City Council - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon. Today is May 19th, 2026, and this is the City of Prescott City Council budget workshop meeting number three, an extension of last week's workshop. So thank you very much, everybody. Good afternoon, Lars.

Good afternoon. I'm Lars Johnson, finance director for the City of Prescott. As Mayor mentioned, this is number three.

I think we should do a roll call, don't you think? Yeah, I'm sorry.

I know we need to get going here. Roll call, please. Mayor Rissing?

Here.

Councilwoman Fredrickson? Here. Councilman Gamboge?

I am here.

Councilman Gehring?

Here.

Councilman Grady?

Here.

Councilman Ruby?

Here.

And let the record reflect, Mayor Pro Tem Pruitt is excused. Okay.

Thank you. Okay. Now let's start our discussion.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. So as Mayor mentioned, this is the third workshop. We had one on the 27th of April, one on May 11th, two four-hour sessions. This will be a continuation of the May 11th workshop with Public Works Department. We have two remaining divisions. On April 27th, we touched on police, fire, library, recreation services, and admin departments. Then last week, May 11th, we continued with community development, recreation services, airport, and public works. So I just wanted to bring up one slide that was incorrect in the slideshow. So last week we covered fleet. Now this isn't working. Power. Power. We covered fleet and the numbers that were on the slide for supplies were incorrect so we wanted to make sure and show you the correct numbers for the fleet management department. This is an internal service fund which gets cost recovered across the city for the work it does on all the city's fleet. Make sure that's included in your packet and without further ado, we'll turn it over to Public Works to continue.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Gwen Rowich, Public Works Director, and my leadership team here in the front row. We're going to continue our discussion on public works budget. We've covered the admin and engineering, we've covered fleet, and we've covered utilities. So today we're going to move on to street and transportation operations and solid waste. Although at any time we're happy to answer questions about materials we've already covered if you have questions. So unlike our other service areas that are funded through enterprise fund, transportation and street operation is funded through multiple sources of revenue that you can see here on the screen. We receive just under $5 million a year in Highway User Revenue Fund or HRF monies. uh... just under a million dollars about eight hundred ninety thousand dollars a year we received from the yavapai county flood control district and by the way that is the sole source for all drainage projects that we do here in the city of prescott we also received just under half a million dollars a year in street light fee that's collected on the utility bill about two million dollars in impact fees And then this year we are in line to float debt for part of the FIP and low water crossing project, about a million dollars if the developer gets going on that project this year. Our major source of funding for street and transportation operations and projects is the 1% sales tax. that everybody pays when they buy things here in the city of Prescott. That 1% generates about $23.5 million projected in FY27. Are there any questions about the revenues? That's about $32.8 million in the streets fund for not only operations, but also street projects that we do throughout the city.

Yeah, I just would like to add that Public Works is what we call the backbone of the city. You take care of all the good, important basics. And I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the streetlight fund, the 75 cents that's on my water bill, I thought went to streetlights. Who knew?

Well, it goes into the fund, and it certainly is one of the sources that we use when we're maintaining streetlights around the city. Okay. Yes, thank you, Mayor. Thank you. So in FY27, within the operating budget, we're up just about a million dollars from FY26. Some of those increases include outsourcing, brush tree and weed mitigation. as well as sidewalk and alleyway remediation. We're also going to have a discussion about our contribution to Y-Plan or what was formerly known as Central Yavapai Metropolitan Planning. And we also put some money in this year's budget for the analysis of traffic injury and fatalities, which was a strategic goal of the council in January to look at ways that we can reduce injuries and fatalities here in the city of Prescott on our streets. Just like we did the last time, we're going to have the leadership team help support us in our conversations today. This is Cian Mattingly, our transportation manager, and we're going to start with our contribution to Y-Plan or SIMPO here in FY27.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Yeah, just like Gwen said, we're just going to go over some of the highlights. Specifically, we'll talk about the why plan stuff and then a couple other studies that we have added that have increased the budget but also are going to give us some good information to do some of the things you want to do in your strategic plan. So for the Y-Plan increase, fiscal year 27 does include a participation funding increase for Y-Plan, formerly SIMPO. So over about the last three years, Y-Plan has intentionally expanded its planning program under the board direction. They've increased production from approximately one major plan one major transportation plan per year to approximately four to five major plans annually. This expanded effort helps to keep more federal transportation planning and transit dollars in the region rather than reverting it back to the state. The increased local match reflects the expanded level of regional planning that we'll get out of that.

Excuse me, Ian, what was their previous, I'm trying to think of what we were previously paying annually to Y-Plan?

So in the latest fiscal year, this current fiscal year that we're in, we're projecting to be somewhere in the $250,000 range this year. That was an increase over the previous years where we were looking at probably payments in the $25,000 to $50,000 per year. A lot of what we pay is offset in in-kind time and depends on carry forward from the previous year that SMPO has. So a lot of times, so in the past it was quite low. It was, you know, in the $25,000 to $50,000 real money range for us, apart from the in-kind time. And then it increased significantly. we're feeling the impact of its increase in fiscal year 26 and that really spawned some of these conversations regard to what we should do with our own budget and what other communities who are members should do to their budget and that's why we're placing this money in the you know in the budget so that we can cover these increases that we're seeing now 350,000 we may not pay that But that is, you know, we're just being responsible and placing it into the budget, so we have a way to do that. But these are estimates that likely will come. Yeah, so.

Yeah, we just need to make sure that this increase is fair and allocated evenly amongst the other communities and that we're not just bearing the brunt of their expansion.

Sure, so just for background, the in-kind match is obviously split between the various agencies and it's allocated by the population percent that we represent. So currently I think we pay 27.31% of the total match. So you can see that 350,000, if that's 27%, we're looking at like a total regional local match between us, Prescott Valley, Chino Valley, and the county of somewhere in the $1.2 million range, 1.5, somewhere in that range. But, yeah, it's split by population based on the census.

Madam Mayor, may I? Yes, Ted. So we pick up 27.31%. You know what PV picks up?

It's very close. I think they might actually be right in the 26% range. I think the calculations are slightly older when the calculations were done because they've exceeded our population.

They have more population than us, right?

They do. And so it's very close though. I think Prescott and Prescott Valley are basically paying approximately 27%. Then the county's picking up quite a bit. And then there's a small amount for Chino. And I think Dewey has a small percentage as well. Dewey Humboldt too. Yeah, I didn't mean to omit them. Yeah. So going back to this, in this current fiscal year 27, Patrick, excuse me.

I was looking at something at the same time you were continuing. So another question along that line, do we know what some of that increase is going to result in other specific transportation planning in our community? That's number one. And then number two, I'm assuming, I've seen this in other communities, I'm assuming that there's a pretty good multiplier impact of that investment. by increasing our outreach to other federal funding sources? Sure.

So there has been an expansion of SIMPO's staff in recent years. I think you guys have seen that in that they're doing a lot more on the grant end. And like I said, they have provided a specific focus to do more studies. In the past, the major study was like the regional transportation plan that we got. Recently, we've got the ACT UP, the Active Transportation Plan. That was like a $250,000 plan. They're doing a trails coordination plan. They do regional safety plans. Yeah, safe streets. Safe streets, yeah. Some of the direct impact that Prescott is getting, for instance, in fiscal year 27, we are directly going to receive for this money... We are getting the downtown Safe Streets Dipsy. That's $625,000 directly benefiting the city of Prescott. That's all money coming to the city in a study. The Wettstein Transportation Alternative Project, we talked about the grant that they helped us write. They wrote that one with us, and they also assisted in the project. the Prescott Sidewalk Gap Study, but Wettstein alone is gonna bring in 346,000 for a direct study that will benefit Prescott. So direct impact, we'll next year receive approximately 971,000 in studies that we otherwise would have had to pay for or get some other way if we weren't in SIMPO.

And Vinnie likes to make the point that you can't get grants if you don't have a plan. So it's their job to come up with the plan and the studies so that we can get the grants.

Yeah, I mean, in fiscal year 26 as well, funded this year, which will likely start next year, we do have the Prescott Gap Study. We didn't even include that. That's about $120,000, $130,000. And then along with that, obviously, SIMPO does a lot of work with congressionally directed spending. So one of the efforts that they're doing, and you guys are aware of these, but they're looking at anticipation to bring possibly 8.9 million in actual construction funds next year. That would include 4.9 for the shift of funds from the 89 widening over to the SR-69 multi-use pathway project to finish off the pathway that was omitted from that project on 69. And then 4 million has been requested for the 89-89A on-ramp project. I'm just bringing up projects that directly would impact us from our relationship. There's various other things that we get, like, you know, 27% of the RTA and the Regional Transportation Plan or the ACT UP, they focus on our city, but those are joint projects that also benefit the other agencies that are paying their local match. So we do have benefits monetarily in those as well, but we're just giving you, hey, here's some numbers on direct impact for our payment.

Thanks. I would just add, too, that the Yavali and regional transit system is something that can be of major help to our economy and to our community and the needs that exist in that area, too. Certainly.

Yeah, and it's important, as we saw from the Wooda Cooper affordable housing workforce housing project, if you're going to get federal and state funding, you have to have a regional transportation system. So that ticked the box having this plan here.

Sure. Yeah, and so we're not even accounting for those transit benefits that we're all receiving. So that covers that one. If you guys have any other questions, I'll be happy to answer it. Otherwise, I'll move on to the next section. So one of the programs that I wanted to highlight was the pavement marking, the striping operations that we're bringing in-house. This isn't new for 27 because council in the last budget already approved this change. So some of the things that you've recently done, you approved through consent at a meeting about two meetings ago, the purchase of our long line striping truck. We're bringing on a striping operator that we've closed, and we're going to have that person on board early June here. And we've also purchased the thermoplastic so that we can do all the crosswalks and things like that. But this is just to highlight some of the things that you've been doing and then some minor changes that are going to occur in fiscal year 27 is that once we bring these trucks on board – and we get the staff up to speed, we're gonna be shifting some of our funding from the actual striping contract that we've been doing in previous years of about 300,000, and we're gonna allocate a portion of that to, a large portion of it, to buying materials and operating our own program. We will retain a small contract for a You know a contractor that specializes in this so that we can still have assistance there where we need it, but This is moving along. Well.

It was one of the strategic plans from the last Thank you for doing this I think this is something that we've been working on for a long time, and I'm glad it's coming to fruition Madam Mayor may I yes

I've been accosted by about three residents over this truck, and I wanted to say publicly, this is one of the best investments you could make. I mean... on my back of the napkin math, I think it pays itself in two years. So, and we get striping when we want and we don't have to wait four or five months for striping. So that was a great decision, great use of the city funds. So thank you.

Yep. Mary.

Thank you. So we've hired added in one additional staff member. Yes. Excuse my ignorance. Is the striping requirement around town sufficient? Is it on a regular schedule for restriping? Is this guy or gal? long-term prospect for staying on staff or eventually, you know, is striping done or is it like the Golden Gate Bridge where you paint from one end to the other and then you go back to the beginning and paint it all over again?

Sure. So what we've done is we've added a striping operator to our existing traffic control group, the sign group. And so striping will not be a full-time It doesn't take their full effort for the entire year. It's very intensive when you're doing it. During spring and fall, we have two primary cycles that we use with the current contractor. We'll move that in-house. So what will happen is he will join the traffic control group. During times when we need striping, you need a driver, you need someone on the rear of the truck, you need multiple people to do the long line parking stalls, the thermoplastic. So our other striping traffic control technicians will work alongside them to get that accomplished. In the off season when you're not striping, they will then join that group to make up the things that were not accomplished during that time. So they'll be doing some of the other work with the signing group during those times, but we can manage our own inventory better. And then in the times when we have special projects or we have a downtown need for like the scramble to be painted, we can react immediately by just moving to that task because we have the equipment and we have the know-how and we have the manpower. So it is a permanent position and it's integrated into our whole operation of how we handle signing and striping and all these things, special events.

Okay, continue.

So then moving on to a couple other changes for us or new things that are of interest, there's two studies that we've included in the budget. One is the citywide serious injury and fatality collision root cause analysis. This specifically comes from the council's newly adopted strategic plan. One of the things that you guys are focusing on is how we can reduce serious injuries and fatalities in the city. And it was... noted that staff should, by a certain time, conduct this analysis. The purpose of it would be to evaluate serious injury and crashes to see what is the root cause of those things, things like distraction, maybe it's infrastructure, maybe it's aging, roadway parameters, we don't know. But basically we need to have a study to do this citywide so that we can have a better understanding of how we can address and make changes to improve or reduce our serious injury crashes and fatalities. Findings from the study will help us identify and target mitigated improvements or education programs. The analysis is also expected to support future grant applications, because if we can identify reasons for these crashes, including infrastructure or otherwise, they can supplement some of the stuff we get out of SIMPO and some regional safety studies. But it sets us up to address these things. Again, it directly aligns with your strategic plan. So that's in there. The last one is the Willow Creek Road and Willow Lake Road intersection study. This has been on the radar for a long time because we're collecting impact fees. They showed you the pie graph and talked about impact fees. Some of those are related to infrastructure projects that are directly related to just growth and increased housing. So we've been collecting money knowing that we're going to improve this intersection at some point in the future. I think we have it. It's in the five-year TIP. But we need to do a study to determine what the intersection improvements look like. And so that's really what this is all about. It's gonna evaluate congestion and future transportation need. It does account for the fourth leg access from Mortimer. So we will include that. And it also allows us a partnership with SIMPO and maybe some other regional partners to extend this just not at the intersection, but up to commerce. We heard in the discussion about 89 widening that we referenced the RTP and some things that are going on because of just traffic. And we know we have a bottleneck congestion problem in between Commerce and Willow Lake. And so this study will address both the intersection and that widening need. And so we put money in there to do that. We'll begin writing a scope, and then we'll partner with SIMPO or Y-Plan and possibly the county. We might approach them. But the goal is to determine what we need to do and how we move forward towards those improvements in the future. So those are my highlighted projects and programs. So if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Thank you, Ian. So this fund is funded not only by transportation services, but also by the street maintenance division. So I've invited Brady Higgs up. He's our field operations manager over street maintenance. So we can talk about some of the shifts that we're going to be making out in street ops.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Council, Brady Higgs, Field Operations Manager. So a couple highlights for street operation is obviously our dedication is to focus on preserving and maintaining critical infrastructure, both in the roadway and the pedestrian infrastructure. To support this, we need to buy materials through our Street Maintenance Materials Fund for asphalt and concrete to repair streets and maintain them, as well as replace and repair deteriorating sidewalks, curbs, and gutters throughout the community. So, you know, each week we got team members that are going out inspecting items, creating work orders, and then the work's getting done. One of the other big focuses is going to be our contracted services. Like Gwenda talked about, these are going to be focused on two main areas. One's going to be kind of mowing, trimming in the public rights aways throughout the community, as well as tree trimming service in those same areas to improve our site distance, prevent, you know, roadway and sidewalk obstructions, as well as removing hazardous trees. Sometimes we have things that age out or limbs that continually break and fall down and we end up cleaning or the intrude into the sidewalk and pop lift panels and create tripping hazards. So two of the big things for us this year in the FY27 budget was some increased funds in these two areas, as well as with those contracted services and people going out and doing this, that allows our team to go out and focus on these roads and sidewalks and drainages. We acquired two new pieces of equipment, FY26, which was our milling machine that will allow us to do some of these road work projects, as well as doing some in-house concrete grinding rather than waiting for a contractor to come up and we have a hazard out there. So we're doing an in-house concrete grinding to get rid of some of those trip hazards.

Any questions for Brady?

Mr. Grady.

Yeah, I'm not sure where this falls in the budget, Director, but so are some of these costs under other services and charges, which increased by $700,000 or so? Yes. Is that where some of this is?

That's correct, Councilman.

Okay, thanks. Yes. Okay.

All right, so in street maintenance and transportation, we have 40.42 full-time employees. Don't ask me how we get the pieces of people. They share them amongst different groups. That's generally how that happens. uh... so this year we're up by one person that would be the new street super street uh... sorry let me back up that would be the new traffic superintendent we currently do not have a hierarchy that includes a superintendent over the signs and traffic team Ian Mattingly fulfills that role he has for more than 20 years. Unfortunately, we're getting just a little bit too big for that to be a one-man job, and I have lots of other things I'd like Ian to do. So we're going to bring on a transportation superintendent so they can oversee the day-to-day work that's happening out in the field and manage that work accordingly. So we're going to move on to the capital part of the Street Fund. We do do a number of projects each year from the Street Fund. Tim Sherwood, our capital program manager, is going to come up and we're going to kind of tag team this part together. Again, I've bolded the projects that we're going to focus on today, but if there's another project that you'd like to talk about that is not bolded, just let us know. We've got them all here on the computer. So in FY27, some of the most notable things we're going to do is we're going to start focusing more on sidewalk repair and replacement in this community. We probably get more complaints about tripping and sidewalk settling than any other complaint that we really receive. We have a lot of walkers here. It's beautiful year-round. We can walk all the time, and so we hear about that a lot. We're also going to enter into phase three of our downtown street bollard program, which has been hugely successful. Each year, this will be our third year budgeting $300,000. We're going to do that for five years before we hit all of the intersections. It's not in your packet, but if you'd like to see a map of the intersections where we're going to put all of the bollards, we can put that up on the screen as well. And then we're going to talk about Willow Creek Road improvements between Jenna and James Lane. That particular section of road would have been widened by the developer, but because we purchased that piece of land from him, they are not obligated to widen that piece of the road, and it will be the only two-lane section of road along Willow Creek Road. So we're going to do that this year. And then we'll talk about Miller Valley Road sidewalk. That's probably one of the projects that's nearest and dearest to my heart. We'll talk about that one as we move along through the

Madam Mayor, may I? Yes. Do we have bollards on Gurley and Whiskey Row?

Yes.

We have bollards on Whiskey Row and Goodwin?

Yes.

I was doing a ride along with the fire department Saturday, and a guy fell off the curb and cracked his head, and I didn't see any bollards up. Why will we not have bollards up?

So we have, we install sleeves in the pavement is what we do. And we have them at various, can you bring the map up? We have them at various intersections. And then depending on the event and the road closures that are requested, we place the actual bollards in the sleeve for that event. So the sleeves are all over downtown. In fact, I think we put nine intersections in so far. Is that right? I want to say nine.

So not all events get bollards.

And not all of them get all of the bollards. Sometimes they need access into the area. So if we put up the bollards, they can't get in. Because once we put them up, you can't get in or out.

Well, it was a car show, so maybe that's the reason why.

Understood. Yeah, I'm sure they needed to get them in.

I'd like to go back to the you mentioned intersection signalization of smoke tree, but on your capital improvement plan, you know, there's talk about smart traffic lights and timing of traffic lights and it seems like it was going to be spread out over five years and this is something we've been talking about for a long time. Is there any way we could kind of accelerate that for FY27?

Yeah, if you want to get up. But you want to know if we can accelerate smart lights?

Yeah, because they were spread out over five years. If we could maybe condense it so that we're doing more upfront this year to get them, because it's been very popular to have them timed and have the smart traffic lights.

Yeah, so... Yeah, I think we started this process of doing traffic signal coordination, where I guess I'll use that term. You'll say smart traffic light. We'll say that they're coordinated. They're in series, and they're working to move traffic through an area. We've been doing that since I think it's been about three years now, and we first did the Willow Creek project that took the 26 signals all the way up from – you know, Pioneer Parkway, all the way down to Gurley. In the meantime though, the next fiscal year we did Iron Springs Road, we did Whipple and Miller Valley. So we've basically completed pretty much all our main arterials. We did PLP, and we recently have done Gurley Street. I think the only section where we don't have done, and we're working on it right now, is Sheldon Street. We still need to just tie a few signals together on Sheldon Street. And then what we're left with is a whole bunch of standalone signals. And I think maybe I've mentioned it here, maybe I haven't. We recently talked about this at PBTAC, the bike and ped committee. But we're getting into the phase next year where we're just finishing out the last of Sheldon, which is only like four signals. And then we're gonna address all the rest of the standalones. So we're not highlighting that here specifically, the intersection signalization program is kind of something different. But we have enough money in just our normal budget to finish out those improvements. So, I hear what you're saying, and we're on track to beat that schedule. And so we are basically coming to the finish line, and we'll have everything either communicating in series or using a smart technology. Like they all have responsive overhead camera detection systems. They are all acting smart. They are all coordinated or doing. And that will occur by next fiscal year. We'll be done with all of that.

Okay. Well, thank you so much for implementing that program.

Sure. Yeah, no problem. Okay.

Mary? Thank you. Gwen, stepping back to the Willow Creek Road between Jenna and James, there's a mention here about a grant applied 600K. So is the numbers that we have associated with that item for fiscal year 27 and then the project total, is the 600K Included in that or is that all city money and the 600k is in addition?

So that's all city money in the budget Columns if we receive the grant it will be six hundred thousand less That was an economic strengths grant that we applied for and we went through first round. We're through the first round so fingers crossed we make it to the finish line and we get our six hundred thousand dollar grant and It's because of the economic development that's happening in that immediate area that I believe we've gotten this far in this particular grant.

So the 2.88 for the project total is the city outlay for this particular project, and we're expecting, hoping to get 600K that we can reduce that. Yes, ma'am.

Thank you. And Mr. Gehring.

Thank you, Mayor. I'm just curious on the conversion over to smart signal systems. Are you having to change out controllers or do you just reprogram and add cards to what we have?

Yeah, for the most part, there were a lot of our new signals that are built by developers, obviously have the latest controllers. But through these last few years, one of the expenses for material that you have paid for is upgraded controllers. So we've upgraded controllers, detection, and then radio communication. Those are the three things.

All right. Excellent. Okay, continue.

Okay. All right, Tim, you're really up this time. Okay. All right.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Tim Sherwood, Public Works. So Gwen touched on a lot of these, but I'll give you a little bit deeper dive into what we're doing. But the sidewalk repair and placement program, we're looking at various locations throughout the city. As Gwen mentioned, it's one of the things we hear most often about is dilapidated sidewalks, trip hazards, et cetera. We have a program every year where we do a grinding project. A company comes in and maps out a very large area, and then they identify areas for just grinding. So with anything less than three quarters of an inch, I believe it is, they can grind it and smooth it out and buy us some time. Or areas where they just can't do it, we need to do a replacement. So we work with our streets department. They handle some of the smaller things. And then when we get bigger projects, we'll go out and get a contract and make some of these repairs. So a lot of it is safety, trip hazards, et cetera. As Gwen mentioned, we've increased our budget to $1 million annually to accomplish this. So we're in the process now of mapping out these locations and determining where we're going in the future. I'll touch on Miller Valley Road in a moment. But one of the other things we're looking at, too, is we've developed a long-term program for sidewalk reconstruction. Miller Valley Grove is the first phase of that, which we're going to do in FY27. In FY28, we plan on going over to West Gurley on that side of town. We'll be moving over to Sheldon Street, then South Montezuma and White Spar. The map's here for you. And then East Gurley. And all these will be areas to identify similar to what we're doing on Miller Valley and Grove. And it's to identify ADA deficiencies, sidewalk that's so far gone that it just needs to be replaced. So, like I said, overall it's more of a reconstruction project than just minor repairs. So, like I said, this is in our five-year capital program now, so for the next five years we'll be tackling all these different locations. As I mentioned, I'll go a little deeper dive in a moment about the Miller Valley Grove project, but they're trying to address a lot of the similarities. Just as Areas have developed over the years. Commercial driveways go in. There hasn't been an ADA compliant sidewalk installed at that location. So we're just trying to address that as well as outdated handicap ramps at intersections or obstructions either through a pole or even a traffic controller or something like that. So just trying to make the entire area a little more safe for pedestrians in general.

And I would just add to there that I was asked where the money from SR 89 went. This is one of the programs that we put a portion of that money into because of the high number of complaints we get about walkability here in Prescott.

You know, I really want to thank you for focusing on this and funding it and getting it implemented because I live up off of West Gurley, and the sidewalk on the south side, I guess it's because it was in the shade, is just basically crumbled, and people are walking in the street in the bike lane. And it's actually... If we can get a decent sidewalk, it increases connectivity because then people can walk in from their neighborhoods to downtown, have coffee, meet with friends, do their errands. And so this is something that we've needed to do for a long time, and I am thrilled to see it coming to fruition. Jim, do you have any more comments?

I did have a question. So these are areas where the property owner that fronts the sidewalk do not have the responsibility to maintain the sidewalk?

So Councilman Gearing, these sidewalks are on major collectors and or arterials, which the city maintains.

Okay, thank you.

Continue.

So the next project I want to talk about is our downtown street bollards. We're going into phase three. This will be year three of the five planned years. The target for this year will be the late winter, early spring of 2027. We try to be cognizant of downtown events, and the calendar gets fuller every year, so the windows are a little bit smaller. We typically have a window from around the first year till the whiskey shows up, and then once whiskey's done, The summer's pretty well taken care of. And then we used to have kind of Labor Day to about Veterans Day, but there's even been a couple more events that have come in there. So really our window is that post-New Year's till the whiskey off-road shows up to get this done. We've done nine locations to date. We mentioned a couple of them before. We've done as far north as right in front of City Hall here on Montezuma Street. We've done both sides of Gurley Street at Montezuma on the far side. We've done both sides of Goodwin at Montezuma and Cortez as well. The project locations we're planning for this year, the numbers are a little off, but we skipped over location eight on this last round we're gonna attack at this time. West Carleton, South Montezuma, that's fundamentally the entrance into Mile High Middle School. Location 11 is West Gurley and South Montezuma, so that'll be the east side of Montezuma Street. As I mentioned, we did the west side previously. 12 will be the opposite intersection on the square, will be East Gurley and South Cortez. 13 will be South Cortez and East Gurley, so that'll be the north side of Gurley Street on Cortez. And then on 14 will be South Cortez and Goodwin, and that is on the north side of Goodwin Street at Cortez. And so that'll give us a total of 14 locations to date. So we've touched on this a little bit. So again, Willow Creek Road improvements, as Gwen mentioned, we've applied for a $600,000 grant, fingers crossed. So it is the section between James Lane and Jenna Lane, as you see on the map. Currently, there's about 3,000 feet of two-lane road remaining on Willow Creek Road. This project would widen approximately 2,200 feet. The developer is obligated to do the intersection improvements, including a traffic light at James Lane, and then we would connect from that end, the south side of James Lane, down to the current taper going north out of Gentle Lane. The other project we're looking at in this area, it's not highlighted, is the southbound SR-89 turn lane extension. which would kind of go in conjunction with the SR89 on-ramp improvements, which will help improve the traffic movement currently. If you make a right turn onto the SR89, there's two lanes, and then only one of them gets on 89. The other one goes to Larry Caldwell. So as traffic has increased, it's been more and more of a problem. So that project is earmarked. ADOT's administering that project. The city is... obligated to contribute a million dollars, and then I also did a little research in the counties contributing a half million to that.

And is this plan going to dovetail with the new retail center that's going in in that area?

Yes, and that's...

The egress and ingress for that.

Yes, it'll help with the, like I said, the traffic light at Jenna Lane will help tremendously because, like I said, if the map doesn't reflect it, but currently Jenna Lane, as far as earthwork, has already been cut all the way over to SR89. If you go up north on SR89 and look to the left, you can see where Jenna Lane's already been cut over to that location. The commercial development will be on the south side of Jenna Lane there. We also want to get this project... designed, constructed, and opened before we do anything on SR 89 in regards to any traffic impacts on 89 because obviously Willow Creek Road will bear the brunt of detour traffic.

Okay, great.

So moving on to the Miller Valley Road sidewalk improvements and includes part of Grove. I get a kick out of this picture because this is an old box culvert bridge that's right near Lincoln at the low water crossing. And you can see basically the curb for lack of a better word, is an old railroad steel that's basically the bumper, and then the sidewalk dips down. It's because the road's super in such a way that water has to still get off that structure. You can see a catch basin just on the upper part of the picture there. So this project will go from Miller Valley Road and Grove from West Gurley to Whipple. There are numerous ADA deficiencies, including driveways and intersections. This will also include the realignment of Rodeo Drive at Miller Valley Road. Currently, it runs at a weird 45-degree angle, so we're going to bring it around where it intersects at 90 degrees and likely include a right-turn decel lane to turn right into that location. The current estimate for the project is around $5.3 million. We're about 60%. on the design. And one of the things, and Mayor Russo, you brought it up, we saw it as well. This project was actually brought to our attention by a disabled vet, and I have seen it numerous times where you see vets or even any other disabled person, they're riding their scooter or their mobile device, and especially once they pass Whipple near the old Miller Valley School, they're out in the road until they get past Fry's because every driveway kicks towards the street and it kicks back up. And so it's not, like I said, it's not ADA compliant. And so like I said, a disabled vet brought this to our attention and we're all very excited about this project.

All right, so we're going to, oh, we have a question.

Just wanted to, I think it's great. I was at the presentation you did at Prescott College, turning the V to a T. I would just hope that as this goes forward, there's some coordination with the potential plan at the rodeo, the rodeo master plan, because there's an interface there coming off a rodeo drive. And I also think that Chris Hoskins and the trails at Parks and Rec, because of the way that Miller Creek comes up to that avenue and that whole frontage along Miller Valley I think could be a really productive economic zone with lots of different connectivity. So I hope there's some inter-department dialogue which

So a couple things I can share with you on that. We are looking at the Rodeo Drive intersection with Miller Valley Road as part of the Rodeo Steering Committee. And we have the consultants looking at that as an alternate bid item for us when we ultimately bring that project forward. So we are doing that already. The city, in addition to the $625,000 that Ian spoke to about the downtown Dipsy, we're also doing what's called the Near North Dexter Neighborhood Pedestrian Study as well, which primarily encompasses Miller Valley Road and the Dexter Neighborhood. And walkability is one of the biggest things that we are looking at in that study. We received, do you know how much money that was for? $150,000 to do an independent study separate from the downtown study, but actually they border each other. So it'll expand our study area so we can look at, from the study, potential projects that we might do in our downtown and low-income areas here in the city.

That would be great. I think that area is an area primed for growth and that the right type of coordinated approach to make a good outcome there.

Thank you for asking.

Growth and redevelopment.

All right, so we're gonna move on to what we call street reconstruction, preservation, and drainage projects. As we've mentioned before, the best way we can spend our street dollars is to preserve the streets we have, not to rebuild the ones that are getting older. So we put a lot of money into our preservation program each year. We do a number of types of treatment depending on the age of the street, the condition of the street. Depending on whether we can coordinate it with a with a water project or a sewer project if that Infrastructure is also failing and Tim will talk about that a little bit more But our nine million dollars we spend every year just to preserve our pavement here in the city of Prescott We have been successful in the last four years or so of raising our PCI from 67 to 75 by infusing this nine million dollars into our roadway system here in the city and We're also going to talk about a drainage improvement project that's primarily being funded by the flood control district. Up on Hornet Drive we had a microburst back in 2023 I believe and some folks almost got water in their homes and so we've been working on that and we'll talk about that project here in a few minutes.

So as Gwen mentioned, pavement's one of the more visible things we do in the city. We can do a water line project, a sewer line project, and as long as your faucet turns on or when the water goes down the drain in the sink, it goes away. It's not nearly as visual, but anytime we do a paving project, it gathers people's attention. So as Gwen mentioned, we spend quite a bit of money on pavement preservation. As you can see, I think this map's a really good illustration because everything in blue is part of our preservation program. So 12 centerline miles is anticipated in FY27. The stuff you see in purple is rehabilitation and reconstruction. And you can see how much less we get for our money. The preservation dollars go a lot further. So if we can stay ahead of our... stay ahead of the curve on our pavement, we can get a lot more done, preserve our roads for a lot longer period. I'll kind of highlight some of the areas. In the lower left-hand corner next to Copper Basin Road is a project, Copper Basin and Sheriff's Posse. That is going to be to take care of some Deteriorated pavement is also, we've got some issues if you go north, if you go, I'm sorry, west past Sheriff Posse. That city section of the road is getting pretty in poor shape. It gets fairly narrow in some areas, so we'll go in there and fix some of the drainage issues, put new culverts in. uh... also widen the road to current city standards uh... the county will also be doing a project we're working with them closely uh... what they call their dirt to black program so where their pavement ends beyond ours they're going to be doing their work so we're trying to work in conjunction with them so we can give them access to their project but not have them driving over some brand new asphalt that we just installed so uh... working closely with them on that uh... the other purple areas you see we talked about this last week these are all uh... ash brush And Willow is the small little area up there, right above Gurley Street. Down below that is Vista, Crest, and Loma. And then the other one, the little curlicue right at the south end of Montezuma is Allen, Granite, and Starpine. The Vista and Ash, Brush and Willow are all what we talked about last week. They're projects where we identified we need to do a pavement project, but we also need to replace our water mains. We had two inch galvanized water mains in a lot of these areas. Sewer lines were not as adequate. So working together, getting both those projects done simultaneously. In the preservation portion of the project, Sorry, my notes are hard to read. Phase one for pavement preservation this year is right off the curve on Sheldon Street, the area right below that. That is Bradshaw Drive, Newport, McDonald, and we're gonna include North Mount Vernon in this. That'll be a thin overlay with some cape seal. That's the first phase we're doing. We anticipate about a $3 million budget for that. Phase two will be the ranch areas, the south ranch, which will include micro seal, scrub seal, and cape seals. That will be about $2 million. And then the area you see in the north side of town, and I'll just highlight some of the more, there's a lot of streets, but I'll just kind of highlight some of the ones that are more familiar, but Delano, Barmar, which is on the right-hand side of Campbell near Taylor Hicks, and then Prescott Heights, black and north side, and Walnut, which is adjacent to Willow Creek Road. Again, micro seals, some seal coat. That'll be our third phase, and approximately $2 million are earmarked for that project this year. Any questions?

Sounds pretty extensive and much needed. It is.

So as Gwen mentioned, we're doing a project up in Yampi Hills. Again, about three years ago, we had a pretty substantial microburst that hit this area. And while we were fortunate that no homes got flooded, water went places it wasn't designed to go. So it impacted some properties. One of the things we did was work with the HOA. In the picture on the left, you can see just on the center picture, you see a deeper cut there. That had silted in, and water was coming off the slope upstream of that, so it wasn't hitting the drainage structure it was designed to do. The Up High Hills HOA invested $125,000 in improving their drainage issues that they're obligated to maintain. Projects currently out to bid. We're opening bids next week on Thursday, on the 28th. The engineer's estimate is approximately $778,000. It'll include upgrades to catch basins. I'm drawing a blank on the name of the street, but the house on the corner in the right-hand picture, it'll include a new drainage ditch behind the curb of substantial size, down to a new drainage structure just below that, and hopefully we'll capture all that water that that created the problems we had three years ago.

Where does that water go, that storm water?

Gwen, can you go to the big map? I think we might be able to see it there. This one? No, the drive map. That's okay.

This one.

Yeah, it's kind of hard to see in the picture, but if you kind of follow the two arrows that are pointing down, the one on the left, just to the left of that near the top, right by the dialog box, there's a drainage detention basin, retention basin, and that water kind of flows through some existing drainage ways and flows to that location. And so what happened in the, could you slide that down just a little bit? And I might be able to point it out better. No, the other way, I'm sorry. Yeah. Like I said, it's just right up there. You kind of see a blank spot in that little box right next to the dialog box and the arrows. And that's where everything kind of flows up there right now. You can kind of see a path that flows in that direction. I'd run up there and point at it if I could. But like I said, when the subdivision was built, it was designed to follow through areas it had historically done. Like I said, with a retention area in that subdivision as well. Over time, off-site drainage ditches had filled up. and so water started jumping out of the designed areas. It started going places it hadn't gone previously, and so it was impacting how flood water works there.

Yeah, it's a challenging area because it's very, very steep.

Very large drainage area.

All right, if we don't have any questions, we'll move on to some other capital projects that we have going on in Public Works. One of them is the second phase of the relocation of our street maintenance division to the south side of Sundog Ranch Road. I'll show you a site plan of that. And then we're gonna talk a little bit about some things that are happening out at Willow Lake that are not very fun. Okay, so Brady's going to talk about the new street, the second phase of street maintenance facility.

Good afternoon again. So on this aerial map you can kind of see the proposed location of where this improvement project is going to happen. Streets admin building used to be on the other side over by the transfer station. They relocated in FY26 and this second phase is going to be part of this project. Right now we're in the design phase, about 15% design. The project's going to include, have a couple different components. Right now we have two existing drying beds that are used by the street maintenance team as well as the utilities team. So we would be removing one and then upgrading another bed. As you can see on the map, there's also a proposed covered snow material area. So when we mix those cinders and have them ready to go for the storm, they do need to be covered under roof for our permit required. As well as there's street operations material storage bins. So on any given day we might need some riprap, AB or cold patch depending on the season. So we have material bins that'll hold those materials and they can go back to the yard, load those up. It would also include a wash rack on that side of the road. We don't have a wash rack for the utilities team. Most everybody's been coming over to the transfer station to rinse off vehicles after storms are getting dirty or mud. So this will provide them a wash rack right next to the drying bed so the combo trucks and the Vactor trucks can get cleaned off after being out on a job. As well as it's going to include paving the surface and surrounding areas. So the access road, the existing spreaders, Those have been there for a few years and ultimately this is just going to tie this project in. So everything street maintenance related is going to be on one side of the road rather than two. All their materials, all their equipment are all going to be in one location.

Madam Mayor, may I? Yes. Brady, when it snows, what do we put down on the streets?

So Councilman Gampoggi, we use just cinders depending on the storm as well as an ice slicer like an ice melt product.

Is that anything like salt?

I would say that it has components of that, but we only use that typically after a storm, just on the bridge areas or shaded areas just to bust that out.

Thank you.

Any other questions in regards to site improvement project?

Okay. So I'm gonna have Matt Killeen come up and we're gonna talk a little bit about some things that have been happening out at Willow Lake and what we're gonna do to address it.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. So for orientation here, I think we have some decent landmarks, but this is the southeast corner of Willow Lake Park. You can access it probably easiest by parking behind the dog park and heading towards the lake. One nuance to the site is that while it is city-owned property, it is technically outside of the city boundary line. And as such, the floodplain regulations are not administrated by the city, you as the floodplain administration board, but rather the Yavapai County Flood Control District. Earlier this year, as part of the Willow Lake management plan, early field trips, we noticed that there were a significant amount of stockpiles identified by project location one and two on the map you're currently looking at. Knowing how close we were to Willow Creek, further desktop review revealed that a significant amount, 2.8 acres, had been impacted by effectively wildcat dumping. This happened, initiated in the summer of 2023, and it happened extensively for a while. It was an unsecured site for the first couple of years. It currently is now locked. But the site had dumping stockpiles placed by virtually every city department and division, as well as what we suspect would be private-side contractors as well. Quite frankly, we don't have the forensic ability to go back and figure out which pile belongs to which person. But we do know that it represents a pretty significant disturbance to a natural area that has threatened and endangered species in close proximity. Being in the floodplain, it is in a special flood hazard area, and so it needs to be rectified. Currently, we are getting better estimates through the city surveyor to understand exactly the extent and content of all of those piles so we can start thinking about proper disposal methods. on the, I guess you would call it a silver lining to this issue, is that Fish and Wildlife Service, as they have been involved in the Willow Lake Management Plan, don't really see this as a terrible thing, rather they see it as an opportunity So approximately a week and a half ago, we had initial conversations with Fish and Wildlife Service to use this site once those stockpiles have been removed and disposed of properly to create an experimental design for restoration of impacted areas with a focus on enhancing the habitat for pollinators. So currently they are reviewing their Partners for Fish and Wildlife grant funding that would be available for us to restore this once those stockpiles are removed. What is before you in the budget today is to dispose of these stockpiles in an appropriate manner. And with that, I'd be happy to take any questions.

Thank you, that was pretty comprehensive. Mr. Gehring, did you have any comments? Okay, thank you.

All right, before we wrap up the Street Fund, are there any questions for Public Works?

No, I just wanted to thank you and your team for your 24-hour round-the-clock work.

You all do a great job. Thank you.

As with last week, I have a few financial slides as we move through Public Works. Again, this is looking under the hood of the hard work the staff does to project financials in each of the funds that Public Works operates in, especially to balance our five-year capital plan, so we know for sure that what we're putting forward to council is fundable, or we have a funding plan behind it. As Gwen went through the funding sources, They should look familiar, but we do in the streets fund have the sales tax 1% local tax levy Next year expected to bring in twenty three point five higher highway users revenue is shared from the state I have a few slides after this I've added because Council asked the question a couple weeks ago about what does it look like statewide for that revenue source? So I have some information but you'll notice that 25 was $4.8 million. It went up in 26 and then back down in 27. And the reason as we investigate, the reason is we talked earlier this week or this year about Santan Valley coming on board as a new municipality in Arizona. That decreased the share by 2% across the board for all municipalities, as well as that is impacted by the city of Prescott's growth compared to communities in Arizona. We also have combined impact fees here for presentation since some projects are funded from both Streets Fund and Streets Impact Fee, but they are tracked separately.

Lars, I have a question. Our 1% sales tax for streets, I understand that has to be renewed by the voters every 10 years. Do you know when that's up next?

Good question, Mayor. The last ballot initiative was 20 years, and so we have until December 31st, 2035 for that. So we're basically nine and a half years left on that previous ballot.

A little breathing room.

So the revenue total in 27 is $31.8 million. Then we have the bond proceeds we're expecting to finance the low water crossing for Phippen Trail since that is actually 100% funded through impact fees which then get paid over time. As we spend the money, you'll see the $13.8 million is allocated towards operational expenses and then the remainder gets allocated towards capital. The fund balance allows us to spend basically accumulations from previous years. The key to know this is working right on our forecast is to look at the last year of the plan and have it highlighted on the screen. With all the capital and operation spending with projected revenues, we'd end this five-year plan at $5.9 million, roughly $6 million in fund balance. It's a good measure to look at. It is decreasing as we're spending money to improve streets and The rate at which we spend or we budget typically doesn't track to actual, so we'll monitor it as we progress. But this does give you indication of how the streets projects are funded. I had a few slides. I'll send these to council and post them on the website after regarding HEERF. The diagram on the left is how this her fund is allocated throughout the state. And there's a bunch of different revenue sources that go into the pot and then by statute they're allocated. So cities and towns get 27.5% of this pool of money. And then from there it gets spread out to the cities based on two factors. One is Prescott's population as it relates to incorporated city population in the state, and then the county fuel sales of origin factor. Those all play into how these numbers work out. But we looked at ADOT has an official forecast on the HEERF fund. They're projecting it to continue to grow at 2.1% annually. Interesting to note that the 18% gas tax has not changed since 1990. It's not indexed inflation. Revenue does increase as we get population and spending, of course. But the biggest challenge is that $0.18 used to buy you a lot more in 1990. The County Supervisors Association resource said that they estimate the buying power now compared to 1990 is 30% of what it used to be. So that's the biggest challenge for us as people trying to, government trying to maintain our roads is that the buying power definitely hasn't decreased, especially in the last five years as inflation has increased.

And EVs, electric vehicles, use our roads, but since they don't use gas, they don't pay into the maintenance.

Correct, and that's a recent conversation the state level has been having is how to deal with that scenario. And here's just the numbers from that forecast. You can see the cities and towns portion increasing in 2% a year. That then gets spread across all the incorporated municipalities. And that's the follow-up from a question a couple weeks ago. I thought it was relevant to bring up today since we're talking streets. And with that, I'm ready to turn it back over to Public Works.

Thank you, Lars. So we're going to move on to the last division of Public Works, which is solid waste. And Brady Higgs is going to help us go through this conversation. So solid waste, again, is an enterprise fund. It's funded by the rates that we charge citizens for the service. We have about 25,000 residential customers on our trash routes, our recycle routes, as well as about 1,500 commercial contracts that we do. Residential use of city services is required, but commercial is not. So from fiscal year 26 to fiscal year 27, you can see that we've got about $350,000 increase. That's not going to add up to the changes that I'm going to go into. We have some increases in hauling fees as well as increases in tipping fees, which is about $400,000 for fiscal year 27. The only reason we were able to balance these numbers is because we deferred purchase of vehicles in fiscal year 26 and we're deferring purchase of vehicles again fiscal year 27. Unfortunately the last rate study that we did did not keep up with inflation and therefore the fund balance is short. So we've deferred vehicle purchases to help offset that but that is not going to be enough to get us to the end of the current rate study. As we go through this we're going to talk about how we see a way forward, what we need to do. If you watch the news at all, and Brady will go into more detail on this, but if you watch the news at all, you'll see that there are at least four valley cities that I can recall in the last couple of months that have significantly raised their rates in relation to trash hauling and solid waste services. Unfortunately, the chipping fees and the hauling costs are one of the most expensive things we do next to buying and replacing vehicles. We try to keep the age of our fleet somewhere between 7 and 10 years. With this deferment two years in a row, we will have four of our 25 vehicles will be over 10 years of age. So we have to make a change. We have to look at how we do things a little bit differently, and we're going to do that. So I'm going to turn it over to Brady. He's going to talk a little bit about... some minor changes we're making in our operations, and then we're going to talk about the rates and how we're going to take our next steps.

Thank you. I think we'd appreciate a plan going forward how we can keep this enterprise fund in the black because it's currently in the red, and we need to look at some implications and mitigations that we can take on. Thank you. All right.

All right. Once again, Brady Higgs. Two big standout items in our budget for the solid waste budget. One is going to be a lithium battery drop-off program. You can see that photo in the top right. It's reality. There's a lot of, you know, just everyday consumer products that have lithium ion batteries in them. And as soon as they have just a little bit of pressure, whether it's from the packer rubbing against other material, Or in our transfer station, when we push and load the trash into the transfer trailers, it immediately sparks up. This program we're looking to implement, there are some battery drop-off areas, but some of them are limited. And ultimately, if we're not going to accept them, people are not going to have an option to get rid of them. They're going to go in the trash can, which goes into the truck.

Madam Mayor, may I? Yes, Ted. So we're not talking about Tesla EV batteries, we're just talking about everyday use lithium batteries.

Yes, sir. We've had nine fires in the last two years. Wow. It's an issue that we have to address and the way we would like to address it is to provide a place for people to take them.

And this could take place even in the truck?

the fire is almost always in the truck while the truck is moving before the driver realizes that there's smoke or flame coming out the back of the truck.

Yeah, and just to kind of go on some of those, we are going to look at doing it similar to kind of how we do our household hazardous waste collection. Obviously, these would be stored in fire-rated containers and then ultimately picked up and disposed of through a third-party contractor that would go and dispose them. So they would just be temporarily on site and come pick them up as they come in. But the everyday products that we're talking about, I mean, phones, tablets, battery banks, portable chargers, toothbrush, vacuums, e-cigs, vapes, all these things that end up being disposable or live their life and end up getting pitched into the trash or into the container, these are the items that we're talking about. Second bullet point is going to be inert debris crushing as well as our millings pile. So located out of the transfer station, we have an inert debris pile which is concrete, asphalt, rock, dirt. We collect that material throughout the course of several years. Right now, we're on our third year of collecting this material. Typically, we're about 7,000 tons a year is what we take in from self-haul customers. So we avoid this from going to the landfill and paying those hauling costs and those disposal costs. We end up storing it on site. We'll have a contractor come in, crush this material into about an inch and a quarter product. And then we reuse it for city projects. Both the street maintenance build, admin building, and the spreader racks were both built on top of this material. It's good for access roads, for our utilities team, as well as Parks and Rec has used some for some other projects throughout the city. So it's kind of that full cycle of people using it, removing it, taking it in, crushing it. and putting it back out there. So, like I said, this is proposed in FY27, and this will be the inert debris pile, as well as the millings pile that's kind of co-located. That's managed by street maintenance. They take in projects that they accomplish throughout the year, as well as capital improvement projects. And I'm going to say we are kind of in the ballpark of that 20,000 to 25,000 tons in each pile that we currently have in our nearing capacity. So getting into a couple of the other things that Gwen had talked about before, you know, expenses, outpacing revenues. That chart on the left is depicting hauling and disposal costs from 2020 to 2025. Ultimately, with those numbers, we're seeing a 48.5% increase. When we actually break those numbers down, hauling costs alone in 2020 were $850,000. In 2025, they were $1.7 million, so about a 104% increase just in hauling.

Did I hear that we only have one bidder and just one person, one company that does the hauling?

Correct, Mayor. Yeah, when we put that out to bid, there was one bidder. And when we put it out five years before that, there was only two bidders. So it's not like we're getting a big influx from... Why is that? I think it's just the area. I mean, these are specialized vehicles. They're transfer trailers that have walking floors at the landfill. Some landfills have tip-to-dumps where they have a tipper and it dumps it out. The landfill at Gray Wolf doesn't have that, so it's walking floor trailers, so it's slats that work back and forth and pumps the material out. So it's kind of specialized. So I think not having tippers, there's a handful of people that aren't going to come up, and ultimately do they have that regional presence to make it worth their while to come out here and bid.

Yeah. Would it be worth doing a cost-benefit analysis to see if maybe we could acquire those type of trucks and just do it ourselves? Because we're kind of hamstringed when you only have one bidder and no competition. You beat us to the punchline. Oh, okay.

Yeah, we'll talk about that here in two slides. Just kind of breaking those numbers down again on that left side of that graph, disposal costs during that same time period from 2020 to 2025, they went from $2.5 million to $3.4 million. These escalating costs are driven by higher fuel prices, transportation, regional disposal rates, and just overall inflation affecting the solid waste industry. The chart on the right talks about the collection vehicles that Gwen had spoke about of deferring vehicles in FY26 and proposing deferring vehicles in FY27. During that same time period, 2020 to 2025, vehicle replacement costs increased by 50%, going from $300,000 to $450,000 for spec'ing the same vehicle. Maybe it has some new technology in it, but tires, frame, engine, transmission, not changing the spec, just what the industry is. And in that piece, it's just, it's made it unsuitable for us to have, you know, a... a vehicle replacement program that we can follow. Ultimately, looking at the fund, talking with Gwen and talking with Lars, I mean, we simply just can't purchase some of these vehicles. And she had talked about, you know, the vehicles and the average age. I mean, you know, pushing stuff has to make sense in the short term until we can get things straightened away. Obviously, you run the risk of, you know, higher maintenance costs, equipment downtime, but that's just something that is part of it and us trying to go through that, which we'll kind of go into this next slide and talk about kind of a path forward. So what we're proposing in the FY27 budget is obviously we have our current rates today that were part of the previous rate and fee study for residential monthly fees, commercial monthly fees, and then our transfer station rate. What we're looking to do is get started and initiate a rate and fee study in July. So just here in a month and a half. Do the study. We'll have them on our next slide. We're going to get into kind of the nitty-gritty of what we're looking at considering self-haul, some of the other things. But ultimately, do a full-blown rate and fee study. We have a good capital outlay plan for vehicle replacements and schedules and trying to keep that average age between that, you know, 7 to 10 year mark and earmarking all those and ultimately come back to you guys with a proposal for what monthly rates for... you know, residential and commercial. And granted, there's ancillary fees in there too, so inside residential fee, outside of the monthly fee, if you're a larger family and need an additional can, there's a charge for that. So it's not just solely the monthly fee. There's going to be other fees that are associated with that. We also have special event fees that we touch on. So if somebody comes and has some type of event in the city and they want an extra garbage can, or a handful of cardboard containers, we have fees in place for those. So they would look at the entirety of that, and ultimately we would come back for a study session or a voting meeting, present the findings to you, recommendation, and have that conversation then. And that's proposed to be in mid-FY27.

Madam Mayor, may I? Yes. Do you have an idea what the rates are in Chino and PV? No. So let's just take one, say residential rates.

Yeah, so obviously in having some of these conversations, looking at some of the valley cities, looking at some of the private haulers in the area, I'd say that rates and fees vary between specific areas and how much participation is in those areas. So we saw rates anywhere from $21 a month to $40 a month, but that was only for one single trash can picked up weekly. If you wanted a recycle container, you might be paying double that cost. And then there was no consideration for the hazardous household waste, the Christmas tree collection, the brush pickup. Those weren't in those fees at all, but rates ranged from $21 to $40, kind of scanning the area.

So basically we were offering Cadillac service at Chevy prices.

And I would also say that we're not in the business of making a profit. We don't make a profit here at the City of Prescott, whereas Chino and PV and the county, they use private haulers, and they're in the business of making money. So the cost, depending on where you're located, vary quite a bit, even if you're using a private hauler, depending on how far they have to go, how much gas they have to use, those kinds of things. So that's why they vary so much.

And also I hope you're gonna discuss a little bit about our, we have an agreement with the county. I was surprised at how much service we provided to county residents. I initially thought way back when that it was just for city residents, but we've somehow expanded to include a lot of services to our county neighbors too.

Yeah, Mayor. So this next slide kind of just talks about just kind of a brief overview of what this study is ultimately going to look at. Items to be addressed included inside the residential service is monthly rates and fees. Those are just us picking up the can, the garbage in the recycle can weekly. Animal proof containers, additional containers, additional recycle containers, there's ways to evaluate these. The additional services, which is in the purple on that flowchart that talks about the Christmas trees, the HHW, the bulk item, and the brush. I mean, those are things that I feel like are important to this community. I feel like a lot of people use them. Right now we're full-blown on our brush pickup. And I think that people are super appreciative of it and getting prepared for that wildland fire season. So there is a handful of things. I think it's just going to be a determination of how much are those services going to be worth in that monthly rate. To your point of talking about the IGA and our transfer station rates, there's two things. It talks about just our tonnage rates. So we have three different primary rates at the transfer station. We have a rate for trash. We have a rate for brush, and we have a rate for inert debris that comes in. So those are the three primaries, but it doesn't matter if you're city versus county, and that's something that we could look at, which is proposed on there for that county IGA.

Yeah, and I'd also like to add, I looked at my water bill and saw that I only pay like $6 a week. It's like $24 a month for trash and recycle pickup, and then all these other amenities too.

And then as well in that transfer station bullet point, we also have the consideration in doing a cost-benefit analysis of self-hauling. I think it needs to be something that we seriously look at rather than going into another rate and fee study and then repeating history of three years into that rate and fee study, the bid goes back out and maybe we have one or two bidders, but the price goes up another year. I think that we can look at that and ultimately set ourself up to be able to, obviously it's gonna be an increase in vehicle acquisition and personnel to be able to do that operation, but if it's able to stabilize the rates, over a long period of time as well as looking at the funding options for getting that equipment, I think that that'll stabilize the rates and allow us to keep them as low as we possibly can rather than having a contractor and being at the mercy of whatever happens to be at that point. One other thing that I just wanted to touch on, I know we had kind of briefly touched on it, but just, you know, we're not the only city facing this. I know back in March, I mean, Phoenix had a large increase. It was all over the news. I mean, they went from $42 a month to $51 a month for residential. City of Buckeye is going from $25.53 to $31.46 a month for residential service. Tempe is currently at $31.28. They're doing a rate and fee presentation to their council in July of raising the rates 12% to 15%, as well as the City of Surprise going from $24.76. And in 2028, they're going to be at $31.54. I mean, ultimately, these vehicle costs, these hauling costs, these disposal costs, I think you're just catching up with people. I think one consideration, too, that we had talked about is maybe not looking at a five-year forecast. You know, if all these prices continue to go up, maybe we need to take a smaller chunk and maybe look at a three-year. So that way we're not trying to project things, you know, going back to 2020, what it was going to be in 2025. Maybe we take a smaller snapshot and be able to forecast a little bit better.

And do you have the number off the top of your head how much your tonnage has increased over the last couple of years? Because I imagine your workload has really increased.

So it fluctuates. You know, typically we collect roughly about 30 to 35,000 tons in our collection vehicles. And then our self-haul tonnage at the transfer station fluctuates anywhere from about 27 to about 35,000 tons. Um, just kind of depends. I mean, we don't know how many people are going to decide to turn left or right on sundog ranch road and come down and use us. Um, but I know that in our rate study, um, I think that there was some over projections on how much tonnage was going to come in that did factor into some of the revenue numbers, um, about how many people, but it's just tough. Whereas that weekly collection or that weekly commercial service, that tonnage stays pretty consistent. Um, but the self-haul is the big question that fluctuates

Yes, Jim. So a question I have is I assume this new rate study is going to look pretty hard at all these issues on solid waste division issues. services, such as core additional services. And I'm wondering if any thought is currently given to changing core additional services to basically be an enterprise operation.

That could be looked at, Councilman Gearing, if that was something that we want to, and ultimately we haven't kicked that study off. So if that's something that we want to look at in those core additional services is that they pay for themselves and is an option for participation, I think that that's something that we could definitely look at as part of this study.

I agree, yeah. And those are only offered for Prescott residents, right?

Yeah, City of Prescott residential trash users, yes.

Yeah, we have to remember, we have to balance our rates and our programs so that we don't have people just dumping things out in the forest because it's cheaper and easier. So we got to keep that in mind too.

All right, that's a very good point, Mayor. And so in solid waste, we have 42.75 employees. That has not changed with the same number of employees in solid waste division. Lars is going to come up and talk a little bit about fund balance for solid waste. Are there any other questions for staff? That's the end of our presentation for Public Works. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

So I did two financial models for the solid waste fund. Just to illustrate, number one is what's in the budget currently. We had to pick something for revenues since we knew we were going to study it. Earlier when we came to council, I think it was the mid-year, we brought up the challenge that we're facing. brought to your attention, we thought, OK, well, we could do an interim rate increase using the last year of the rate study. So on this chart on the slide, you'll notice the bottom section has the current rate study. As Brady mentioned, we adopted five years of rates. And what he mentioned was, OK, maybe we should look at three years instead of five. But we did do five years. Our proposal at the time was let's take the last year the rate study and adopt it sooner So we put that those numbers in the budget Just to start with something so The revenues reflect that The Challenges those revenues with that fee level don't cover operations even and So fiscal year 27 projection column, that would be a $15.5 million revenue increase slightly from 26. Operating expenditures are expected to be at 16.7, so we'd be in a deficit of 1.2 million. So just to illustrate to council not to circumvent this rate and comprehensive rate study, which I think is still needed, I just did a financial model of, okay, what do they need to be using high-level numbers, not evaluating service changes. So you keep status quo, what the rates need to be. So that's what scenario two looks like. And this can be modeled in several ways, this is one option that we could look at. You'll notice the effective date of the change would be October 1st. So this would be if council wanted to do something quick. Posting a 60-day notice is required. So we'd have that and the 30-day delayed effective with council action. So you need 90 days. So I used October 1st to be the first realistic change in rates. Here's the assumptions in the financial model is that the base monthly rate would be $31 a month.

Mayor? Yes, Jim. So, Laura, if you go back to scenario one for me, thanks. I noticed that the fund balance doesn't drop into the negative until fiscal year 28. And so I'm wondering if we're going to have our rate study done in time to adjust rates before that.

Good question, Councilmember. Actually, the 27 column goes negative, so the ending for this next fiscal year is projected to be in the deficit.

Yes, but we still have a fund balance in 27.

We start the fund balance, so the bottom July 1st, the estimated fund balance is $461,000. Oh, yeah, I see. It's a million dollars in the red in 27. So next year, we're projecting to be in the red. And the challenge is... There's restricted fund balance here that we're already using to offset this. Recollect, every customer pays $0.50 a month for landfill closure effects. That's restricted in nature. So that balance shouldn't be used to offset operations, but we're already using it now. And that's why we're saying we're in a deficit, even though it doesn't next. And the financial model is not happening until this next fiscal year. So yes, that happens in 27.

So the way to stop that is adopt scenario two then?

Scenario two is an example of an illustration we put together on what the rates, keeping everything the same, would look like need to be. And this is a high level, as I said, using current tonnage, current service levels. monthly base rate for residential would be $31 going up a dollar a year after that so you'll see when you have like a larger increase up front to catch us up and then incremental increases after that that's what we're expecting is needed to bring us out of this hole.

Well you know when I go downtown it's like seven dollars for a chai latte and I'm paying six dollars a week for solid waste service. I think it's I think we're definitely undercharging for our services here and we need to fix it.

Yeah, good point, May. There's two ways to go about it. To get out of this deficit, we increase revenues or decrease expenses and... Or decrease services.

Yep. And we are a full service city.

Correct. Commercial also would be changing by 16% in this scenario already and then 4% after that. Same thing with transportation. You'll see a large increase up front and then incrementally $5 per ton per year for tipping fees. Now this is what that would look like implementing October 1st. We would have a positive 959,000 on net operations. And then by fiscal year 30, the fund would generate enough revenue to begin paying for vehicles without taking loans. So it would take us still a few years to dig out of the hole of having to loan to pay for vehicle replacements, which in turn off increases operations. So we have this balancing act to do. But we just need to jump a bit to create the capacity to get out of the hole. So this is a scenario that we wanted to bring up as a possibility. I also model, okay, well, October 1st is really quick, so what was January 1st look like for this scenario too? It brings the net operations in 27 to about 250,000. It's still positive if we can do it January 1st. And that's kind of our goal for the rate and fee study is to get something quickly in place by January 1st if possible.

Okay. Any comments? Mr. Geary?

So, Lars, would you envision then that if the rates shown in Scenario 2 are adopted relatively soon and then the rate study generates a little bit different rates than what Scenario 2 has, then we do a course correction on rates?

That's a good question. Just to clarify to council, we're not like proposing two rate increases. We wanted to do a full study to do it once. So we're not hitting our customers with a rate increase and then coming back and actually we need more. So this is just to illustrate to you what on a high level, what kind of increases we're looking at.

But it does look like we're going to be close to a million dollars in a hole no matter what we do.

Unless we adopt fees sufficient to cover, we can do that. But yes, it's an immediate need, to your point, something we need to act on.

Yeah, and this isn't something that just happened overnight. It's been kind of creeping up on us over the years.

Yes, we... Maybe let's say the second year of the rate study, we started to notice revenues not coming in as projected and started analyzing the situation. So preparing last year's budget, we didn't have quite two full years of history to look at. So about midway in this rate study, we noticed that things aren't going to work out as intended. If there's no other conversation on solid waste, we can jump to the wrap up. So as part of the budget adoption, this would be the fourth year that this is in place, the approved expenditure list is called AEL. In the procurement code, it's a form of authorization, council authorization to move forward with procurement without it coming back to you in a specific council meeting. Departments have put certain operating items on the list, and then we put the full capital plan, so basically any project that's in fiscal year 27 starting. A new project is on that list without deciding for you. We wanted to put that on there. So basically we're asking council to look at the list, not necessarily tell us today. It's been attached to the May 11th meeting. I'm not sure if it's on current today, but the May 11th meeting has the authorized expenditure list. So we just want council to look at that and then give us feedback when we come back on May 26th on items you'd like removed. We will adopt this.

Did you say, excuse me, did you say items to be moved or removed?

If you would like something to be removed from the AEL.

Do you know what page that is in the budget?

It's a separate attachment that was in May 11th. Oh, that's right.

Okay, I got it. Okay. Oh, yeah, right here.

This is it. You have a lot of attachments, I'm sure. This budget's been overwhelming, lots of detail.

Okay, got it.

And this on the screen is to summarize the AEL. It's a quick reference to our procurement code. There's a lot more detail in the procurement code. This helps you identify the thresholds at which council approves versus departments. and city managers. So for goods and services and professional services, the approval level for council is 50,000 in the procurement code, unless it's on the approved expenditure list. So years ago, there was some talk about how to make council meetings more strategic in nature. There's a lot of routine things showing up on your council meetings because of this low threshold for approval. So this approved expenditure list was an idea that allowed some flexibility and that council could give some approval on items that you're fine with them moving forward at this point. The finance department.

Would some of these items be administratively approved then?

So they basically go through full procurement process and finance does that compliance assurance for the city. We make sure before a purchase order or contract is issued that there's proper procurement followed. And then once that's done, we look at, okay, is this procurement on the AEO? If yes, that goes for signatures, mayor's signatures still on there with the city attorney and city clerk. But then if it's not, then it shows up on a council meeting. Does that help?

Okay. And what about changes? to the contract change orders?

That's an excellent question. So the amount that's on the approved list is basically approved. We have a change order limit of 50,000. So if that change is less than 50, it could be Included as if on the AEL, but if it's over 50,000 that has to come to a council meeting. Okay. There is a 20% scope change. That also is a threshold that would force it to come to city council.

It always struck me as ironic when a contractor would put in a bid and we'd hire them and then they start digging and it's like, oh my gosh, there's granite. Who knew? And then they'd, you know, come back to us for more money.

Changes do happen, but we do have a specific language around that in the procurement code that kind of directs what to do on approvals.

Before we finish up, I would appreciate if you'd go into a little scenario about our debt, how much debt we have. and what percentage, but Mr. Grady.

Could I ask another? Can I ask another question on the authorized expenditure list before we do the discussion on debt service? Sorry, this is all new to me. What is it that actually qualifies, and how do you make decisions on what qualifies as an authorized expenditure? I mean, are these the same items that were approved in last year's budget, but they're higher dollar amounts? What's the history to some of this?

Yeah, that's a good point. What shows up on the authorized expenditure list are new things or basically an end of a contract. So as part of the budget preparation departments identify items that they need in their operations that will be a new contract or a new procurement and they put that as a request to include on the packet. And then we put the full capital plan if it was in let's say it's a three-year term contract and It was approved in last year's AEL that doesn't necessarily show up on this list until it expires So it's new items that are recurring annual purchases Madam Mayor may I yes

On this chart, Lars, is this current or is this what you're asking for?

This is current procurement code.

So an item that costs $50,000 has to come to the city council?

That's correct, unless it's on the approved expenditure list.

That seems way too low to me.

Yeah, good point. We want to make sure that we are as efficient as possible and don't get bogged down with some of the minutiae. But we are talking about taxpayer dollars. So we got to look at it both ways.

Yeah, and that's, council can give direction to city manager and finance to evaluate the procurement code and come back with the proposal. But this is current in city code.

I'd bump it to 100. and move the next category from 100 up to 150.

Mayor, I've got a question.

Yes, Mr. Goering.

So, Lars, I'm still troubled by our solid waste situation. And tell me if I've got this right. If we don't institute an interim rate increase by the July 9th budget adoption, Solid waste is going to be a million dollars give or take in the hole. Is that right? Correct. So we've got to make an adjustment in this upcoming budget to avoid that if we want to.

That's correct. And that's where the rate study has been proposed that we could address that situation.

just to make sure we have the dates right on that. So with the budget adoption and no interim rate situation, the million dollar deficit comes into effect at the end of fiscal year 27. So it would be a million dollars in the hole at this time next year. There's still the fund balance there now of about a little over $400,000. There's a little window, but you're going to get closer and closer if you don't have the interim. It seems unlikely to me just assuming proportional spending throughout the 12 months of the year. That means you've really got maybe a third of the year until you get to the red. Without some action, then three or four months into the fiscal year, we'll be into a deficit. But it's not July 1. It's October. Madam Mayor, may I?

Yes, Ted.

So we know what the surrounding communities charge. We can calculate what we need not to lose money. What are we going to learn in a rate study?

That's a good question. I think it's really up to council how they want to approach this issue. fee increase and to justify the need.

Priority one is we don't lose money.

The study I did was extremely high level, but there's a ton of ancillary fees that the solid waste division charges. They don't necessarily drive the needle. What we talked about were the things that drive really the revenue, which is the residential collection fee, the tipping fee, and the commercial rate.

You went through scenario one and scenario two. I don't drink chai lattes, but to the mayor's point, those increases seem minimal, and that brings us from a negative to a positive. I think you have everything you need to make a rate change, and I would support scenario two.

So you were talking about like an interim rate increase until we can do the more comprehensive study so that we don't die by death by a thousand cuts. We have the facts and the data and then we can just do a study and a increase and that'll be it.

That's one way to go about it. We could do an internal study of rate increases, adopt that sooner, and then spend more time on a rate study.

Because we need to do a comprehensive one that involves our county partner and our county customers to make sure they're paying their fair share because it's very convenient to come to our transfer stations Because the county, you know, they'll drop off what they call a roll-off every once in a while when it's time to do a community cleanup. And so using our facility is very convenient.

Thanks.

Sorry, I just have a comment to make. The city and the county currently have an IGA for use of the transfer facility, which requires us to charge county residents the same rate as city residents. So unless we make a decision where we have different paths from the county in terms of the use of the facility, County residents currently receive the same rate. So we'd like to explore that. We'd like to explore the self-hauling, as Brady explained, and some other things. So I do believe that the rate study is needed. But whether you do an interim fee or not, that's at council's discretion.

OK.

Would adopting scenario two allow us to do the rate study with a bit less pressure and be able to take more time with it?

Yeah, for sure. We'd have more leeway to spend on that rate study. In City Code, there's two more rate increases, one program for January 1st of 27 and one for 28. So at the minimum, we'd have to sort of address that part in City Code with... proper noticing and justification.

I'd like to ask our city manager for his wise input.

Oh, that's a pretty high threshold. But what makes sense to me and what I think Council Member Ruby was just alluding to is with an interim step, you have the ability to be very thoughtful about the study. You have time for whatever conversations, public discussion that you might feel are necessary. There's always an opportunity in the study to look at different aspects. If Council wants to talk about We may get into other conversations, right? Do we want to be doing recycling pickup every week or every other week? Do we want to be doing certain drop-off options at the transfer station? There's a lot of different things we could do. And more taking the pressure off gives council the time to go through any of those options that you'd like to go through. And then we can implement based on that direction.

Yeah, thank you.

Can you reiterate, Lars, the optimal timeline for the soonest positive impact from scenario two?

Right, so we would, the earliest we could implement would be October 1st. We need 90 days with proper noticing and statute for changes to fees. So we would have to publish that notice. We have council action. sometime at the end of September at the latest. So we'd have to publish sometime, and that brings us into July, if I'm doing my numbers right. We have to publish a notice in July to make that happen. And then between then and the notice, we have to prepare justification, documentation as to why this is needed. So the earliest we could do it is October 1st.

And that would require council action before July 1st?

Council action wouldn't actually happen until the 60-day notice had been published. So that would be sometime in September. Actually, sorry, August, because we need 30-day effective dates.

Yeah, and this is, we can't take a vote now or anything because this is just a study session. But it is definitely food for thought. We need to look into this more as to which scenario would be the best, the least painful.

So I got it clear in my head if I just read it one more time. So the meeting for council would have to be adopting the rates end of August, because that would give us at least 30 days for an effective date. We'd have to publish the notice, the six-day notice, by the end of June. So we'd have like 30 days to make this happen.

Thank you.

Okay, so maybe just get this on the agenda.

This could be an item too if council wants to on the 26th. We're going to bring back a number of items and this could be one related to the budget. This could be one that we just revisit just to confirm that council is feeling good about scenario two and then we'll get to work on noticing and get that done in June.

Okay, good plan. Another question I have is our contingency fund. How much did you budget for the contingency fund? If I remember, was it $30 million or something? What?

Mayor, we have a $10 million contingency budget. That's not necessarily funds available. That's budget appropriation that allows some flexibility. Each fund has its own reserves and its own fund balance, which we went through. It's like slide number three of this deck. I could scroll back, but it might take some time.

Oh, that's OK.

In the general fund, actually, I shoot my computer locked up. In the general fund, we have its own reserves. That's the only fund that has unassigned balance, but council has adopted a budget policy that says the minimum fund balance in the general fund is 20% of revenue, and that's allocated. And then each other fund after that in the policy, it's as makes sense for operations, which we do, administratively, we do as a 10%. So each fund has at least 10% besides solid waste available for minimum fund balance. So I can do a recap at the follow-up meeting to revisit that.

Okay. And then my other question is debt. You know, we have to keep our bond rating A plus, whatever it is. And I'm very concerned we seem to be taking on more and more debt as we grow because of growth. And also because we have a lot of aging infrastructure that we're constantly replacing. And then we seem to be doing a lot of development agreements where the infrastructure costs have been transferred to the city rather than borne by the private property owner developer. So could you tell us about how we're doing with our debt?

Yeah, sure. The vast majority of our debt is with utility funds, water, and wastewater to accomplish large-scale projects that are paid for as the useful life is utilized. That's roughly $100 million in currently WIFA loans. Then we have in the streets fund a remaining revenue bond to pay for It's residual from this 89 Granite Dells Parkway interchange and Williamson Valley road widening projects. There's roughly five I think at the end of this year it will be $5 million remaining on that loan. It's expected to be paid off in fiscal year 29. As we evaluate the wastewater fund and the additional debt that we're taking on, there's benchmarks that we use and especially the loan providers look at for making sure it's financially viable to loan us money. They use a coverage ratio of I think I'll get back to you next week with more details, so I'm not misquoting, but they look at the financial viability, and our debt consultants that you heard from in February did that, and they thought everything was going to work out because it's in the rate plan, so we're increasing revenues enough to cover our debt. Now, you mentioned the development projects and development agreement projects. thing to keep in mind on that is we have what's in place impact fee development impact fees that pay for this these projects um they don't pay a hundred percent though it's a fraction of these projects? Several of the projects do, so we create, as we identify the fee amounts, we create an infrastructure improvement plan. And we identify the percent of each project that should be paid for by development. And several of them are 100% paid for by development. Granted, that's over time because we have to build infrastructure and development happens and then pays down those projects.

And that's why it's important that we do the impact fee study every five years to keep up with that. And we probably left, I believe it was 25 million on the table when there was the moratorium and we decided we weren't going to increase the fees. And then we finally, in order to catch up, we did increase the fees and it was unfortunately somewhat of a big surge, but we had to do it.

Yeah, but those fees are specifically governed by statute and we're required to put together this 10-year plan of projects needed to support the development that's been planned.

Okay.

I think that covers it, but I'll have some follow-up for you on the debt at the next workshop.

Okay, moving on to next steps.

So we've extended the offer for council to do one-on-ones with finance. If there's some detailed questions you'd like, we've done some of that already. That's still available. The next step is May 26th. We've moved it to the study session. It was originally planned for the voting meeting, but with the number of items we thought it would be better suited to have at the study session. So next week that's been added. We will come back to you with some of the things that were brought up, questions and feedback from council. I have a list here on the screen, but if there's anything else that you would like to bring up now or to finance or city manager, we can try to prepare something quickly for next week to discuss further.

Okay. Mr. Grady, did you have a comment? Should we go down the row? Some final thoughts from our electeds here. Do you want to start, Mr. Gamboge?

I think everyone made a great presentation. It allowed the community to see what's involved with running the city. And I think you're using, you're prudently using the city funds.

Thank you.

Jim? I'm your man of few words. I agree with Council Member Gamboge.

Record that. That's the second time.

I'll use my own words so it doesn't appear I'm agreeing with Councilman Gamboge. Yeah, I want to thank all of the departments for really some outstanding presentations and presentations that really are looking for the best outcomes for our community. And that just... MAKES ME FEEL THAT THE CULTURE THAT WE'RE TRYING TO CREATE IN THIS COMMUNITY AND PARTICULARLY IN OUR GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE IS DOING WELL. AND I THINK THAT'S A GOOD SIGN. AND YEAH, I THINK THAT SOME OF THE ITEMS THAT HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED HERE ARE THE ONES IN MY MEMORY THAT WE HAD RAISED SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT. Yeah, I like to always go back and kind of double-check my notes, but yeah, thank you very much for all of this.

Okay, Mary? Don't mean to be a broken record, but thank you for all the departments for their presentation. What I particularly like about it for the citizenry is that if they just look at the numbers in the budget, they're pretty eye-popping for citizens people who are just managing their own money and their own lives. And we are talking about millions here, millions there, and pretty soon you're talking about some real money. But the nice thing about the department presentations is that lays out what the city gets for their money. And I don't recall anything within the presentations that were fluffy. They were all things that need to happen. I think people get that they need their potholes fixed and their toilets to flush, and it goes away and does something magic that they don't have to deal with. So I appreciate the presentations because of the balance between the numbers that people can look at and say, well, that's just crazy. But then the discussion about what they get for their money, I think, is very useful. So thank you to everybody. Yeah.

Mr. Ruby. Good work. Let's go home.

Well, is there any public comment out there? We do have some, Mayor. Okay, thank you. First is Grant Quisada.

Hello, Mayor and council members. So my name is Grant Casada. I own Founding Fathers Collective over here on Granite Street. And I'd like to see if possible we can do something about the always present car wrecks that have been happening on Granite and Willis. I know I've talked to several council members in the past. It was a consideration. Our street's also pretty dilapidated, and the dirt parking spot that is on the east side of Granite Street is actually all owned by the city and currently have several city plumbing fixtures that are sticking up out of the ground exposed, and it's only a matter of time before somebody hits them and possibly punctures a pipe. So that's pretty much all I have.

Well, I'd like to thank you on behalf of the people of Prescott for all the time and effort and money that you and your investors have put in to restoring and rehabbing what was actually kind of a rundown, dilapidated area. And you have turned it into quite a wonderful gem, a fabulous attraction. And I think the least we can do is to do our obligation and support you as an entrepreneur to get that road fixed. I mean, it cracks me up to see the dirt parking with the, isn't it fire hoses that you have out there for striping?

Yes, ma'am. I got pretty creative and hit a Prescott fire department and they had some extra hoses. And so we had to cut them up and lay down strips for parking.

Yeah, and we definitely need to do something with that intersection with all the business that you're attracting. So I noticed it wasn't in the five-year capital improvement plan, so I would hope that we would be able to fit that in and get that done sooner than later. Sure.

Thank you for your consideration.

Okay.

Hey, we have a killer block party coming up in May. Okay. Come on down.

All righty.

See you.

Okay. Thanks, Grant. In summary, I'd like to say that as elected officials We have a fiduciary duty to the taxpayers and the people of Prescott to put their best interests first above all else and Also, it's the same with our city staff. They work hard to do what's best for the people of our of our community and where this is probably the most comprehensive budget session I've had in seven years. And I want to thank Lars and the rest of the city staff, the directors, and our city manager for doing this. We've put a lot of time into it, but we've gone over it with a fine-tooth comb. Every governmental entity is going through this process from the federal government all the way down to the local. So we've got a lot of company, but I'm really quite pleased and quite happy with the way the process has played out. So thank you very much. Any more comments? We have one more public comment.

One more. Okay. Raymond Rossi. Okay.

Good afternoon, Mayor and council members. My topic for discussion today seems to be a popular one at today's meeting, and that has to do with traffic flow. Obviously, with the amount of people that are coming in to live in Prescott in recent years, the traffic has increased exponentially, and I feel that anything that we could do that would help increase the traffic flow situation and make things a little better for everyone that's traveling is a good thing. My issue concerns two traffic lights that are on Willow Valley, or Willow Creek Road. At the intersection of Willow Creek and Gale Gardner, you have a light that is very important because that is a main thoroughfare, and you have a lot of traffic there that needs to be dealt with. I did not time how long that light lasts, but For an explanatory reason, let's just say it's a two-minute light. The second light is located at Black and Willow Creek. And that light is coordinated with the previous light on Gale Gardner. So... The traffic flow, however, at Black and Willow Creek is very different. If you come to a stop at that light, obviously, and you look at the north end of those roads, you have medical facilities there, which has... very little traffic going in and out at any particular time. If you look at the west side, the road there, black, just seems to go down to Walmart, and that acts as a shortcut, in my opinion, although I'm sure it's used for other reasons. But it's coordinated with the time. If it's a two-minute light because it's coordinated with the other light, it seems as though that you come up to that light and you look to the left. and there's no cars needing to get out, and you look to the right and there's no cars leading to get out, I was wondering if you could coordinate that light to not last for two minutes. Maybe you could coordinate it to last for 30 seconds because usually there's either no cars or there's just one or two cars that are trying to get out into Willow Creek. It's something to look at. I think it could possibly facilitate a better traffic flow if that's possible.

Well, thank you, Raymond, for your comments and observations. Our traffic engineer is right here, so he was making notes, and he'll look into it. So you're talking black where all those dental offices are? Correct. Yeah. Correct.

Oh, and one other thing. I noticed that I go through there, obviously, several times during the week. And I noticed that I wonder if also you could have that light on the weekends, especially Saturday and Sunday, when those offices are closed. So obviously, there's no traffic coming out of there. And traffic in general, especially on Sunday, is diminished. If you could set that light at black, to be on a weekend run or a midnight run where it's not there for the full two minutes or whatever it's set at.

Yeah, those are good ideas. We have to be careful, though, because sometimes if all the lights are green all at the same time, then it turns into a speedway racetrack. And, you know, it's nice to have a few red lights occasionally.

Yes, yes, I agree.

But thank you very much. I really appreciate your comments.

Well, thank you for the opportunity to speak.

Okay. Okay, any more comments?

Okay, this meeting is adjourned.