City Council - workshop

Well, they've trued through a couple of them since the tornado, so.

I'll think of it. You know who that new guy is? Yeah. Not Hoover, but. But he's not.

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

There's two lakes that are like in tandem. Lake Mead, and what is the other lake reservoir?

Oh, thank you.

That's what Siri just said.

year and a reminder my practice and all the previous cities I've worked for in every budget that I've done before is you can set the preliminary budget higher than the final levy so we tend to try to aim high for the preliminary budget and then work our way Towards a lower final budget last year when did the same thing we started off the the tax rate would have been about around 60% for the preliminary budget and up in fifty four point seven six percent by the time we got to the final levy and Some of the items that we had found were those reductions in the debt service levies based on the existing cash that we had built up over those funds over the years. But this year, kind of really just sticking to one area in particular that is an easy opportunity for a reduction in budget with a potential park dedication fee that could be coming in related to the track data center development. Um, so right now where we are with the 2027 budget, um, the key assumptions that we're making is that we do have all our three union contracts are up for negotiation this year. Uh, they all expire at the end of the year, so we don't have a fixed, um, adjustment to the pay schedule. So, uh, just as if you're not familiar with it, the way everything is established in terms of pay, um, is what we have a pay schedule. So there's a grid of grades, and then steps that have each increases every year. So then as a person advances through their experience, they go up a step every calendar year. So where they get placed is where their job is on a point scale, and that we'll kind of discuss a little bit more later. when we talk about the personnel plans. But those point scales place them onto a grade, and then their steps are indicated by their years of experience that they work with us. However, every year, that pay scale is adjusted. So it's usually adjusted upwards because, you know, we see wage increases or inflationary factors, cost of living adjustments is another way to... Another term that's used for this but those are dictated by the usually by the contracts that we negotiate with the unions So the past two years they were three percent increases this year We haven't settled on a number, but I do have two unions that have their initial proposals So I do have an indication of where they want to be and it's fairly reasonable So we'll be discussing that later. That's part of that closed session at the end of the council meeting So the personnel plans that, um, we'll talk about after, uh, let the department heads talk about anything related to the capital improvement, um, are, uh, that's, that's kind of how part of the contract negotiation is going, um, how we're going to be able to implement some of those action item or some of those ways in which we can get the market, uh, to align for positions that we have within the city and that, uh, and keep that adjustment for the overall pay schedule in alignment. But the biggest thing for another biggest thing for personnel is on health insurance. So we have some very limited options available to us as an employer in health insurance because we technically aren't in the large group pool or we don't qualify as a large group employer. That's usually a 50 person threshold, 50 full time equivalent threshold. So because we don't qualify for that, that limits our pool options. And based on conversations and meetings that we've had with our insurance broker, Michelle and I met with him last year. and kind of briefly discuss this this summer. Uh, the only really available option to us right now that we can get in our marketplace is the blue cross, um, age based plans. So there's a variety of different plan options within that, but what we have is a low deductible plan that has a 500 deductible thousand dollar deductible for a family, but there's coinsurance. So you're, you're paying a portion of that even after you hit the deductible up to your out of pocket max. And then a high deductible plan that's eligible for an HSA. So in those plans, you pay all your medical expenses, and once you get your deductible, that's also your out-of-pocket max. But you're eligible to have an HSA, which is a health savings account that employees can make contributions into. We actually have a small match as an employer to make contributions. So if the employee is making a contribution, the city is matching a very small part of that. And then you can use those to pay your medical expenses. So if you use it right, I've been doing this for myself for many years. You, you can have those contributions made, cover all your medical expenses out of that, which are pre-tax dollars. Uh, so you do have some savings on that front. And then, um, you may basically make those payments up until you hit your deductible. But those two plans themselves, the low little deductible plan went up 21% from Blue Cross and the high deductible HSA plan went up 18%. Last year, Uh, we didn't have the HSA going into it, so don't know what that increase was, but the other plan went up 17.7%. So these are certainly some areas that we want to pay attention to why we were having the conversation about, uh, what plan options were available to us. Um, there is one, uh, employer group or union group that does have a health insurance option. Um, Um, however, it's, it's challenging for us to implement because they only provide a family plan option. They don't provide a signal care single coverage. It's just a family plan. So if you're on it, all your family members are eligible for, for this coverage, but it doesn't cover the cost of singles. So the premiums per month are relatively pretty high for what we would offer for our singles that we pay 100% of their coverage for, whereas families, we pay 100% of the single, but then 50% of those dependents. So it's something that I'm trying to kind of work through and calculate if it's worth us exploring that discussion even further, which is, you know, something that I would be open to taking input for in this meeting tonight if that's, you know, seeing that we have these large increases, if it is something that we want to do. Their messaging to me is their trend for increases have been lower because it is part of the 49ers union. and they offer it to all of their members. So they have a pretty large pool of people in that insurance group. So it's like over 30,000 people. So they, it does soften the overall, increases, whereas where we are, we're geographic-based and age-based, but we're in probably the worst geographic region in the state of Minnesota for Blue Cross because we're in Mayo's territory and costs in Mayo's territory across the board tend to trend higher regardless if you're in Mayo or not, but that's just the way it goes. If you're in the metro, our general costs for the same plan options would be lower. Uh, and then obviously fuel costs, everybody's been experiencing that, but those are increasing. So we've been trying to cap cap, calculate that into the budget. And then with the capital plan we do have, uh, in this budget we've included, um, building up some funds. I know this was part of the small brief part of the discussion last year, uh, when we talked about the capital plan. Primarily the money that went into that was set aside for equipment. So vehicles that we use, equipment that we operate with, things that move. What we didn't do but we briefly discussed was putting money aside to fund trail replacement. or facilities that are at their parks like the pavilions, playgrounds, and then additionally some money towards the pool. Um, so this year, uh, that is included. Um, it's based on really just some high level estimates on saying, Hey, if we, uh, do have a million dollars worth of trail improvements, how, what's the cycle, how long of a cycle do we want to be able to, you know, build that up to, you know, to pay for improvements over time. Um, because granted we don't know exactly what it is. We don't have actual proposals on the table, but if it is something that we are going to need to do, uh, we're going to need to start setting some money aside to be able to, to accomplish that. So, so for us that was, that's included and that is a pretty significant portion of what we have in this preliminary budget. But one of the areas that we do have an opportunity in front of us for revenues, we do have a couple franchise ordinances that are up for renewal. And we've talked, well, one is cable, which we've always had a franchise fee for. But the other is for natural gas. And then we do have the franchise agreements. I do believe for our electrical utilities are coming due pretty soon. I think one is next year, and then the other one might be shortly after that. So they're all kind of coming to you about the same time, and we don't have any franchise fee established for natural gas or electric. And those are commonly used. I think the statutory limit is you can do 5% on the gross revenues, but they would be a very good revenue source for us moving forward, especially in light of the potential for the data center the use that could come off of that. The franchises are in place, and the ability to impose a fee is within the agreements as they stand today, so it's nothing new to these companies. It's a pass-through. They just pass that cost on through their customers and utility bills, but generally the impact on residential customers is pretty small. in the grand scheme of things. And you certainly don't have to do 5%. That's just the statutory maximum. You can do any amount lower than that if you want. So I'm going to pass it over to, um, other departments. Uh, fire isn't here. Uh, Bryce couldn't make it, but I did indicate in a council update that we, um, between the fire and the ambulance that I think they are kind of warrant their own special discussions, individual discussions on that fire in particular because of the long lead time for equipment. Um, they've been, exploring a ladder replacement. That apparatus has been really causing us a lot of maintenance costs over the last couple years. This year, no exception. But to order a new one and have it available to us is about a three-year lead time. And then on the ambulance front, I think the bigger thing there, it comes with just figuring out what we're going to do in terms of revenue. We're struggling. This isn't new, but we're struggling because I believe it's like 60% of our care coverage is paid for through Medicare. Medicare has some very strong caps on what people, what our ambulance departments can bill and what they're willing to pay for. So it doesn't matter how much we actually bill. Medicare sets a cap. That's the price. This is what you're going to get. So, um, and since we have such a high threshold of users that are paying through Medicare, we're not collecting everything that we're billing and that's leading to a shortfalls in our, in our funds. um, an opportunity that we do have available to us and other jurisdictions are doing it. Our ambulance serves a lot wider territory than just the city of cannon falls. It serves a lot of the surrounding townships and actually even bordering up against a couple of cities. So, um, there's the, the ability for us to make those conversations and work with agreements with that, that group to have them support us and help fund those operations as well. If we are going to move to this, um, probably necessary need to subsidize the operations of the ambulance department. Um, so I don't think it's fair for the city to have to do that all on our um, backs because we aren't, we are just a portion of the total operational base for this. So we just want to be prepared, um, to kind of be able to calculate out and figure out what it is that would be a fair and equitable opportunity to, to charge back for, for that subsidized cost. there were some things happening at the state level to fund shortfalls. Uh, however, that was came vastly short of what we needed. Um, we actually put in a, uh, put in a request based on the, what we were supposed to report last year. And we were only, we only received about $7,000 and in that shortfall funding. And I believe we had over a hundred thousand dollars of, of, uh, costs that we could show that we were short and what we, what we received.

So John, does the ambulance and fire over,

They have almost, much of it is, but there are some fringe areas that are a little bit different where the ambulance serves some territory that the fire department doesn't.

Probably about 90%.

Yeah, it's pretty close to most of it.

Yeah, I think the overall square miles is pretty significant. It's pretty large.

So in the population base, I think is what, around 12,000 roughly that both of them serve, ambulance being a little bit higher. So with that, I think since fire's not here, I have police next on my list. So I don't know, Jeff, if you have any presentation. If you don't have a presentation, you can cover it from there.

No. So last year, if you recall, we had put together a nice presentation PowerPoint to bore you guys for a while. John asked us to keep it short this year, so we did not do that. Primarily, you're going to focus on capital and not so much 27, but looking down the road. Um, so with our capital plans, we are due for a squad replacement next year. However, Lieutenant and I have looked at our, our squads where we're at. Uh, we got behind, um, The one year because we couldn't get it ordered, so we ended up getting two of them at the same time. But we're thinking that we will stretch that out one more year. We're trying to do the squads on a four-year replacement. But if we manage our miles and stuff, we don't think it will be problematic this cycle around. The plus side is we have the money there if we needed to. So if one got totaled, something happened, it's sitting there. The upside is, is that if we don't replace it, we stretch another year out of it, which allows us to build actually up additional money within that capital area. So that's always a good thing. We replaced our radios in 2020. We should be good on those for another three years probably. Motorola is now trying to obsolesce their equipment at about six years. The radios are no longer just a radio. They're mini computers now. And so they put end of life on them. Once they do that, they no longer are making parts. So you can usually get parts out of radio shops for about another two to three years because some of those shops will buy up equipment. But We're probably looking at doing those on about a 10-year rotation. We're actually sitting pretty good. Ambulance and fire are further behind. Their radios, they took some of our old ones and are not encryption enabled, which is where all communications is going. So that'll probably be something they'll talk about when they come in and give their presentations to you, but just be aware. Right now, mobile radio is about $8,000. So if I've got to replace 10 of them, you know, it's $80,000. That's a portable. The mobile radios, I think, are about $9,000. So they are a sizable expense when they come due. But again, we built that into that capital plan. For next year, we're looking at making a transition to optic sights for the handguns. I built that just into my overall budget. One of the things that I'll take a look at when we get to that point is it may be advantageous for us to just trade in our weapons and get new ones. And the last time we did that, it ended up costing us about, what, $75 a weapon to get brand new ones compared to keeping the old ones. So we're across that bridge when we get there. As part of the 27 budget, I just didn't want to put that component in yet, not knowing where overall things are going to be because John had already alluded to some of the higher costs in insurance this year. Fuel is definitely higher this year. My fuel costs, I'm estimating over a dollar more in a gallon than I have in the past. I don't know what it's going to be in December. I don't know what it's going to be in June. I'm just going by where we are today. So those costs are higher within my budget. Personnel-wise, looking down the road, for 26, we added back the retirement position we'd lost a number of years ago. That has helped in bringing our patrol officer balance to three on each side of the schedule. Ideally, where I would like to get is add another lieutenant position. So I have one on each side of the schedule. that would allow us to not necessarily need part-timers because the lieutenant, right now, Lieutenant Berg, we've got a few officers that are all off at the same time. We try to accommodate because we try to be flexible to retain. But, you know, Lieutenant Berg was working mid-shifts the last two days. This Saturday he's working the day shift. I'm working Friday and Saturday day shift. We're just getting that covered. But that extra lieutenant's position would help balance that out where they could each take care of their own side of the schedule instead of having to hop back and forth, which is what we're currently doing. Looking at our overall budget, I pretty much try to hold things as close to zero increase that I could. You know, you've been on a minimum of two years almost now. You know we've done that for a number of years. There's just some categories where costs have risen. Just naturally with the rate of inflation, I've had to make adjustments to reflect that. But overall, I think I've given John a very solid budget to work from. That's all I have. All right.

Jed? He's got a presentation, I think. I said you could do PowerPoints.

Oh, I have.

So for 2027, we have our utilities, which is our enterprise funds, as well as the public works side, which is our general fund. Enterprise funds have to be self-supporting. That's water, wastewater, and storm. This year, my primary focus for 2027, I'm looking for some increases just to focus mainly on streets, like our mill and overlay and just our streets in general. And I'll go through that further in the presentation here. But also our ash trees. We have over 150 ash trees on city property and in right of way that still need to be addressed. Most of these trees now are big enough that my guys who are not loggers cannot handle. We need to contract those out to have them taken down. And then the aging of our pool and our trails is also a, and John touched on that as well.

How many do we have to begin with?

Of course you would ask that.

I was curious because someone made a comment to me the other day that Why the hell aren't we getting them down? I'm like, we have been.

We have taken down well over probably 300 so far. There were so many. And again, this all started back when the elm, the Dutch elm disease took out all the elm trees, so they replaced them all with ash trees, and now we're in the same boat. So... This is just kind of a quick slide of where all our priorities are. Streets and alleys want to prioritize mill and overlay this year. I have asked John for extra funds to prioritize that, as well as the ash trees. Right now, if we take care of 50 trees a year, that's $50,000 roughly, because it's about $1,000 per tree. or more depending on size and how hard it is to take it down if it's tangled up in power poles. We don't have much for equipment. We're starting to get caught up on our capital equipment as far as we finally got our 23 and 26 plow trucks this year. thankfully. On the water side and wastewater collection side, everything is staying fairly even, but we do have our 2027 headworks update for the fine screen and grit removal system. Chad, that's the building that you and Diane walked through. That was so awesome. As I stated before, the preservation of our streets is our primary goal, not only for 2027, but also looking forward. and then, again, concentrating funds towards the trees. We do have a plan to repatch and repaint the pool, which is pushing between $55,000 and $75,000. Our pool is, I figured it out today, is about 66 years old. I don't think that we have it in the 12 or 15 million to build a new pool anytime soon. taking steps to make sure that we are maintaining what we have and just keep what we have running and going. At some point, the deck, the splash pad, the pool itself is going to need a major overhaul. Right now we're doing our best to maintain it, but it's not going to last forever. And then we have a pretty good capital equipment replacement plan as far as our trucks and equipment to keep moving through those and upgrading them as they're getting older. We still do have a 2008 and a 98, I think, Chevy pickups that are, one has extra floor mats so that they don't have to flinch on it. This year, we did a PACER street ratings study on all of our city-owned streets. You can't really see it very well, but the black, the red, You can see kind of some brighter yellows and whatnot. Those are all streets that are in less than ideal condition. But overall, there is a lot of streets that are in great shape. But as you see in like Viking and Village, you can't even tell where it is because it's all black and it just blends in. So, but this, when we decide to mill and overlay a street, we also have to take into consideration what's under the road as far as our water and wastewater and take into consider. viking and village specifically that's where majority of our water main breaks have taken place that is really old infrastructure so we need to do complete reconstruct and i think we're shooting for 2029 for that 20 2030 yeah so that that one would be a good project to try to align with

the county and county road 17 if um if we can kind of make those project because just the scope of what needs to be done up there is going to be a multi-year construction project i mean it's going to you're going to need to do it in phases over multiple years and and aligning it with them would be good since they're going to be doing something anyways with 17. okay

A lot of my slides here are just to kind of give you an idea of all the things that we take into consideration before paving and doing a reconstruct. We take a look at pavement condition, maintenance history, and remaining life. Then we take a look at the water, the sanitary, and also the storm. The goal is to avoid spending a ton of money on paving, just to tear it up to replace water and sewer later. So we are working on, that's part of doing that PACER study, is to build a coordinated street and utility capital plan. So we want to take a look at our streets now. We may have a couple streets that do need more of a either reclaim, that's where they take all the asphalt off and reclaim it, but because of the water and sewer and everything underneath isn't that old, it makes more sense, and then 20 years we'd look, you know, that would be a good lifespan for a street to go 20 years and then do a total reconstruct. So we try to take everything into consideration. We are still trying to find all the records to determine on how old some of this, our infrastructure is. I think some of my slides here are a little redundant. But water also we need to take into consideration the age of our reservoir, which is going to hopefully get taken care of when tract comes in. So aging reservoir, we've got mains, we've got valves, hydrants. The controls, we have a couple of booster stations. The controls are getting pretty old to the point that there's not parts. And the electrical components don't last forever. and as they are aging, we're having a harder time finding parts to fix them. The same thing goes for wastewater collections. We have 14 lift stations, all with pumps and motors and controls and everything that need to be maintenance and replaced as we go, and that is part of the capital plan there. Stormwater is a little bit easier. We just identify you know the age of pipe Thank you for letting us buy a camera this last year so we can look at and and actually determine what our sewer pipes look like and The same with the storm you know we can see how things are and why if something's not draining figure it out and move forward so The treatment plant it was constructed in 2001 and generally You start updating Things they their equipment is made to last 25 to 30 years This next year we are doing a head head works update. That's the fine screen and the grit removal And then we also had whks do a complete plant Review and we have we have a a plan for broader treatment plant updates as they come. The biggest thing I want to put, or emphasis I want to put it here is, you know, we have kind of higher utility rates, but we need to kind of keep them where they're at so that we're not hurting ourselves in the future when bigger upgrades and these maintenance items come needing replaced.

Going into a bond,

Right now it's almost paid off. So the bond funds right now that we have, we have three that cover, they're primarily for street projects. So we do not have any bonds for the waste plant. That was paid off. However, the cost for those projects, you know, predecessor projects, had the plan to move everything to paying for projects with cash. So a lot of those efforts were, were built into, you know, be building up capital to pay for projects with cash. So we have a, we have two street projects that are now finished. that we are working on closing out with the auditors, and we have to move funds from our utility side to those project funds to close those projects out. So some of those dollars will get reduced there, as well as with this first headworks project, mainly that's gonna be covered through cash as well, since there are funds built up. And we do have the opportunity where funds are being built into what we have for water and sewer rates that we don't need specifically for operating that we can utilize for these capital improvements. So to say that we have enough and what we have now, and we're not looking at actually raising rates again this coming year, but that always has to be kind of taken into account that just because yes, our operating costs are well covered by the rate structures that we have, we have some major, major capital investments to be made, you know, for water and wastewater. In the next years if you know unless you know with the track project if that does come through that does help tremendously because there are funds both for the You know the water tower or tank storage tanks for water as well as there is funds coming in that will be an investment into our Treatment plant that we can use to offset those future expenses so so if those come due that would be a great time to really evaluate and say I okay, our rate structure with this new capital, are we where we need to be to fund these projects moving forward? And I think there's definitely the potential for reductions at that point if that project goes into fruition.

Okay. The parks, trails, pools, aging assets, we have quite a few parks and we are struggling on just maintaining what we have. We had some really old playground equipment. Our pavilions are getting tired. We're trying to set aside funds so that we can start identifying the worst by need and then start updating. Especially at Archie Swenson, some of that playground equipment is from the What, the 70s, 80s? So it no longer meets industry standard. With ash trees, we have about 50,000 in that area. fun to to take care of ash trees uh... at this rate within the next three years we should get on top of all city-owned ash trees and then i will once we get for the most part on top of that we'll focus on rebuilding our canopy and start planting uh... the To buy a new tree sapling isn't too expensive, but when you take into getting them to establish, that was one thing we ran into this year with John Birch Park. With it being so dry, we lost a couple trees at John Birch Park because they're on the hill. And even though we were watering them two and three times a week, we still lost two. So we ended up having to buy bags to get it to soak in deeper and to take care of those. Over the long term, the biggest thing is to make and uh, look down the road further, not just for 2027, but our, our mill and overlay program, our street and program as a top priority this year, but probably for the next 10 years is until we can get caught up on our streets. Um, uh, the ash trees, and then again, coordinating street projects with underground utilities to make sure that we're, we're not shooting ourselves in the foot per se by, by doing streets and then having to tear them back out. Um, If we maintain what we own, we can coordinate what we replace and save for what we know is coming. Any questions?

Maybe save some questions and let Nicole go. Then we'd have everybody done. Because my admin one is pretty short. We need a new building for City Hall. This thing is not going to be a long, yeah, in Dakota County, and then maybe we can help with the insurance piece.

That was discussed when I started here. Damn it.

Maybe it won't work.

Beautiful picture of downtown cannon falls Yeah, I hate this Chromebook okay, well maybe that's not gonna work okay at least I have I Mean it was more visuals than anything else so I I wanted to start with telling you that the library mission statement really informs everything that we do in the library. It helps us decide everything. And the mission statement, as we have on our website, is the Cannon Falls Library welcomes and strengthens the community, supports literacy, provides access to information, and fosters lifelong learning and enrichment. So that's what we do. We foster literacy in all its forms. And there are many different forms. People tend to think it's just books. It is not. So yes, that's our decision making. I'm going to make this fast, too. The library has three different revenue sources. The primary one is the city. And then Goodhue County is going to be contributing $127,777 to the library next year. And that's based off of the percentage of the total rural population's circulation. So our library in Goodhue County gets about 22% of the rural population's circulation. So we're getting 22% of the $606,000 for next year. Other libraries in the county have had a decrease in their circulation from county residents. So they're getting a drop in their funding. We're actually getting an increase. And I'm very happy about that. And then we get about $3,000 in other revenues, which is fines, fees. When people may come and make copies and prints and if they lose something, if they damage something. And donations. So those kinds of things. And then the library services that we offer. There are a lot of people who think that the library only checks out books. The only thing that library staff do is sit at the circulation desk and check out books to people. and recommend things like books for people to check out. And people will say, well, I'm not a reader. Well, that doesn't mean you can't use the library. Or I can afford books, but not everybody can afford books. So I just wanted to let you know everything that we do, although when I was trying to think of it, I realized I don't have the complete list. We do circulate traditional items. We circulate books, DVDs. CD music and CD books. And we circulate the e-books and e-audiobooks through the Libby app. And we contribute about, the goal is to contribute about 20% of our collections budget to Libby because about 20% of our overall circulation is the downloadable circulation through Libby. And that's what Selco is asking from us. Personally, I would prefer to devote it all to our physical collection because we get a better return on investment for it, and I'm all about saving money. We also circulate non-traditional items. We have puppets that are excellent quality. Kids love them. We circulate hotspots, Chromebooks, a Yodo player, which is... Really, really cool if you don't know what it is. It's not like Yoda. It's Y-O-T-O. And the cards. We have a DVD player. That's not as well known, but it's a portable DVD player that people can check out. And we recently got an induction cooking kit. So if people want to learn about induction cooking, it's the little stove and the pans and whatnot. There are other ways that we serve the community that are not just circulating items. We have educational programming, which is also called edutainment because we're also entertaining people. That programming consists of story times, book clubs, Lego and Duplo Club, chess club, craft classes, fitness classes, music programs, nature programs, cooking and food related programs, public computer use, free Wi-Fi, PRINTING, COPYING, SCANNING, AND FAXING. IT SEEMS LIKE NOW WE'RE THE ONLY PLACE IN TOWN WHERE PEOPLE CAN GET FAXES, SO WE'RE GETTING A LOT MORE MONEY WITH FAXING. AND NOW WE HAVE FREE NALOXONE KITS AND FENTANYL TESTING STRIPS, WHICH IS IN RESPONSE TO THE GOODHUE COUNTY COMMUNITY NEEDS ASSESSMENT TO REDUCE DRUG OVERDOSES. SO THAT IS SOMETHING WE'RE MODELING IT OFF OF DAKOTA COUNTY LIBRARIES, AND WE'RE THE ONLY PLACE BETWEEN RED WING and Northfield that offers the kits. And we are addressing food insecurity through the harvest box and extra food shelf in the back foyer. A lot of the work that library staff do is invisible work. And going into all of these things, including researching, purchasing, cataloging, and processing about 160 new items a month, we plan and carry out an average of 30 programs a month. And everything that we buy, we really look to get the best price and complain about it when it's really expensive. Because we know that we're spending tax dollars, and we are very, very responsible with it. We organize volunteers. because we also have a library on wheels program for shut-ins, people who are not able to come to the library. And we spend time learning about trends and issues in libraries so that we can remain innovative and proactive. So the majority of our budget is personnel, and that's what the personnel is doing. We are covering all of those services in that invisible and visible work. And so, the budget that we have presented to you, proposed to you, is reflecting all of the work that we do. And I also just wanted to let you know that there are a few unknowns, like Jeff alluded to. We have some unknowns in the library world. Right now, E-rate is in question. We don't know if we're going to be able to continue E-rate. And SELCO has informed us that if it does go away at the federal level, our library would be able to continue to qualify for E-rate funding. But we would still have to pay about $1,200 or $1,300 a year for our internet service. And it would take my time to manage the internet. acquire the hardware and all of that that SELCO now does for us. So right now, we're just really hoping that we get to keep you, right? And another new thing that I learned about last month is that SELCO is proposing that every single library in the region convert all of our entire collections to RFID. Because Biblioteca said, it would only cost every library $188,000. And I'm going to ask, where do you think we're going to get that money? Because I know I'm not getting it. And I'm not going to ask for it. So there's a meeting about that next week. And I'm going to be fighting it with a lot of data about why it's a bad idea. But that's just an unknown that I just wanted to let you know about. And hopefully, it's just... something that we're going to think about today and then never have to think about ever again. So that's everything that I have.

So now, any questions for the department heads or me? Because like I said, admin budget for capital is pretty pretty much tied to whether when and where we would do something with city hall and right now we are not putting any funds away for for for that yeah that's that's the internet um currently it's

It's basically federal grants, essentially, that will pay for the internet for schools and public libraries. And what's going through the courts right now is that it's unconstitutional and that potentially it would be larger communities that would lose it. So then SELCO wouldn't be able to be the hub for the region to handle it for us, and every small library which would, I'm forgetting the word, qualify, would then have to take on all of that extra work and pay the percentage that we would have to pay.

You're welcome.

Any questions for Jed or Jeff or?

I guess one thing, and this is just strategy-based, and I think it's going to play itself out later, but you had talked about franchise fees, and I think it's something to take a look at, potentially maybe dedicating franchise fees specifically for roadway stuff, because that's a big thing, and I've seen that done across other communities, and it's viable, and it helps pay for itself almost, and assessment fees and stuff like that. So... something that I would agree to or think about and want to hear more about, I guess, and what that plan would be.

Yeah. And even if it's, and I agree, we could also look at that and using those funds to offset existing costs or planned future costs so it isn't feeling like, okay, a resident does get this now on their utility bill that I'm paying for it there, but I'm not, I didn't see any benefit in my taxes. Yeah. Like there are certainly ways we can kind of factor in and calculate out what that is. But in the future, you know, a vast majority of those franchise fees that we would collect and come back to the city are going to be coming from, you know, the industrial, more of the industrial users that are high power, high gas usage.

I guess I've just seen instances of other communities or I don't even know about us, but just just the rate of how much stuff costs and infrastructure. It just sounds like it's becoming unsustainable if you don't think about it and

And another piece of this, too, would be we saw a lot of turmoil and heartbreak and frustration on the project to put in fiber from Frontier. And the state creates the franchise fees or opportunities for franchise fees for cities to use that to manage maintenance and improvements in their right-of-ways. So if we did implement something like that, that could be the fund that we can use to put in those restorations to that project when those applicants kind of fail in meeting our expectation for what should have been put back, we would still maintain our permitting for it because we want to know who's digging in the ground and where, because there's a lot of, you know, things and utilities that are, are in the ground and we don't want to be damaged. And we want to put people on attention to, Hey, make sure you're doing everything right. and following the, you know, go for state one calls and locates and all those proper procedures. And we need, you know, some resources to in that permit fee to, um, administer that. But the, you know, the deposit levels and other things like that, maybe that fund goes, you know, changes to, to be able to do this. So we don't have to worry, worry as much about, Oh, do we even have the money to put some of this back? If we're, you know, only charging $900 for a deposit, but, all of a sudden they cut into the road and it's a, you know, $2,500 replacement fix.

Um, and then one other thing that, that caught my ear, I guess is right off the get go with, with, um, ambulance calls and other townships areas using, utilizing, how's that going to work? Um, you know, if we try to get them to pay for some of those services,

Yeah. So right now, at least on the fire side, we are building out calls so that that's a little different from, uh, other communities that I've worked for, uh, where one was just a fixed per, you know, you have X number of square miles within your township that we serve, you're paying per square mile. Uh, the other one was a, uh, combo, um, formula of, uh, partially the population, partially the total taxable value, in that area and then the actual, on a basis of the fire calls, because we wouldn't bill out calls. Nobody would get a bill for a fire call. It was all coming through the jurisdictions and what they're contributing here. We do bill out those fire calls, but we're not, we're not taking in, or we are taking in contracted rates from, for, for fire, but we're not taking in that for ambulance. So right now, ambulance was purely just bill, bill, bill hours for, for a call. You call the ambulance, you get a bill. Your insurance covers X number of percent of that bill. You pay the difference if there's anything left. If you're a Medicare customer, what Medicare is paying is far less than that and we're not collecting. That's where we don't have any additional funds coming in from townships or other jurisdictions to pay those So when does that I guess when would that happen? So I mean that's that's something Tim and I have been talking about of you know, what is what is our strategy going to be and I think from our perspective we want to look at What is it that we're gonna need for you know? Try to fund for surplus or subsidy dollars each year and then you know bring that as a present you know, present that to the other jurisdictions to say, Hey, this is the portion that this, you know, we feel we're short. This is the portion we feel like based on population, um, I think would be probably the simplest measure to, to account for because, you know, we're addressing the ability to take care of people. Um, that city of Cannon Falls covers this much population. The rest of the jurisdictions are this. So your township has, you know, reflects, you know, this sort of ratio of, um, you know, potential costs to our system. You know, whether or not we get into fine-grained details about age demographics within those townships is, I think, tricky. But, you know, peer population numbers seem to be the simplest and the way other jurisdictions that are in these partnerships, funding partnerships, are kind of rolling it out.

I think what Tim's brought up in the past is hard with the ambulance calls because people just don't pay.

Yeah. You have to go on them. Yep. And, and yeah, and the average collection timeline is about six months from the time the bill goes out to actually funds, funds start coming in. So you know where we're at today is, is really a reflection of six to nine months ago for the services that were being provided.

Thank you.

Yeah.

It seems to me, and I don't know if it was last year, a couple of years ago, when the townships were in talking about these issues, both fire and ambulance, there was a lot of tension in the room. And I don't remember what, because they do right now pay something.

Is that toward fire for fire? They do. Okay. Yeah. But we're not collecting anything from, I don't believe we're collecting anything from ambulance from any of the townships.

Have you approached any of them or?

I have not yet. And that was part of this, you know, kind of strategy around this to say, Hey, we want to this, we're, we're both coming to this. We don't want you to come and try to solve our problem for us. We're a part of this too, um, where we really want to be, you know, sharing in and saying, Hey, this is the service that the ambulance provides. This is what we're bringing in for revenue. This is the cost of the service to deliver.

If we're under the constraints of when we have to have this preliminary report,

The preliminary levy does not affect the ambulance.

Right, but I mean, they're under that same one.

Yes, and theirs is typically in March. So we want, they need to, their funding, they're statutorily on a different cycle than we are. Townships are, yep, townships set their budgets in by March. So they're, you know, it's, Yes, it is important to time that out properly. I learned that when we had our other contracts and making budget changes. If they only find out in February, well, there isn't a whole lot of time for them to make that adjustment in their annual budget. So we want to be kind and accommodating for them and their plan. But for us, in our preliminary plan, it doesn't affect anything because it is an enterprise fund, as Jed talked about, for utilities, so it operates separately from... I just like I said after that last but we don't we want to be yeah, and much better Yes, yes, I've heard about it, and I do also Share in that sentiment that we don't want to be coming in there and trying to tell them hey You have to pay this or else I think that's not I don't think that's gonna work I wouldn't want anybody telling me that for the city Any other questions on capital stuff? So touch on personnel. I did add this slide from what went out in the presentation. So just to reflect kind of where we are today. Hopefully I got these numbers right. I tried to check on everything. So on admin finance, so we have, you know, these are primarily full-time or regular employees. So we have our administrators, city clerk, accounting technician, that's an HR assistant, our new payroll technician, HR assistant, utility billing clerk, and then the license and permit technician, that's Izzy, for our full-time. And then we contract with CETA for three days a week for Laura and provide additional, get a lot more value out of her than the three days a week that we have. On the police side, you know, uh, chief said, uh, chief position, Lieutenant six full time officers, one right now officially fart part time officer. We don't have any other additional part time that I know of. Yeah. Yeah. See how this year worked with the change to moving back to that full full time schedule. And then, uh, Karen for the administrative and records assistance. So that, um, admin position in the police. On the ambulance side, we have our EMS chief, Tim, EMS lieutenant, and Sulo. We have four full-time paramedics on our payroll, or within our budget. Unfortunately, right now, we're down to two of those, and one of those is not able to physically provide that service due to a medical issue. So we just have one that moved from full-time. He's regular part-time, so he's still covering that time, but moved full-time to a different department. And then we've been trying to fill a paramedic role for the entire time that I've been here. And I think this is even going back farther. One of the, a big factor to that and Tim is, you know, shared with me some, some, uh, statistics on, on wages is that, um, when they did the market study for the city, ambulance kind of was kept out of the, out of the comparables, which I can see why, um, rightfully so. There's, it's difficult to find true just city owned ambulances that are comparable to our city. Um, I think in terms of just a city run ambulance is Lake City is probably the closest one to us that that is, um, just its own city that runs it. There are some other, like Dodge County has a group, Partnership for ambulances, but then it's you know, you're getting into the larger just jurisdictions and then the hospitals that are covering their own ambulance services like Mayo and Northfield so when you have that as your comparables, you're you're you're struggling because you're running into Private slash nonprofit sectors and that are you know capable of paying a lot higher rates for their those those professionals than what we are as a city. So, um, I think that is dramatically infecting our ability to recruit for this position. Um, we've had some, uh, potentials for new, uh, paramedics, but have lost them due to taking jobs, other locations or washing out due to background checks. But, Um, we're just not seeing applicants. And, um, I think that's pretty telling that because it wasn't considered into the market study and wasn't looked at in terms of its rate. Uh, so it is something that would be coming in this upcoming budget to, you know, actually bring that up to, um, a higher level in the marketplace. And then we do backfill a lot of the, the, you know, the shifts cause we have so many people that, you know, a certain number of people to be on the rig to provide that, uh, advanced life saving, um, coverage. Um, and that comes in the form of part time EMTs. Uh, and then we do the, we're pretty good on that. We have been hiring, uh, on the EMT side and training and, and, and that, that side of the coin has been all right. Um, but we do run into, because we do have this partnership or kind of arrangement with St. Olaf College, that we do have some times a year where scheduling gets a little difficult. So Tim and Sula are getting more time on the rig than they otherwise would be as more administrative roles within the department. And then we do have, back to, we do have part-time paramedics that cover those. But if Tim were here, I would echo, or I'm gonna try to paraphrase what he's shared with me. It's challenging and it's very, they're getting burned out. in terms of the service that they provide onto the truck to cover the shifts to make sure that we're meeting all of that. We are meeting it. We are meeting our ability to provide that level of service, but it's just becoming harder and harder, especially in the rest of the condition where we are with staffing.

Do they show the fire hall?

Yeah. The public safety building is the hall that houses ambulance and fire. So on the public works side, obviously we have our director here. You have two supervisor. It's West Street supervisors Tony to maintenance to operators that they covered the utility side and then the maintenance one operators are those streets and parks and then on the library they have just made some Kind of slight modifications in terms of their staffing and titles and and where that landed and pay but we have full to full-time staff at the library and with the director and the circulation desk manager, and then four regular part-time library assistants and three part-time shelvers.

Actually, for shelvers, it's really only two. Okay.

We have three staff.

Yeah. Rebecca, I ended up rehiring in kind of an emergency because it was Saturday that I didn't have enough people to work with me. Got it. Thank you. And she's just on staff just for emergencies.

Thank you. So where I, you know, you saw in the presentation what we've talked about and been having a lot of these conversations with department heads and now the union groups as well in talking about what's kind of our plan for personnel moving forward. So at this stage within the budget where we are with the preliminary plan is what we're On the administration and finance side so looking at we have on their ordinances we do have an assistant city administrator position within our within the city. So it's something that is a position that we could, um, we could hire for and fill. Um, so that I would be looking at doing as some sort of internal, uh, filling of that position, likely sharing duties of the city clerk in that instead in the past it was slash a city administrator slash finance director. Um, I would look at combining those duties with the clerk position. Uh, and then we do have likely need for, um, another person that handles a primary functions and responsibilities of finance side. So that accounts payable, um, also other financial, um, responsibilities that, that we have in the city, um, due to, you know, potential for retirement from, you know, employees that have been here long enough to be eligible to retire. And I would like to plan for that, and when that becomes more public, to hire and allow for cross-training, because when you have a lot of knowledge base and experience, it really helps when you can have the person that's coming in to replace them here existing already. And then, um, the other thing, and this is, this is where it kind of gets nuanced. Um, so one of the elements in terms of the plan with the union groups is to talk about how to create, um, opportunities for growth and, and development with our employees in the city. And this really ties back to, you'll hear me say this over and over and over the recruitment and retention of our employees. because it is vastly more expensive to try to hire, train somebody and then lose them because we can't retain them and then do that cycle over and over again. It's costly in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness of what we can do in our roles. whether that's in finance and streets and police and fire, like every, everywhere we want to do it. If we get people on board, we want to keep them. Um, so one of the things that I've worked on in the past, and I think there's, there's an opportunity for this to be successful is to create multiple tiers of positions throughout all the departments within the cities. And, know what you end up seeing is maybe an org chart that looks like you have you know 20 positions within a department but you're never filling 20 positions you're filling what you need for at the time but you're being able to take the people that you have or the people that you're gonna hire and their skills and abilities and align them with with what you have so that they are they can you know be paid fairly for what they're capable of providing to the city So an easy example of this is you look at the maintenance two positions. So those are utility operators. We just hired a new person in that position. He came with no license experience. We had other candidates that did have a license experience. But as you would do this, you would establish multiple tiers of that position to say once they get to a C license, then they can move up to be promoted into these positions. Once they get to a B license, they can be promoted to that position. Even the potential for an A, which we don't necessarily need because we're not an A-licensed facility, but I don't want to take away the opportunity that, hey, if I could get an A-licensed operator here, I think they could do a lot of great things. They could be very efficient in operating our system because in order to become an A-licensed operator in the state of Minnesota, you're likely got 10 years of experience. So I mean that to not, you know, to, to lose a person because you can't even accommodate that or, you know, a reward them for that level of ability and then to achieve that certification I think is, is, you know, if, if you can afford it, it's something that you should be able to do at least provide for an opportunity. So that's where, um, as we move forward, like that's what I would likely try to present. You don't have to have four tiers of in every, in every position in every department. maintenance utility folks are, you know, a different breed. Um, there's very specific core standards that they have to meet and they're statewide. Um, likely you see a lot of that too as in the law enforcement side, you have a lot of comparables in terms of one, just being post licensed in general and then to their, you know, other certifications and things that they provide within their industry in other areas. I think that's, you know, it's a little more nuanced. You know, one example I used in a previous city is we talked about your utility billing clerk. So we had hired a new utility billing clerk, and when we were going through our plan there, she was about four years in in terms of experience, and, you know, I went and asked her. I'm like, so on day one, when you ran the utility bills every single month, which is an incredibly important revenue function to fund our utility departments, our enterprise funds, were you able to, you know, how long would it take you to run those? Series bills for that month and she's like it usually took me about three days to get everything all together just to do just to get to the point where I'm printing bills and Okay, four years later. What does it take you well? I can get it done in a day I mean just as is using that as an example to say you have now with your experience the ability to be more efficient in your job That has savings to the city even you know even if we're paying more to do that There's probably a net impact positive impact financially to the city So that's where I just want you to be open-minded to what we're talking about here. you know that as this moves forward you know we'd be presenting opportunities for people to move into positions to meet where they are with their skill level and experience and we have a lot of people here that are pretty long-standing and very experienced in their roles and providing a lot of efficiency and I think that's really important valuable for us to be able to to provide that you know guidance and show them hey this is where we and and for new people to retain the existing ones that we have with the experience and values that they bring to the city and recruit the new ones that we'll need to show them these are the paths and this is where you can go. It also aligns really well on that recruitment side too. When you are hiring, you don't necessarily have to only post for the entry level. You can post that range and you can say, Hey, if I get an officer that comes to us and he has 10 years of experience, he or she has 10 years of experience in law enforcement, we can put them into a higher position. We can start them up higher versus what we have to constantly do now is renegotiate and then come back to you to say, can we start them higher up on the step schedule from, from where they were. it kind of just gives us a lot more flexibility or capability to recruit really experienced candidates, whereas a tenured officer is probably not even going to look at us because our pay range isn't even close to what they could make in another jurisdiction. So one, uh, another element element of this is a license permit technician, um, looking at creating a zoning administrator. We've had that in the past. And I think as, um, you know, that position has gained more experience, uh, an area that is really an opportunity for us. Um, especially if, if the data center development does go through would be to take over the building inspection, uh, piece. So we do contract that with the County. but it is not a revenue generator for us. It's not losing us any money, but it's not generating revenue because County keeps most of the permit fees on the building to do the, to do that inspections. It's something that you need enough activity and work to be able to afford a person that can have those credentials to do that. But with the data center, I mean, that is looking at, and if it comes to fruition, that would be a plan of over 10 years. You're going to have a lot of building going on. Building permits are traditionally funded by a fee structure that is related to the value of the project. So the higher the value of the project, the higher the fee costs because the more expectation is, the more review that needs to go into play. So if that is happening, that is certainly something that would be a potential for revenue for the city. So as I go back to where we were in the existing positions, Chief talked a little bit about this on the, on the police side. Uh, looking at, you know, there are, I would just comment that there's other potential leadership opportunities yet. He talked about adding another Lieutenant. You know, you do have other, other areas where you could create these different tiers of like a Sergeant to captain, a assistant chief, um, that you could also align for people as they, they grow and look and want to be able to stay with us. But you know, maybe you don't want to stay in just a, um, a basic patrol officer role. Ambulance is one of those that talking with our chief, EMS chief, we do have a little bit of nuance in the lieutenant role. that the person in that position was working towards a paramedic certification, ultimately didn't complete that. So that would be kind of a unique built around the person, but they're very valuable in the organization and trying to ensure that if we do create this, we create opportunities not just for people to gain certifications, but to keep people that maybe aren't going to have them. Uh, but we should fairly, we should be fair to accommodate them accordingly. So, you know, if I, I try to start this with out, you know, focusing on the individuals, but thinking about, uh, what could, what could or what opportunities do exist. So that would be one kind of nuance with this department where we'd have kind of that Lieutenant without, with the paramedic certification, without, Then, um, in terms of paramedics, we only have the one category, but I think there's the ability as Tim and I did had a long conversation about this, that you have paramedics that have, you know, certain levels of experience that they just have much more capability of providing services on the, on the rig. Not necessarily that they're absolutely needed, but you know, they could provide care that otherwise if you didn't have that experience, you wouldn't do. So I think it just adds to their adds their value. Then on streets and public works, kind of talked about this, those examples of that experience level, the certifications in terms of licensure for utility functions themselves, and then maybe even potential for lead operations. In a small department, it gets a little trickier when you're talking about you know, you already have a director, you have two supervisors and then you have five staff kind of underneath them. You know, how many, how many leadership roles do you really need? But you know, you do have some people that have been with us for quite some time. Uh, they're providing a lot of experience. They have a lot of, a lot of knowledge base. I mean, we just had a retiree of an employee that was here for almost 30 years. Um, so it's, it's just even, even if they choose not to move into a, you know, full on leadership role or move up to the director role, I think there is a lot of value that is in that experience. And then this creates that opportunity for them to have some level of growth in their in their career standing, but some people, that's all they want to do. I just want to be a maintenance worker. I just want to, I don't know. I want to move the parks in the summertime. I want to go fix streets like that. And they're totally happy with that. And I'm, I'm very happy in keeping them here. Uh, the way we kind of balance that out is then, you know, by providing these senior tier positions, we do away with any con conversations around longevity pay. just paying you for your years of service. I'd rather have it tied into you being a senior person as it comes with the experience, but also your capabilities of providing these other abilities to the city. Then library kind of touched on that already and then I did want to know we do have there there used to be Hasn't been around long enough and heard previous budgets there used to be $15,000 that was kind of set aside as payment from for the building itself when they constructed that that ended a couple years ago and now that money's being put into their capital improvement fund and So hopefully if we have issues related to the facility, since it's one of our newer ones, we do have some resources kind of already starting to go there to make those costs. And I just wanted to show you a picture of somebody using the library that happened to be my daughter. Um, so where are we kind of at right now? These numbers, I'm going to be very cautious. These numbers are always in flux. I mean, we're constantly getting new information about things changing. They even changed from the time I sent this out. So, um, by the time we get to the, to the next, to the actual levy resolution and at the next council meeting, You're probably going to see some of this stuff change, but as a general sense, we're just trying to figure out where we are and what some of these impacts would be. So if we did nothing, if everything just stayed status quo and we didn't do new contracts and we kept 3% or just kept our pay schedule going and didn't make any adjustment, we would need to add 2.6% to the levy just to accommodate the step increases for the existing employees. And then the wage adjustment, so that's moving that scale up. For every 1%, that's another 0.7%, relatively speaking, to the levy. So when we talk later, I'll kind of share with you where we're at and why I think the presentations are very reasonable and accommodating. The health insurance impact is about one point, just under 1.6% fueled specifically just fuel what we expect, what we're kind of budgeting for increase based on where we are today, as Jeff said, not where we think we might be as 0.7. The capital improvement plan, so that's all those other things that we add in there, that's the biggest chunk of what we have. But that's also the biggest opportunity to make some changes. We do want to support and advocate for kind of keeping to the plan as we presented it, but a huge chunk of this comes in that park capital where we're now adding in these non-mobile facilities and improvements. So that's like about 280,000 to the total budget. So on the municipal reserve side, that's an, that one goes up a hundred, but that really is kind of shifting. Um, what the budget for what Jed talked about for that mill and overlay budget or maintenance maintenance budget, the higher level maintenance things, a lot of that shifting into there, but also adding to it because we just know the, based on the needs that this isn't even enough to catch up. If I had to, they've had to put an estimate to what we need to do for replacement costs. The city, we're probably in the talking in the millions, maybe 5 million to 7 million. just in an annual cost in replacing the streets to, to keep up to the standard. So you had nice streets and you really had potholes. Um, but you know, that's something we're just not going to get to. But if we did have that, um, you know, if, if those park dedication funds, as I talked about with the, with the project, we do have the application in hand, uh, from tracked for the final plat. And with that is the two big fee payments that we agreed to in the development agreement. The one being the park dedication fee, that's 494,000. And then the contribution that goes to the school district at $500,000 a year, starting at $500,000 a year. So if approved and these do develop that, that fee is to be paid. Um, once those approvals are made or shortly after it was approved for the name. So yeah.

When they make those payments, assuming they make the, you know, if it goes and they make the payments, those are non-refundable, right? Correct. So if in the future they don't manage to get a building or whatever.

So, yeah, just as a reminder, with the school payment, yeah, the park dedication fee is this one-time payment that comes to us, and that's locked in. With the school funding, there are out causes, and that's if the state fund, primarily the one is if the state sales tax exemption goes away, they do have the ability to, cancel or take away that payment, but they do have to make once it starts a they have to make at least two more years of payments after that. So there, we, we discussed it and everybody is in the understanding that once a payment starts, there's, there's at least three payments that are going to be made. So that first payment to put two years following that, give them an off ramp to be able to, I just was wondering about the park plan for so, and then, um, longer down the road. Once the, once we get to the point where the buildings go up, as Jed talked about for the water tower, as I talked about for the sewer plant, those would come in, closer to that date. So probably three or four years from now. So where, uh, we kind of ended up with this is that, you know, we had that 282,000 for the park and pool funds. Um, if we just left that alone and where we end up with the levy increase, we're, we're looking at something around 13%. And if we just took that out, then we're, you know, drops about 8% and we're down into the, into a levy increase about 5%. So that, again, I gotta wrap this up, but, We, with the, with levy, there is the percentage increase from the previous year. So that's kind of the fairest means of what I can compare you to. So what we've had for a levy last year and what we pay, what we increase that to this year, that's the 13%, the 5%. That's those numbers. What I also need to help you understand is, Where we are with valuation is last year, our valuation across the city with the county assessors valued all the property didn't change much, if at all. Almost everybody's valuation stayed exactly the same as it was in payable year 25 to payable year 26. Where that's going to change next year is actually those are increasing about 9.8%. So values across the board for the whole city are going up 9.8%. So if we just kept our, so the way you figure out the tax rate is you have what you're gonna levy, that total amount you're gonna levy, and you divide that by the net tax capacity. It varies across residential, commercial, industrial, but that amount, went up 9.8% for us. So if our levy stayed flat, even though our tax rate would come way down, so if we kept our levy exactly the same, the tax rate would come way down, but everybody would still potentially see an increase in their taxes because their valuations went up. So there's kind of the middle ground, and what we tried to balance is Obviously, the whole point of this presentation is to show you that we can't stay flat. We have to try to keep up with our costs. We need to be putting money into capital. We need to be making these investments into our community and our resources and our staff. So there are levels of increases that we are advocating for, we are asking for, and we're hoping that you can be supportive of that. but we want to be mindful that we know there isn't unlimited resources, so we want to be respectful in what we're asking for. So the true balance of what you want to try to do, if you're going to be fair to everybody, is try to keep the levy increase underneath what the valuation increases, because then you can say, we're not truly the ones totally raising all your taxes. Your valuations are changing, too. Yeah. And the county assessors handle the valuations. It's very rare if we're going to have a city of our size that do our own valuations. Yep. So yeah. And then, and then they do mass appraisals so that they take the sales of, of houses or commercial property and then they use that to kind of formulate and calculate what those increases are going to be. So they had probably enough sales of homes over the, uh, the, period of evaluation, which actually is about a year and a half ago, to determine how much that general increase is going to be. But they do on-site inspections, and I think the assessor was out last year, so those now are going into the valuations for this coming year. So that could have had a factor into it as well. So I did want to point out, you know, when you actually look at each department for its impact to the overall levy, the library at this point was the lowest 0.4% thankfully in part to the county's increase in the circulation. So, and then this is the spreadsheet where those numbers came from and they did try to show, you know, what the impact reduction would be with that park capital improvement. We did have the preliminary levy from 2026. What ultimately was approved was just over $4 million, where this number, what I was sharing for numbers right now, we're about just under $4.2 million in that adjustment. But the tax rate for that 26 was 60%, and this one I think is actually like... 56% for this preliminary levy. So just as a showing, we're increasing even 100,000 more than the preliminary levy a year ago, where the tax rate, because the valuations didn't change, was going to be 60%, where now the valuations increased, our tax rate's only 56%. I'm sure I've confused you all.

Now we just need our five-minute break.

Yeah, and I'll leave it at that.

Thank you for your time.

Yeah, thank you for listening.