer.

No, I'm just saying we're just coming to you now because I'm trying to get the thumbs up prior to the first of the year so we can start contracts. It's a nine- to ten-month build, and I really want to get it done by October.

And you'll be talking, I presume, to these other jurisdictions as well to be like, hey. Yeah, you said Poulsbo.

Yeah, Poulsbo has already presented to their city council. They've already been given the thumbs up, so that's why the cost has already come down. It would just be nice to get it down to the

Yeah, that's what Paulsville said at their meeting. We listened to that meeting, and that's what they said. Boy, it'd be nice to go down from the, well, they were 430,000 at that, because they have a little bit more.

So the finance department got this presentation earlier and recommended support for this. And where we're at is, The other system gets turned off at the end of next year and it's a nine month build out and they want to get heads nodding here. But you guys are comfortable with this. It's built into the budget that Noah and I have been working on. But they want to get going on contracting and getting the ball rolling on this so that January 1st when this budget goes in place, we can bring a contract forward and they can charge and hit the ground running at the beginning of the year to start this conversion process.

I'll say this two cents about this and this particular way we're approaching it. The EJ is free to use. But free is only good if it works, right? You get it correct. That's what I was going to get to. So outside of implementation costs ongoing, this is going to cost us around $35,000 a year. they're literally giving up a point three of a person which more than covers that so I think you guys do a great job what you work on I've seen your budget so thank you we already asked all

One of those layers is digital parking enforcement. We want to go to that, but we can't invest in that technology until we have a software system that we can send that data to. And this does that.

I think maybe my questions were misread as being incredulous of this proposal. It is not. It's because I'm nosy. No, no. And curious. Sarah?

Go ahead.

The only question I have is with digital, in terms of does this change the experience for somebody interacting with the courts? Does it in any way change the accessibility to people who aren't as tech savvy?

Well, I'm going to say no. Anybody that comes to our counter and they have paper, we're still gonna accept whatever they have. We'll find a way to get it into our system. But it also gives those people out there, District Court has all their stuff online. I can go and look at all their cases. I can pull up anybody's name and look at anything I want to. So somebody can sit at home and do some research at home.

And in a lot of forms and things, will be online and that people can petition the court for whatever based on you know going on to the website and pulling up the the form and submitting it and so i think i think for kids looking at kitsap county's experience with it it has been easier for people to deal with the court because there's a lot of information

It's really, from someone who uses software programs for a different government agency every day, it's really valuable to use the same software programs as your neighbors. We get together and we feed off each other and answer each other's questions with your neighbors. It's really important. The billing departments do it locally. They try and use the same ones. Yeah, so cartograph this. I mean, it's really important that, not really important, it's really valuable. Continuity. Yeah, to share with what your neighbors are doing because you can balance it off each other. I've never seen that sharing, you know, lowering the costs before. That's pretty nice. Yeah. But I find it really, really valuable to do that.

I think that us being able to partner a lot with Kitsap County is what is reflected in that because Kitsap County has done a lot of the legwork for journal. I mean, a lot of the stuff that journal would have normally had to do Kitsap County has already done. And so, uh, yeah, so, and, and you're, I mean, I think that one of the biggest ones to me is the prosecutor's office. If we went to, they're dealing with journal now. If we went to Enterprise Justice, they would have to relearn a whole system and have somebody who was dedicated to our system in their office.

Or they could completely pull out.

Or they could completely pull out. They don't want the contract. And so that's, I think, one of the biggest pluses for us doing what our neighbor is doing.

And so, okay, any other questions? Any objections to them not moving forward with contracting? And the dollar amounts will work its way through our project process.

The dollar amounts will be, the most will be 270, and we're hoping for 225.

And Judge, I was already sold when she came in during our retreat and answered questions. Well, yeah.

I don't even think she needed me here. She didn't need me here. She didn't need me here. But she said I had to be here. I just got back from vacation. We were already sold.

Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. One thing, Mayor. And this is also for the public as well, because I think it demonstrates good financial leadership by the court's part. So six years ago, we knew they were going to have a new software coming. So that council at that time set aside $76,000 in our ENR for a new court system. Now it's fascinating more now, six, seven years later. So you got 76,000 there, and then we have the savings from giving up a .3 FTE. So a total of $210,000 that the court is really committing to this 270. So it's really 60,000 that the general fund's picking up. But again, I think that shows that they're willing to invest in this software and they've made some good decisions.

Thank you. That was important. I appreciate it. Okay, thank you. Good to see you. All right, we're going to jump into the budget next. And the finance department went a little deeper. The feedback we got from them is we went a little too deep. So we're going to fly the airplane a little higher in the presentation that you guys are going to get here and focus more on the documents at the back of the page, which are the highlights. But Noah's gonna kick us off and then I will follow Noah.

Yeah, so I have everybody unpack it here. I also sent out the preliminary budget book on Friday. So that has a little more financial detail in there by GL. Also has a message from the mayor on the overall status of the budget and kind of the work that we did. I did want to walk through the calendar first before jumping in because I think that's important just so everyone understands the timelines. So as we sit here today, September 15th, we're bringing the first budget to the work-stay session to present to Council. We met with the Finance Committee right before this meeting. So we'll cover today the operating budget, primarily OO1, General Fund, OO2, and our operating enterprise funds, 411, 421, and 431. Those are our utility-operated funds. Next week, September 22nd, I'm going to bring back another presentation for more conversation on the capital budget. I really wanted to separate the conversations because you can really get deep into the details either way. So we'll talk capital budget next week. Then we'll be in October. October 13th, I'm going to bring forward a presentation talking about debt service, debt capacity, and all our kind of smaller funds that don't have a significant impact on operations, but they are in the budget, so I want to talk about them briefly. That will lead us to our October 20th work-stay session, where we'll have a revenue and sources hearing and a presentation on property taxes. We'll hold a public hearing on the preliminary budget itself, and that will all lead to the October 27th, where hopefully we are adopting a property tax levy for the 2027 fiscal year, as well as the 27-28 biennial budget. Any questions on the timeline? So we will talk budget pretty much every meeting from here to the end of October. So what I'm hoping is that as we have conversations, you guys have questions, I can take notes and come back and follow me and kind of address any questions or thoughts that you guys have. The next document in this packet is an income summary, and I pulled this out of the preliminary budget book that we already provided. But I did want to spend a minute to talk about this. Mayor, I don't know if you want to talk at a high level just about your message before we jump into all the numbers.

So as Noah talks about these fund balances, in particular our general fund, the three biggest drivers to our general fund are what is called the O01, our current expense, It's where our police are funded out of, our street programs are funded out of, and where our parks are funded out of. Noah, he's gonna speak to how we're utilizing fund balance to this budget. We're finding this budget. And I'll talk later about some positions that are open right now that we're not filling to help balance this budget. The term Noah and I are talking about bending the curve. We need to see an increase in the economy. Our sales tax has gone flat. And we also need to look at controlling our expenses and the budget we're presenting is really a revenue neutral or flat budget everywhere we could achieve that. Excuse me. So I think that kind of foreshadows where Noah's headed as he shares with you what the fund balances and some of the challenges are. We really need to bend this curve a bit so that when we get to the 2028, so this is 27 and 28, so 29 and 30 budget, that we don't have crises like we're seeing some of our neighbors have. We want to try to get to matching our revenue

Thank you, Mayor. Sorry, I lost, I don't know my PDF for as long as I'm trying to reopen the file. So while that's loading, again, we're gonna turn attention to this income statement. It's on the back page of this for those who got the double-sided. We're gonna look at the 001 fund. Again, this shows you 27 and 28 preliminary budgets here. And what I want to point out, which my computer is struggling to, is that we begin the biennium with roughly $14.4 million in beginning fund balance. Revenues for that fiscal year of 2027 are roughly $16 million, with expenses roughly at $22.7 million. So we're in a deficit position from an income statement perspective for 2027. Likewise, for 2028, we have roughly $16.3 million and $19.8 million of expenses. You'll see at the end of the binding, we have roughly $4.1 million, and that does meet our financial targets. So we have a working capital financial target of roughly $3.9 million. So it has a little bit more than that. But this is the issue that we, the challenge that we've identified that we need to address before 29, 2030 budget, that our revenues are vastly shorter than our expenses. So thankfully we have time now over the next 24 months, as we were trying to coin the phrase, bend that expense curve closer to revenues by using a strategy of really tightening our budgets, looking at actuals and tighten them really close. We've paused on a couple of vacancies to help with that. And we'll talk about that in particular once we get into the operating.

Can you share his screen?

Yeah, I'm going to have to pull a different file. For whatever reason, it's frozen. We'll try this one. We'll try in PowerPoint, see if that works a little easier.

All right, there we go.

Have you restarted it?

You know, you laugh, but my son-in-law is a computer guru, and that's the first question he always asks me. He says, have you restarted it?

Okay, so I'm going to jump back in now. I've got it on PowerPoint, so that's working. So I'm going to turn to these presentations here, these presentation slides. So the income statement is available. It has it by fund, every fund, so you gain funding, revenues, and expenses. But really, again, I want to focus on this story, which is the current expense fund, 001. And when we look at this graph here, you can see that, again, revenue is vastly short of total expenses. And the real challenge that we see here is that salaries and benefits of personnel represent 80% of our overall revenue budget. That means you don't have a whole lot to cut in supplies or services, and transfers is very small. So when we talk about the challenge going forward, 80% of your revenue is going towards personnel. So this is where we gotta start talking about what we can do to either increase revenues or slightly decrease expenses as we approach 29, 23rd. So the question would be, Noah, if the revenues are so short, how are we funding this biennial period? And you see in the next chart here that you got $9.8 million of what we'd say is unrestricted cash, and we're using cash essentially to fund our biennial budget, and we're spending it down to that $4 million balance that we talked about before. So that's how we're achieving a balanced biennial budget with revenues and cash on hand, and we're really going to be monitoring our expenses over the next biennial period. The services include utilities or facilities, landscaping, IT services. Each department has their own budget for services. So depending on each department, we can look at what particular services are. Most of the services aren't particularly flexible in that you gotta keep the lights on the building, you gotta pay the water, you gotta pay those kind of things. There's very few things that you can cut without cutting your true operations. Similar to supplies, you see how tight supplies is a small orange bar, again, not a lot of area to cut there. Transfers, in this case, we'll have to look here if it's for capital projects and or debt service. That's generally what we're doing with the transfers, moving money from the general fund to support another fund who has challenges and or moving money from the general fund to pay for capital projects.

We've obtained a number of, debt service payments and they need to go in to be transferred from those capital accounts into the funds that make those payments.

Yeah, and you'll see this is particularly true in enterprise funds where there's much larger amount of transfers going out to operating fund to the debt service fund to make those payments. So overall, this is a very much what I've called a status quo budget. Meaning when we look at the prior biennium I believe expenses increased 4% when compared to the prior buy-in and revenues increased 2%. So pretty static when you compare it to 25, 26. I just did want to mention part of the assumptions here for personnel. We are assuming that non-representants will receive a 4% COLA. We're assuming all contracted and guild employees will receive what their contracts provide for. So that's from a personnel standpoint, cost increases. Sales tax is a significant driver of our revenue, and what we've identified is that sales tax has been relatively flat from 23 through 2026. We are using a four-year average for sales tax, which puts us for about $7.8 million in the general fund.

Do you have any data on, and we don't have to go into it now necessarily, but on where that sales tax is coming from? Like what people are buying.

We do have data on it. I have to be careful about what we can share because of confidentiality agreements with DOR. So we can try to elevate it to such a degree that we can have a general conversation. We don't know specific purchases. We know categories.

And category would be great too.

Yeah, so we can get into category like retail and construction and wholesale, those kind of high-level categories. Again, what we've identified is that the construction category over the last four years has been declining. Retail has been relatively flat, and it's really propped up by some other kind of online sales. But overall sales success has been relatively flat since 2023. Yeah Yeah, I'll have to look to see if that's the full category The category is really says other service. I think my sales in there and that's why the impact has really Had some growth. I was more concerned about what categories were declining and is that something that could change and Okay, so that's been our challenge. We've talked with directors. We've met with each one. We did not fund anything really new in their requests. Again, really status quo compared to what we're funding as current bi-agent, which is keep your operations going and keep your personnel. We have some things that we'll talk about here that we're moving forward, but not as much in the past. Again, in this slide you'll see current expense, roughly 89% of your revenue is taxes, that's sales tax and property tax. Smaller categories, permits, fees, fines, and a little bit later tonight, Nick's gonna talk about some additional revenue solutions that we're gonna look at over the next biennium or so to, again, close this gap between revenue and expenses. There's a bunch of information here on department, so let me give that to you to take home. It talks about the department, what it does, kind of FTE accounts, kind of where the majority of the budgets are. Again, I think you'll see it's mostly personnel with contracted services. I did want to skip forward to the street fund, again, high level summary of the street fund. Very similar, again, expenses exceeding revenues. Again, salaries and benefits being at 43% of the street fund budget, so not the 80% that the general fund supports. So that's a positive. But this refund does have a lot of services in this budget in particular because we have a million dollars budgeted for preservation work. That's half a million dollars per fiscal year in this budget. So when I look at this refund, that's a positive because the services, while it's large, that's a million dollars of preservation work that we're committing to over the biennium.

Where do we place acquisitions?

That was the question? Where do we place acquisitions?

You would typically find that in our capital funds as it's a capital purchase.

We don't have any purchases in this budget.

But if you look at what we purchased in 25-26, you'll find in the capital fund 302, that's kind of where we bought the lumps of the building and did all that, usually in the capital funds.

But that wasn't in the budget. The dollars were there, but we didn't say we're going to buy that building, we're going to put it in the budget. We find the property. And we recognize we have the dollars.

Yeah, we did a budget amendment to facilitate that purchase. But you're right, it wasn't in this budget process.

We're not out hunting for public works facilities. If you pop up, they pop up. It was an opportunity to present itself.

So the street fund, very similar to the general fund, is again spending down as cash, the unrestricted amount of $2.8 million to the end and to roughly have 228,000. Again, that's unrestricted. The 3.6 million in the green bar that grows to 4.9 million, that's our TDD sales tax dollars that we took a councilmatic action several years ago, and that money is dedicated towards completing the Bethel, Salmonberry, Blueberry phase one project. So we intend on using those funds for the construction phase, which we anticipate during fiscal year 2028. Again, mostly this refund is funded by taxes and less transfers than in the prior years.

Do you keep a list of how many amendments we do during the year? I do.

So I'm gonna move on the water fund. That's our water operating fund 411. Again, you see a similar story, revenue less than expenses. Again, spending cash to have a fully balanced budget. You'll see we do have our restricted capital value of $1 million being met. So we are again meeting our financial targets. It's just our unrestricted balance that is shrinking by the end of the biennium. I do want to point out here in the transfers, it's a big purple. So in these transfers, and again, we can look at this further in the detail of the GLs, but that is money moving from our operating fund to our debt service fund. We have taken a lot of debt over the last few years to pay for our wells and our water capital infrastructure. And so now we are finally having to make debt payments on those borrowings.

Okay, so sometimes we, let's say, we do something where it ends up being an asset currently, but later on it moves to being a liability. So right now we'll be on our budget as an asset, but maybe it clears from now a liability.

No. Okay. I mean, it depends on how you want to look at it, I guess. I mean, anything could be a liability.

Okay, so specifically, let's say we acquire a building, or when I say that, now, let's say we purchase something this year. Could it possibly, on our budget this year, show up as an asset with no liabilities? But later on, like you said, this one finally moved over into the liabilities. So the next year after that, it would show up as a liability.

Yeah, I'm going to frame it just a little bit differently. I understand your question. Yes, absolutely. So let's take a simple example. We could be funding a project or buying a building, but we're going to do that through a borrowing. So currently, we'll get the cash from borrowing. That would be the asset. And then we'd have to repay it in the future years. So you would see an expense in the future years that you don't necessarily have today. So you have all the revenue coming in, no real expense except for the purchase. And then going forward, you'd have debt service payments to repay the debt. if we did a borrowing. If we did a borrowing, yeah. Now if we just paid cash, then you'd pay cash, you'd own the building and the property and the borrowing. Yeah, yeah.

I have a question. Before we jump to stormwater, I have a water question. After we do the dinner time, are we going to start generating I don't want to call it revenue, but water rates versus currently we don't because we pay government $10 a dollar. We're not currently

Buying any water? We're going to next year.

No, it's still a few years out. So we have that water tower that was an asset in the agreement we have with Bremerton that they're buying from us. So we have two new reservoirs. There was one reservoir. McCormick built us one new one, and then they built us the very large one. And so we're in the process of separating our systems. So we're selling the original reservoir to Bremerton, but we're trading that asset for water. And instead of writing us a check, we established a value. And every year, money comes off of that balance. And we've got a few years left on that.

What's that? We're on target for fall of 2030.

20 so we so we got a few years left on that agreement it will allow us to move our water from this side of the city to I've been hearing for a long time Foster's right around the corner. And once we get Foster, though, we still gotta build a well for that new water source. And so we're still, even if it is next year, hopefully, we're probably three years at least before we're drawing a drop of water out of the well that we've already drilled, that we've gotta do a water campus for. So, we'll still need some Bremerton water coming into our system to supplant that. And actually, they owe us water for the purchase of that asset. Yeah.

So, the reason why I'm asking is because I know our water funds are tightest fund. But once that fossil product goes through, we should get a lot healthier.

well it will we'll have source right um we'll have options it doesn't it doesn't necessarily generate revenue uh until we we gotta work then that's it's in the budget as finance committee members are aware that we need to look at our water rates and our capital program uh in this updated water plan that will happen in this next budget

to build a well. Is that accounted for in our plan or you're saying, no, it wasn't?

There's two wells. There's two wells in our capital plan that haven't been brought online. One has been drilled and one is just a pilot. And with this intertie that we're proposing to build without the intertie, we would have to build both of those wells.

with the inner and someday we'll have to build them both but with this inner tie we'll only need one of them in the short run and then someday in the future we'll need that second well um and while they're in the water plan they're in the water planet seven million dollars a piece and they're actually probably 13 or 14 million dollars a piece and so our rates don't reflect the full cost of building those facilities as well as our capital facility charges

in McCormick, and 13 is on the top of Sedgwick, and 11 is in a well that's built out in McCormick that we're drawing half of its capacity. Once we have the water rights, we flip a switch, turn a valve, or however it works, and we'll be able to double the production out of that well.

Okay, so you said one drill with 12, the other one with 13? Yes. And then... 13 is the pothole that you said?

13 is a fully drilled casing. And 12 is just a pile hole. It's a small diameter pipe. It's not big enough to produce water. It's big enough that we could get samples out of and determine the water quality down in the aquifer.

I saw that we have in our operating budget for services under foster program we have a wedge there for that but we don't know whether that's going to cover our costs for that right now or we're we've got some money in for foster for the mitigation that we need to do once we have an agreement once we have an agreement on that and i've certainly opened this biennium we're building the mitigation right and i just you know my only question was that that was do we think we have enough in there because probably not No, not on that one. But we will be able to double our capacity out of well 11. Yes. Which will be a help. Yes. Okay, thank you.

All right, no, I'm sorry. The water fund is our highest one.

A water fund isn't healthy. And we've been transferring money out of our general fund for a couple of years to shore it up. And now our general fund can't afford to do that any longer.

And if you recall, the general fund in this biennium has been making transfers or contributions to water projects, like the SR16 in the state did that project. The general fund paid for that, but the water fund couldn't absorb it. So the water fund is also in a challenging spot. But storm fund looks good. We just did rate increases three years ago now. So we've built in rate increases to fund our capital and operations. You can see from this graph, revenue is greater than expenses. You can see we are adding to our unrestricted fund balance over the biannual period. So that is a good healthy fund at this point for us.

But they are restricted funds that can only be spent for that purpose.

Yeah, on storm drainage activities. Sewer, you know, sewer is kind of an interesting one because while the graph would suggest it's also not particularly healthy, revenues are less than expenses, we are drawing on some fund balance here. Overall, I think sewer will stabilize at $20 million, and other projects that were cash flowing. So those would be one-time expenses that will go away once completion of those projects. So I'm not particularly concerned about sewer at this point, but we will continue to monitor it. So I just kind of ran through a high level overview of each of the funds, just to kind of drill the message that we're monitoring the general fund 01, 002, our street fund, which generally is funded through 01 to do preservation work, street work. And the water fund is also another fund that we are going to continue to monitor this plan very closely. The other funds appear to be healthy, fully budgeted. We are, well, I guess we'll move to the tax dollars at work, and the mayor can talk about things that we have put into the budget.

So, Noah, could you bring this document up? Just for the benefit of the public, and then I'll, and council members, if you find this yellow page in your packet, that's what we're going to talk to you next.

I know finance has been through this mayor. Sorry for you guys to go through it twice. But I think if you continue both finance committee and the mayor and NOAA continue to emphasize which funds are segregated you know or it can't be used it'd be helpful to all of us and to the public and we when we talk about that no i'm saying so that's always important to keep emphasizing that because some people think that we can just pull money from one fund to another So that is very helpful to everybody.

So you're right. There are general fund dollars, which are largely our property tax and our sales tax. That's the current expense fund that we were talking about earlier. And then we have capital funds or enterprise funds. And so you've got your sewer, your water, your storm. We've got some transportation dollars that are restricted, and it's the sales tax. the one-tenth of one percent for sales tax in our transportation benefit district that the council previously directed at us is the fund that we're going to pay for the Bethel improvements and Noah spoke to that earlier by the end of this biennium about five million dollars in that fund for that project that's north of 10 million. But we've also got transportation impact fees, we've got park impact fees. Those are also can only be used on capital projects in those particular categories. And then lastly is REIT, there's REIT one and REIT two, and they have a specific and that's real estate excise tax. And those are restricted dollars also that can only be spent on capital projects. and can't be spent on our general operating expenses. So that's a high-level overview of the different types of funds. Yes, ma'am.

LTAC is also like.

It's a restricted, yeah, that is also a restricted fund.

And I should have spelled that out, I'm sorry, that's sort of watching tax advisory committee and that is the dollars that we deploy downtown. I mean, I should have, I'll correct that. Hotel, motel tax, yeah.

I have a quick question. So our last, I remember the other one was budgeted. So when I first came on, it was budgeted for 100. upping it to like $136,000. Now it's at $200,000. But our sales tax is flat. Has our lodging tax actually gone up?

Well, a little bit, but I'll get to that in a moment. I'll answer that because I'm going to run through this top to bottom. So Noah's talked a little bit about our financial policies and we're meeting our targets there. We have stabilization funds and we funded our debt service payments. So as I get to these highlights here, we have election costs. I'm just pointing out that that's what the county auditor charges us for covering the registering voters, doing the ballots and our proportional costs.

Mayor, just to be clear that everyone understands, these are biennial values, not just clear values? Yes. It's up to two years.

Yes. Okay. Do you mind questions as we go or do you want to wait as long as you don't jump ahead? No, no, I'm just okay when you talk about election and voters registration, I know we had a discussion at our retreat about putting a item on the bus later.

It's later in my presentation. Hold on.

Okay, but it's funded in this it's not there.

because this is election costs.

There is a line item for that.

And Noah's at the great point, these are biannual, these are two-year costs all lumped into one. And so our legal stock services, and we've been talking about that, Charlie, we've got Charlie, we've got a personnel legal firm that we do work with that offices with our union negotiations. Also prosecuting attorney. Prosecuting attorney are all in these and we're very mindful of that number keeps growing and we're gonna try to be a little more self-sufficient in some of our things and not be relying on Charlie to answer questions maybe as much as she has in the past. That housing services, those are restrictions Those represent House Bill 1406. We have a contract for roughly $50,000 on the books right now with Kitsap Community Resources. We've struggled to get them to deliver in the past. So we've got dollars budgeted here, but I'll be bringing back hopefully a different service provider and eligible uses for this. are rental assistance, which has been challenging to find a partner to do. Another way we can use those dollars is home improvement loans for low income. A new roof, windows, porch, and that can be a form of assistance too, keeping somebody that's low income in their home by fixing their roof on their house. I've partnered with Housing Kitsap. They've got a really good program with that. And so I'll be bringing that back later. I don't know who's going to be our partner, but I want to get those dollars deployed because that's the only way they can be spent is to helping people with either rental assistance or low income home improvements to homes. It's a grant program that Housing Kitsap would administer for us because they've got a list of people and they've got a program throughout the county and so then we'll deploy. These dollars have to be spent in the city of Port Orchard. Okay, you asked about lodging tax. That's a two-year number, so it's 100 each year. We had some extra balance in the fund a year ago, and we identified we wanted to do some BFA activity, and that was that additional $35,000, $36,000 that we followed up later and deployed some additional dollars and at mid-year review if it performs better we could i've already had conversation with council member morrissey who's the chair of that committee we might be able to deploy some additional dollars there too just for the rest of the council we have not increased the hundred thousand in my nine years here you did last year

Well, yes, just because of the FIFA. It was a one time, but we have not increased it to cover inflation or anything since then. It only covers what comes in, right? Well, we are holding... a healthy reserve fund for future activities.

And what Jay's pointing to is we know when we open the community center, we're going to need a staff person or a contract person to lease that up, manage those. Clerk's office right now All of the facilitation between the nonprofits for the permitting, I see that. So those are all lodging tax eligible expenses, and we've been putting roughly at $50,000 a year for a number of years to pay for that employee when the time comes. So moving on to the finance department, one of their biggest expenses is the state auditor's audit, and we have the privilege of paying for their staff time when they come visit us. The IT workstation replacement is every four or five years. We're replacing the laptops throughout City Hall to keep our equipment modern. We've got some dollars for security upgrades to our software system. And then that large number of over 600,000 is various pieces of software, like your Microsoft Office, the CardioGraph software, all those different pieces of software and their annual maintenances that go with it. We've already talked about the courts. a new software system. Remember, these are preliminary numbers. As we move through this budget process, we'll be truing all of these dollars up. We estimated at the beginning that we didn't have any partners and it was gonna be $300,000, a little over. We have to pay our proportional share of 911 services. That fee is derived from your call volumes. The more call for service you have, then in turn, the larger fee you pay. The police department needs to replace some of their weapons. That happens periodically. The 854, it says vehicle M&O. and the maintenance costs for our police vehicles over the two-year period.

And then- It also includes, Mayor, just to mention it, it also includes the $145,000 for repairs on our boat. Yeah. So we have a boat that is set for replacement. The chief has applied for a grant. We think the cost of that boat's a million dollars. So one of the options we ask them to look at is what would the cost be to repair the boat and get us a little further down the line? Because we don't necessarily have a million dollars lying around for a boat. We're splitting that cost. They are working with the fire district to potentially split the cost.

Split that cost. And I'll get to Jake here in a second. Without that, without having the vote.

That's not potential. We voted on that, did we not? Did I get that wrong? I thought we came, we've had that discussion. We've had a discussion.

We haven't had an agreement brought forward. We don't vote.

So I can speak to that. So we did have this conversation with the council, I believe, last year and then again this year as well. We applied for the Department of Homeland Security grant, port security grant. Because of the issues with FEMA last year, they did not follow through and they provided no grant awards. This year we did again apply. We were told that the funding from last year was going to be combined with the funding for this year. We were supposed to find out in August from Homeland Security whether or not we were going to receive that grant and no one has heard if that grant funding is going to be provided. The actual number for the boat that we have worked with Safeboat for the last several years is 1.25 and it's a 25% matching that we would split with the fire department and so ours was going to be about the value of the boat once we sell it.

because without it, you know, at times we, in the past we've seen 20 or more derelict boats out here in the bay. And so without our ability to go out there and patrol, ticket those boats, and work through a process to seize those derelict vessels, they just multiply out in the bay. Jay had his hand raised first.

Two questions on police. One is, Have we been getting full reimbursement on the removal of derelict vessels?

Depends on the fund balance. We do pretty well.

So all of the derelict vessel abatement has been reimbursed 100%. We generally work with DNR before we affirm a seizure to make sure that they will fund that. The derelict vessel fund at the state level is a little bit low, but we have been doing a really well not we our marine services unit has been doing really really well this year so we are down to one vessel and that's some that's the large one that's out there i've forgotten the name of it but that's a that's on a coast guard hold so and we also don't want to abate that vessel my second question was on the uh police bonuses um are we still saying

we're right now we're not we don't have any open positions to fill so we wouldn't we wouldn't have the need for that right now we have that program exists yes it still exists if we had an opening to fill and i didn't know if we had a wedge in the budget for that or we just

as it comes available.

It usually would come from salary savings because we have an open position. Yes. And so over time, you accumulate some dollars.

Okay, so we don't miss it as a separate budget. Okay, thanks, appreciate it. Sure, go ahead.

Yeah, sorry. My head was spinning because I was trying to, okay, so we have a vessel, we have to worry about derelict vessels. So why is that not, I guess I'm trying to understand why is that not covered under the Port of Bremerton? Yeah, I guess, Ken, can you explain why it's not covered in water?

It's not their shoreline to manage. They have a marina. They're responsible for their marina.

What shoreline? I'm just saying that specifically.

The shoreline in front of our city limits.

Yeah, and we have, I think, 1.7 square miles of water that we also are responsible for within our jurisdiction.

So only us? It's like only ours? It's not part of anybody else?

I mean, it gets really complicated when you start talking about personal, well, personal property and then DNR land, but I can certainly talk to you about that offline if you'd like.

Okay, and then we, do we have like a specific officer who handles that thing?

We have a unit of six that are all part-time on overtime, and we're primarily funded through the state parks grant.

No, I'm sorry, who handles going out and getting the demo?

Our officers, there's six of them that are trained.

We have a unit of six.

oh, okay, now I see. Sorry, when you said that, I was like, no, specifically, you're like, okay, thank you for explaining that.

I think it adds to Correct.

There's been various bills sponsored and so it's important that we work in collaboration with DNR because we've got to pay and get reimbursed and we've got to make sure that there's money in the bucket to get paid from at the state.

And so just right before we leave, I just want to make sure it's clear that what's in the budget is just for the repairs. So if the chief is successful in getting a grant, there might be a budget amendment later, depending on the timing of the grant, and if that's the decision to go forward with that.

And down, farther down in our discussion, you'll see derelict vessels and building abatement, but we haven't gotten there yet. um prisoner boarding that's every each year it's approximately four hundred twenty thousand dollars we pay for uh jail income in custody service at the kids county jail it fluctuates depending on how many people we've got in jail at any moment in time we're keeping some dollars in building consulting services in this budget as the you know remember we've got Three of the four people in our building, plans examiner building inspectors, have been hired within the last six months. We're moving the needle. I think Nick will speak to the process improvement and where he's at with software and stuff in his director's report. uh next week but uh we want to make sure that we don't slip back to where we were we've made really positive end roads in the building department our building official is retiring in about a year and a half ish and when that happens we'll look at what building activity looks like whether or not we want to lean more on these consultant services or hire a staff person because housing is on fire again, it's slowed down a bit. um where are we at here uh the parks plan that that says we've got a grant pending for this we need an updated plant parks plan to be eligible for rco grants the state grants and we if we intend to do a parks levy we need a robust plan and then a plan to show the public what it is a parks levy would fund. We need budget authority for the full amount, but we're hopeful that we're gonna get a state grant that will pay for half of the cost of this parks plan. You see, I spoke to the building and derelict vessel abatement. From time to time, we will have a dangerous building, we need to take it down, we lean the property, We don't always get our money back on those adventures, but it's important to do that and get dangerous buildings or derelict vessels off the water. When we developed this budget, we hadn't gotten the proposal yet for the giving campaign that's actually 600,000, 300,000 a year, and more, come on, I'm not, bringing that contract forward until I get my responses back to the public facilities district on Friday. They need to hold another board meeting and then give us answers related to the additional funding that we've asked for them. It looks differently if we don't get that money, we're doing a campaign then for the community center for about four million versus doing a campaign for the plaza because we've got all of our funding in place for the community center. So this piece is a little fluid and hopefully it will be resolved before we're voting on the final budget. So it went from 500,000 to 600,000? We were estimating. We didn't have their proposal until recently. When Brad started doing the work, we were at $500,000. I don't believe. We didn't have a proposal for the next phase. He just gave us that proposal. since Noah and I started this budget process. We had our best guess, some of this is, like the insurance premiums that I'll talk about later, this number may not be what it is in the final budget when we get to vote on it, so getting to that point. We've got down in Public Works, we've got a generator that we're repurposing from, I think it was a well site, well 11 generator we're going to repurpose that and this 25 000 represents uh all of the switches and wiring uh to to have a an on-site generator uh to power that facility in a power outage we've got uh the we got new uh sports courts at givens and the ones we resurfaced six or seven years ago at Banzine are getting tired and the surface is starting to come up. So there's money in this budget to resurface those again. The water system plan we talked about a little bit earlier. Public Works says there's a chlorinator that needs to be replaced at one of our well sites. We've got, if you see storm for $200,000 and farther down sewer, 300,000, those combined are a building that Public Works wants to build to store equipment in at our new Lumsden facility. Those are both capital dollars from enterprise funds, so it's not coming out of our general fund. A couple of pieces of equipment that the Public Works They need to have and they're both funded out of an enterprise fund. And then our SCADA equipment, which is the equipment that allows us to monitor our sewer and water infrastructure, is outdated. We're going, we want, this is starting that process. We want to move it to the new Lumsden building, which is the sewer and water facility, and then modernize that equipment. This is starting that process. The $3.9 million is our payments to the sewer plant. This is a pass through from our rate payers to pay for the sewer operations, and then our MSA is our property and casualty insurance. Our board meeting is the end of the month. I'll get an indication what our rates will look like at that moment in time.

Can't they beat that number up a little bit?

Our experience factor's probably the biggest driver to that and we've been doing pretty well on our claims management. Going to the next page, we've got bridge repairs. That's the one bridge and we're responsible to have that inspected and to make annual repairs to that to keep it safe. There's a million, I know that the, You guys had asked in the retreat that we get north of a million dollars on street paving. We were able, it was a struggle, but we got to a million dollars in this budget. Then we've got over $400,000 in sidewalks and street lights. We've got our traffic signals and traffic control, and we've got some money for snow removal if we get a snow event. the capital budget we've got the 35 million dollars for the community event center we've got transportation projects which are largely the bay street reconstruction water capital projects which is largely the intertie project we've got some storm drainage and sewer projects And jumping down to the equipment revolving fund, from the ER and R funds, we're going to buy two police officers and repurpose one of the two of them, the last item in this yellow section here. is an admin vehicle, which is the former police vehicle. Public Works is gonna take a used police car that our mechanic says is still in good enough shape to get us a few more years out of it. And then DCD had some vehicles that were funded in this budget. I think those are being carried over as they're being ordered and we just haven't taken delivery of them. And then the last vehicle there is an admin vehicle that we've been saving for. We have the money in our ERR fund, and whether it be the finance department needing to run to the bank, travel to a conference, IT department travels to all of our different buildings, and we're trying to get our employees out of their personal vehicles and get them into a shared city vehicle. So, some of the things that were in the council retreat priorities that we were able to fund, well, not to the level we wanted to. You see there in that green box, the million dollars in street paving. We're funding 25,000 to continue the revitalization storefront grant program. We've got the water system plan. We've got a design for the stormwater park at Sherman. We've got this court software. We've got the update to the parks plan. We've got the fireworks measure that Council Member Rospepe was asking for for 25,000 in 2027. And we've also got $5,000 to the flowers and the hanging baskets and the pots were a hit and we intend to bring those back next year. The blue box on the next page, we've got the first few things are things that we're reducing. And all these staff positions, other than the one in the court, we intend to reevaluate at the mid-year review if provided revenues are different than what we're seeing today. So we've reduced funding for an accounting position, We've eliminated the court's position to help fund for the court software. We've reduced a police position. We've reduced a plans examiner. And then in our water department we needed to reduce, at least until we get the rate study done and it can afford to pay for that maintenance tech out of that enterprise fund. Three new positions are in this budget. Two of them are coming out of enterprise funds and are rates funded for compliance purposes. One is from the stormwater utility, one is in the sewer utility. And we talked previously about construction management services during the construction of the community center. The consultant wanted a million dollars to do that body of work. We intend to hire a temporary employee for a two-year period. It'll probably be about a third of the cost of using a consultant that way.

So we... Go ahead. We're going to hire somebody? We intend to, yes. And if we don't, then we're going to contract it out?

We'll revisit it, how we do that, but I'd rather not spend a million dollars. Is there a requirement to have it? We want somebody to be a representative there.

The federal dollars required on the contract, if I recall. That was the Brogan project. Oh, sorry, Brogan project. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Yeah, we don't have to have it, but I think this is a big enough project. And there's some moving parts there, but that's our intent at this moment, and we'll revisit that as the time, and hopefully we find that person. Let's see here. Moving on, we've got the sports court resurfacing. We've suspended our payments for our ER and AR funds, any of them that are touch the general fund. It's not a good long-term practice, but we just couldn't afford to do that, which in turn will force us to hang on to some vehicles that will probably last longer than we have in the past. And we delayed some vehicle replacements also. Things that we intend to discuss at the mid-biennial review is the finance department has been talking for a few years about a financial advisor to get us our restricted dollars that we have in savings. Upgrades to the AV equipment here in council chambers. remodeling the processing room in the police department, the evidence processing room. We'd like to, after the court's system is up and running, the court, to transition to digital tickets and ticket writing system and it would reduce great efficiency there and and improve that process. We'd like to consider additional preservation dollars in street paving. And the Anderson Hill roundabout will finish, that design will finish in 2027. And we've got a very large federal award for the, we've got the Intertie project funded. but we've also got an award that hasn't been funded from the federal government. Once that award becomes real, we'll be able to claw back our local dollars, and that's one of the ways that we potentially can fund the Andrews Hill construction. But this budget right now doesn't have enough dollars to go to construction on that roundabout that we definitely want to construct in 2028. We'd like to reinstate the ENR payments and evaluate the vehicle purchases that we delayed. And then you see the three positions that we'd also like to keep under consideration as we have a mid-year review.

Thank you. So we did or did not spend $5,000 on beautification flowers.

They are in the budget. We spent that this year. Oh, yeah. That's the flowers that we have down there.

And I think it was beautiful and great for FIFA. But I would like to make a statement that moving forward next year, we should be able to pool money to make sure Van Z gets some swings. or Bansky, they have swings. There's a huge apartment complex. There are children there. Right next to it, we're having a huge complex built right next to it. And right in, you go to the other side of that, there are tons of apartment buildings with tons of children. That can be used not just for FIFA and to look good, that can be used by children every day. And they have shown that swings help children especially So this is not just a nice to have, but I would say it definitely goes to building a more, and focusing on wellness for our community.

Thank you. Just as a quick question. So as I, because I wasn't here. I don't know. I don't know how we stopped that. What's going on? Anyway, something is listening to us. We've got to do something. Anyway, because I was not here for the retreat, as I understand it, the the flower baskets were an ask from this council, right? And going forward, it was an ask. So it's not like that money couldn't be repurposed if the priority changed. That's my point. But I just wanted to understand.

Mr. Ryan, the playground is a big ticket.

It's a big ticket because it has to meet ADA compliance.

So that means that we have to have... Can we just turn off the speakers, please? There's nobody online that we need to hear from. I shouldn't... Well, it should be recorded, so... I didn't ask for the microphones to be turned off, but I don't need to hear anybody because there's nobody online. So that would end whatever feedback we're getting if we didn't have any speakers volume up. Should we just turn off the mics and turn them back on?

Or it's committed to the...

So yes, it is a big-ticket item because we have to have walking paths that meet the ADA requirement Bare bones for playground surfacing you're probably talking a quarter million dollars so Yeah, so

The playground that's currently there, with now nothing in it, to add a volume, we can't turn up volume?

Does anybody have their teams?

I do not need a speaker system in here. It's coming from the speakers overhead. That's a microphone, that's not a speaker.

Oh, yeah. Sorry, so the Zoom is off because we do have an attendee.

but they're not gonna speak, so we can turn off the speaker until that person is speaking. We're getting feedback.

It's like muting your Zoom. We're getting feedback that's coming out of these speakers without a sound system.

So the box that's currently there. Correct. Now nothing in it. Yes. To put that... to put playground equipment in that, which was already playground equipment in it before it was just removed recently, that would take ADA to put playground equipment that was already there. The swing set was already there as an example, the structure, just no swings. That would have taken sidewalks and everything to put swings back on that.

It was substandard. It had pea gravel as fall protection. It wouldn't meet any compliance for modern play equipment. But the swings have been... It would be new construction, though, because you're putting new swings up. Yeah, so you have to have double the run out for the height of the swing set. I mean, you wouldn't have any other amenities. You could get a swing, but you would have to make them accessible. And that means a ramp getting into them and a transition from the nearest parking lot. It's similar what we ran into with Givens Park and the dugouts. And Nick, if we could direct a bond, if that's permittable, I'm not sure, but I strongly believe that it would require a full. We run into this with our work around the county with the paving that we're doing. If we touch pavement in front of the ADA ramp, the curb ramp, we have to replace it.

Yeah, let's go ahead.

It falls under the American with Disabilities Act. Okay, but you... And it's enforced by the Justice Department. The American with Disabilities Act?

That's a specific question.

As to specifically the swing set, why that applies to the swing, putting swings back on the swing set that already exists.

We'll work together to get you...

I appreciate that. Thank you.

So I don't know if everybody has had the opportunity to drive downtown this week, but so far we've had one property owner who painted on their own. We've had another property owner who came in front of us and we granted them money and they have painted and been reimbursed. We have another property owner right now that has I mean they're in the middle right now of refacing and doing a great job on it. New windows, they're gonna put new windows and doors down below as well, new roof. The property owner next door I believe is jumping on and we still have Fred who is definitely interested, definitely interested. We're putting, we're with partners, we're investing $35 million to bring some really good life downtown. We have, and you used momentum a few times today, and we have good momentum. I think we should have, out of that 100,000, I think we probably have 50 left out of it. Or more. Or more, or more. Fair, right? So, will this 25...

Thank you.

but at some point, I don't know, who of the five of us sitting here knows what the end of life of that bridge is?

A bridge inspector, which takes five years to achieve a certification. That's what we have in our building.

We're very hard to find in the county. Oh, I'm sure there's a... We... We... What are we doing physically to make sure that we can be ready? It's a modern bridge, and it's...

We're currently, we have been inspecting it every two years. So we have a missed schedule. Eventually there's going to be some seismic upgrades that we're going to have to do. But there's no critical flaws in the inspection reports. What's that? The intended life, I believe it was like 50 to 75 years. I'd have to go back and look. No, from now. Because we keep maintaining it. We're inspecting it.

Yes.

Yeah. It's a moving scale. It's a moving scale. Yeah. I did just read our inspection report. So those bridges are always designed for 75 years with proper maintenance. They can be extended 150 years. I mean, we've got bridges like the Brooklyn Bridge. So that's why we go every two years. We are not on. I have to cross one of those bridges every day to Fox Island. So no, we are not. But our inner time might not be done before the water system plan. The inner time might be done before that. Mr. Mayor, oh, sorry.

Could we get at least a cost estimate? I understand the ADA, and I'm not paying you for that. I'm just looking for what would be the wedge to the project.

I 100% advocate for parks. I think they're the cornerstone of the community. These type of projects, like redoing that playground or swing sets, those are awesome and excellent candidates for RCO grants, small playgrounds. And so this parks plan, if it's a little bit later by the time it's designed and everything, there's a great opportunity that could be coming up. Not a bond or levy, but it's those... Yeah. I have, when I was evaluating, I can tell you right now, the swing sets are the cheapest part of the whole thing.

Yeah. Okay. No problem. Easy, easy.

It's already been demos demoed Our council we talked about the the direction from council was we use that funds to hire an arborist They were irreplaceable. They were irreplaceable. You can't buy components from because they're so old. I No, it's sad because it's been in that state of repair for decades.

I'll still scope it out and get a price for what it would cost.

That was the direction from Council.

To remove the structures that were there because they were irreparable. When we talked about the arborist, about looming up and raising the tree canopy, we had $50,000 at a previous council meeting that we discussed this.

And they said to remove them?

To remove the, because they're irreparable. It was just the A-frame that was there. It was probably 50 years old.

No, no, no, that's a different conversation. What council said to remove something?

I'll go back and find the meeting. I'll go back and find the notes.

So one of the items, the only real addition in my budget that would have significant $185,000. Our current fire permit

I'm not sure the size of it. I know it's up to 18 inches deep.

So it's right on the back side of the building. So then once they're installed from that point on, the outside of the box, they would be the maintenance responsibility of the city. They will be the maintenance responsibility of the city. Unfortunately, the PR orders with PRDs in all of these houses, but they're inside the house. And so that service line from The cost of this

What do we have to do as a city to get access to these properties? It'll be in the right way. It's not a right way.

than 2028, but when we turn this out, we may need to coordinate with what's happening on the whole Clifton project and have everything happen at one time. I think we still need to work that out. But it'll at least be constructive in time to get it done.