Administration / Public Works Committee - Regular Meeting

car. and electric signs. Okay.

Most of the stuff is just cleaning up some other but those are the two two new ones on audio. All right. We are live chair master plan. Uh well welcome everybody to the August meeting of the administration and public works committee. Um we got some stuff to talk about this evening and we've got a PNZ meeting here in a little bit. So, we're going to get right to it. Um, Amy, why don't you call the role? Council member Preston, Council Member Mabry, here. Council member Nyan here. Council member Farmer here. Council member Marshall present. Council member Bockart present.

Council member Vanick here. Council member Alers here. All right. Um, that brings us to uh the approval of minutes. I know we had a little thing that Mr. Mavery found that we've gotten fixed. So, unless there's anything else, uh, I'll look for a motion to approve the minutes. I read them. All right. Motion made by Mr. Mabry, seconded by Mr. Backer. All those in favor, please say I. I. I. Anyone opposed? Any abstensions? All right. The meeting minutes pass. Uh, that brings us to public participation. There is nobody in the room. I don't think I see anybody online. No one no one is online at this time chair.

All right. So, nobody's online. Nobody's in the room. So, we'll go ahead and close public participation. So, uh that brings us right into our form information section where we have our monthly reports. Tom, I assume this is you chair. All right. So tonight, uh we at based off our last meeting in July, we have implemented a new uh reporting mechanism for both code enforcement courts and our police just to kind of have it on a standard footing. That said, we were hoping to get our police and court reports done and turned in today. We are still waiting on the headquarters down in Clayton um to get us the report, but they will be getting that. It'll be included in our my CA report coming out this Friday. Uh the same can be said for the courts. The only issue we have and might want to discuss uh maybe having the July in September because it's when on Friday that's when we closed out the books. You have to have it running all the way until the last day of the month. Um that said it usually takes about a week to finalize all the numbers when people are paying and whatnot. So we can have those reports. We'll have the July version ready and ready to go via the CA report but also bringing that back um at the next meeting if that would be preferable to the committee. But I I can wanted to address that before we took on the code enforcement side.

Yeah. Uh anybody have any thoughts on that? Anything's better than what we've had in the past. So I mean if it and I I don't think we should have everybody stop what they're doing to get a report ready for two days. So I mean

I almost think I mean you if you put that into your report if there's a question we can ask about it but I don't know that we need to like do it in every meeting. In that case, then what we'll do is we'll have it attached with the CA report and that we can have it included as well as an item for just the work session just so the public can be notified as well. Cool. Um and then that said the uh code enforcement side uh we've been busy looks like you. Uh but if any questions more than happy to answer but really that you know when you're looking at trends this is pretty it's what I expected to see uh for the first month especially a month like July uh really trash containers being stored outside where they shouldn't be and then also um tall grass which ironically it seems to be the the nuisance for all all cities. But that said those are the two major ones. But the cool thing is kind of breaking it out by ward. The hope is to these fun little pie charts here. We'll break down your ward based off what are the top nuisances that are are the issues that are being reported. U but for the ward breakdown, you can kind of see who's you know where the number of inspections are going, where our code enforcement officers are working. Uh W three took the cake. This this time we're having the most

I know. We'll we'll keep tracking that though. But it does seem to it it is going to be very helpful to be able to see what what kind of codes are being broken um violated. In that case too, we can maybe start looking at a proactive measure too, especially for grass and the storage of trash containers. Let's have the winner talk.

Um this is really to save time for the city because most of these I'm not aware of some of them I am sometimes and then I don't ever know like the followup. I know code enforcement goes out there, but then people will ask me, "Oh, did you hear or did they if they haven't heard or whatever, is there like a system that once they've gone?" And maybe there's only so much they can say depending on what the violation is and what they're asking people to do, but it does that automatically get out to them and say, "We've been there. This is the result."

So, if they go through my gov right now, it is programmed if they put their email in and they report it through my gov or if they give me their email. What I've been doing is putting their email in like even though I put fill out the form or whoever will fill out the form, you're instructed to put the resident's contact information and they should get a bounce back email that says, "Hey, this has been confirming receipt of the request." Then they should get messages throughout the process as it gets closed. That said, we have another item on the agenda today to kind of clean that up as well. We're actually quite as well doesn't work as well as we'd like it to. Um, so now we're actually looking at a couple different other software solutions. We are under contract with my gov until March of 2026. So it's going to we were kind of stuck with them until then. Uh that said an RFP has actually been published to help find a solution. I the department has a couple in mind that seem to have that notification uh system a little bit more in uh just developed and they also have geospatial the best part about it is the geospatial technology of it. There's a couple that a resident just from reporting purposes, they open up the module or they press the link on the website, it'll bring them up where they are. It uses if you allow the service to know your location, it'll pinpoint you there and say, is it around here? If not, you type in the address and you can report it. But for someone that just wants to get a click there, they see their residents uh their neighbor's yard is a little in disrepair, they can literally see it and not have to scroll over over a map or put in an address. just click it and say tall grass. So that's the hope. There's a couple software solutions that I'm pretty positive we'll we'll be able to do that. Right now though, I do encourage working out the kinks, but I encourage any resident to submit it through my go and if they have an issue getting a notification back when it's going to the pipeline, I can at least track that and that will help with iron software while we still have it.

Mr. Marshall, do we have an agreement with Republic that they do a communication every year?

Yes. So, I guess my question would be, wouldn't it be in our best interest to have them send a mailer out telling people about when the trash cans and they need to move back and then show the the regulation there since it's the biggest offender and most people say, "I never saw it." But I think if we put it there and from a communication standpoint and then also reiterate the corrugated situation because I still see it where people leave all the boxes out there and they're not picking it up but I don't think anybody's going to the door to say we you know we're not going to pick it up because you didn't break it down. But I would think that we could encourage them since it's such a big now we have numbers. We could say, "Hey, we we really believe you should get your communication out to all the residents uh about when the trash cans come out, when they can go back in, and that they have to be behind the side of the they can't be in front of the house or out of view." Just a thought.

We definitely do that. Uh we also have the upcoming gazette, too. We could put a little graphic in there as well. Well, I mean, something like this would be good if you're like, "Hey, most of our code violations are, you know, garbage cans and tall grass." That's a thing that should go in the gazette because it kind of doesn't seem to really matter. Well, I guess word six obviously is a little bit different, but most of them are about the same. That'd be good, too. Part of one, I guess one and six would have gateway. You got Mr. Mayor. Well, they they're required to uh another another place we have the new resident packet and I think that maybe you can include something that says here's like the top 10 list to stay out of trouble. Just

these things you're probably going to be, you know, okay shape. Maybe include something like that in that new resident pack. At least you will educate those new people looking in and over time y that'll become a significant number. All right, we can definitely do that. I was just gonna say one you could add in that top 10. This isn't really when you're blocking the sidewalk. I think it's more in the summer because that people have extra cards but college kids home and I hear people I can't I have to go on the street with my dog and blah blah blah. So that might be something people don't even think about. You can definitely I don't know if that's an ordinance. I don't know if you're not allowed to do I think you I don't you say blocking the sidewalk is like if somebody parks their car

the sidewalk so people have to go around it and get a sidewalk to go on. I'm positive that is I'm pretty sure. Yeah. So Mr. May, thanks.

U I've just reviewed the quarterly crime report and it shows incidents um which which shows that we're tracking well tracking the same well we were last quarter. um and so is the u general area it's called. But what I think would help would be increments per 1,000 or per 10,000 residents of both the general area and our city. Our city's 33 or 35,000 because I don't know what general area means the confines of St. Louis County or something else. Um, yeah.

So, if if that benchmark measurement uh was included, we they we'd say, well, our our speeders are one in 100,000. Uh, but the but the surround the general area, whatever that is, is uh 250 per 100,000 and Wildwood is a really happening city if we can keep our crime rel comparatively that much lower by percentage than the general area. Yeah, I think that and then I mean the general concept I've talked to Captain Mandell about it that ideally I don't know if we'll be able to do it that I would like to try to get to is you know when we contract the the county police whether it's us or like Fenton or any of these other cities to do it we all pay the same amount for an officer and all that kind of stuff which is makes sense but it would it is helpful at least for me to understand that like you know we have a very low crime rate. Do we have a very low crime rate because we have so many police officers? Do we have a very low crime rate because of the demographic shift? What is our crime rate per number of people compared to somewhere else? So then to me that just helps us when it comes to budget time going like you know do we need this or that because I know last year we had a conversation where just because of the timing shift of their um scheduling like we dropped two officers which seems like it didn't affect us which is what we kind of thought but then there have been some metrics where at a certain point it was like 50% less of something and that's kind of started raising red flags. So the idea is like we want to be able to get it to a place where we can understand a dollar value for crime for lack of a better way of saying it. So those ideas are great just like you know giving us a better idea of like what are we compared to this other place that is you know 12 miles down the road that has the same you know setup with the police officers stuff like that. I think that'll help us tremendously because our police contracting's like the biggest thing that we've got. So, we need to really be able to speak

intelligently to the residents as to why. I don't think anybody's going to complain if we're spending more on police so we don't have crime, but we want to be able to talk that through for sure. We got a Yes, sir.

Question regarding uh if somebody was to park their RV in or their trailer in front of their home uh for more than 24 hours, is is that zoning is that a violation of zoning regulation, recreation, vehicles, boats, and trailers, or is that a nuisance vehicle certain conditions? It's it's the trailers. Yeah, it's it's a new but it can also be I would say it's probably in our traffic code too. I know it's against the law that said the problem is enforcing it because they could technically have it for 23 hours and 59 minutes and then move it and then I think the frequency is three times. Yeah. And then there's a twohour

Yep. Yep. So if they're if they just drive it though to their friend's house or whomever, but typically what happens is we send out an officer and we'll have them just talk to the individual if it seems like it's becoming a consistent issue. Our code enforcement guys can also take care of it. But sometimes it does help to have an officer to say hello. Mr. Mayor,

yeah, just just a quick thing. Uh, the number of officers that working at a shift, that's never changed. Even though there was a reduction by two, I think one was an administrative role with the other was maybe also kind of like a split role if I recall, maybe partially protected. But just in case you know folks are watching, I don't want to leave the impression that there are two less officers working right than prior contract that the number has stayed the same. But to your point about the data and reporting I I think that's a good ask because it's definitely made some improvements where we're seeing it. You know, it's helpful to see what does this data tell us because when I look at certain statistic, I used to wonder, well, is that good? Is it bad? Are we in the ballpark? But now, I think we're starting to see trends like they compare it to the past. I think that's one of the issues we run into as a city where we do have a contract like this because sometimes you'll see like in the news uh like a city that has their own local police department. I guess their data is collected differently. Ours is kind of combined. So you'll see like oh some city is like rated you know top safest in the state or whatever. But I think ours we never really get that differentiation because we're intertwined with the whole county. So yeah, if you can do something where you uh can get specific wildwood data and you know it's better to compare us with a local municipality is comparable to us. I think that would help. I think our data you know from what I see in here is good. It's just you know how do we get an applesto apple comparison? Thanks for that.

Yeah mary.

Yes. I don't I don't mean to make the meeting as late as we can for Mr. Marsh. This is all his content, but uh I've got another item that comes up. Sure. Uh the police u I was going to save this for just Mr. Lee, but uh I remarked to Mr. Vunich in passing that something's going on with the police that I've seen uh quite a ratcheting up of their presence. Overall, there were two speed checks. I think one might have been on Clayton. I can't remember where, but uh then I drove behind officers on Orville Road all the way from one end to the next before I was able to stop him and talk to him a little while. And I said, "Is this going to be a scheduled route for you or are you just canvasing the the area?" Goes, "No, it's just a general route. We've got 33 routes or I think is what he said. I'm not sure. Um, I said, 'Well, I've seen two of you now rolling that I've been driving behind and I had noticed them effortlessly

for quite a while. So, there's some sort of a message got to somewhere and u it's working. Good. Safe speeds, safe streets. There we go. Um, part of our one of our major initiatives over the spring and summer. Okay. I I only had one quick question and I'm assuming they're two different things because they're two different codes. One is tall grass and weeds and one is tall grass and weeds over one acre because one acres.

Cool. All right. Well, I think it's a good start. I'm excited about it. It looks pretty nice. Anybody have anything else on the reporting they want to throw at us? Okay. Uh that brings us to our um municipal management software RFP. Thank you, chair. Uh this is going back a little bit of time, but wanted to really iron out the kinks and see what we we wanted the the department um along with Department of Public Works has played a pretty crucial role and also Melanie with planning um going through and figuring out with my gov we've had some hiccups that said it overall for permitting it works very well as we've discussed. Back in April, we went ahead and presented to this committee and got permission to go out and solicit some bids. Um the idea is to have an open bid for about the next month and we've invited multiple vendors that have contacted us and we've spoken with and seen demos. Um that said the idea here is to kind of slowly wean off my gov and go on to it potenti if my gov is able to provide a proposal that really knocks the socks off then they are obviously eligible as well. But that said, we're looking for someone to come in and really show us the tools to not only do permitting, uh, work orders, requests from residents, but also take care of business licensing and doing pretty much one h a one-stop shop for everything that goes on in the city. So, it's one system that everyone's being trained on versus having, you know, three different systems that are working. U, that said, just wanted to give an update that that's been published. It went out last about two weeks ago and we expect to have the bids open in time to have uh them ready to go at the next meeting. So, we'll be reviewing proposals from different vendors at the next meeting which we might uh wish to invite them for interviews or potentially just have them give a demo at that meeting with coordinating with the chair. But overall, there's a few really good vendors out there. Um put a report together with the RFP today. But if there's anything that you know is missing in that RFP that you'd want uh the department to go after and discuss

with anyone uh that's reaching out with questions, feel free to let us know. U try to make it better. Marshall, not not to change the RFP, but uh as you talk to other cities and and ask them information about these providers, do you have a ballpark in what you think the cost will be for this versus what we have now?

So right now it's similar. So it'd be less it's around less than $50,000 per year. Right now we're paying like 36,000 for my gov. So in this case, it's if we were to go with something like EZRI, which is a little bit more it's probably the best tool out there because it's that's who does GIS and that's who does all the interactive maps in the first place. That one it's a little bit more difficult because you pay by the user and technically every resident would be considered a user. So that one gets up there. It's that's hundreds of thousands of dollars. So we can't necessarily afford that. Um that said, there's a couple other software solutions that integrate the GIS data. So that master asset map that we showed in that meeting, you would almost be able to integrate the data we've uploaded there and show where our prop where you know city maintain rightway is and be able to drop it into whatever software. So when someone were to click a certain parcel that's on our road, it would immediately notify us. It would kind of give us a little extra context. So that said, probably around 50,000 per year at the top end and then 30,000 alone. So with the improvements in that any uh savings from maybe integrating AI and not having as many people deal with it to that you could kind of offset some of that to say hey look we can do it with

that is one of the critical features we're going to be looking at within these proposals is that without dampening our current service provider um when asking the vendors like what is the plan for the future the hope is that they're working on AI and trying to incorporate it into pretty automating the system. They these notifications to residents could be easily automated on the back end, which in some cases they are. Um that said, we've asked our vendor, you know, their ideas with current vendor um their ideas to utilize AI and it hasn't been too superb. So the idea would be to have a vendor that comes in and says that's going to be a major point of their model. There's a couple out there that are already looking at that. Great. Thank you.

Anybody have anything else? All right. Uh yeah, I'm excited to see what they have done. Okay, that brings us to our four action items. And up first, we have an amendment to the code of ethics. So, Ed, we got here just in time. [Music] Uh Tom, do you want to take this one or do you want me to you take it off?

Um so, this is a concept that, you know, we a number of us have been having conversations about for quite some time. Actually, I was thinking back um to when I joined the council six years ago, we were having a similar conversation about some issues regarding this thing and and I just for myself, I just think it's much easier in a lot of ways to get things locked in where it's not so much a guessing game. Uh and so um what we what I put together here is sort of a a framework that should um give us a little bit of a better idea of you know when there is real issues and when there is not and a very clear idea of if there is an issue how do we speak to that or address to it or whatever whatever it may be. Um so you know these are things that are um kind of happening in the city at at at the moment. We've had uh I've had a number of conversations about it. Uh even back on the uh watershed roing task force, we've had questions because one of our members also happens to have a house that is caving into the creek. And so they have a very personal connect in what it is. And so one of the things that um Mr. Lee and I have had conversations about with this is there's a difference between um serving on a committee or doing something where it's a real deciding body. So, uh, you know, being on city council, being on P&Z, those are definitive decisions that can be adjusted versus more of an advisory thing. So, on watershed, we can suggest we'd like to do this, but somebody else has to do it. Uh, and so it's kind of putting clear lines in place with those. And then also spelling out for people how it works because I mean, I I remember when I got on the conversation I had was pretty limited about like, I don't know if you feel like you have a conflict, maybe go with that. And while I think that's I also think that you know different people have different thoughts and so um

you know this con the concept of this is not specifically directed at any one person or group or anything like that. It's trying to kind of solidify what we're doing. So it's not um it's not necessarily a new uh ordinance for the city. It's just adjusting the one that we already have. Um we did that I can't remember what it was on. we did something on that 48ish. Yeah. Um, so anyways, that's that sort of the concept. I'm sure Tom and I have left lots of time to have a conversation about this and some other things. So, I will open the floor for anybody that would like to kick it off unless you want to add anything, Tom.

Uh, overall, you know, just what this policy is presenting. The only thing is we'll need to do one last check with the city attorney before we would pass the official amendment just to change the for the code change itself. Uh, but overall it' pretty much be taking the advocacy portion if there's a financial interest involved. That's that's the key that's being added here. Right. There we go. Mr. Marshall, you got anything you want to add? I do. All right. I think I might be the only one here that's brought been brought up on the ethics board four times. Yeah. Congratulations.

It's quite an honor, by the way. Um, I guess the one I have is when it gets down to the financial interest, I think we need to make sure we we go along with what the charter says as well. So, the charter is really clear when you file your personal um disclosure if you have any affiliation with any property that you own or any business that you own in order to do that. We as council members never see those, right?

They get filed with the state or whatever. So the bigger issue is they are public documents but I think that's another one where if somebody you're expecting people because then um Mayor Bolan added that you did the financial review or whatever but in that particular case you already have one legal document that should override all the other ones as much as we try to say what interaction do you have or financial disclosure in order to do that. So my only comment was you don't want it in three or four different places. So, if we know we put it in a charter that's updated every 10 years, then I think we ought to make sure that what we're saying here isn't different without the fact that we'd have to change it again, we'd have to change the charter based based on that. So, that's one that I I just think we need to keep in mind that it's got to fit in all the different buckets in order to do that.

Okay, Mr. May. Well, that just begat a question on my part, Mr. Marshall. Are we proposing to publish each elected officials financial disclosure as a document? Uh, you don't have to, but it is a public doc. They got, but someone's got to know they've got to go to I guess if you wanted to. Yeah. I mean, the idea of this is not really to publish those kinds of things. It's it's more I mean, you know, we we have a um

as I said, this isn't directed at any one person or situation, but we've got a situation that has been quite a topic in the city in terms of like our chapter 100 and our uh Mr. Con who's, you know, long served the city in a lot of different ways. And so, you know, the idea of un like of understanding this is when this might become an issue is kind of what this is about. It's not about, you know, necessarily publishing anybody's financial interest. It's about saying, hey, you know, you know that you have a financial interest in this and because you now know that and this is what we're saying, this is the process that you need to go through.

And these really aren't new. I mean, I go back Lisa Wax when she Marty were developing their property, uh, Ted and Maryanne Simmons, whenever that was on the agenda, they got up and left the building, right?

And and they were completely outed for any discussions. Now, the first time I got u charged for the board of ethics was they said that I voted in a certain way for Lisa Wax. Well, I absane from that vote to start with, but until they brought it up and they went back and back then we had the tapes and everything to go back and do it. So, this is new. We've had it that way. It's just how it's being handled. And then the bigger issue I think in all of these are what can you do to enforce it? I mean, we had I don't think Tom Mlan when he developed everything over here at uh across from the community college where the bank is, all of that development, he was on the planning and zoning

and everybody threatened to take him off because he was treated differently and all that kind of stuff. Well, when he quit coming to the meetings, the council has no authority to take a P&Z person off, right?

And he refused to resign. And so, we dealt with that throughout that cycle until he was off there. So, these aren't new things popping up. they've always been there and then you try to figure out what you can or can't do. We've had the situation with council members um violating the stuff, but nobody in my experience has ever move forward to try to remove a council member. The idea was just let them write out their term and then somebody else will run for that. So there a lot of these things aren't really new. They've just always been dealt with. And the more clarity I think is a good thing. I I just think that if you're getting a disclosure here and you want to make sure that we're not setting up a parameter that's different in the dollar amount that you have to report and how that is so that they both kind of sync up. Um I'm not sure how they enforce it. I guess we'll find out that with uh Mr. Paige, but

right how you can do that. So yeah, Mr. Um, other than the individual you just stated, um, are we aware of anybody else that has a conflict with any of the committees right now? Um, I mean, not really. The closest one would be would be Greg Burgerer, who, you know, he's the W five representative on the watershed erosion task force, but as I said, okay,

you know, that's not a deciding body, right? Um, I mean, we had a situation. I'm trying to remember, uh, Mayor Garano, that's when you were when uh when we had the council member that was taking the mailing list from the city and incorrectly doing some things with them. I mean, that was kind of that's another one of these things where we started a conversation, but I think is to your point, Ed, like it doesn't it's hard to kind of figure out where to go with it. Um, and so this is designed to kind of try to put a little bit more framework in that. So like one of the things is you know if we have a person who you know has a conflict as we're talking about like if it was the guys across from the way across the way there you know maybe the mechanism that we can say which is sort of what it's says in here is like we're going to put these conversations about this thing on hold until you know that puts that the onus on that person then if they really want to do this thing to go okay well then I will step down. Yeah. Yes. Mr. Gerano.

Yeah. I mean, right now the way that the ethics rules are written very clear in that there has to be a financial conflict of $5,000 or more. And I I would have to refer to the city attorney because I don't know if that only pertains to elected officials or it's appointed or or appointed. Okay. So, I said for

I mean, unless it changed, it's always been appointed and city officers. So, anybody working for the city as well as anybody appointed. So, I think that um the mayor previously uh had attempted to try to tighten up some of the board of ethics rules uh beyond just the $5,000, you know, clear, you know, you know, line that if you cross that, you have a financial income tax. Uh but I don't think he was able to at the time. I know that one of the issues that came up was uh you know we had a council member who felt that they could vote on a matter that affected their spouse um you know that appeared with that item there. So I think it just has to be very clear. I mean I think doing a cursory view I know many of us are involved in groups or organizations when we're very passionate. we lobby, you know, for road safety or things like that. I just want to make sure that the city attorney doesn't find anything that says that, you know, you could be violating someone's uh first amendment rights, you know, to be able to speak on an issue or something like that. So, I think that Thomas said that John would be looking at that and seeing where we could do something.

Yeah. So, like the idea with this, as we've done a couple times, this is kind of a framework that I think is pretty good, but if there's things, you know, like to your point, Ed, making sure it doesn't conflict with the chart or stuff like that. If there's any of those things that seem to stand out to anybody or whatever, we can kind of add that in and then John can take a look. And

since we know we have to do that for the state, it just makes it easier to refer to it in in the program that that's what we have to go by because the state overriding that. I do know for an example um Tommy Kelp uh used to be on our board of ethics. We spent a half a million dollars with him on construction. I took him off. Oh, everybody thought that was the worst thing I could ever do. But it's really not fair to have a contractor appointed to something and people were going up saying, "Could I wear this shirt when I uh do my bicycle race or whatever." That that wasn't the whole intent. That's we've had those situations before where if they are somebody that's doing business with the city just there's a lot of things they can do other than set or be appointed to a board uh in order to do that. So that would be uh good things to look at.

I just have a clarification question. Sure.

So under where it says resignation um officials with active financial in matters before a decision-making body must resign. Period. or to advocate or lobby, they must resign. And what and who decides if it's advocating or lobby? Does that mean if something's said then that goes to the board of ethics when someone says, "Hey, I think that person did this or that," then it gets referred to them. Or is it strictly saying that person has to resign or it's only saying they're going to get up and rah about it, then they have to resign? I I mean I I think that this is kind of one of those things where to me it's like you know the the letter of the law and the spirit of the law are a little bit in conflict like the the concept should be if you have legitimate business in front of the city

you should not be serving on a deciding board of anything. It's just a bad idea to me. That makes it kind of like wishywashy like I didn't say anything about it or I had someone speak for me on my behalf and you could say it's just laying out the facts and pros maybe not pros and cons or whatever. So is that lobbying and advocating

or if you don't I don't know. I just want to make sure I understood that gray area. I think um so one of the issues with the charter and the thing so in the charter it allows for recusal disqualification when a conflict exists but does not require resignation from the body itself only from participation in the matter that's what the charter says the proposed amendment would require resignation from the body before advocating on a matter where there's an active financial or organizational interest if the charter is read as allowing continued service post recusal mandatory resignation could be challenged as exceeding charter authority unless clarity unless clearly framed as a code of conduct enforcement tool, not a challenge or not a change to the eligibility to hold office. So, I mean, that's how I would probably I mean, what I'm seeing is saying is like, you know, I don't think that you're banning somebody for ever or anything like that, but I mean, I guess it's the smell test thing.

It's hard to explain. I mean, that that's the challenge is just trying to explain to other people why it is what it is because they have no idea the different commissions and boards and that kind of stuff. And quite honestly, it still comes down to the council. Well, then you can't do anything to the council members either, right? I mean, anybody's been in front of the board of ethics, it's they can recommend it, but the council is not going to do anything. So, I mean, it just becomes kind of a vicious circle. So, the clarity, I think, is the big issue. And knowing upfront what's expected, and a lot of this stuff, you know, we didn't always have it. We we kind of fell into it and learned what you shouldn't do. Um,

Mr. that paragraph you were just reading it talked about organizational interest. Now, you know, obviously I have this group on Facebook that advocate for citizens for a safer old state as an organization. I guess, you know, that's my concern is that putting me and my advocacy for my group in peril?

I don't I mean, I would look at it I would look at it this way. if you know and um I will Mayor Garitano I'm going to use you as an example similar in a different way. So Joe has this great newsletter that he sends out and a everybody many people in the city have it and it's all good stuff. And so you know he he talks about the city business. He talks about everything that's going on. He's not ever saying from what I have read in it as mayor I am endorsing X Y and Z. It's justformational things. So what I would say for like for your group um you know you can be a member of the group. you know, Ed's a member of the Lions and the Lions give us free hot dogs or whatever. I would assume if it ever came to a vote because some other group wanted to give us or wanted to cook the free hot dog program, you know, Ed might go, well, I might have a conflict of interest here. I don't know. I love cooking these hot dogs. So, I would say like for your specific instance, I don't think that it's I don't see it as that kind of an issue. But if you're if you were to say which like I started to see stuff not from us from another city, a neighboring city the last couple days on next door pe people posting some pretty wild stuff and it was just like, you know, if you happen to be on there and you're like, as a as the city council member, I'm not going to do anything else period until this thing happens. that would be bad. But if you if you are a member of the group or you founded the group, you know, I think in here it's like maybe hand over the admin thing for a while because it's like, hey, I'm I still advocate for this process, but I'm not doing the day-to-day stuff on this. Um I think that's kind of the same thing. So, you know, kind of looping back around to um you know, whether it's this chapter 100 discussion or any of these other development things like you know, at the end of the day, it's very difficult, you know, even when we for me when we have

votes on the council. I mean, we are all we all have different opinions, but we're all very friendly with one another. But sometimes when you are voting against something, you know, is very important to another council member. That's a difficult thing to do. And I think sometimes when you have people that are sitting on boards, it's a difficult thing to go, hey, I appreciate that you're not saying anything here, but you're still sitting next to me. And I know like you're not doing this in the room. So that's kind of where that conversation comes from. Um, but you know, like a lot of these things, I mean, as right, the the the enforcement mechanisms for almost everything we do is relatively toothless. So it's kind of best behavior I think is the way I would look at it.

So here's another area where I just think we have to be aware because if you put these caveats in here where if it's a group that you're supported or a group that so like the historic society or pond ballpark if you you in turn belong there or part of that then you're supposed to abstain from a vote on that. we could get to approve a budget and not have enough votes to get the bad budget through because if you can't vote for that parks and planning program or for the pond thing, then you don't have enough council members to vote for us. And we've been down this road before to think, okay, well, if you can't vote on something because your organization is going to get something out of it, then, you know, you need to figure out how do you work around that. So, I mean, just other things I think because we we've been there and done this so many times. There's nothing new here. It's just a different girration of well I guess the big tax incentive thing is different but we've never had anything like that where it created that kind of a controversy and yeah we we have had a lot of board of ethics questions and turn them over to the state for board of ethics and the state says no there's nothing to that you just have crazy residents there. So Mr. Mayor

yeah I think that my I you know it's always good to tighten up things. I think the main concern I would have is don't make it too broad because then it could be interpreted anyway, right? Like if you say and and just to use an example, the hot dogs and I thought of that like that. I mean the Lions do this service and uh I believe you get some compensation. You get $500, but you know Mr. Marshall does not get any compensation directly because of cooking the hot dogs. All he does is cook hot dogs and smile and talk to people. Well, because we had another vendor who did it for the city and he wouldn't do it anymore. So,

we were kind of the fallback people that said, "Okay, we can do that." But I will say this, one of the board of ethics charges that were brought up back when we did the barbecue bash

was the Lions and the Rotary Club because we sold beer. Then we were turned over and but the issue was the city did not have a contract with us, you know, so they turned and said there was nothing to that. Now, that didn't keep our local board of ethics trying to take people off saying that you voted for the barbecue bash. It was in the planning budget for the whole city and so it was voted for. But then, you know, the people would come in and make the complaints and the IRS, all this stuff. Just a real drag on people. No one made any personal money out of it, but it was a big fundraiser for that. No different than with Pond and that kind of stuff. So, I think part of it is you just got to make sure that it's clear enough and who's involved in it. It's not like you're making a personal checkout to an individual,

right? It's going to a charity or an organization or or whatever.

Very specific because I mean like the spirit of what we do as as elected officials as we're there to represent our community. And so you don't want to have officials now concerned that they shouldn't vote on it because maybe it's a vote to put a sign at the end of the street, a stop sign. I mean, they're not benefiting. They're they're doing it for the spirit of, you know, making their community and representing their community. But, you know, you can really if it's too broad, all of a sudden somebody could start making an accus. And we actually saw it years ago uh or Miss Deborah McCutchen, you know, she was advocating for a gate at the end of a road and we had uh you know, two former, you know, former mayors back make an accusation in the middle of the meeting that she was benefiting from it. And so, you know, it has to be very narrowly defined so it's crystal clear because otherwise it could really spin out of control. And um and I do think the financial piece is one way to look at it like do you directly benefit by this vote

or not? And and so the city attorney probably if I think if they get the feedback from this group, they will uh do that. And one other thing too, I think a really good thing that was implemented a couple years back because we went through a period of a lot of frivolous

complaints that were being filed. In fact, there was a total done that the city attorney had spent almost $40,000 in taxpayer dollars reviewing civilist complaints. And at the pre prior to this change I'm about to talk about, they would always go to the board of ethics. And so imagine just the exhaustion that the board of ethics had to go through. So, the former mayor, I think with the council's approval, implemented a change where they would go to our special prosecutor would review the complaint to see if it was legit, if it actually had merit, and if it didn't, then it would not go any further.

And then he could send a letter back saying, "Your claim has no merit, and then we didn't have to bring all of the volunteers in for the board of ethics." U so it and it we do have a special prosecutor just for that. Yeah. So, that's a good thing. tying it up on there. But and he's pretty good at knowing exactly what's has a claim, what doesn't have a claim. And what's good is he stays, you know, independent enough because he's not the functioning city attorney whose job is to help keep us out of trouble. And it really wouldn't be a bad idea as you progress into this further is to get sit down with him and get some feedback as to all of the crap that has gone there. Yeah. How could we change the wording some because it's hard to get somebody to serve on the board of ethics anymore because all you know, some of them got beaten down pretty bad,

right? So, you know, in that particular case, it might be a a good suggestion to at least review how many we've had in the last few years and what were they about? Yeah. Like our code thing. Mr. Bick, just one more thing that I could foresee a problem specifically for me is that improvements to old state. uh you could view it as increasing my property value since I live off state, you know, and you know where I'm going with this obvious. Yeah. I mean I I would say I mean it's a little bit like what Mayor Garano was talking about with Dev's thing like while technically I guess that could improve your property value. That is not like to me it would be

if you were advocating for a roundabout on Old State Road that you owned a construction company for and were going to build. Yeah, obvious that's this the fact that you live off of a road that might need to have an improvement and therefore your property value could go up slightly. That is not what this is. That's why we're blessed to have 16 council people,

right? You can say just vote no or abstain and everything else goes on. One other one that did come up and and this Jason, this is just for you. schoolboard members and teachers for Rockwood that for years the council members who had a teacher in their family was why I can't vote on this because uh my my wife works for for Rockwood school district and and large no has no your your judgment as a council member has no purview over the teaching uh roles at at the at the school board. So a lot of those type of things I think just kind of get worked out over the past. Uh but to have people feel that they can't vote for what's right for the city because of that interest, it'd be pretty narrow.

So um so I dropped the charter in and you know here are some of the suggestions is offering and we can like these or not doesn't really matter. Um but when it talks about narrowing um like organizational things obviously direct money is pretty clear. Um but it is uh serving in a go in a governing or paid role such as officer, director, managing committee chair or employee for an organization that is currently seeking a contract, permit, license, grant or other discretionary approval from the city or receiving such a benefit from the city. ordinary membership, unpaid volunteer service, or involvement in organizations whose interactions with the city is as a member of the general public do not constitute any type of concerning interest is what it says. So, I mean, my thing is like I think if you're not the the president of the Pond Athletic Association, I don't know that that matters. It's that's how I'm reading it. Anyways, I think if you are, you know, cuz my I had a similar thing where when I was thinking about the wershed erosion thing, like I'm I would advocate for help with the wershed because I know things. But then as an elected official, we're not really supposed to advocate for things. So then, you know, that turns to the question of like, well, me personally, I would do it. As a city council member, I'm not saying one way or the other, but

Well, I'll do the same thing though with the Lions Club. we come in and buy a liquor license. I'm a member. So, in that particular case, uh can I don't we don't we're not really we don't really vote on anything. We file the the papers and get our liquor license. But because you are a member, what you know, how do you do I mean it's not one point get like five or six members on the council years ago, but how do you get how do you treat those type of situations or historic preservation any place where you have that interaction that becomes a required document like a license then do you just not that we vote on license but do you just and I don't apply for the license but I mean it's just another you I do I know that I belong to the organiz organization.

Well, and I would almost say with the L licensing item that those are treated with a separate set of criteria to it. I I think you that would be a separate concern, but it wouldn't be an issue. I I don't believe because I'm just curious. But when you say licensing, then you kind of have to get a liquor license. It's a good point. Uh and if you belong to that organization, Pond Athletic, then you're you're part of that. Not that we vote on it because we as council members don't vote. I mean this this thing the suggestion it keeps coming back with is if you have a direct personal financial benefit which as a member I mean you're volunteering you don't get paid to be a lion

you don't get paid to make all of our hot dogs so I don't know that there is a direct personal benefit to you I would say the same thing for even Pond athletic I'm trying to remember I think wasn't Dan Flasher on that or some he on something um but you know he's not like being compensated Well, and but then used to we donated quite a bit of money to pond. We did. And so in that particular case, that was always a questionable thing. So I don't know. I just think it's that's one of those where you want to be sure you try to narrow it down, but you also don't want to end up blowing up your face. So Well, let's um let me run this thing one more time and then we'll talk through the other conflicts and we'll see if anything comes up.

Then I know you got to get out here. Did you want to talk about the other stuff? I was just a little bit more concerned about the discretionary tax incentive and to see if you could help my whole mind back in 2006 or seven. The first one we put in, was that for the sewer system or for town center? The first one we did was for the sewer system. It was a NID and then we did the town center. So those two happened when I was there and I I couldn't figure out what they were, but that's they were the two that I had.

Yeah. And and the NID was created by petition from the petitioner side. And then the SID, that was more of a development agreement with the city. They were coming to us at Comman Properties and and the other interest groups were saying, "Hey, we want the garage. We want to have the fountain, etc." So, in that case, it was definitely the NID first. I believe it was like two and that was just financing for us to finance it so that they had to pay it back. Yep. So, really, it was it was to serve for the SID anyways and and the NID actually the NID was to serve as a mechanism for the initial investment to run the sewer down. They had to get all the residents to sign off on it. Yep. They had to pay every year according to Y.

And then the SID is just for the garage. The same thing, taking out a loan in the name of the government getting a better interest rate, but then them paying them back and the city being kind of the the collector, if you will, each year. So in the fine notes of that, it did mention the fact that subdivisions couldn't do it. Did I read that correctly? For example, I know in Clayton, for example, when they came in and wanted to put new granite herbs in, they did a a nid and all the homeowners had to pay for that. I was just curious, and I don't I didn't live there. I just happen to know that that's that's what they did. So, when you say something like that where a subdivision or a certain neighborhood wants to do something,

is that restricted in our direction? I personally don't believe it would be, but I think that that would need to be struck out because that that could right now there's a state right as a group of residents, impacted property owners to petition the city government, say they wanted to do something like that. It's obviously the end end of the day, it's the city council's decision to put it on the ballot or not. That said, they should have the right still to make the request and it's that's usually going to be a nid. Yeah. I was just curious

that said that that you you'd probably want to strike out like a neighborhood and just maybe make it like once again maybe tie it to you know more so a private corporation entity trying to profit off it instead of making a public good. So I think that you know I think an argument can be made for the SID too that that was more of a public good that's going in as a large parking garage. Um but let's do this real quick just to kind of keep the meeting going. So according to the run I just did there are six possible conflicts between the charter and the ethics policy. I will read them very quickly and if anybody else has anything else we can add them to the list but then we can you know keep the conversation we got the framework going. We'll keep the conversation moving. So there is the resignation versus rec versus recusal uh which means the chart officials charter allows officials to remain in office and simply recuse for matters where they have a substantial or private interest. Um our proposed amendment requires resignation from the decision-making body before advocating. This could be seen as creating a new qualification to hold office which the charter controls. The solution make resignation optional tied to the choice of actively advocate tied to the choice to actively advocate. An official who wishes to advocate for a matter in which they have a conflict may only do so in a personal capacity after resigning from the decision-making body consistent with the charter provisions. That's the fix that it's suggesting. Um automatic enforcement penalties. Uh charter uh specifies due process for forfeite or removal of from office and disciplinary measures. Proposed amendment applies automatic penalties loss of chair removal from committees project denial. This could be a challenged by bypassing chartermandated removal or discipline process solution. Change automatic to automatic referral for action under the charter with a clear due process path. So that would basically go to I guess probably the ethics board. I assume they would handle that, right, Ed?

I'm not sure.

All right, we'll figure that out. Uh appointment eligibility restrictions. Charter grants mayor council broad appointment power to boards and commissions. Proposed amendment creates hard bans on appointing people with active conflicts. This could be seen as limiting charter granted discretion. Refam is a council policy standard rather than a legal prohibition. It is the policy of the city to avoid appointing individuals with active conflicts unless the council by majority vote determines safeguards are in place to prevent any issues. We can do that. Uh advocacy restrictions and use of title. Uh charter does not address advocacy restrictions outside of formal proceedings. Amended uh proposed amendment restricts use of title, city resources, and certain communication platforms. This would be something that the current county executive maybe would want to think about. Uh not a direct conflict, but over broad restrictions could unintentionally limit lawful speech rights if they don't have a clear nexus to city business. Keep restrictions limited to solutions. I'm sorry, keep restrictions limited to situations where advocacy creates an actual or apparent conflict of interest under the charter definitions. Broad organizational interest scope uh currently too broad could pull in incidental or non-governing roles. um just narrow it basically. Uh enforcement overlap and ethics board charter empowers the ethics board and sets expectations for how violations are handled. Proposed amendment adds direct council enforcement actions without always routing through the ethics board. This could be read as bypassing or duplicating chartermandated review processes. Require that significant sanctions, removal from office, project denial, forfeite, etc. follow a finding or recommendation from the ethics board or applicable charter process. Those are those suggestions. So the only question I have is we keep saying removal from office. I don't think we by law can remove a council member or a planning and zoning person.

They have to resign. Okay. Uh it's what I've always been told under the state constitution or whatever that an elected person elected or and then the planning and zoning falls under appointed for that. They they cannot be taken out for what whatever reason supposedly. So un in the past that's always been and that'd be a good one to check legally to see if it's true or not. But we we had that situation with planning and zoning and a couple times I think they tried it on council and there's not much you can do for elected even if there's a direct violation of

unless they would lie on disclosure. So for example, if they didn't disclose they had financial interest in something then at that particular point they'd be they could brought up their charges under mouth fees. This is what this says. I don't know if it's right. Not a lawyer, but according to RSM77.340 and 79.240, the mayor with a majority vote of the city council may remove any elected city official, including a council member for cause shown after giving the officer an opportunity to be heard before the council acting as an impeachment body. Alternatively, the council itself can remove an elected official by elected officer by twothirds majority vote with or without the mayor support also after a hearing process. Typically, such removal involves an order to show cause, opportunity for defense, and vote of council. Per RSMO 89320 and typically other city ordinances, the city council may remove any citizen appointed member for cause only after written statement of the cause. any public hearing. Many Missouri municipalities codify local rules specifying removal grounds such as multiple unexcused absences and require the same public hearing process. Unlike elective officials, appointed commissioners cannot be removed by vote alone. Cause and due process are required.

So our the one that we dealt with before, attendance was always an issue. If he'd accidentally missed a meeting, we could have taken him out, but he came to that meeting and then he wouldn't. It's like one out of three or something. So, we were never able to do anything and he he kind of worked out his year um just refusing to to resign and that was a planning and zoning that wasn't a council. I mean, yeah, I I think I mean obviously we should have a policy in place. My hope would be that you wouldn't have to get this far down the road. I mean, it just seems crazy and it's nothing but a waste of time and just everybody's feelings get hurt and it's just sad to think it gets carried that far, but we've had it before. So, right, you just kind of learn from the history. Sorry. Hope that's okay.

You're all welcome to come in for electronic signs, electronic message boards, and drive-throughs. So, um, as we do this ethics thing, does any have any other thoughts or concerns or questions we can add to the list? If not, we will pass those, uh, to our next group of folks, our ethics guy, our special prosecutor, per se, and your city attorney. Yes, sir. Sorry. Mhm. At the very beginning of what you thought was the first version since I thought I heard any paid position such as then you did you say any paid position something different that you um

would it be any paid position such as the council or the this or the appointment or the I don't know paid as opposed to appointed volunteers. So I think the biggest concern would be and this does not I can't imagine that this would ever be a thing that would happen in our city but like the idea would be um you know if if Cliff was all of a sudden going to become the director of parks and planning and take a paid role with the city that that would create an a conflict for him but that but he couldn't be a council member any longer right well he can't I mean he can't even do it I think I think it's like a three-year thing, right? You can't

do anything. Yeah. You Yeah. Yes. You can't immediately go over to the paid side, but that's said technically how much they're technically paid by city. That's true. I guess we are. So that that's the difference. That's not the qualifier. I think it's like actual employment. Yes. It's like a different There's a difference between employment and being paid as an elected official as compensation for the service. Yeah. So the idea would be like we get paid a couple hundred bucks or whatever it is, but we're not I mean we're not technically employees. We don't get employment benefits or any of those other things from the city. I get a W2. You do get a W.

There's a there's a I can come back with the answer, but there is a difference between like a there's a difference between Rick, Amy, myself, and it's a it's a coding for the IRS. Tracy, you have something or no?

Anybody else? Okay, so we've got a list of some things. I will get them over to Tom and we'll keep keep that conversation while um that brings us to our tax policy or tax incentive policy framework. Uh and this is another piece um that I wrote. I actually wrote it for the economic development committee. Um, but I thought since we're probably going to have this conversation here in a week or so, we might be better to have it in a smaller group now rather than a much larger long drawn out thing then. Um, so, uh, basically what this does is it creates a framework like we've done for a lot of other things lately that just say, you know, when a tax incentive might be considered, what we think that tax incentive might want to look like, all those kinds of things. And the idea would be or my concept was if we have a framework in place that we know what it is then we can determine as a group do we want to use these tools yes or no. If the answer is yes then do whatever projects that come to us meet these requirements and if they do great. So this is kind of trying to make the conversation about the the process and the proposal not the person. if that makes sense. Um, and I'm happy to get into some more details on it if you guys want me to, but I don't want to eat up a whole bunch of time if you have some thoughts.

Uh, I reviewed it and I didn't see anything about when when the request should be submitted. Yeah. And I think that's important. I Yeah. You know, did I miss something?

No. So, so that's kind of one of the you didn't and that's kind of one of the other issues that we run into um that Mr. Marshall I'm sure would have probably talked about too. So, a lot of the times when we're dealing with I would say larger scale development stuff or even smaller scale stuff like I I personally feel like our process is a lot of times like kind of backwards because we don't like we're we're voting on a concept of something not like this you know do we want to have houses here? Sure. How many houses? we'll figure it out. What do they look like? We'll also figure that out later. And so I think that th those kinds of questions will be kind of the next phase of this, which is like here's how this like process should play out. My suggestion just in general would be, you know, if if a development is going to apply for something like this, they should ask as early as possible as soon as these kind of answers can come into place because if you don't, then we wind up in a situation where which we're in, which is we already have an approved project and now we got to figure out if we want to, I guess, reapprove it or whatever, whatever we want to call it. Um, and so again, while we do have an issue that is happening right now, this is designed based on what Ed's talking about, like we've kind of learned a lesson here that we want to try to move forward with. And and if if the chapter 100 is granted, the expectation would be more people will ask for them. So, we want to put a framework, a pretty clear framework in place. And so, the idea with this is um with some of our things we've done before is to basically break projects into tiers. So, a tier one project, it it meets checks a lot of boxes. That's kind of a not a rubber stamp necessarily, but it's the idea of, hey, this seems to really apply very broadly. Tier two meets some, but there's some questions that we got to answer. And then tier three, it's like these don't really meet anything. So, while we

certainly can have the conversation, the odds of anything happening are very slim. Um, but we can also change those things around or the parts that are inside of it. Yes, ma'am. I just have a question. Um, and I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the amount, but where did we come up with like under incentive caps um delivering a minimum projected public return of $5 million over a 10-year period, which that's a great number. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I just wondered how we determined and there's somewhere else where it said about if it was going to involve 20 jobs or whatever. I just wondered where we just so some we could say this is how we came up.

The best the best way to explain is I went through this thing and I tried to figure out like what are the best practices and what are the things that make sense. So, if we're building, if we're going to grant a tax incentive to some commercial property, which in our city, we're probably not ever going to have, but if we did, you would want to you would want to kind of balance this out where it would make sense to do, you know, this is the sort of the repayment back on that. So, I think for for the the the dollar amounts, like it's like if you have a a multi-use property, you know, we don't want to have one that's getting this massive benefit and is returning back to the city, you know, some very insignificant amount of money. Um, we want to try to get it as verified as possible. So, we can make alterations to those. Those are just kind of the national best practices.

Mr. Albert, you got something? Mr. Vert, you always have insightful things on items like this. I'm good. I think it makes sense. Um, and probably worth to your point kind of clarification because as we move forward, once you do it one time, guess what's going to happen? You're going to do it a second and a third. So, the better kind of outline you have, the better we'll be.

Yeah. And I mean the the only I mean having written the policy the only question that I kind of had that I wanted to put to the group is most of this is you know like one of the criteria is town center activation because that's kind of our this is our primary hub of activity but we do have um a small strip of like industrial space down in the valley which is currently a farm basically. Um, we had a couple years ago, I know we had a group that wanted to build like a pretty significant warehouse facility in there and they wound up going somewhere else. So, I mean, my assumption would be if something like that came back around, it might make sense that somebody would request a tax incentive to do something like that. That being said, the fact that it isn't in Town Center is just kind of like one box it doesn't check. So, it's not saying you can't have it anywhere else. It's just saying I didn't know if we wanted to include something like that somewhere else because

that strikes me as more than a single percentage of our residents would say not only it is just not check off one box. It's a clear violation because it's so geographically far and it's so it's so philosophically different. Farm is not town center,

right? Um so uh there would be a qualifier that that it it must meet three of the six boxes um or provide a as of yet uh undefined quality that we haven't gone and and spent years researching on AI and that kind of shuts them up because we can't think of everything under the sun and we didn't say it had to be in town center and only in town center. Um, and that checking that one box wouldn't have automatically eliminated it from contention at another area where there weren't already subdivisions. So, I'm rambling on.

All right. But then the the farming area like that still would affect all the tax entities the same as it would in Yeah. So I mean I guess the question is do do we want to include because I mean how big is our our industrial area is like not big. No it's it's almost 250 acres. So it's a very spec like my question is do we do we would it make sense to put a piece of criteria in here that says it also might be down there. Um, you know, I'm not not that they would do this, but that giant production facility they bought they built down in Chesterfield, like that wouldn't have been a bad thing to have at our little industrial park.

I think you should add because there's been other interests. Weren't they talking about like an animal testing center there? Remember like monkeys? There was a No, it's not not crazy. That was a floater from the St. Louis economic development partnership. collecting down there and more and more things are getting built along there and I mean it could be another sports facility. I think I think they've got everything they can have by now but I mean we wouldn't want them not to look at that. I think we could we could just tie this off by having it it's got to be in town center or in the industrial so so change number one to town center or industrial area activation. I like that. Yeah. Okay. That's where you want to bring your

um so we can make that change. Any other um thoughts or concerns? One one of the things that um

is sort of in here or a thought process is um like just based on the process that we've gone through so far with the chapter 100. There are cities that granted chapter 100s, but those chapter 100s were only for sales tax during the construction period and none of the other stuff. And at least based on what I was looking through, it sort of seems like that's because they were they were collecting city taxes that would have been pretty dramatically affected. So, they just didn't apply those. Um, I guess we might want to look and see if that is while we don't take a city tax. Uh, you know, that might be a direction that we want to look at that says, you know, hey, this is what it is. The biggest question I've gotten from a lot of people is and is, you know, if we are we are voting to take money away from other taxing entities, which is our we have the ability to do it, but the question is, is that something that we want to do and and you know, other all of our other surrounding municipalities are doing this and so we also don't want to take a tool out of our toolbox that says, well, no, we just don't want to. Um, so that would change some of the numbers in here versus a return because then you don't need to make $5 million back. Yes, sir.

Thank you.

In in changing it from town center and adding the the the small acreage called I industrial in the valley. That's two areas. Now, what what about the Arnold Palmer 18hole golf course that someone comes and proposes a mile or so from Hollow? It would technic the way it's written right now would technically need this would have there's recurrently a procedures for the review and processing and this would be going in and amending those procedures. So what you would be saying here is if that request came in if we just abided by our ordinance then we would it would be an automatic denial if it was outside of the town center zoning classification workplace district

do do more than 50% it's not a necessarily an automatic denial it just doesn't affect that process. The way this is written is though is that it's all about consideration, but maybe we could change that word verbiage to say these are more of a this is added and it's almost like a criteria for favorable consideration. That makes sense.

Yeah. I mean, so I would say like public benefit criteria. So it's got to meet three of those. So town center activation is one of six. Town center industrial is one of six. So if they wanted to do that, the answer would be it doesn't meet that. But it might check the infill development or it might check the sales tax usage or it might check the job creation.

But by but by identifying a quantity um specific quantity and specific location uh you're you're you're giving the impression that you've thought of all the other places and you've decided against them because these only two won. That's I haven't I'm just I'm just thinking of someone who would have some teeth in a lawsuit that they weren't given an ICE because uh they proposed something that wasn't in the the industrial area or town center.

Well, this has other points besides it was for other points than that, but they're going to be pointing to that as as uh yeah, you and your silly pointing check off boxes today. But it's not saying they couldn't build it. They're just not going to get a tax break for it. Yes, it's a valid point. I mean, all this is for is just the tax breaks. So, people can build if if they're zoned to build something, they can build. I'm not saying that they will, but they theoretically could build anything they want anywhere, assuming it meets approval. This is just specific to them going, "Hey, we would like to have a tax incentive to do this." So what what this is saying is from a city standpoint, one of our primary criteria is it's got to either be in town center or in the industrial area which we want to activate.

The fact that the city is is is giving away uh an opportunity to make all the benefits that would come from having this golf course. um um that wouldn't be worth trying to build in conditions that that steer that type of development elsewhere besides just Town Center and the Valley. Um I'm I'm really an 18hole golf course by some reputable well-known designer out there. Uh that' be a counting coup. There'd be kids there'd be families naming their kids after that golf course that got here in W. But I I I would say if we if we were going to do that, it would have to be I mean if you're going to give a tax benefit to that, it would probably have to be a public course, which would then become a whole different situation because now you're talking about a public use, you know, they're putting in a public use component, but now you're like, this is an addition, like if it's a if if somebody wants to come build some award-winning golf course and it is a public course in the city of Wildwood, that to me is like a whole different kind of a conversation. That's like adding in a level of a different park. That's not what this is talking about. Those guys are not going to come here and go, "Hey, we'll build a course here if you give us $4 million to do it.

This is really a funnel for tax breaks is what it amounts to." It's a funnel to say, "Does it make sense?" And if it does, it gets to here. It's not really a funnel for what you're describing. Well, at a a name brand 18hole golf course where you have to go x dozen miles east to find any uh I would consider that a a real cherry to pick for the city of Wildwood. You you'd have people from halfway to those golf courses east and I think there's one down in Eureka. Um they'd be coming out here by the droves and throwing money in our city. But then but that's then becomes it's not it's Go ahead.

No, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say like so this this is not saying that from happening. That's this isn't saying that can't happen. This is saying if they came here and they wanted a chapter 100. I would say it has to go through this funnel and and that to me sounds like a tier 2 project which means now the city council is going to have a conversation about it. Is there a greater public benefit in doing this than not? It's not a like all or nothing. Yeah. It's not like a this is, you know, I want to build a bunch of warehouses, you know, across the street here and I'd like you to give me $5 million to do it. That would be a tier three because it doesn't meet any really of the requirements that we're talking about.

It It sounds like you've got the conditions that there's enough um avenues for relief. I mean, basically what this should do is this should help developers, who whomever they are, understand like if if I'm going to approach the city looking for some type of a development incentive, I need to be within this sort of general vicinity. It's not just, hey, I would like I'd like free money, too, to go build this thing. Um, that's what we're trying to curtail. We're also trying to make sure that we understand like, you know, if we're going to um grant a tax benefit, you know, like we had a lot of conversation about um you know, we have two adjoining cities. One did the MA project which is an apartment complex in Ellisville. They got a chapter 100. The other did an Aldi's which got a chapter 100

and Eureka in Eureka. And so both of those are

taking tax money from places but in reality only one is in is possibly adding expense that being a residential facility. So you know like in my heart of hearts I think this chap in general I think this chapter 100 thing is sort of a silly thing that the state came up with. I used to work with in development for a long time like this is a this is a ask and you shall receive situation and so what we want to try to do is say hey we want to work with people we want to work with them in this way assuming that we like what this says and then these are the processes that go on and it doesn't become a matter of you know do you like um the the guy came in and talked to us and he was wearing a green shirt and I didn't like it and therefore I'm going to turn this down. It's a does this check these boxes and if so let's have a conversation about the merits of the project not the specific situation that we're dealing with. Um but we can change the numbers. I mean Tom and I had some conversation about looking at those numbers a little bit more firmly. Right.

Yeah. The fiscal impact was the one that I was focusing in on just because that may there's certain projects like it would need to be a very big project to return 2.5 since we don't have a property tax. If we had a property tax, it'd be very realistic. Uh that said, without the property tax, we're we're really basing it off a best estimate based off how many people it's adding, potential sales, and then the utility tax. That's really where we're the bread and butter is. And if you can calculate, which is difficult to do, the impact on our net population in 2030, but if they propose it in 2031, then technically that impacts null employed for another 10 years at least. Is it is is this chapter 100 kind of replace what was happening five 10 years ago the tiff tax you know thing

kind of is I mean it's just another one of those things it's a similar thing I mean the mayor I think the guy in Ellisville lost his uh lost his mayorship because of you know he wanted to put that uh super Walmart in there and they started almost evicting people out of that apartment complex and everything, right?

But but just seems like it's kind of a long it's it's probably a different process, but it's another tax incentive or in break type of thing. So, and the other thing Yes. I mean, it's just it's one of those. So, the other thing that I liked about this, which kind of answers some of the questions and concerns that I've heard over the last couple months is um all applicants seeking a discretionary incentive shall submit a project proforma for independent thirdparty financial review paid for by the applicant. This review is required to verify that the incentive is necessary for project viability and must produce a summary finding for council without disclosing proprietary financial details. So this in theory, obviously the numbers we're working with are kind of probably skewed anyways, but the idea is like the question becomes if I don't get this, I can't build it versus if I don't get this, I make less money. And we as a governing body I think need to consider those two options because

I don't understand why for project viability you know why the citizens or the taxpayers of the for the Rockwood school district why should they be on the hook because somebody doesn't want to go back and get adequate financing. I don't I mean I'm saying here

typically where it comes from is that in some areas and the argument is that in Wildwood it's just you can't the bank will not provide that enough financing and the other thing is sometimes it it really depends the question that the council the elected officials that would view this has to ask themselves do they want this development here if if yes okay well then trying to get to the bottom line of are they making a profit with or without the incentive that said if they don't if the project's not wanted at all in the first place and that's a pretty easy decision. Then they shouldn't be getting an incentive. Um that said, if it's something that we want as a city, I mean technically it's going to produce more money for the county in the future, but there is going to be a short-term period of pain,

right?

And I mean the the question is like I would look at it with the situation we're dealing with right now. So you know at this moment there is sort of this um and we see this with our road projects and stuff where everything just costs a whole lot more money. That's a that is a reality of today's world. That may not be the reality in you know three year five years or whenever the next thing comes. And so the question becomes you know in my experience this a project is not going to get a loan based on the fact that you might get a tax incentive. That's not usually how this works. And so it's the idea with this is to say, you know, we are um we're deferring a certain amount of money for this period of time. That's why I think some of these other municipalities have said, hey, we're willing to partner here. We want to get this thing going. We're willing to partner. So, we're going to defer the sales tax, which is it does kind of broadly affect everybody, but we're not going to go in and go also this for the next five or 10 or whatever, however many years. And so to me,

the framework that we are kind of looking to set up here is to say to developers like a chapter 100, if you apply for a chapter 100 in the city of Wildwood, it means you have to meet these criteria and this is what you are. This is the option. There isn't a thing because I I'm a big believer, as I think many people are, like you don't get what you don't ask for. Oh, sure. So, you might as well ask for the world. you don't know, you know, some everybody might go, "Yeah, let's do that."

But I think for for for me and for this process, I think it's important to go, hey, this is what we're talking about. So if if your project, for instance, if your project is not viable without a 10-year tax break, it's probably, as much as we might like to have it and it might help us in some way, it might not be the best fit for us and come back when it becomes more viable if that's what it is. Um, that's kind of what this is meant to be. And it also helps too because you know I've I've personally I guess I'm by far well Tracy's close I'm way the longest serving person around here in this room currently but like it's always strange to me and I think we ran into this with um the folks with McBride that wanted to put a thing in over here like these time frames get really weird. So there's sort of a reshuffleling paperwork that happens and it always reminds me of that scene in casino when they're like you just change your title and then we take it off the top of the thing and we put it down at the bottom. And so like this is like you have to have real things happening in a period of time for this tax incentive to kick in. You don't get to get it and then sit around for five years and then all of a sudden build it. You got to have real things happening in real time or we're taking it back. That's kind of how this should work.

And you can have that in the any agreement with them. By the way, you can have that clearly state that if you don't and the way you do it is you do it by okay, you have to pull permits by this date and you have to start grading by this date, you got to go vertical by this date, you need reoccupancy by this date. If you if you enforce those, I mean, it's e if you have that in the development and performance agreement, you can make it where it's an automatic trigger. if they don't meet that deadline and then sub pretty much submit to the city substantial completion form of whatever it is then the city can go out there and say okay you didn't have it and then that nullifies the contract over overnight so that that is actually slight good thing you have a little bit control because then you can kind of be a project manager to them u and just for a financial indicator I did want to note that the MLE uh had 227 units and it was approved back in 2021 the one that's down the street in Ellisville. Just for a financial comparison, u it was $30 million when they got that approved and that's how much they paid to build that. It's 227 units. Uh the project that's being proposed here is approximately 52.5 million and it's 189 units with retail on the first floor. So the retail is actually the it makes less money. So that's where the I think they're trying to make an argument that the costs are going up to an extent where people can't afford it. Uh and I guess the question is do we want it or not or is the developer making additional money that is a question

right? Just curious with this project here. Uh do we have any of those performance uh for the profit margin or for the no the building the building buildings and things? We do and that'll be on the agenda at the next meet at the next meeting and specifically tying it to when do they pull permits when and we can have I'll have that in a summary executive summary sheet u but it'll have when they pull permits when they actually start grading when they go vertical on their build and then also when they pull the occupancy permit at the end of the day we could actually add in more too yeah I mean the way I look at this is I think this framework should be kind of like a minimum like this is the basic thing

but I think from a project by project thing, we probably need to get like real in the weeds of like, yeah, this is the very minimum threshold that you have to hit, but there's a lot more things that go on because I mean, you know, we struggled even this reserve that is now just happening. I mean, that I that has been going for like years, 10 years, 10 years or something. I mean, it's crazy. It's gone through six different builders and everything. The super target set too, right? Yep. All kinds of stuff. This is really the first gate, right? Look at it that way. This is the first gate to get through the hurdles, whatever funnel, call it whatever you want. Yep. This is our rules of engagement. You pass these, you're in. You don't, you're out. You pass these, you get to keep having the conversation. Yes. If you don't,

it's for very easy.

That's what it's designed to be. So, it shouldn't be like I don't personally look at a lot of these things and and maybe the financial component, you know, Tom and I can work through this before it gets to the work session if that's the direction we're going to go. like it's this is not meant to be punitive in any way. It's just a bare threshold to start the conversation. And and I did this I mean I've said this to Tom and I'll say it you know publicly like while we do have a chapter 100 project that is in front of us when I wrote this I intentionally didn't score it. I didn't use it as an example. I just was like I so I don't have any idea if we were to approve this as it is right now. I don't know what tier that project is. I mean, I could guess if I want looked at it right now, but um you know, to me, it comes off as a tier 2 project, which means we get to have the conversation.

Yep. Which is kind of probably how most things should be. I mean, unless something is really crazy,

probably most things are two-tier or tier two. Um, so the idea would be if you guys like this, um, I there's a we can make some tweaks. Um, and I think we can probably do this going into the work session. Tom, tell me if I'm wrong, but we can make some tweaks to the dollar amounts to make it make a little bit more realistic sense because those are, you know, national numbers. Everybody is a little bit different when it comes to that. Um, but the idea would be, you know, recommend the city council adopt the city of Wildwood discretionary tax incentive policy framework uh and incorporate it into the city's current procedures for the review and processing of requests for public funding assistance and apply it to all future discretionary development incentive requests. So, if you guys like this, we can do that. If you want to keep working on it, we can bring it back around. Just know that, you know, we're we have some competing timelines, I think,

and we'll be working on inserting verbiage as far as timing of the requests. Yeah. So, in the future. So, the way I kind of look at this is a little bit like we did the um the gates and the blockage thing where it's like, you know, I just Yeah. want to make sure that that was Yeah. Yeah. We want to get it done. So, when it becomes a bigger conversation where everybody can go maybe it should be $780,000 instead of 20 whatever fine. All that stuff is where that happens at the next part. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think with a little fine-tuning, I I I like it and I think it's needed. Okay. Well, if you'd like to make the motion, we can make that work.

I'll make the motion that we approve it as written with a few tweaks on what do we say? Timing. Timing and the dollar amounts and dollar amounts. Okay. All right. Made by Mr. Backard, seconded by Mr. Vanic. Any other questions, concerns, or discussion? Okay. All those in favor, please say I. I. Anyone opposed? Any extensions? So Tom will get those things figured out. Um, all right. That's good stuff. Uh, that brings us to our erosion funding article for the gazette.

Thank you, chair. Uh, this is a this should be a quick one, but hopefully everyone had a second to review the the memo that came with LA. At the last meeting, there was discussion about communicating the governor's recent veto, and we have been promoting the original email. Obviously, a little bit worked up to the point where it's not directed to the council. It would be your residents. Um, that said, we were trying to incorporate this directly into the gazette, but it said it was going to take about four pages up of the gazette because it was a lot. That that said, we only have 12 pages of the gazette and it's our 30th anniversary. that I mean if the committee is okay with it we can do that but we also have a you can fit 500 words on one page um so I provided a 500word version that's pretty starkly uh written trying to utilize the same themes that said the motion directly carried that we would publish the exact version there would be another side of this where the a QR code would be included in the gazette which would say hey read more about this and the first thing that would show up and they scan that QR code is the full text as written in the first exhibit A and then um we also have a link to the website and to the vetos. So wanted to get everyone's opinion on that tonight because we do have a a publishing deadline. We can we could publish the whole thing. It would just be four pages and that would with our 30th anniversary being our 30 30th anniversary edition. We we

I will just add this having done not for the city but done this for some other entities. uh anything we can do in the gazette that can help us to understand readership action. So a QR code call is an awesome thing to have. As much as I would like to have all of this out there in right written form that way, this gives us an ability to go, hey, we had, you know, nine people or 9,000 people click on this thing. The people that are going to read it are going to hit the QR code. Yeah. Y it's just the fact. And you make a fair point. you could mine a lot more and better information from the QR code than you could from the content.

And that and the good news is too, we're able to still have like a a call out of it of of kind of a executive summary of the the full text and then it says, "Hey, are you interested in the subject or you want to learn more and you click on it, it has that letter and then we're going to actually use that to start building out kind of different trunks of communication for the erosion issue on top of what we have." We could maybe even put a survey in that link too. Yeah, that would be a good idea. That would be very open and read more pages. No. Yes. So I feel like on shorter they're going to look at it and you're going to get the information out to more people where they're going to look at four pages. They're going to go forget they're going to move on. Right.

Cliff, did we talk about this in the EDC um to get the uh leader in the West County get articles in there beforehand with the the QR code too, you know. Um Paula had one in there about that things the historic wildwood preservation and you know I came up to that meeting they had a pretty good crowd and I don't maybe that helped. So I I really think we should look at that kind of stuff too with pro promoting things you know. Y point Mr. May

uh I saw this as uh fleshing out um and proving as a as as a proofing process like you're rising bread know or something. Um and it's going to put the people into two distinct camps. If if if they if it's this long, the ones that don't read it are going to be in the camp that don't care. They'll vote no on a bond issue for watersheds. The ones that do read it are in the yes camp because they want to know every tooth and nail and and part that comes with these three year in a row vetos. The fact we're never going to get zero dollars from the state. We already don't get zero dollars from our own like mod. we're already we're always on the tail end of of those entities. So, any way to have us get a head start on knowing how many people we have in each of these two camps, I I saw this as a perfect way of getting a head start on that. uh your QR code. Uh I don't I'm not well that well verssed in what their power is, but if you get the responses from people who either if you can measure the amount of time they spent going with their with their little feeler on this one.

Do you go, "Wow, we have an issue, right? Do we use the issue?" Yeah. Yeah, we should. Yeah, we can. We definitely do that. We were kind of playing that with that. We moved from 16 to 12. We're trying to play with the format for this next version of the gazette to then what if we did I mean it may be when does this go out? This has to go out before uh celebrate well. So we need them we need we had to finalize like text we have text finalized. Well, so I guess what I'm saying though is like if we if this text to me is is fine and I well whoever wants to make if somebody wants to change the motion, whatever, that's fine. But if we were to use a system rather than just going here's a link to the to our city's website.

If we did it through issue where we're just basically digitizing this, it doesn't take I mean I I can do that for you guys. That's not a big deal. That gives us what Bob's talking about, which is like, you know, we had 500 people read this and 300 of them got to the end and they spent, you know, 12 and a half minutes on this section or whatever it is. Those kind of metrics are available in there. And um it allows us to retarget them as well, which is it would tell us that yeah, our bond issue has a snowballs chance at hell, right? Our other results would say we're going to waste a lot of money putting this to vote. Well, it's going to pay.

Well, there's two things with that, too. And I know it was on it's on the agenda. I don't know if the attachments on there, but that ties in. We actually have a pretty simplified survey to try to gauge that was kind of an idea for if you want to go out and talk about that initiative. Um, but the idea would be to ask some very baseline questions.

Uh, actually open that up real quick. It would have this included and once they get on there, it' say, "Hey, what are your thought?" Kind of asking and feeding. We would also know when someone scans QR code that counts and registers. collect that data um and we're able to say well the number of site users for that specific URL. So we'll we'll be able to tell how many people clicked on it or got to it via you know other ways too but we'll also be able to know how long they're on the page. So that that data we could record I would I would encourage you guys it's a little bit off this specific thing but I I would encourage you to put a couple other things throughout the gazette have so we can actually get a real understanding of how much back and forth you get. Yep. Thank you. No, no,

you also have to understand there are people that are going to read the gazette that have no idea what a QR code is or how to use it. There you go. And some people are busy and their kids are crawling on their legs and they're going to read the short version. Doesn't mean they're opposed to it. They just don't have time to go in and do the whole thing. So those numbers could be a little skewed. I don't necessarily think because they don't click on it that they're and they'll also be able to access it. Just as a heads up for everybody to feel a little bit better. they if someone just stumbles upon our website, it'll also live on the website to live and breathe. So, they will be able to they click in watershed erosion. It'll have that document that shows the messaging if you will um along with the the survey that we can talk about here in a second.

The biggest concern I have is anything that we put in print or say or allude to has the city done its best to protect against being charged with promoting um an issue as it as I'm told that well we aren't promoting anything yet. We're just saying then we're making sure that we're not saying at the bottom, hey, this is all going to mean something important when we put our ballot out.

The minute we do the minute the well, it's actually the council has to approve the ordinance. And then once the ordinance is submitted to the board of elections, at that point when they file it, that's when everyone on the council, but also the city as a body can no longer speak. But the governor can't come back and say, "You're stacking the deck in your favor and making me look bad on purpose so that I'm gonna XYZ." Nope. The governor that that that one doesn't matter because the governor should the governor should have gave us a call. Okay. Thanks. Yes, sir.

We u Now we've talked about our reserve being too large, right? And using some of that money for the watershed. So what's what are what are we what's the plan that way or a ballot issue or both or I I would suggest this and I don't want to cut you off Tom but I think I'm I could probably say this easier than you can. So the idea would be we've got a couple things that are happening. One we're going to talk about in a minute which is our capital improvement situation. Oh

the next one is our our reserve situation. Okay. And then the following one is how do we come out at the end of the day if a ballot initiative is necessary. So like what I would say right now if we put a if we put an initiative on the ballot you know in August which obviously we're not doing is that hey we need to have money for storm storm water and parks anybody's going to look at this and go you guys have a month right what are you talking about right that's not to say we want to go out and blow a bunch of cash on stuff right but at the end of the day when you look at the reality of the scope of this situation we could spend 100% of our reserve and everything in our capital improvement budget on the wershed and still need more money, right? Yeah.

So, the idea would be like let's we need to get our as a council we need to get our budgetary thing unders understood. We need to have that conversation about you know what is the right amount of money to have in the reserve. From what we've been told now it seems as like what Tom like 89 million right in the reserve. In the reserve that how much uh $19 million no how much we should not how much we do. So technically right now per law we have 25% of operating. So that's approximately about 3 million. And we talked about going to 50.

We talked about going to 50 and we actually and this will be presented next month but we had our auditors but also our finance officer do some run some comps from other annual comprehensive financial reports and typically you'll see anywhere between about 40 to about 60%. 60 is the high end u for other municipalities. That said um each municipality also is showing increase in expenditures year-over-year. um and also dipping in some other municipalities are showing some some dips into their own reserves. But that said, they're not sitting at 157% of operating like we are, they're sitting usually around 40 and that's a healthy city. Like St. Peters, Missouri is it's they make a lot of revenue.

So in theory, if we had let's say between five and eight million to spend and fixing city hall cost a million dollars. Okay? because personally all of those things are the city hall thing is just deferred maintenance. We just didn't pay for it when we should have. We also have, you know, the parking garage over there that's going to be very expensive and some other items, you know, maybe, you know, this main street thing that we want to get squared away. I don't know. So, there are items that are that need to be taken care of that are kind of these neverending conversations.

And then once we take care of those things, you know, philosophically, we all get to make our choice. Do we, you know, are we going to maintain the things that we have before we add new things or not? And then that's how we balance it all out. Is the garage structure issues? I mean, uh, we're actually, so right now it's a little bit more difficult than that. There's a way to do it. That said, the CCID, we're actually planning on publishing RFP to do the second deck ceiling and also do u replace some of the joints that are kind of holding it up. It's not dangerous at this point. It's been inspected. There's areas that need repair. Overall, the thing that I notice, and Rick's, our traffic engineer, he could give a better better explanation, but when it rains, yeah, it's it's got water infiltration. It's not looking great. Yeah, I was.

But I mean, between the garage and the fountain, I mean, that's about roughly a million dollars. Uh, yeah, with all the repairs you need for the garage. Yeah, I'd say. So, I mean, million here, a million there. Yeah, it's a million dollar. Exactly. Exactly. Definitely spend. So Ben, uh, unless there is anything else, Tom, you would like a motion to approve this as is. Mot asis is fine. Um, as long as you're all okay with the wording, but using that with the understanding that we'll have a QR code that links to the full text. Not a problem. And then we can talk about the the survey questions, too. Make that. All right. Made by Mr. Albert, second by Miss Nant. All those in favor, please say I.

I. Anyone opposed? Any abstensions? Okay, that's good. That brings us to our capital improvement budget.

All right. Now, as a handout, sorry for getting that out a little late. We if what you'll find in front of you today um is the tiered out system for 2026. There are some honorable mentions for 2025 that haven't had the trigger pulled on them, meaning there hasn't been an agreement that has been authorized by the city council and executed by the mayor. So, uh, that includes the village green phase 2, even though it's budgeted this year to in order to encumber those funds for fiscal year 2026. You actually have to sign an agreement for that year. Um, same goes for Old State Road Shared use path and the U Route 109 BA South roundabout project. All three of those projects, large ticket items that right now are budgeted for fiscal year 2025. That said, they they would need an agreement on file in order to not have them uh if you want to carry them over into 26. Um what you'll see here is first and foremost the three tiers. Tier one, tier two, tier three. Um and then if you turn the page, there is a matrix that is weighted and ranked based off all the projects that were listed in our five-year capital. Um there was a basis and an explanation of the rankings at is at the very bottom page three of the capital prior project project priority matrix fiscal year 2026 under the methodology explains how it was ranked um and how it works. But really it takes from left to right being your your highest criterion and if if the council has uh the committee has an issue at this how it's ranked let me know we can go back and change it. Uh but on the far left you got you know still an important thing but when you take a number like 0 3 5 and 9 and it's for tourism and recreation which is ranked one you put um for just for instance like old pond school repairs uh for tourism it doesn't actually affect tourism uh not too much for recreation since people aren't using if it was the playground maybe different that said it's a zero you would actually multiply 0 time 1 which equals zero so

no additive points there but if let's just say it was 10 and you got a score of three you multiply three times 10. I know this is sounding a little confusing, but it's to make it so if you're hitting the master plan points, you're getting an extra boost, whereas if you're hitting the tourism points, you're still getting a boost. It's just not as amplified, exponential growth. So, each one of these projects that are listed in the the capital project priority matrix FY2026, uh we went through each one of them. This one is from the city administrator's perspective. department heads have not weighed in uh to the extent we were just putting this this whole template together but then the criteria weights is where I really want to get down to is it explains 0 three five and nine why those are important so the master plan how closely does it the project align with the goals objectives priorities outlined in the city's master plan for example a zero would mean the project's not mentioned or aligned in any way city's master plan or support its objectives it's a three it would align and kind of in principle bullet something mentioned in the master plan or one of its elements, but it's not a prioritized component that's specifically stated. Five would be something that definitely supports one of the missions or one of the policies, but it might not be that project might not be specifically stated. And then nine, it's something that's in the master plan. It's stated over and over again. Uh that's the kind of approach we went with the five-year five-year strategic plan as well. Is it included? If it is, is it specifically named and so forth? I guess the more important part would be to let everybody go through this. But if I wanted to provide the actual scoring sheet because then if the council would like to the committee would like to go through it, take the paper copy and we'll send out an email version. This was just something I was tightening up tonight this morning this weekend. Um if you would like to go through this and you disagree with any of the scores, I think that would be a a really great thing. If you want to I can share with you an Excel doc that already has all the equations formatted. So, if

you went in there and changed the number and just sent it to me with your initials at the back end, I would be able to take your scores and just say, "Here's here's uh council member vocard scores and then if we like something we did for the charter settlement fund, which I found very useful." We took this similar type of approach for how we were going to spend that those settlement funds and we ranked out a bunch of projects and then we took the average scores for each individual council member that submitted submitted answers and then we took that and if there were standard deviations we accounted for it. So if someone's clearly supporting one project and everyone else gets a zero and it's able to call that out and then to save we can either have the council member scores listed transparently or having it be respondent one, respondent two, respondent three. Either way, I just wanted to kind of show the process in which uh the department went through it, but also very open to um suggestions or just going through it as as a whole. I think this is a great starting point though to get started on 66.

All right, Mr. May, please don't explain it here, but can you send something that provides a rationale for how you came up with your multipliers?

Yes. Well, I can do a quick this one actually pretty quickly. So the multiplier and it's just this is a a base ranked system where you anytime you do rate weighted criteria typically what you're going to do is your number of criterion is going to be your max. You can actually change it. It can be all this is just a standard standardized way. Um so master plan is 18. So that is weighted at 18x of whatever your score is versus the tourism and recreational uh impact which would be one. So if there's a someone gets a nine on the tourism scale, project gets a nine there, they're they're just getting nine points. Whereas if they get a nine on the master plan and that means they're it's heavily hit within the master plan or it's very much supported by our master plan, then you're actually taking nine times 18, which I need a quick calculator there, but you're taking 9* 18 and that's added to your score. So it each one goes down one after another. So say for 10 if you have a score of nine and then you actually are getting you're getting 10 points there then it would actually be 900 points uh nine points sorry for that that same exact uh criteria. But the main thing tonight that when we can send this out as PDF and also Excel u wanted the committee to go through this and go through also the actual ranking criterion. We want to change this. We sure certainly can. And the idea would also be to have the planning and parks committee review their parks items. Um, and then also have the council, you know, at the end of the day have this as supporting materials, but have department heads submit their scores and we can kind of have a bunch of different scores listed out. We have all those, then it would be it'd be a really cool time for data an data analysis. So, not not opposed.

I missed it. I'm sorry to take the floor so much, but have you got these numerically ordered by their uh cost or by their priority? So, cone park repairs is by what criteria is it number one? You just threw a dart at a wall or are it's number one on this list for a purpose?

Oh, that was just that was just the way it was listed in the capital improvement budget. So that that had no that had no the the more important page there is the first page where it's got tier one, tier two, tier three and that's just in the order which we are copying it over from another Excel document. So don't don't take any um don't read into the order of the projects. I would be more so looking at the first page seeing if you disagree with any of the projects that are not in tier one because tier one are obviously highest priority. Um and then same goes for uh going through the criterion like saying okay I actually think the uh you know business needs economic development benefits that should be you know 16 versus being right now a six. Um if there's a difference in opinion on how we want to actually grade each project that's fine uh we just want to make sure that get comes out we'll be able to go through it again and run run the numbers again.

Anybody got anything else? I would just I would say uh just for clarity sake it might help. I like I like most of this a whole lot. Um I would maybe just suggest like either add it add something up at the top that is explaining the 1 to8 or reverse the order. Okay. You know what I'm saying?

Y um reversing order is probably a little easier. And then I would also suggest like for for each of these projects um maybe color code them because they're all green, right? I think in here. Yeah. So color code them based on tier and then line them up based on score. So like whatever. Let's see. Uh the top score they're pretty much I I think I know you're in tier one is bridge are the two bridges. Yeah. rank them to the bottom. You get a quick snapshot. Yeah. So then it should be like tier one. So pretty much taking this first page but having it broken out in the priority score matrix, you would pretty much see that duplicated on the side. Okay.

And I don't even know honestly I'm not even certain that you need this first page if you do that. You don't because you know tier one is green, tier two is yellow, and tier three is red. Kind of combine them almost. Yeah. Yeah, we can certainly do that. It does sell fun sources though on the first page. It does. That was the reason why we wanted to break it. I mean, maybe we'll do that. We'll keep this to highlight because the other thing is this this secondary page didn't show the cost. So, this was like a referral. I don't disagree, Tracy. But what I would say is like when we first kind of came up with this, the idea was if something is a tier one project that is a mission critical has to get done

and like I don't see in here any below tier one that has any additional funding stuff connected to it. So, while like it's important to know that it's getting funding, if it if it's a tier one project for a reason, like I think if there's if there happened to be like some tier 2 thing that had it, maybe just have a some way to say, oh, we have, you know, Rick got us $300,000 for Ethereon Road, whatever. Okay. Whatever it is. Yeah.

But I mean, my assumption would be based on how we're doing this, if that happened, it now moves up to tier one. That would be because that would also and great example u so that actually ties into uh criterion 11 which is the external funding feasibility which if you have funding secured then you're going to get a nine there then you're going to take nine times 11 and that's going to be a pretty large amplifier versus you get a zero if there's no funding available and then three is like we know of it but it's not likely and and six is it's likely we know it's there it's just we haven't applied for it yet. Yeah. So I mean I think put these in the tears like their suggestion it's going to be black and white what we do and what we don't

I think especially like when we get Rick and and Joe's score or whoever else is doing these things like to me that's not to say that like no tier 2 thing is going to happen but it allows

you know either the city the the staff or whomever on the council to advocate for you know I really think we got to do the ash tree replacements like I I think that we need to do that. But, you know, let let them advocate for it rather than just being like, "No, it's in there." Because even like like I've said this before, like I I forget where segment C and ENF are on the striker sidewalk stuff, but I mean that's all up there code site. Yeah. Yeah. So, like while I am not saying I want happy to give that money back, it's not happening anytime soon.

That one's tough because I tried to work into criteria. the department try to work a criterion in there about legal implications really saying how difficult it's going to be that said it you almost need that to be like a black and white yeah but that's what I'm saying so what I'm saying is that is black like that to me that is a there is a legal thing that says we're not able that that removes that down the line where then it maybe goes to a new list that says of our legally currently legally unviable projects this is a tier one project

gotcha so in that case to help for clarity sake Do you think it would be beneficial to still keep this system like grading it like this but then to have in like kind of a an overarching you know wrecking ball if you will if first you had to answer this question are we in active litigation about this is this legally viable the answer is no yes okay so so do that and I don't I mean Rick you tell me I know you didn't get to score this yet but like if we didn't have the legal situation we have on striker that would be a a pretty big priority I assume Right. Likely. Yeah.

So, so then the idea would be like if we didn't have this extenduating circumstance, this would move over to the side of the list. But we do and until this circumstance is gone, it's off the list. And once it comes back, then there's not some argument about like, well, why does this get to go in front of everything? This is why. And I mean, that's I think a oneofone situation from what I can tell. It is. Is there a bunch of those parking lot type issues or is that like a you mean the anniversary park thing? Yeah. No, just to your point on the um what you were just talking about, is there a bunch of those that fall bel? Yeah, it's it's it's a pretty but it's a pretty big one.

It's a pretty big. It's a large segment. So like to me and and you know I always think the budgets these types of the budget is always a little bit silly to me. I I personally would prefer that we don't encumber $325,000 in something that is not currently legally viable. And technically this and I wanted to kind of start off small because eventually this will stretch into the fiveyear which is going to add 2027 28 29 and 30 now. Um so that said I you would actually see if you had year 2027 technically we're projecting ENF's construction so it's actually more that's what I'm saying. So all all we're doing with that specific project is putting it on putting it on pause. Yep.

And it's not going to take up I mean like that's where we can get back to the reserve thing if it's even if it's necessary. Like if all of the sudden that the legal situation cleared up overnight and all of a sudden we could build it. Then it's like great here's a million dollars. Go build that thing. Right. Well that's what I was saying. So that one's almost like in a parking lot of its own. Right. And until but it can totally screw the other three years up if you keep it correct. all. Yeah, that Yeah, that it it definitely does. That's the big thing, right? So, what we need today and you can't that's not even that's not even on the highway. It's in the parking lot.

Yep. That that's true. And it's it does take up space. That's that's the big component that that said, I think there is there's folks that, you know, there is a belief that if you remove it, even if you put it on the special list, which I think is a good idea, that if you have it off the official, like, and we'll get to this in budgeting, we'll have the five-year. If you take it off the five-year that it's no longer a priority. That said, it's still within our strategic plan. Clearly, it supports our master plan. It's scored very highly because of how and if we line up if we do the strategic plan appropriately, which is not project based, it's conceptbased. That's what we're going to fix up. So, the the the reason that that has been a problem in the past is because there has been no framework to not make it that.

So, just keep that's what this fixes. So then because you know the other side of this is like you know when let's see specific to striker road you know Katie turns out next year I turn out a couple years after that whoever comes on is going to have no idea that the striker road thing has existed for however many years it's been on the budget. Yeah. So like that's why you need to have these continuity of things to say hey this thing is sitting over here for this reason and this reason only. Um so I think it's I think it's a good start. I would just just for clarity I would just swap the order of those things and just and you know is it all right if I still start if we go 18 to one still because that just helps with the multiplic it I don't but just have 18 start the list with like just

yeah just count backwards y and then color it and then I would also I mean it should be pretty easy like I would color it based on tier and then and then organize it based on score yep yep that's and if it's easy to do you know put so you don't have to refer back like you I'm not saying this is good, bad, or just cuz it's anywhere, but like Cone Park Repairs is $100,000 and it scores a 506. Put that have a line in here that like this is $100,000 just so that you don't have to go like how much Okay, how much does that cost? I just think that'll make your life a whole lot easier. Quick question.

Yep. Okay. So, unforeseen um like let's say county council skies parted and they decided that uh they got a little bit of money you want to tribute contribute towards a roundabout at Bridge Road since Ridge since roundabout ridge road is not on here. Is that going to be, you know, if the county is looking for matching funds from Ellisville and from Wildwood? I mean, that's not preventing. So, I would say if if obviously it's unlikely that that would happen, but if it did,

the conversation would then come to the council and it would be like, do you want to then it becomes more of like a mid-year adjustment kind of a situation where it's like because I think we already I think we voted a couple years ago to put some amount of money towards that, didn't we? Yeah, if they matched. I thought that there was some Well, it was there was agreement towards a a tip app where all three that was but we didn't get the the agree. But so in to me like in a situation like that because like that piece of information now goes hey we did this

we agreed to this six years ago whatever it was. Is there some reason we've been working on this all this time from from an advoc advocating standpoint? not like it's parked on a budget somewhere, but like why wouldn't we do like why wouldn't we do this? That's that becomes more the question. And then you know whether it's you know you and and Mr. CR or whomever can go hey guys this is like same thing with the sidewalk thing with you know like put that on a different like would we if we could do it how much would you know if it's $250,000 it's here's why it's not happening because we need to get matching funds from X Y and Z. So should it be listed? I mean, we could we could put a tier in there. I mean, does that help you guys to have that an unfunded tier?

Yeah. Where it's just like, hey, if all of a sudden the county were to give us however much it costs and Ellisville had to contribute and we had to contribute, you know, I would say the same thing kind of applies to the watershed stuff like all of if if somebody decided to give us a million dollars and it required us to Yeah, we could have an unfunded list. Yeah, unfunded list. That's how other organizations wish list. You really have an unfunded list, right? But it could that unfunded list could include scores too with them. Like you you then you would have that sitting like if the money comes available the highest score. Yeah. Didn't score enough.

Yes. Like I mean I don't I mean because it's not on here I don't I mean I assume it would probably score relatively high. Um and so if you're like to me as once you put once you put a concept like this together any conversation where we went hey you know because we did this with the J turns thing where somebody mode somebody came in and we're like this went from a from a this to a 2.6 six and all of a sudden we were like, "Well, that makes perfect sense. Why wouldn't we do that?" What? You know what I'm talking about, Rick? Somebody came up with a metric. I thought it was for the J turns where it was like, "This is the score. If we do it, this becomes the score and the score was like so dramatically different that it was like this becomes now a no-brainer comp. This is like yes, it is expensive, but the cost is too."

Oh, the cost benefit ratio. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was based off that was I don't remember who put I thought there was one for it was definitely one for the the uh surf high friction surface treatment too that showed that one stretch they calculated and it was like cost ratio as part of the justification for the project. Yes.

Yeah. So something I mean it doesn't have to be that exact ratio but like something along those lines where it's like hey this this means you know this isn't I like gym so I'm going to support ridge road. It's like this is it's just math. This makes more sense than this thing. That's how I would set it up. That that just makes everybody's life I think a little bit easier. We still get to make the decisions. It's just different. Okay. So Tom, what else do you need on this? Anything? Uh any feedback is warranted? Uh we'll go ahead and incorporate the changes, but then the department

I think your capital I think your city hall investment is too low. Well, that that was just and another thing that is this is literally carrying over what's in the capital improvement program. So, we have not gotten to adding in I didn't want to change the numbers. So, then someone would be like, "Hey, I get it. The fiveyear says this. Why are you putting an extra 200k here or whatever." That said, well, we'd like the roof to stay on the building. The city hall, the city hall, I will say city hall needs to be higher. And we can bring we can Yeah, that's very true. Um, okay. Anybody have anything else on any of these items or any of the suggestions? No. Okay. Need a motion or anything? Are you good?

Uh not uh nothing in this case, but we'll have it back next month with the changes recommended and also having some of these added kind of a unfunded need item. Yes. Awesome work on this by really good. I mean I would even suggest I mean I don't know how hard it is. I would suggest carry out the five years just so people understand this is what this is. Yeah. And I I we could definitely do that. It's going to be a Yeah, I just wanted to make sure. Well, you could you could say I mean I would say whatever the number whatever the date is where it completes out. Mhm. Just do that. Okay. You know what I mean? So like you know if we were to build this road thing it's not going to take five years. We started it today. So then it would be like no this is 26 and 27. Yes.

Do you understand what I mean? I get you. Okay. Uh that brings us to our review of proposed communication protocol.

All right. Thank you, Chair Farmer. So this is taken into some feedback from last month's meeting. Uh also just incorporating kind of an official policy. So we what's currently included here um is what we try to follow indirectly and it's more so internal policy. But the idea was to bring forth a policy of how we communicate internally but also communicate outbound um to residents. So in the memorandum tonight uh what you'll see is you know different categories uh different kind of things that could be happening around the city which includes capital projects delays in timing for those projects anything that we're doing utility work u new construction that's not necessarily you know ours it could be a developer homeowner something that's big enough where possibly get a phone call um proposed property sales like something like the Lasale property is a big one change in land use so major zoning change uh development applications that got approved. Uh multi-phase or long-term projects requiring permits. Uh that one's kind of the same as before, but school district news, uh disruptions and changes to mod or St. Louis County projects. Uh emergency repairs, obviously those are, you know, top tier, you know, get get info out as soon as possible. And then um just other things that you know, this one's where you kind of have to leave a little bit of flexibility, but other things that if a director or uh the department hears about it, we know it's probably going to generate inquiries. So, we're going to go ahead and implement the policy. Um, so the way this works is we would look at internal communication. Um, and it would be one of these items that were listed in the categories, but it would lead to a direct email communication from the city administrator uh to the city council. And that's been done in the past for, you know, different law enforcement issues that may have come up, snow issues, things along those lines. Um, it would also be followed up with a notation in the weekly CA report and typically we we try to do that. Um, and then also having if it's a big enough issue, having a subsequent report

at committee or the city council depending on what it is. Um, and if it gets to that level, it go to a work session. So that's the internal communication flow. Uh, typically that's the mayor and city council are just going to be on that email thread and questions are always warranted. If they if the council has questions, they can reach out. Um, a key component here is that that protocol is followed prior to doing external communication. So then the council's not caught flatfooted. um and that if you get a phone call about a certain project that's going on or a uh repair work that is going on that you should already have something in the inbox to be able to note it and have as much info as possible. The other side of this is just kind of like documenting what tools we have at our tool belt. We have our news flash which is kind of a little local alert we have on our website but we also have an alert that goes on the top of the whole web page when you go to our homepage. We have our Facebook, Instagram pages, YouTube. We don't typically post videos except the videos that we're currently on right now. Um, we have an e newsletter that sends through email and m SMS and then really our gazette. Other than that, we're doing direct mailers which we use quite a bit. We also do public notices that hang up in our parks and also go into our best fuel upstairs. But really where this comes in is kind of a process for external comms as well. So first and foremost it's confirming the details. Say a water man's blown. Okay, we want to double check that Missouri American Water has this posted on their website already. Have somewhere to direct them. Um, go ahead and this this is where this is kind of internal jargon, but it's stuff we already do, but we want to make sure it's now listed. But, um, establish the web present first. So, we already have sent the email out to council and the mayor. We're going to go ahead and create a home for the issue on our website, whether it be through a spotlight or alert. Then typically we're going to proceed with the social media posting on Facebook and Instagram. Uh depending on the issue sometimes it doesn't make sense to do it but sometimes it does. Sometimes you just want to put it on the website. We could

talk about those situations here tonight as well. But then also we've done this before is we've taken the ease newsletter um that distribution list which is approximately 2,300 folks um and we've spent sent sent out special editions. So when we had the large snowfall event, we've sent it out when we had the tornado, the E3 that hit out west, we send out information through that. So we almost if the occasion where it's really severe weather based or if there's a public emergency, uh typically we're going to communicate that through the e-news, we're going to use every communication tool on our belt. Uh the other side of it, if it's more of a long-term issue, that's when we can start talking about having, you know, kind of consistent updates on social media and on the web page itself, which would typically be weekly if it's a long-term project. Uh we do that right now for the Route 100 project. We're doing it for the uh Village Green and we're doing that for our Manchester Taylor project. Um same could be said for projects that like the AT&T project that went out, they sent out their own mailers, but we also sent out our own mailers. So it it depends on the level of the issue and how much budgeting we have uh funds we have left to do a mailer. But overall we we do a lot of this for the deer management program and also doing this for um anything that impacts could potentially impact a resident's home. We're going to send them a letter. Uh the other item is the gazette. Obviously want to include major stories. If it's region of the gazette typically it's a major initiative we're trying to cover and uh typically is reserved for long-term projects. But overall tonight the department is just putting in uh kind of an internal process that we have um implementing it then we'll go ahead and have this on file but this could be something that would be approved through a resolution and would not need you know full ordinance but tonight have any questions the department's available.

All right Mr. May how much money are you saving by cutting down the gazette 25%. It is for mailing purposes it's about%

it's about $6,000. So it's from from postage. Not postage. Postage to it's a little bit less than weight, but really it's from production. If you look at that material that the Gazette's made out of, it's a very nice piece of paper. It's a lot. It's It's great, but uh I'm surprised that we're cutting this the size of a mailed out glossy publication like that that's got chock full of information. If we voluntarily reduce that opportunity to provide that much more a third more information than three than than you said 12 pages. Well, what we got now, you'd be cutting down 25% for measily 6,000 bucks. Not kidding.

We're trying and the whole idea here is we're trying to make the articles somewhat shorter and then having them be accompanied with a link to the website and a QR code so then we can start tracking how many people are actually engaging with the gazette. So that's the idea behind it. I mean, we can go back to 16. That's we had a discussion last year in this committee where it's like we need to start kind of thinking re refresh because we spend 25k on each edition. That's we're you spend 25k on each edition and you'd be spending 6,000 less than that that we would be spending 6,000 less. So we'd be spending 19 versus 25 each edition. Yeah. So it's like we budget $54,000 for the cassette each.

The the conversation we had um and it I think it's even more relevant now that we've got Paul on board. We started to have it when we had Gina is, you know, we're we're asking Paula to effectively communicate all kinds of stuff. And so currently the communication budget consists of what the gazette is. That's it. So giving her the opportunity to go, you know, if I think the exercise we did with Gina was it was like if you had $54,000, what would you do with it? And her answer was not this gazette. And as a person who has published things like that, that would also be my answer.

And I would say you're kind of I would look at it as not the 6,000. I would look at it as the hundred thousand. And what we're trying to do, at least what I would be trying to do is wean people off that completely and get them to go where the rest of the world's going, which is paperless and online content and QR codes and me, right? Yeah, that's exactly what we're trying to do. They don't just say calendar, but I think you're I think the approach is a good one and that you kind of keep keep weaning it down and keep getting sources like the QR code, like links, like things that are trackable. And then

right now too, just as a heads up that we when we had this discussion, the idea was, hey, you know, the first gazette of the year that goes out right before the municipal election, we are not changing that format. We're keeping it 16 pages. We're going to write out all the articles just fine. I mean, we did we're doing that for this one, too. But the idea was we will and we also wrote it with the mindset of this could be the one gazette we write this year. That said, we're going to do this second edition. It's our 30th anniversary. That's the focus of this edition. That what we're trying to do though is maybe do a yearly mailing and then have something else that fills in the gap where it's like a check-in Charlie and it follows up on all the issues that you may have brought up or any updates to them at the beginning of the year. So, if you go back to the first, and I recommend this, and we have copies upstairs if anybody would like some. Uh, but for the spring gazette, we put all the event data in information in there. We had the gazette, I mean the celebrate Wildwood event date in there. We usually did it based off of gets mailed out. We're only going up pretty much to the July 30th and then the next gazette covered the remaining portion of the year. We're trying to make it so, hey, this first gazette will cover everything eventwise. It gets approved on a yearly basis and then we'll do a check-in Charlie halfway through.

One full-blown normal one or was it that was full-blown normal? Okay. Yep. Well, it I I told you I thought it was very well done and um I I I'm for trending towards going down to one like you're talking and give all of us some money for things like that then too. That's kind of the idea is that she can take advantage of that and utilize it kind of have that as almost like her own reserve for hey I need you to think creatively to communicate XYZ. How do you do that? Okay. Well, then you can start paying for, you know, premium issue. Yeah. Or video work or whatever, whatever stuff that a little bit better.

It's a good exercise, too, because then you can have an employee kind of show how they can create their their own revenue there. So, the economic coordinator has never had a budget. Still don't. Yeah. The other thing about QR codes, they're great if you put them in the right spot. Like I could see us and again just an idea guy here getting to the point where you have what's going on in Wildwood QR codes around town on businesses. Yeah. Wherever where when you walk in you're seeing it and right getting people into that mindset. What's going on in Wildwood? Bill does it with their public hearings and their development. They've got a QR code and and they have I saw it on their sign. They have some kind of text message system there.

The the the thing that says coffee with mayor and whatever. There's no reason you can't have a QR code. this is what's going on in Wildwood and it's a yeah that the more you have that the more people will start to get into the habit of okay that's where I go to find out what what's going on or important information or important dates what was that AI is more common place you can do everything on AI car that too and AI could yeah AI can do some fun stuff as well that said how we were kind of thinking about we're already someone someone thinks Rick baby steps baby steps But we're thinking about that already and having it almost I'm with you though.

Take like a sanitized version of a CA report and have that be publicly available immediately. So that's where we're we're putting things together to make it work. But that said, this should allow us to have some access to funding to allow us to explore. Maybe something we might have to cut some corners elsewhere too. But that's the idea. I I having done this in a lot of different industries like this, I I would just suggest all these I like going digital, but make sure that all of the things that you guys are doing are having like a real trackable understanding of what's happening because what we what we don't want to do and Tracy, I think you were around when we did I mean having the calendar conversation was like a knockdown dragout fight. It was insane. Um

sorry I missed it. It was something. Um, and like you know I think like for instance I think getting one of these gazettes out a year with a lot of pertinent information the whole year and all the stuff I think that's in the near term I think is a really good idea but being able to go and look back and see what's happening because I know um you know working with ad buy on things you know you print media is well it's dead and it is prohibitively expensive and there's no way to know if you what you're doing

if you're successful in any way. It's just kind of like I don't know. I guess it went out and I heard three people said they liked it. So that worked out pretty well. Um so we want to be just make sure that all those things are really trackable because the other side of this is I think from a city standpoint with a lot of these things like you know any organization gets stuck in a rut of like well this is just the way that we always do this. So we always send this thing out in this way and that's just the way that it is. And if it doesn't work then you are paying for legacy things that don't matter and all these other kinds of deals. We we can be very very um forward thinking on this. I think for sure. The other thing is the 10 people that read it are always the loudest. It's true. I will say I will say there was uh it's like the facts

since we had this conversation there uh it was last year around this time. But um every time we we try to well at least when I'm on the phone with residents that call in for random reasons. So typically they're not even calling about the gazette but if they're willing to listen for a second I do try to ask if they read the gazette. Most of them if they call if they're calling the city they they they do read the physical copy.

Um I would say like nine out of 10 folks that I've asked thus far but then then again it's anecdotal but it people get I understand where the the hesitation could come from about slowly weaning people. I I just think you know I think it is the people that read the people that are calling the city are the people that are interested in what is going on. They're going to read whatever we give it we give to them and as long as they have the ability to do it which although this doesn't necessarily apply to where you're at Bob like the city spent a whole lot of money to get people better internet access and so that was also part of that reason was to get them upto-date information because the other side of it is you know we might have a concert scheduled that's been in the gazette all year and then you know we've got some kind of awful whatever and now we got to cancel it and you know you're not going to be able to reach everybody but you're still going to have people show up and try to figure out what's what's going on. Um, so do you need a motion? What do you

Yeah, a motion to uh I mean, if there's any changes tonight, the departments weren't happy to utilize them, but just the department put together the the text of the policy. We just have this proced for us as a resolution. All right. I think it looks pretty good. Tracy, you going to make it? Accept it. All right. Tracy's going to make the motion. Jason's going to second it. All those in favor of moving forward with our communication policy, please say I. I. Any one say no. Any abstensions? Okay, that passes. Rick, I think we're finally to you.

Uh, status of the MDOT and city improvement projects. Um, members, this is the same update I provided previous two or three meetings now, I believe, uh, relative to mainly projects that are ongoing in the city of Wildwood given the busy construction season we have. Um, bill for any questions in particular. The U Manchester Taylor project, as you probably are aware, is wrapping up nicely. Um they're doing all the final pavement markings and stripings uh this week and uh the resurfacing is done. Signal work is almost complete and um so we're pretty excited about how that's shaping up. We'll be giving them contractor a final punch list shortly um to wrap that project up. But um otherwise things are moving forward uh I think as planned. Our Centaur bridge project should be wrapping up ahead of schedule. Um hopefully this week they'll reopen the bridge. If they get the uh epoxy surface applied uh here tomorrow or soon thereafter. So I'll wrap up if there's any particular questions you might have. probably be doing Austral one with the J turn says with completion winter right the only um when does like paving general paving on 100 you know I'm just the lefth hand lane at Taylor Road off off 100 is pretty pretty bad um when People once in a while ask me about that. You know,

generally the resurfacing will wrap up around December 1st, more or less. It kind of depends on when the temperatures really cool down. Um, but they've said they they have it all scheduled to be to be done this fall. They're out resourcing right now on the two-lane section if you've been out that far. No, I haven't. So, they they're starting out there. Uh, and I think once they get the most and the J turns are coming along once they get most of the J turn complete and the asphalt laid and the J turns and they'll probably drop back and do the fourlane section. Okay. But they do still obviously have quite a bit of asphalt delay. No question.

Thank you. It's just one area I don't go ahead. the U roundabout at Wild Creek and fall of this year. What's left? Um, pretty much I think just the final restoration. So, the metal grading, seated, cleanups, driveways. So, yeah, I think most of the hard construction has been completed there as far as I know. It makes sense. I thought it was done, but you're the Oh, yeah. have a special

else. Um, are we gonna I don't know if we even have one. It might be it might be worthwhile to put a sign at the left turn on pond with school start here in a couple weeks to remind people that that isn't going to go away or be changed here before the end. You know, that's a good idea. Everybody going up to pond and wild. I mean, there's a lot of people that go up to pond wild coming. Yep. You mean Yeah. Well, just to let them know like, hey, you're not going to just turn here anymore. You got to go down that way or go around the other way, whatever it is. But just one, two, but not Yeah, but not here. We might as want to stick a sign out there well in advance because before people get into the habit and all of a sudden one day they're like, "What is happening?"

Um, and then I only I just my I had a question on the reservicing because it does look so nice, but like are they going to do the redo the curbs in the roundabout where they're all busted up or is that something we have to do or how does that work? Like specifically when you're coming off of 100 on that first roundabout on 109, the the curb all along that left side is all mashed and busted.

Oh, so I've been meaning to follow up with BDOT in terms of the curb. There are a number of curves which you're talking exact exactly and and I I was meaning to bring that up. I got to believe they're aware of it. My expectation is they'll fix them, but I haven't gotten that confirmed because that's typically the order that they want to I mean, I would just because it'll be the same thing. I don't know that they're going to redo our planters or whatever, but that turn at Westland Farms the those are all mashed as well. I don't know. That's our a different story. As you probably know, we've been working trying to get their attention to do a little more work there, but the other curbs that are in the roundabouts are within the limits of their work by and large, but I expect that they would.

Yeah, I would be kind of surprised if they didn't. Sort of silly typical of what they would do. Yes. It's just they're doing a lot of work to not it takes away from what would overall very nice looking. Yeah. Feels weird. It doesn't help. It doesn't help them and it's an easy win. Um okay. Anything else? All right. Uh well, we got some things to talk about next time, but that brings us our next meeting will be September 1st. Any miscellaneous items for anybody?

Chair, do you mind if I bring one item up? Sure. There was uh on the agenda there was a analysis for the stormwater parks tax. the attachment didn't get put on there and honestly it might go better with the comparative analysis for uh unfound un uh reserve fund balance sorry um so could we is if it's okay with the committee the department would be fine with postponing that till next month but having that back on the issue um for some reason it didn't have to pass there and are you going to change the September meeting to Tuesday is it currently B&Z night Mr. Alers,

it should be on Tuesday, September 2nd is when it's scheduled the first. Sorry. Yeah. No, there typically we try to have them on that first Tuesday of the month. No, just when that Okay, this one was a fun one. Special election. All right. Anybody have anything else? Thank you. Need a motion to motion to adjurnn would be great. Made by Mr. Mabry, second by Mr. Ber. All those in favor, please say I. I. I. Anyone opposed? Any extensions? Okay everybody, we will see you here I guess next week right for the council meeting but we'll see you next month for this one. Have a good one everybody. next week. Good meeting.