City Council - Regular Meeting

You can come in.

There's the thing downstairs at 6. This I just threw my computer in here so I figured I'd at least close the door.

So I got it all set up back there. Oh, cool.

Yeah, so you're all good to go.

You pretty much just have to turn them on and get it all going.

So you're already streaming?

Yeah, already streaming. I have to put the flash drives up and everything. Excellent. So it's all good. Like I said, you just have to go live.

Okay, but like not actually streaming, then, like?

Well, by stream, we just mean we had a splash screen. Okay.

So it might say bad things.

No, no, no. Audio is completely down. Stream is starting soon.

Just make sure that when we do it, we do turn audio back on. Because I think last time you said we didn't realize the audio was off. Oh, yeah.

It should be good. Just that. Yeah. It should be good to go. All right.

okay yeah absolutely

all right

He had the, thanks for watching, screen up. Are we still calling this the Committee of the Whole now, or is it?

No, I think it's like City Council Workshop or something.

Okay, we'll have to have Paula, I guess, make a do a screen for that.

How are you? Good. Emily, you're doing a presentation on this? Yes. Good. That's why she's in here, like she's studying for a test.

That was probably Nikki did that.

Yeah. She'll remember eventually.

She kept getting McKamey and Ryan.

Ryan mixed up?

Yeah, about three times a row. She said, I can't remember.

I know. She said, oh, it's going to be in the hole. She said that last time.

Yeah. I'll remember next time. Yes sir.

Testing, testing.

Aww, you even brought it back in.

I'm the sweetest. Do you ever do a roll call at these things?

At these ones?

I don't know. I didn't feel like it.

No.

It's only 15 minutes.

Oh, it is?

Yeah. Oh, just break. Maybe.

Just break. Do you remember us ever doing a roll call at these?

At City Council? No. I mean, at Committee of the Whole? Yeah. No. I usually just checked off.

I got it. I've got your stuff.

I got your stuff already.

Last time, Brian and I switched last minute. They were ready for you this time.

Sparkling grapefruit juice. Someone get this on camera.

At home.

I was worried if we weren't going to start.

I think this is for you. I mean, I know it's for you, but...

Oh, and then they give it to you. Okay.

Okay. Okay.

Who's that from, the NLC?

Jamie.

Oh, my God.

So this is the name. It's a whole cartridge. Lift receipt. You might have been out of the room.

That's the call.

Oh, my God.

It's a cartridge.

You're big.

No kidding.

You went on the lift ride.

Right.

Just like this fellow doing it. But that's OK. I mean.

No, no, no. Yeah.

That's going to be true.

I was like, what's folded here? We're having a great time.

Let's talk about fiscal sustainability.

Yeah. Let's go back to fiscal sustainability.

I think that can go back there somewhere. Hello, Jim Cotsen. All right.

All right.

We ready?

Yeah.

This is our city council workshop. on May 26, 2026, at 7.01 p.m. Meeting is being broadcast live via YouTube, and we're at 389 Spruce Street today. Our topic for today is enhanced amenities. But first on our agenda is unfinished business related to fiscal sustainability. So our first item is a staff presentation on TIFFs.

Yes, and Assistant City Manager Emily Mazzarelli will be presenting on this item.

Thank you so much. Everything's behind me, so I'm going to try to double duty on the screen and make sure. So if I start talking about something that's not on the screen, let me know. So today I'm going to provide a brief overview of tax increment financing or TIFs, including how they work, why cities use them and how they've been used here in Morgantown. I know most, if not all of you on council already understand TIFs, but based on some of the public comment and some feedback we've got, we thought it would be worth running, doing a very quick overview for anyone here and watching online. So, again, we'll do a quick run-through. I'm going to focus on Morgantown's TIF districts and what each of those has accomplished and where they stand today, and then kind of give, again, an overview of what are key considerations for council. So, first, what is a TIF? It stands for Tax Increment Financing, which, again, is why people don't say that. They just say TIFs. It's a tool that allows cities to use future increases in property value to basically spend and pay for things today. The key point is that it only focuses it takes the increment of what that would be the increase and no baseline property taxes are redirected, so all of those things that currently either go towards government, city, county government, school boards, different levies, those base values still go towards those partners, it's just the increment that gets kind of redirected. And so this is a diagram, again, kind of digging into it. A TIF begins by establishing a base value within a district. And that's kind of seen in that dark blue or purple color. Again, this is within a defined area. As development occurs or is anticipated to occur, you'll start to see that rise in property value. And that is what they call the increment, that additional tax revenue above what the base value is. And really in that light yellow color, that is the amount of money that is used to fund projects. So you would take the total of what's in that yellow triangle and say, hey, over the course of this time, this is how much money we're going to make. So we're going to take all of that money that we anticipate and basically take out debt service today to be able to pay for a project upfront. And then once the TIF terminates, there's always an end date to all of these, then all of the new assessed value of the project goes back into how they normally would be divvied up among taxing groups. Cities use the TIF again as a tool to capture growth and reinvest into a targeted area. So funds that are generated from a TIF district have to stay within that targeted area. It can help close financing gaps for challenging projects, fund infrastructure without raising taxes, and encourage private investment into an area. And again, we'll kind of see a few examples of that. Ultimately the goal is to support long-term economic growth and redevelopment in a specific area.

Emily, when the TIF's proposed, there's a but-for case that needs to be put forward, correct? Yes. That presumably the economic development wouldn't happen but for the TIF district and the eligible increment to support infrastructure development.

Absolutely. And if it's okay, we have a really great example in one of our TIF districts of a development that would not have... would not occur but for a TIF to fund the basic infrastructure for it.

Thank you.

So we currently have five active TIF districts. Each one is listed on the slide and then we'll go into detail on each of those momentarily. Just wanted kind of more for the public because I know council knows we are in an upcoming transition. So the Willie Spruce Brockway TIF which is just right next to downtown here that will be terminating as of June 30th. and we will be starting a new TIF, the East End Village TIF, beginning July 1. So they overlap in areas, and so you can't have two TIFs that overlap in the same area, which is why we had to close one before starting a new one. Overall, the districts have supported a range of projects throughout the city, although activity level across those have varied, with some being very active and some having no activity. And it really depends a lot on location, market conditions, and we'll kind of get into why some TIFs may not be active. And I would be hearing from our geospatial divisions manager. As we get into maps, all of these are available on Morgantown's GeoHub website. So I just took screenshots of each of the districts, but you can kind of see them in more detail and information about them on the website, which is geohub-morgantownwv.org. or if you go to our search engine and just type in GeoHub. So the first one I'm going to talk about is the Riverfront TIF. This is often what we refer to as our wharf district. It was created in 2003, and it is intended to eliminate blighted areas within the wharf and encourage development around the surrounding properties. It is one of our larger TIFs. It's about 109 acres. And it is currently set to expire in 2033. So some of the notable projects, I won't be kind of highlighting every project, but some of the notable projects completed were the Wharf Parking Garage, the Lower Walnut Street Streetscape. So this is on the far north end. So if you go Walnut Street all the way, you know, past the boulevard as you go down to the The rail trail, that streetscape project was done. University Avenue improvements in Clay Street streetscape. Today the district revenue is approximately $480,000 a year. We have about $2.5 million in debt service on primary on the primary bond from 2006 and 8.6 million on the subordinate bonds from 2007. We are currently in default on the subordinate bonds and again we'll talk about why that could happen in TIF districts but didn't want to at least call that out that we're making payments on the primary bond but in default on the subordinate bonds. The Falling Run TIF, we have Falling Run, or sometimes they'll call it the Square at Falling Run, and then Upper Falling Run. Those are two different ones. But Falling Run TIF was also created in 2003. It was in part to eliminate flight, but also to support a mixed-use development known as the Square at Falling Run. it's about 87 acres and it is set to terminate in 2033 it funded road improvements and property acquisitions that were intended to support the mixed-use development known as the square at falling run the company unfortunately went bankrupt and the project never came to fruition so we do have about 1.7 million dollars in debt service remaining And while we do generate some increment, a combination of the increment and a pilot or a payment in lieu of taxes, so some of the property was purchased by a non-taxpaying organization, and so they actually provide a payment annually to essentially cover what the property taxes would have been. So that's the payment in lieu of taxes. And that covers the debt service. And so the development did not move forward, but we are meeting those debt obligations. And I found a nice depiction of what the square falling run was because, again, that was before my time at the city. So I had to do a little digging on that one. So the next tip I'm going to talk about is the Sunny Side Tip. It was created in 2008 to eliminate blighted areas, encourage development, It's about 148 acres. This one actually now terminates in 2053. So this had a 15-year extension that council approved in 2025. A number of streetscape projects and multimodal improvements and property acquisition. So again, kind of showing quite a few here. There's been a number of these projects that I've been involved with. since I've been here at the city, but just kind of wanted to highlight some of those. It's still an active district that we are generating revenue for to cover the debt service payments, some pay-as-you-go funds as well, so that's things that are kind of above and beyond that have some ability to cover other projects within the district. We partner with Campus Neighborhoods Revitalization Corporation, or CNRC, sometimes they're referred to as Sunny Side Up, which is all now one of the groups that are part of the partnership. We do have a large attractive property that is along Beatrice Avenue. So between I believe it's 3rd and 6th Street, if you ever wondered what those kind of vacant grassy areas are on the on the riverside, that is all owned by or most of it's owned by CNRC. And that does have a balloon payment up and coming, so that property will need to either be developed or sold to cover that balloon payment.

Emily, where is this one in terms of increment being generated in debt service?

Our current operating fund for the TIF account is $948,000 plus the $537,000 to cover debt service, and that is on the initial bond from 2014 and 2017 as the subordinate fund. Okay. Thanks. So we touched a little bit on one at the square at Falling Run, but upper Falling Run is another TIF. This was created in 2015. It was created to support infrastructure developments on a property. This one actually came to us from the Fairmont-Morningtown Housing Authority. It's about 15 acres, and they said, hey, we'd like to create housing on this property. If we build the houses, will you build the infrastructure? So again, this is kind of where the but four that you brought up, Councilor Downs, they had intended to do it, but did not necessarily. They weren't going to be able to get financing to cover both the housing component and to cover the infrastructure. So there was some desire to have access, Office 705, and some roadway improvements. But as you can imagine, developing, you know, undeveloped property can be difficult in and of itself, but when you have to also cut in roads, lay water, sewer lines, gas lines, all of that stuff, that public infrastructure can be difficult. So this is one of those but-for projects that If we didn't do it, then it wouldn't happen. This is one of those that we're working pretty closely with Fairmont and Working Times Housing Authority. Their project was not able to go forward. So while the TIF exists, we haven't spent any money on the TIF. We haven't gained any increment, nothing's really happened. So there's no activity, but there's also no debt service. So you can create a TIF and not take any debt tied to it. That is also our smallest TIF. The next one, again, I'm sure you're very familiar with, the Willie Spruce Brockway TIF. This was created in 2015, encourage eliminating blight, encourage development. It's about 99 acres. This is the one that terminates in June of 2026. So far, projects completed were a lot of those that are done more recently, the demolition of blighted structures, some property acquisition. We still are on target to have the Richwood wall completed. We anticipate that will be happening. They'll start probably early next week. I think it's supposed to rain most of the week. That will take down, again, we call them pay-as-you-go funds. That will take down all of... all but about $5,000 of the pay-as-you-go funds remaining. So that project's a very quick turnaround once they get on site to repair that wall. So this is the project that is being terminated. And I'm sorry, that should say 6-30-2026. And Easton Village will start July 1. So that is where our current TIFs lie. But you see some of these have been very active in the past and some of them maybe aren't as active now. So I want to kind of talk about why TIFs can become inactive or underperforming. It's important to understand that that's not uncommon in TIFs. all over the US. They really depend heavily on timing, market conditions, and property values. Simply designating a district doesn't guarantee development. Some of the most common reasons include development not occurring as anticipated. That's happened to us on a couple of our TIFs. Change in property ownership or use. So in 2025 when we changed the TIF district in Sunnyside, that actually removed the power plant because that use of that property changed. And so the value of that property had changed. Other areas may become underperforming because parcels that used to be subject to taxes are no longer subject to taxes. Or districts could reach their term limit or they also could It may not be at the term limit, but sometimes when you are looking at bond financing, you need that longer runway to be able to cover that debt service payment. So even if you get halfway through a TIF, you may not have a long enough runway to take that increment generated and cover the debt service payments, which is why some of the districts, state law actually recently gave cities the ability to extend TIFs by 15 years. And obviously, in other cases, if the original project goals have been met, then they don't become as active. Nothing comes without risk, right? So when you are doing this increment, you are setting the base value. And as a city, and anyone collecting those taxes, you say, OK, we're willing to accept that base value of taxes coming into its revenue. Any increment goes into the district and you as an organization don't see that for your general use. So you sometimes see that delayed benefit for that. Sometimes there are overly optimistic projections, whether a development is actually going to happen or how much increment is gained from that change in the development. So sometimes your revenues fall short. project eligibility, the but for justification, you know, is this development going to happen regardless of if you have the TIF? There are equity concerns. So when you look at a map, most of our TIF districts are pretty centralized, you know, between Falling Run and the riverfront, right, and Sunnyside. So they're all pretty central. we don't currently have any tips out out in further areas of the city and again these are long-term commitments so our tips and i think all of our tips have been set up for 30 years and we just extended one for another 15 so that's a 45-year commitment all in all so when we look at from a policy standpoint about whether a project really truly requires TIF support you have to understand whether those investments align with the community priorities and again I ran through this kind of quick but just kind of key takeaways it's a tool to invest in growth not a guarantee They can really vary by location, market conditions, timing. It is possible for TIFs to underperform what they are expected to, but understanding that that's not an uncommon instance and, you know, it takes a lot of timing and analysis and careful planning to not only decide to move forward with the TIF, but then also to make the projections when you're taking out bond debt service. So again, hopefully not all of that was repetitive for council. I know they can be a little bit tricky, but I wanted to at least for council's benefit and the public kind of get that very high overview of what TIFs are, how they work, what we've done in Morgantown with them, how they can be used. And so happy to answer any additional questions that folks may have. And we also have our wonderful bond counsel here. If you get too into the weeds on asking questions, I'm going to have to defer to them.

Any questions for Emily? All right.

I guess I have a comment. So I guess I was around at the public hearings for the Square at Falling Run, and it was very interesting because there were quite a few people in the crowd that said that the Square at Falling Run would never ever, ever happen. And then there were people in the crowd who thought it might happen so you have always with these projects naysayers and then you have dreamers and planners that go for it and it's interesting to see how like in the wharf, you get a nice parking garage, but then you get sort of the middle part of it kind of stalled out where you get nothing in the square falling run. Sunnyside was very successful in that numerous different projects happened as a result of the increment and we're building toward the next increment that but four or the just, idea that the funds that you have today by virtue of pay as you go funds or bonded funds needing to be sure that you target those toward whatever the next project's going to be and make sure that they don't get spent somewhere where they don't have an impact on the district or they don't have an impact on that next project. I always wish that the upper falling run project that we had figured out how to either bring in different more partners or whatever would make that work because the idea behind that I think there were multiple ideas different times but one idea was to have like a combination of some of the housing would have had students with children in and some of the housing would have had possibly senior citizens in. It had different iterations but it was neat to think about at that location if you had some parents and some older people mixed together what that might have, that would have been kind of a cutting edge idea. I think there were other ideas in there too, but it's too bad that that one didn't quite go. I think there were a couple of things like, there were a couple of key things that were not quite in place, and then I think there was some change in the staffing of the group that was sponsoring it that caused that one to kind of fall apart. So it seems like we're getting better and better and more successful at figuring out how to use them. So I hope that we can keep using them and not to forget that we can do those pay-as-you-go projects if we don't want to bond. And then if we want to do a larger project, bonding seems to work out very well.

And if anyone is interested, on our website, all of the annual TIF reports for each of the districts is available. So it's under our finance page under financial reports, or you could just type in TIF, T-I-F, in the search engine. And I think it's maybe the first one too, but I know at least both the second and the third option when it pops up. takes you right to the page that all of those financial reports are.

We've also noticed that other states have more economic development tools, and we have fewer. And so sometimes TIFs might get kind of overused in West Virginia. And it would be, I think, because there aren't a lot of other funds and grants and programs For instance, Pennsylvania, you can see all these different funds so that if you're working on an economic development project, there would be several ways that you could accomplish it, whereas here we have, I would say, fewer.

All right. Any other comments or questions? If not, we'll move on to item B, staff summary of public feedback and outcome areas related to fiscal sustainability.

Emily will be presenting on this item as well. Thank you.

These are quick. There's only a couple slides. This is a wrap up to our fiscal sustainability workshop series. I'm going to be reviewing the comments made during public input session. More information was in the packet. All of council was able to obviously be at your own meeting, but then the public comment meeting. So again, this is going to be a really high level just to kind of summarize for those watching. So in March, we had our first initial workshop With council, discussion from council primarily focused on the city's revenue structures, MSF and sales tax. That was in March. In April, we had our public input session. It was well attended, provided valuable insight, included a few photos. We had display boards on the budget revenue sources, current uses of MSF and sales tax and the V&O tax. We're going to review the feedback tonight, highlight some of the items that we believe are ready to initiate and move forward with as long as council is okay with that. And then a couple items that we are seeking clarity on direction from you all. Attendees provided responses to a variety of prompts. Overall, a number of themes stood out. First, participants expressed a strong desire for clearer, more accessible budget materials. Again, really valuable feedback asking for smaller file sizes, plain language explanations, more narrative style documents with more definition and context to some of the information. Next, there were definitely clearly identified priorities for funding, including libraries, parks, housing, infrastructure, roads and sidewalks, non-motorized transportation, and planning and development services. Many participants indicated they do not feel that the current budget aligns with community priorities. And in general, there was a preference for identifying new revenue sources as opposed to reducing service levels. a couple items that we got mixed feedback on. For sales tax, some favored flexibility to allow the city to respond to evolving needs. while others supported dedicating funding to protect historically underfunded services such as parks and pensions. Additionally, while public safety was identified as important to maintaining community quality of life, there were frequent comments suggesting that police funding levels were too high and that more emphasis should be placed on root cause of issues such as addiction, homelessness, and crime. Other suggestions made by attendees fell into different types of revenue tools, place-based strategies, or tax structure. So revenue tools, a home role, heavy vehicle fees, student impact fees. carve outs for small business, and more enforcement on corporate landlords. Some of the place-based strategies, you just heard about TIFFs, creating business improvement districts, which were one of the topics highlighted downstairs in the economic development public input session, and strategic annexations. And then for tax structure, looking at how we can have scaled or more progressive taxes. So some proposed action items, some of these were covered in this, and other items are just ones that we've been talking to council about. We felt that, again, with council's consensus, that we could move forward with completing a compliance evaluation for all existing fees, and then were necessary to implement a compliance plan, updating and enhancing the budgeting process. That's been something that Manager Miller has talked a lot about. to create additional engagement and ensure more clear public-facing educational materials. Expanding the idea of franchise fees for our utility providers and implementing street cut fees to address damage to roadways and infrastructure. I know the road I live on that we just got paved two years ago just has a big hole full of gravel in it now. So it can be very frustrating when you finally get it paved and then it gets cut. And then lastly, we had a three hour long meeting today to talk about exploring opportunities to reduce health insurance costs while maintaining those benefits needed to kind of recruit and retain employees. So those were just a couple of the ones that we felt were really clear and to move forward with more quickly. And then the two big items that probably no surprise that we are looking for additional feedback from council is related to sales tax and user fee. There was a lot of time with council that we talked about those. They were both presented to public input session, I think. I overheard many of you having really great conversations with folks at that public input session about those two items, but really would like to get council feedback on how you would like staff to move forward on either changes to bring or to leave them as is for now. And I promise that one would be quick. So that's all I have on that. And thank you again for Council's participation in those public input sessions.

Thank you, Emily. So this portion is designed to provide that overview of what we've heard and then summarize some of those consensus outcome areas. And then at this point, we would turn the meeting, of course, to council as we call it the wrap-up topic session of fiscal sustainability. But we know realistically the work is really just starting on this topic. But the idea is to open the discussion and dialogue back up to council in order to help us as staff prioritize

uh which items get focused on and move forward could you go back one for purposes of discussion because i think we know user fee and we know sales tax the proposed yeah yeah i think that would be useful i'm just yeah i agree making a suggestion so i think we basically have rolled right into item c council follow-up discussion and prioritization for policy review on this topic so

whatever we'd like and i'm not saying we shouldn't be discussing the sales tax and the user sales tax and user fee i'm just saying yeah these are the ones that i can't remember all of them to prioritize i'd like to start with what's not there compliance and you know action on revenue compliance i think it's a huge huge problem as we've discussed manager miller And yes, are you suggesting?

Oh, I was just saying, yes, we agree that would be the compliance. Oh, sorry, sorry. We concur. I skipped that. Yes. But cost, yes, yes, you do. I think we concur with that.

And cost, but, you know, besides the revenue side, the cost side is also something that I'm, As we discussed in the first council session leading up to the public session is absolutely something and I know there's public preference to not reduce services. But, you know, I think it's something that we've got to consider. I think it's benchmarking our spending is a good exercise for us to go through. And I just I'd like to see that explored.

Chair Stephanie Sharp Could you define that for me?

What benchmarking?

I know what benchmarking is in general. I just didn't know.

Like your conception of it.

Looking at our city spend to see how we're prioritizing our spending and then considering whether or not it aligns with our priorities, one. And two, if it aligns with kind of the norm for our peers. And I'm not suggesting that we should always align with our norms or with our peers, but there may be reasons, right? But benchmarking is a very healthy exercise to go through because it gives us the opportunity to have those very deliberate discussions rather than just doing what we've always done. which may be working or may not be.

So are you looking at efficacy of those dollars or are you just looking at the number of dollars or how do you, when you're doing benchmarking with respect to money and budgeting, how do you?

Generally, I mean, I think it starts with a percentage and you try to identify a peer set and there are a number of different scientific ways to go about it, but

Yeah, I guess I would always like to see kind of what you get for your dollar as much as where the dollar went.

Sure. Absolutely. I mean, that's very definitely there can be a return on investment component. But I'd like to I mean, I I'd be happy to just see us start the exercise in general and, um, and, you know, get a little bit into it and then, you know, sure.

So could that be sort of part of the next, like a precursor to the next budget budget season, like kind of the months until we start budget season.

Jamie and I've talked a lot about it. I think, you know, um, Finding a data set about, you know, that we can rely upon is really where I think the first challenge is.

Yeah, I think it's when you're doing an exercise like this, it can't be about finding the perfect data set because I think any data set you find, we can make criticism of that data set but saying, hey, this is a comfortable base for us. And then let's look at how that data falls out from there. So I think that is the first challenge to go through. And we may not get it perfect the first year, but I think we're walking through these types of exercises. And same thing with the strategic planning and the goal setting and the performance metrics. It may not be everything we want in the first year. But going through and getting kind of used to the idea of this is how we're going to measure some of these things and building a couple years of data. I think as we look forward in the long run, it will help us as an organization.

I think at National League of Cities, we had talked to some different groups about data sets that were available. So I don't know where we get those data sets that you're talking about. I know they exist because I've talked to the people that have them, but I don't know what ones are the best ones.

In terms of fee compliance, when we evaluate how much compliance we have, like what steps or remedies would we have for increasing compliance?

Sure. I'll give you an example of one of the items we've already started to take action on, and this was more of a process decision, is under fire service fees. We send out the fire service fees annually, and we would go through that process. We would send a letter of overdue fees or collection letter, if you will. We don't quite call it that, but once somebody had $1,000 of owed fire service fees. So we ran an exercise and said, well, if $1,000 wasn't that threshold and we backed that down to, say, 500, what is that uncollected amount there? And it was several hundred thousand of people who fell in that threshold of 500 to a thousand. And so a simple first step was, well, we'll just start sending letters earlier because I think as you get into revenue compliance, uh, trying to pay it when it's smaller becomes more manageable than once we allow it to escalate to a high level amount. So I think changing the approach, uh, I think we would rather take a first step of more communication, more education, more seeking for it to be paid. before we take an aggressive approach and certainly we would communicate as that goes along. But right now we're working just to gather our arms around some of those data sets and ways of looking at them and really just at this point going to people and saying, hey, in case you didn't know you haven't paid us, you need to. And we are seeing some success just from that initial additional contact.

When do we usually send those out? Like what time of the year?

July, July. I think we recently just pushed them back to maybe like August, but it's typically, it was July. I think we might have just changed it.

After budget?

Yeah, it's typically because we normally, if there's any kind of fee changes, it starts with the beginning of the fiscal year, but trying to be mindful of resources, right? And so that's also when B&O taxes, quarterly B&Os and things like that. tend to all come at the same time. So I think there was just, we might have bumped it back a month or so.

Okay.

There are a couple of things I want to touch on. One, I tend to agree with the public that our budget does not align with our priorities. And I just want to revisit, I want to keep the conversation about the police budget on the table, particularly how we determine. We were talking about these data sets and looking to our peers and figuring out how we decide how much money goes to each place, but particularly the police, the staffing. I'm curious to explore more information about about a more reasonable police budget. And just want to highlight that our public participants have also expressed that desire, including more people-centered solutions rather than police-centered solutions. I just wanted to highlight that. I know we talked a lot about that during budget season. But now that we have feedback from the public, I wanted to highlight that. that that was worth having a bullet point about. I want to keep the conversation about the police training center on the table. I know that staff has been working on that. Just wanted to say that publicly. And then I actually have a couple questions about the municipal service fee in order to give council direction. And maybe this is too into the weeds, Looking at our ordinance, it seems like our ordinance is more restrictive than the state code about what we can spend it on. And I have questions about if that's the case or if I'm misunderstanding something. But if it is more restrictive than the state code, that's something I would like to look into changing.

As in opening it up to other revenue?

Yeah.

And so for context on that, the state code involved in service fees that municipalities in West Virginia charge is West Virginia Code Chapter 8, Article 13, Section 13. It provides the governing body plenary power and authority to establish fees for special or essential services. And it has a laundry list of those. Police, fire, streets, trash. many other things. So that's the general source for any of the fees you charge. That includes the fire protection fees that are in a separate article of the code, but it's also the source authority for this fee, which in Morgantown is targeted toward streets and law enforcement services. based on the defined class of users. There are a variety of ways that you can approach this, and the guiding principle is that you have to define, reasonably define, who uses the services that you're funding and what those costs, and if he has to relate to that cost.

Okay. Thank you. That's helpful. Then, yeah, I would like to look into some changes of the ordinance. not even necessarily expanding, but well, maybe yes, expanding because that state list of essential services is a lot longer than what we have here in our ordinance. And there are plenty of things that I think we can all agree are essential services that we'll talk about later during the enhanced amenities portion of this meeting. We've discussed an increase in the fee and I absolutely think changes need made to the ordinance before we entertain that. But even if there isn't an increase, I would like to explore broadening Morgantown's definition of what we use it on.

For context and clarification, The 25% fire, 25% police, that's specifically just their pension?

Oh, so those categories are, those are allocations that city council has made in the sales tax ordinance. With the service fee, those are the permitted uses of the fee but they are not allocated by ordinance between those two uses.

Which one was voted on by the public? If I remember correctly, someone has mentioned that one was brought to your vote from the public. With the service fee or the sales tax?

On a ballot, I don't think either was. Neither of them. These are both adopted by ordinance of counsel. The sales tax initiative is part of the home rule plan. Okay.

But the percentage of the sales tax related to police and fire for the sales tax is focused on the unfunded liability for pension.

For pension. For pension. Correct.

I think the reason and this council this council is up to this council but the reason that maybe the user fee is more specific than the state code is that we were wanting voters and people who are paying these taxes to know with some specificity what they were getting and I think general if you want to do a levy or if you want to do whatever method sales tax or whatever method if people know that a difficult problem that you've had is being fixed or that there's a public benefit that you're looking for and that's happening, that they feel more secure because they know where those dollars are going. Now, some dollars, like with the sales tax, were going into the general fund. So then it would be for amenities in general. It wouldn't be with some specificity. But I think people do like to know if you have intention to. And I think that often we focus more on what we're going for than necessarily, you can always mention who was not getting funding, but if you mention who were both, like for instance, when we were having these discussions, there were a significant number of people that were talking about wanting more funds for roads. And so, aside from some of the other issues that I'm sure we'll talk about like you're talking about, but I think It's important for people to know what we have in mind when we're talking about adding taxes or charging taxes.

If the language is so specific, what was it that happened that it was written that way?

Just generally, a lot of cities in West Virginia would charge a solid waste collection fee like Morgantown does and a fire protection service charge for each structure like Morgantown does. There's a handful of cities that also charge these service fees. mainly on people who work within the city because they utilize the streets of the city to travel and the law enforcement services to make those areas safe for travel.

More or less I was piggybacking off of your statement that ours is a lot more specific than everyone else. So I was curious if there was a reason behind that.

It's more specific than state code in that state code lists a lot of services that you can charge fees for, but our service fee structure, the one that we're talking about, Article 745, is very similar to the ones charged in other West Virginia cities that are this type.

Is it possible to have steps to the MSF based on income?

We can certainly take a look at that.

Like brackets?

I thought it had to be based on users and actual cost of the service. I thought that it couldn't be based on income, et cetera that would make it more of a tax than a fee.

That's right. The fees have to be based on use. They have to reasonably classify users based on their use. There are a few different ways that have been found permissible ways to do that and some that have been found not permissible ways to do that. So any kind of classification you make has to relate to how the people who are paying the fee use the services.

So I'm specifically looking at section 745.7, dedication of revenue. It says all revenues generated by the city service fee imposed by this article are hereby dedicated to and shall be exclusively utilized for the maintenance and improvement of public rights-of-way and police protection services. And so I just wonder, like, are we able to... include or change essential services. For instance, I'm thinking for the maintenance of public restrooms or Sidewalk infrastructure. Sidewalks and connectivity. Sidewalks, right, right, right. Is this improvement in the right of way?

Would restrooms be as well? If they were constructed in the right of way?

If within the public right of way, probably an expense that's permitted under your code.

But I mean, to answer the question more generally or to discuss it more generally rather than answer it just...

If those are, within the current definitions of the article, if those are services that the people who are paying the fee use, then they likely could be expanded to that. So if you determine that people who are coming to work in the city or have their business in the city are benefiting from those services and the fee they would pay relates to that use, then it would be something that

So is it worth looking into and discussing further the laundry list that the state gives in the code and determining what our council priorities are as far as what essential services mean? It feels like a worthy conversation to sort of dive into that list and determine our priorities Um, for how this fee is used.

Um, it may just be top of mind cause the library director is here with, I know we have libraries outside of the city and when we fund our library system, it's funding those libraries as well as that. It's correct assumption. No.

The city pays for the downtown library.

Oh, the levy will pay for the satellites? OK. It was just something I was thinking of in terms of the complaints we often hear is like, I don't live in the city. Why should I have to pay the user fee? If it was funding services that are outside of the city but kind of still within our purview. just might be one way of tackling that objection and giving people more of a benefit that generally take issue with this service fee.

I think we would all agree that the library is an essential service. But it may be hard to make that argument to the state that it's an essential service to the people who work in the city is my only concern. Certainly happy to explore it.

Yeah.

Who doesn't stop by the library on their way home from work?

It's easy to say, like, a road or a sidewalk is essential to someone who works here, right? Because they have to use it to get there. It's useful.

I've got to use the library's notary service. The other thing, are you?

No, please.

I was just making sure. Thank you. Okay. When we talk about an enhanced budget process, are we actively thinking through how we do a participatory budgeting allotment and citizen involvement in that?

Yeah, I think that the first step for me not only is the citizen, but some strategic planning efforts around there to have those dialogues to say, similar to the conversation we're having today. And I think that the public input is a key component to that. and then further than breaking down the pieces of the budget into smaller components and tackling them more intentionally, right? We should have time specifically to talk about revenue. We should have time specifically to talk about capital. We should have, you know, breaking them into smaller pieces and getting input on them.

Sure.

It takes a while for each council to have their pride. a budget isn't going to automatically materialize the first couple years of a particular council with those priorities just ready to go. It takes developing the projects and looking for the funding and figuring out whether we have the personnel and the positions that we need to do whatever the changes are. So that would be good to start evaluating. how money is spent and then figure that out as we go.

With respect to the service fee, we discussed that its current implementation didn't account for indexing for inflation, and I still think that that's a worthy discussion. I don't like the idea of you know, costing people more money, but I also don't like the prospects of setting expectation that a fee is in place to pay for a service and us not being able to provide that service with the dollars that we collect. I think that's a failure in and of itself and I'd like to see that continue to be explored.

I am more amenable to that conversation if we discuss what we would do moving forward rather than retroactively. I think going from $3 to $4.50 is a huge jump that is unplanned for, I would be more amenable to that if we said, okay, so this coming year we would start that.

I'm, I'm open to having the conversation and I'm not, I'm not, um, I don't have an outcome in mind, just that I think it's a, I think it's incumbent as hard as a conversation as that is. and something for us to undertake, I think it is just responsible governance for us to have that conversation and make some decisions around that.

Then if we were to look at it more moving forward, would people be interested in indexing it or not indexing it then moving forward? I would suggest that we index it moving forward so that we don't get in the same spot.

And we don't force other councils into a similar position.

I agree.

We have to do the hard thing. Anything else on this? Council?

I guess I would when we're talking about The fees, I would definitely look at the improvements to roadways and sidewalks as an important reason why we need to index and why we need to look forward because all of those costs go up. And if we're looking at other public amenities included in there, that would be great, but I think we need to realize that the amount of funds here goes a certain distance, and then, and then.

There's nothing wrong.

There's, so, and I think it's important to give some specificity to it if we can, just so people know, particularly people who are, not voters, but our people who work in the city. And I think it's very fair in a university town with two hospitals that people who come in to work help to support the rest of the system.

Or use our hospitals.

Pardon?

Or just come to use our hospitals. For our education systems. Right, right, right. All of it. I'm, and I think, I wish we were, it's kind of chicken and egg for me. I wish we were not, I wish we had more confidence or better lens into compliance right now because, you know, that would, I think there are, I think there are good gains for us to make in compliance and at least having the confidence around is everyone that should be paying paying before we took other actions. And that's kind of what has me leaning towards not making a large incremental step forward, but I think it is responsible for us to to make sure that the problem isn't going to continue to perpetuate itself in terms of the service fee.

I think people would be more comfortable with it, too. They could see exactly how much more money that would give us to be able to work with to provide. I think a lot of times when we talk about these increments, we're talking about just trying to catch up. People don't realize that catching up means paving however many more streets or everything else. I would really like to see, I would mean in support of very small increments as well, but also being able to show people what that in turn will look like.

Yeah, I think as you said, chicken and the egg, I think part of the problem here is we need to show that we can provide good services and prove that out a lot more than we have. Even if that's just being vocal about the good things that we have done with it, which I've talked about before, but yeah. All right, anything else here? Is he manager or anything else? All right, then we will move on to our public portion, which is subject to rules established by council and adopted by resolution. You can have signed up, but if you didn't, do we have a sign up, Emily?

I don't think anyone has signed up.

If you have not signed up, feel free to come up to the podium. Just state your name and where you live, and we will open the public session.

Good evening. My name is Jim Coats and I currently serve as chair of the Morgantown Green Team. A couple of people have brought up an issue and we've been looking at this recently and I have bad news for you. It's very appropriate that we're having budget discussions but the news is not good. For a number of years, the Green Team has been supporting a number of energy efficiency investments by the city that have helped to reduce your electricity costs and also as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Last fall, Our local utility, Managehila Power, submitted what they called an integrated resource plan to the Public Service Commission, which projects a 200 megawatt shortfall in the amount of electricity that they need to provide. That's about 5% of their current capacity. In earlier this year, Monongahela Power actually proposed a 1,200 megawatt gas-fired power plant for $2.5 billion. They had suggested that the shortfall would be between 800 and 900 megawatts, most of which is for data centers for which they don't yet currently have contracts or any other kind of issues. The Western Legislature last year adopted House Bill 2014, which has been very controversial, but is meant to support data centers, and it included some provisions that were supposed to prevent data centers from causing rate impacts to existing rate payers. Nangihila Power in their proposal has not adopted any of those types of provisions. They don't have any kind of a contract, et cetera. So it does look like rate payers will be on the hook. That $2.5 billion power plant, my calculations work out to be something anywhere to $4,000 for every rate payer in their service territory. What troubles me even more about this is that Manpower is also asking the Public Service Commission for what they call abandonment authority. So if they sink $2.5 billion into the power plant, but it never operates, goes bankrupt, what have you, we the rate payers are still on the hook for that. To make matters worse, several weeks ago Manpower also filed a separate base rate case calling for a 13.9% rate increase for all residential customers. It's something like 12% or 14% increase for street light tariffs. So suffice it to say that electric rates are going up much faster than the rate of inflation. That's going to have a direct impact on the city's budget. That was the bad news part. It will also have a direct impact on all of the residents in the city that pay an electric bill. The green team will be seeking a resolution from city council asking for you to state your opposition to some of these rate increases in the power plant in particular. The power plant... is particularly troubling because of the greenhouse gas emissions and also because under current procedures, the utility is actually incentivized to overbuild. They are requesting a 9.6% rate of return on investment, and so the more they invest, the more profit they make, and with this abandonment authority, they're pretty much guaranteed to make that. It's a sweet deal if you're a bond power. Suffice it to say that the utility request to the Public Service Commission is not necessarily what the PSC will grant. And the PSC has taken some steps to reject some of these rate increases when there's sufficient public opposition. And so I just wanted to bring that to your attention and tell you that this is going to be coming at you and it will probably be lasting the next 30 years or so. Thank you.

Thank you, Chair. Is anyone else wishing to speak? All right. If not, we'll close the public portion, move on to new business, enhanced amenities, with item A being a partner presentation from Bopark.

Have you been to council since your in statement as director?

First time.

Greg Trevinsky, new director of Ballpark. Thank you for being here.

Thank you guys. Thank you.

Longtime employee, new director.

You took my introduction, so I guess it's H1 now, Danielle.

Sorry. I'm just taking over for a brief.

All right, so thank you guys for having me this evening. Bree was supposed to be here with me, who's our marketing of director of communications, but she woke up with a sick kid, so that takes precedent for that, so I'll fill in for her portion. So the introduction, obviously, I'm the new director of Bopark since December, but I've been an employee with Bopark since 2007 in multiple capacities, so I've seen our system grow, and these amenities change over time. So hopefully I can relay to you how we've been enhancing them. When you are thinking about enhanced amenities, you're thinking about all-inclusive playgrounds or multi-use sport courts or fitness and wellness areas, aquatic splash pads, and then anything that adds some comfort or maybe some tech to the community. But I also want to touch on amenities that you don't typically think about through this presentation, so I'll start with the larger projects that everybody sees and are visible, but work our way through things that change just small user groups' opinions of the park system. OK, so the first one. One of the large ones, these are two projects completed in 25 and 26, is the Morella Pool Complex. Obviously, we have two pools in our system. Both of them were aging drastically and failing in many ways, and we were putting Band-Aids on those. Obviously, this is one of our crown jewels now. We have a massive pool that we're able to serve more people with zero-grade entry, the lazy river, the water slides, the splash pad, which can be free through different times of the year, so people of different SES can come visit this and use this. They may not have the opportunity to actually use the other parts of the pool, even though we do keep our costs low to get more visitors in there. Along with the pool, There was a state-of-the-art playground built right next to it so that if you have some kids that want to do two different things, some at the pool, some at the splash pad, some at the playground, this is one of our largest and nicest playgrounds in the system with a four-in-place surface. The accessibility of this is improved, and it's kind of a destination. Our offices are right outside there, and there's tons of kids that are at this park throughout the day. The next large project that I wanted to touch on is our ice arena project. This was a long time coming as well. It was very specific to certain user groups, and people were very passionate about it. But what it does for us, not only does it provide ice, but it provides an indoor space for us, which we're indoor space challenge. We have a wonderful ice space now throughout the winter that we can have partnerships with hockey user groups, figure skating, curling. We expanded our public skate opportunities. We do top sickles there with young kids on the ice. But now, in the summer months, we are able to put turf in the facility and expand our programming. We have an indoor facility for our summer camps. Our sport camps are there for eight or nine weeks in the summer. We have some youth programming there that involves... like sort of like a taught service program but on turf we have opportunities for lacrosse dodgeball soccer so amenities we think of typically are maybe like tangible things like a facility but that also allows us to do programming inside this building as well so this building um it got a party in event space so typically we were hosting birthday parties in the ice arena that were constantly full but you were stuffed in a hockey locker room that smelled like hockey players now we have specific rooms for birthday parties um and they booked almost immediately in the first couple weeks they were full. We're using these rooms also through the summer to allow birthday parties in there as well. So we thought that was a very nice addition to our offerings. Obviously some electrical things, plumbing things, those aren't exciting for the public, but they're exciting for us because they allow us to take better care of the facilities and provide maybe a nicer ice surface or a more comfortable warming room, a more welcoming space to the community. And then a new dashboard system, which was really awesome for all the hockey users to be able to enjoy with the netting over so they're not losing their pucks constantly. So this is where I wanted to kind of jump into some projects that you may not think of as an enhanced amenity right off the bat because it's not a splash pad or a court or something like that. They're a little bit different. So some of these amenities that we have replaced over the last, and this is just from 2020 on till now, so a Wilds Hill roof replacement. While that doesn't affect people directly, if you're in the building taking a class or enjoying something at the cafe or maybe renting the gymnasium, when water's not leaking on you, it's definitely enhancement. Like people, people are enjoying that. The Marilla Playground, which I touched on, or White Park, Maintenance roof so the fact that we're able to keep our maintenance equipment dry safe Long-term maintenance on that cuts down on cost that we can provide further Funds for other things for the folks and also just our maintenance guys ability to take care of the grass You know grass is an amenity our green spaces. We have to take care of in a way that people can still use them and I wanted to touch on Valley Crossing here. So Valley Crossing had an Avestis abatement, it was demoed, and now there is going to be a pump track built there as well. So while some of the things we do directly and we work with the city to create these amenities are like one or two parts. So you see something get torn down and taken away, but we're quickly trying to work together to replace that to create an amenity there. the Krebs Park's courts. So I want to touch on several courts. So Krebs Park's got new pickleball tennis courts and basketball court upgrades. Also basketball courts the same year that the Krebs got it, Paul Preserve got an update and Jack Roberts got an update. Paul Preserve got a walking trail And then one amenity that I focus on a lot that people may think not think of is Picnic tables trash cans and dog pots when you see a rusted beat-up trash can The perception is just that you don't take care of the park in general So that we're switching to a little bit nicer trash can that's mounted to a concrete slab. So it's easier to mow around Same with the dog pots. They're not smashed in I'm sure if you've seen them on the trail some of them get smashed in and beat up pretty quickly We're switching to ones that are a little bit that last a little bit longer in our picnic tables. When we had wooden picnic tables, people tend to carve them, write on them, burn them, destroy them, we switched to sort of a recycled plastic table for longevity, they're easier to replace things on, and people have, knock on wood, to this point have been a little bit kinder to them. So just those small little things have a large price tag to them, and people may not appreciate them as much, but I think they make parks look nicer in general.

May I ask you a quick question before you go to the next slide? The trash, or the dog waste, Are those the ones you're referring to that you're switching out?

Yes, we're slowly replacing all of these things throughout our whole system.

It's no longer metal then?

They're not metal now. It's like a recycled plastic pole with recycled plastic spindles around the edge.

In the summer when it gets really hot, it's not the most pleasant.

Yeah, so that will also help with that. Suncrest Mini got a playground replacement. King Street got a playground replacement. The Dorsey's Knob Lodge, it got completely remodeled. It is rented a lot throughout our system and it takes a lot to maintain that as a park system. It's essentially having an Airbnb on site with a large park built around it. The disc golf course got multiple new baskets replaced up there so that they have multiple hole layouts. And then field fencing improvements. This is another one that I wanted to touch on because it doesn't affect anybody. You drive by the field every day, you see a fence. It's a fence around a baseball field. But the little leaguers that play on it or the softball players that know there's a hole in it or that's rusty or it's maybe full of bees, we've been strategically replacing fences around our athletic fields over the last couple years while improving the surfaces on those as well. Or kickball for the Mountaineer Kickball League. I mentioned all these in the community center with the Debra D. Palmer Gallery, so there's an art aspect there and the cafe. To say that we kind of touched, when we sat down to look at all these amenities, we tried to touch amenities for everybody. We didn't want to just focus on one thing. So you have an ice arena, you have a cafe, you have pools, you have walking tracks, you have trails, you have a skate facility, you have tennis and pickleball and basketball courts. We have classes and programming, so we wanted to reach as far as we could throughout our system and improve something for everybody, so nobody tried to feel like nobody was left out of that system. Here's some things that are currently in progress. The Lower Morella Park project, this is one of our largest projects that will kind of finish off Morella Park. This park system here is getting six new pickleball courts, six new tennis courts that will be separated a state-of-the-art action sports park that has a bicycle playground, a pump track, a skate park to it. It'll have a turf field amenity so that people can do classes or little leagues can use these if there's rain out on other fields. We can have events on this field. The parking is going to be improved. There's going to be some return to green space on the opposite side closest to the creek. The Marilla Center is getting completely renovated. It's one of our highest rented facilities and it's taken a beating over the years and it's at the end of its life. It is getting renovated. The Marilla Pavilion is getting replaced.

So this will be also like the Marilla Park will be the place to be after this one is finished up.

This is a very large project. The one thing I want to touch on, the restroom facilities. I know you guys mentioned restroom facilities. We have looked throughout our system and some of our older outdoor restroom facilities. Obviously, they're seasonal, and that takes a lot to upkeep these. Some of those, unfortunately, when you go into them, feel sort of like a prison restroom. They're kind of blocked walls and stainless steel, and people did a lot of damage to those. So we're strategically removing those as they come about and replacing them with all-season restrooms, ones that are able to stay open longer, get more people in the parks throughout the year longer. As we're building these, on the back of the Marilla Center, there will be all-season restrooms equipped with that. This is an actual picture from the White Park Playground. They are finishing it up now. So almost every playground in our system has been touched at this point over the last few years that we're replacing. You can see this is a turf surface. This is something we're exploring to see for accessibility, cleanliness, and longevity in our system. We have a lot of pour-in-place options and some engineered wood fiber options. Engineered wood fiber is the cheapest, but obviously takes the most maintenance. With a small team to get people out there to constantly replace those to make sure they're safe and they look nice, it's a little more effort. The form place is wonderful, very accessible. It gets kind of hot sometimes, and then when people start picking at it, it gets destroyed kind of quick. So we are trying this option out as well, just to see what the community likes and what lasts the longest. This is like the demolition, there's the demolition phase mentioned here. So the White Park Pavilion is currently gone. The Marilla Pavilion is getting replaced in that project. And down here, we'll get to the Krebs Pavilion. It's also being replaced. So all of our pavilions are moving from the wooden structures that have kind of rotted out and bees like them over the years to steel structures that will all match. One of our goals is when you pull into one of our parks, you kind of recognize it as a Bopark facility. because us that are from town we see this we kind of know what bow park is in charge of or manages but we would like people to recognize our signage and our colors and our facilities that they all kind of look alike and give you the feel of being in a city park system Another one of those things that you may not consider a large thing, but the Ogden field had a storm pipe repair this year that the field was kind of sinking, making it a less desirable playing surface. We worked together with MUB and we got that replaced and the field leveled back out, new fencing put around that facility. So it gave us a chance, an unfortunate event happened, but it gave us a chance to level that playing field, add new fences and build upon that. And then the Coben Creek Bridge, which we had a ribbon cutting for, that's going to allow us to add a lot of trail system and connectivity and flow to our park system. From that south side of the reservoir back to the other side, like the new, there's a green bag road project going there, and it'll be people to flow all through that side. Some more things that are in progress in Krebs Park. The Krebs Park Pavilion, just like I mentioned, it's got a new concrete pad and a new water fountain over there. That's an amenity I wanted to highlight. A lot of our water fountains in our system are old, dated. It takes a lot of money and time to maintain those. We're slowly switching those out. You'll see those. One is in the Krebs Park currently, Krebs Dog Park currently. There will be one at the Krebs Pavilion facility, Marilla facility. So they'll have bottle fillers. They have opportunities for the dog bowls in the bottom of them built in. One is going in at Stanley Spot very soon as well in that dog park. And dog parks are something I haven't mentioned yet. Kreps Dog Park got a complete renovation. Rocks removed, seeded, trees tend to fall down there still every week somehow.

The fence replaced so many times.

There's one portion of that fence that has been replaced at least three times just this year. So that's not great. Another all-season restroom here. So there'll be one in Kreps Park on the back of the Kreps Caretaker Facility. It's in the top picture there. It'll be right outside the pool area. And then the CREPS pool bath house, obviously we weren't able to replace two pools that quickly, but our maintenance team went in and updated that area. Excited for you guys to see that, but it's a, the front desk and concession area is consolidated to not being separated, but one which allows us to have less employees, better flow, and hopefully better service to the customers coming in. Shower area's got a facelift, a little more private, they got cleaned out, the bathrooms on the outside of that facility got renovated completely, drywall, ceilings, lights, just to make everything more friendly and have a better user experience.

I think that's, I'll do that one.

So Wiles Hill is another park that we have. It also is getting its first real-sized pavilion up there. Now the intent for these pavilions, like I said, they're all to match, they all look alike, but there are different sizes for these because we wanted to be aware that while every neighborhood likes new amenities, what we want to actually put in those neighborhoods, so appropriately sized. So some of these are going to be rented facilities that you can have graduation parties or things like that, and some of them a little more strategic that we don't stuff a bunch of people in a neighborhood that can't hold that capacity. But it gives us the opportunity for our summer camps to use it, rentals to use it, and then when we do neighborhood nights or we do concerts at our parks, we have that ability for that there as well. There are two playgrounds at this facility, which is really neat. One was having a rough time with the poor in place surface. The drainage underneath of it was tearing it apart. So that one's getting completely resurfaced. They added a wall on the backside, new drainage, and this one is getting turf as well because it's one that we think will benefit from that just based on the foliage and stuff in that area. This pavilion will also have electric to it and lighting and a new privacy fence that was falling down in the back of that facility. So as I'm going through these parks, you'll notice that a lot of our parks are getting upgrades. It's not just one specifically. Here's another one in progress that is our Jack Roberts playground replacement. We went through a couple of public input sessions. We heard what everybody wanted. We took a lot of time to design this and work with the playground people to come up with this. This project, we had a mandatory pre-bid there on site, and we hope that it's going to be finished by September of this year. This one we bid both for turf and for in place to see this will buy us some time to check out the turf See how it goes and kind of lean back and forth and also pricing what's it going to cost us to build these because as As we know you guys have mentioned tonight things are only getting more more expensive So this is where I kind of wanted to switch from the tangible facilities and restrooms and picnic tables to more of our programming. So the turf field in the ice arena allows us to reach out and get more people involved with programming for practices for baseball, soccer, lacrosse, dodgeball, expanded kickball leagues. A lot of our amenities can only be better when we're partnering with other folks. We're working with partnering with the Mountaineer Kickball to bring some folks in with this. Our trails and stuff are always improved by our partnerships with the Boy Scouts or local volunteer groups. So we're working on a volunteer and parks program so that it's not only on the boat park and their employees to enhance things that have great ownership in the community so that they can help tell us what they need and also work on that on their own. Our ice arena programming, our public skating is expanded. We have an adult hockey league that we run internally. And then we rent some time off to youth leagues and figure skating and instruction for that. And then, like I mentioned before, the toxic was programming and curling. Curling has its up and down years based on the Olympics, but we just want more users and more people in the facility.

partnerships I mentioned, and then the impact, you know, it drives facility.

We want to create access across multiple seasons for multiple people. We don't want to pigeonhole ourselves into one thing. We're always flexible and ready to change and adapt to what we need to to meet the community's needs. It's not about what we want. We try to listen, have that information. If it's not working, we'll pivot and go somewhere else. And it adds some more sports presence in the area and creating opportunities that aren't weather dependent. So arts and enrichment. We have the studio up at the Wallace Hill Community Center for open studio. We have monthly workshops and some clay programming that we're trying to get back on its feet. We have the Debra D. Palmer Gallery, which we try to highlight local artists up there. And then our youth and seasonal programming. So this is one of our, when I talk about programming, this has been our bread and butter over the years is the youth programming in the summer camps. The arts, athletics, outdoor recreation, science, they almost always fill up pretty quickly. So we're always trying to make sure that we're improving on those, the training we're doing. I keep going back to this, the amenities aren't just what you can see, it's our training that we provide to the counselors and the lifeguards and all these people, give people an enhanced experience at these places too. Because if If we have these state of the art facilities but people aren't running them properly or they're not treating you kindly when you come into our customer service, that's the first line and it doesn't matter how nice your facility is. Community offerings, everything is low cost at these facilities so we can bring more people in. And it diversifies our programming just beyond our athletics that I just talked about and our fitness classes that we hold at the pool and at the community centers here. Some of our aquatics and fitness classes. So we have these new pools, so we wanted to use them in certain ways. So we have aqua board yoga, deep water interval, shallow fit, water play features, baby splash. We still have our swim classes with the youth. We have fitness at Wild's Hill. And all of this supports the health, safety, and social wellness, bringing people together. But like I said, just trying to reach our expanses and provide something for everybody. The community impact, these investments we hope are helping shape the future of recreation. We've had these facilities that were kind of failing over 30 years without the ability to bring them up. So our goal first was to put some band-aids on those to keep us functioning, and now we've reached the point where most of those things are being replaced. And we just want to make sure we don't get back to that situation. Obviously, all these nice new things are wonderful, but they cost money to stay at this level. So that's what we're strategically trying to plan to keep them at this level. and preventative maintenance and programming throughout that. There's some things here that I just mentioned that onboarding our future recreation development. So we have opportunities at Flegal Reservoir. What a massive opportunity for us to explore something, a property that's sort of outside the city limits that's wooded, it's got water features, it's got trails, it's got all kinds of different things for us. We're excited as a team to work on that and what it's going to provide to the community. Right now at a base level it's providing some nice hiking, biking, and fishing opportunities for people. And we're working through about what the public feedback is providing to us and what we can safely provide to people out there. The talk of the Greenmont park system that may be onboarded to Bow Park as well. That will give us something adjacent to the new Valley Crossing Park to look forward to if we can pair something there together with that bridge. And then just supporting our volunteer and community involvement. It's what the community wants from us. We like to hear that feedback. We like to see people happy in our parks and using our parks.

I think that is the last one.

Yeah, that was the last one. So thank you guys for listening to that.

Do we have any questions, comments, concerns?

I just want to acknowledge all of the hard work that goes into this and also how obvious it is that you're keeping everyone in mind and that accessibility both on an SES level and a physical accessibility level is obviously top of mind for you. And we appreciate that. Thank you.

Is it a flat rate to rent for the ice rink and stuff like that?

Yeah, so it depends on what you want to do. There's certain rates for ice times on weekends, weekdays, high traffic hours. Then if you want to rent the turf, you can rent the full turf. You can rent a batting cage. You can rent a party room. You can rent half a turf. You can rent it by the hour. So all of our rates are listed online. I don't remember them off the top of my head. I could spit them out. But there's a multitude of different things that you can rent so that you don't have to be burdened with the whole facility.

The reason I say that is because I know that when I'm looking at the rental facility, it's actually way more affordable than private businesses, and for those watching at home, they may not know that. So I just wanted to showcase that they have an opportunity to provide for their kids in a affordable way.

Yeah, if you look up what it would cost for a birthday party for a couple hours at private facilities that have kids things and events, ours is definitely affordable.

I cannot believe how far this facility, set of facilities, has come in the last few years that we had, and we, I mean, the city, Beaupark, and our community, had these aging major pieces of infrastructure that needed to be redone, but also the minor, the neighborhood park kind of aspect and how different, what a difference it makes for people when their park is something that they can be proud of that has the facilities that they need to just leave wherever they live and come and just play for a few hours or read a book or have a little picnic. And I think Sometimes, like today we were talking about economic development, I think that sometimes we forget the role that parks play in stabilizing communities as more and more of our schools are not nestled within our neighborhoods and are out either completely on the periphery or on the edge of our communities, that the role of parks in stabilizing communities, stabilizing neighborhoods, making, we're going to talk about amenities, creating a place where amenities can happen. And so I just really appreciated the role of Bow Park in managing our city properties and in willingness to upgrade and also take advantage of those upgrades because I think that that was an excellent point. The number of, how many hours is the ice arena programmed in the summer with that number of, is it programmed just as much as are a little bit less or?

Slightly less. We have some morning programming for people maybe before work, and then we have some opportunities for, like I said, young kids or people that have the opportunity to bring their kids during the day. And then we have typically two to three offerings in the evening as well. probably from 8 in the morning till noon and then kind of revisiting from like 4 till 8 or 9 o'clock at night. These are all kind of trial runs right now. We're trying to do cornhole. We've tried to do lacrosse. We've tried to do dodgeball. We've tried to do certain things to see what the community wants and who's going to bring their kids or what adults want. We have the opportunity to do a lot of different things for a lot of people. So this is like our test year for that. And then obviously once summer camp starts in June, our summer campers will be in there from 7.30 to 11.30 before they get bused to the full facility. So that we'll have to cut down a little bit in the morning, but we'll be able to still offer just as many evening offers.

And I appreciate the morning, like there was morning hockey.

Yeah, it's like sort of, we call it coffee club just because it's the name that's been called. But we had coffee club lacrosse, coffee club soccer. So it worked well in the hockey season. We had a group of, I mean, as large as 20 guys would come at some point. But sometimes it was just seven or eight guys that would come before and pay their $6 and play hockey for a couple hours and just talk to their friends. And maybe they don't have that opportunity. Maybe they have kids or jobs that are obligating them into the evening. So we wanted to try to get them on the ice as well.

I used to work swing shifters basketball in the logging community a long time ago. But anyway, yeah, it's interesting when people need their recreation and great that you're making it, making it available. But anyway, obviously I kind of like Parks and Recreation, but I like it for a number of reasons besides just the activity of that moment. It's the being able to be social and having those green spaces in our, in our communities.

Along with those amenities comes like education for our team as well. We have a, you know, a relatively small team, 17, 18 people. Uh, they're very dedicated to the park system. They, they work a lot of hours sometimes, and then sometimes not as many during different off seasons, but, uh, making sure they have the right training for, what their job is, so educating them on the playground system or if they're spraying something on fields or they're taking care of equipment or they need to be the best they can at their job because we have so few people to keep those operating at a respectable level.

I just want to note that my toddler is a huge fan of the turf time. Shout out to our babysitter, Ava, who takes her regularly during the day. So thanks for a place to go when the weather is undesirable.

Yeah, you're welcome.

They did a neighborhood night recently, and my 12-year-old was also a big fan of the turf time. He was playing with a mini lawnmower. He was playing with a giant Lego.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Let him be a kid.

You're never too early to recapture your childhood.

Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

How many of the projects that you were going over, how many of those do we have? Are they all bonded?

No, just lower Marilla or the main Marilla project and the pool project. And all of those projects that you saw there, if everything goes well, we'll wrap up in June besides the larger Marilla project.

And then at some point you can tell us what happens next?

Yeah, I mean, we have plans on the ride. Like I say, I showed all of these things, but obviously we will probably have gaps that someone's like, wait, I didn't hear my thing that I like to do, or I missed that part of it. We do have plans. Like we have, you know, some major parks that still haven't been touched yet. And a lot of things are coming around those and we need to Like we've sat down and we've talked a lot about them as I mentioned like your indoor space challenge for Different events and different things and so so we do have plans I would while I'm very appreciative of all the projects We're doing it would be very nice to be able to do one or two Projects a year to keep things on track, but maybe not like catch up and do nine at one time

Good idea. But Stanley spot is on the horizon, right?

Stanley spot's a couple weeks out. We took it down there.

Well, I think some of the ball fields and restructuring the ball fields and that there's a lot of.

Absolutely.

We may have talked about this before. Who do we have responsible for the mowing at Suncrest Primary? That is us. That's what I thought. I want to say in a public meeting, because I know we had come up before, that there was some conception in the neighborhood, and I think somebody was also mowing it intermittently. So that we hadn't taken care of it. So whoever is mowing it, you don't have to do that, but we're doing it. So we know.

I can confirm we've done it. I've seen it. I've looked at it. I've seen our guys park there. That is what we're doing right now.

As a matter of... I don't know, just administration. I don't wanna harp on Turtle Park too much, but like the drainage near the slide, it gets like real soppy wet. And so I don't know if you can look into trying to make sure it's graded a little bit better on that.

Yeah, so adding more EWF to our parks that still have that is on our list for June. And when those guys do that, they'll kind of level back out in the system, fill it back in, fix any drainage issues. But that's on the horizon for sure, yep.

It's been all hands on the pool deck for the last month or so, but now that those are open.

Now that both pools are going to be open and running, then they can spread out a little bit. Go ahead.

I was going to say, maybe I shouldn't ask this in public, but would you... Those are the best questions. Would you have a problem if someone were to say, put a large outdoor container at Turtle Park full of sporting equipment? Would you get rid of that?

Generally, you need to have a little volunteer form. You need to request it. If I just don't say anything...

Adding more obstacles for them to mow around. They'll do their best, but I can't promise they won't shoot a basketball or a football to the moon with their lawnmower once it's laying in the grass.

That's okay. I just don't want the receptacle removed.

because we can replace this stuff have you is the receptacle already no it's not there so reach out ahead of time and see where yeah let's let's plan for it let's play sometimes you just ask for forgiveness daniel but okay we can do that they're very amenable to working with people they'll tell you the best places to put it even if it's off the record

So it has the highest likelihood of staying. It sounds like we would like to have a receptacle there and we would like to ask permission ahead of time so that it can be placed in the correct... I know it's ruining all your fun, but the other thing is that we need to locate a... A fixture for water so that we can water our fairy garden.

Oh, in the back back there. There's a creek.

Yeah, but we just get buckets and then dump it in there. I have carried buckets from the creek. There's a little poison ivy down there, and it would be really nice to have an actual spigot, but not one that you can just open any old way, but one that has either a key to it or a lock or something, or a keypad or something that, I don't know whether keypads are in favor or not, but... But not anymore.

Typically not in the middle of a park.

But anyway, we can talk to you about our private meetings.

What's that? That's what we talked about that before.

Something else to mull around.

Well, there's a MUB facility nearby too. But we were thinking like, yeah, we were thinking the MUB facility is nearby and there are gutters there.

I'm sorry. I don't mean to be taking your time discussing rainbows. I apologize.

We're just solving the world's problems.

Oh, I have one more question though. So there's all season restrooms at these places. Are they going to be open all season?

OK. And are they gender neutral?

They are family restrooms.

I hope Patrick Hathaway is paying attention from wherever he currently is. That was his biggest thing. Took us years, but we got there.

All right, I think you're good now, unless somebody else has something else.

No, let Greg go home.

Thank you.

I'm still hesitant to walk away.

All right, so we'll move on to item B in new business, which is our council discussion on key topics for exploration related to enhanced amenities and whoever would like to kick us off here.

Well, speaking of restrooms, um, so I know there's a long list of things with my name beside it on the agenda, but I'm gonna, um, focus on my higher priority items. The top of which being public restrooms open particularly downtown. I know this has been a topic of discussion for many years and I also understand that there are plenty of hurdles and obstacles and challenges involved but I think the spirit of all of those conversations was that having public restrooms open most of the time, definitely all of the year has been treated as optional and instead of a vital essential service. So as far as enhanced amenities go, public restrooms downtown open all year long. including restrooms in public city buildings being unlocked and available to the public is pretty important. Their tax dollars help us pay for these buildings and the public should be able to use them. And I just want to highlight, I just want to acknowledge that I don't think anybody is against public restrooms being open all the time, but I don't know that we're thinking about who all this benefits. It obviously benefits everyone. It benefits the downtown merchants. Not having restrooms impacts older residents, transgender folks, people with disabilities. I mean, the list is long for people that not having a consistent public restroom open all the time negatively impacts. So I just want to migrate the conversation from well, we've tried that, or but this, but that, to how can we? because this is an essential service. It is not an optional service. I've had positive conversations with Caitlin Lewis and Development Services about the ambassadors being part of the team. I think that, in my opinion, the most successful way to tackle this would be to delegate the responsibility for monitoring and maintaining the restrooms across a few different departments, many hands light work kind of thing. And there are lots of specific options I'm happy to go through, but as far as maintenance and funding and the sustainability around that, But that's my top priority as far as enhanced amenities go.

Yeah. When we talk about the business improvement districts like we were talking about before, I think this could be a way that we fund those sorts of amenities along with lots of other things that we could put in our downtown. But everybody's got to use the bathroom. that is alive. So we have to recognize that and allow people space to do that in. I think it takes a lot of pressure off a lot of different areas. And we shouldn't be designing restrooms that aren't open 24-7, 365 anymore. If we're ever going to put a restroom in, that needs to be a number one thing. It has to meet those standards at a baseline.

That's been a wall I've been beating my head against for years. Brian, is that? Yeah, I am all for it. I think that that is a high priority. Everyone wants to say that it's for the homeless population, the unsheltered folks, right? But My 12 year old has to go pee sometimes and the library is closed and, you know, my mom has had to use the restroom when we're on the rail trail. And, you know, we did, we did to the city's credit, um, put some for the Johns along the rail trail, which has been at least a good temporary kind of. Band-Aid solution, but I would like to see something more permanent. I still, I cannot fathom anyone building the restrooms at the amphitheater and not winterize, like making them so that they can be used year round. I cannot fathom.

It is funny to have a porta potty next to the restroom.

It's crazy that we have to do that, right? And I've asked many times, like, can you get the cost on what that would be to make it so that those are usable year round? And I never get that number.

Yep, agreed. Just an anecdote. I recently, a downtown business owner shared a story with me about a group of cyclists that had traveled from southwestern Pennsylvania into downtown Morgantown and had stopped and tried to use the restroom. And we're looking for a place to use the restroom. So they ended up in our downtown and going to Walmsley's or Pathfinder, rather. And Pathfinder was like, oh, just across the street. So they were between Pathfinder and the bookstore using the bathroom because they were on the trail. Oh, there wasn't enough bathrooms. Well, the bathrooms weren't open. bathrooms weren't open. Yeah, agreed.

It's not glamorous.

It kind of is.

But neither is having to pee in a bush.

Yeah, that's what I mean. It's super not glamorous.

It kind of is. Sort of along those lines, I'd like to see installation of water fountains and bottle fill stations, just making water slightly more accessible. particularly in our city center. I know we've had constituents come and talk to us about water accessibility along the rail trail. I'd like to explore options, bottle fill stations, et cetera. Maybe we can talk to Greg and see what the boat park ones look like.

I did come in to put one in at the dog park. Yes, amazing. The water fountain at the bottle station and the puppy bowl is going in at the dog park. Perfect. I love it.

I think the water station in the heart of downtown is a great idea. I know they do it in France and a lot of the different blue zones. So with water being a right, accessibility is important.

It'd be nice to see one near the dam.

Oh, yeah, closer down the rail trail.

There's one, I'm assuming it's still working, near the MUB facility, near the water facility. There's one there. I think people forget sometimes that that's there.

There's one at the amphitheater, right?

Pardon? There's a water fountain thingy, yeah.

At the amphitheater?

Yeah, yeah. bottle filling station and everything.

The last thing I'm going to mention and, um, deputy mayor butcher and I have talked with, um, city attorney and city manager about this, but, um, We are interested in no longer using anything that could be considered hostile architecture. So when we install new benches, we'd like for those to be without the armrest in the middle so that they are more accessible to everyone. And again, I think when you hear the phrase hostile architecture, our unhoused population typically comes to mind for people. But again, this is something that obviously would benefit those community members, but also folks with various physical disabilities. And I think our vision for that is moving forward. We'd love to retrofit every bench in the city, but we understand that financially that's just probably not feasible. So moving forward, we'd like to look into making it so that we don't use those benches and also keep this in mind when we're thinking about retaining walls and just all the surfaces, particularly in our downtown area.

Or not having those spikes on the ground so people can't lay on the ground. Do we have spikes on the ground? I don't think we do. I don't think we have them.

I would keep it to things we actually have.

Not having them in the future. There are some ledges or walls associated with private property that have those additions. on their ledges.

Are they for...

They're to prevent people from sitting on them.

Are some things for preventing skateboards?

So they'll usually put these little metal things. Yeah, little metal. That's not really.

Is that considered hostile architecture or is that preserving the architecture you have?

I don't think those things are because it doesn't prevent.

These are, I read a letter. I rode a lot of skateboards. These aren't for skateboards. These aren't for skateboards. No, they're for keeping people from sitting on them.

No, no, no, I understand.

That's stupid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it.

I'm just saying it's good to think of which things, if we don't want to see more of something, which things are, what things are considered hostile because I would love to have everybody be able to skateboard everywhere, but sometimes you just tear up the... Yeah, yeah.

You don't wax in it. I did plenty of that, too.

Wait, didn't you grow up here? Maybe.

But yeah, I think it's also just, I mean, for me, I don't know if it's this way for other people, but my perception when I see those in cities is that, oh, this is not a very welcoming sign to me when I see those and it calls it out to me. But I'm also a person that's deeply invested in these sorts of things, but that's the perception it gives me is a stance of not being welcoming towards our community and our people with disabilities. So I'd love to see us just have a resolution that would allow these in the future, especially for city projects. Any further discussion on any other topics here? Go ahead.

So are we, are any of these topics are fair game?

I think, or any additional?

Are we going through them one at a time?

I wasn't planning on going through all of them.

I want to talk, if I can.

Yeah, Jenny, did you want to?

I just do like to see... having very welcoming pedestrian friendly spaces and looking at connectivity between areas and really kind of paying attention to some of the details that make it welcoming and make it make the make walking be the choice that someone might make that they would park like park once and walk to all the different places through our downtown or walk down park once like in the downtown and then come down to have to come to the concert series and then come back up into town and stop and have a drink somewhere or listen to some music somewhere else after that concert's over and then go back you know and so anything that we can do to have pedestrian scale lighting different places we have some weird lighting holes that surprise me and having crossings, particularly between the waterfront and the downtown, having the crossings be more friendly so that people feel like we're really one community rather than a community that's divided by a boulevard or a highway, depending upon your perspective. I would like to see more of those, more connectivity.

I would piggyback off of what you're saying. ask what we can do to work with the state to turn a lot of our crosswalks, all of our crosswalks into scrambles. Especially at the bridge down here where the theater is. Because if you're coming across the street, when the people from the bridge, the Westover Bridge are turning left, it is at the same time as the crosswalk. And I don't know how many times I've almost seen people get hit. in terms of crossing when they're allowed to it's it's so hard to know there i used to cross there with children and it was awful yeah not knowing who's going to whip around the corner at you and there's so much that's like the main way you get from downtown into everything that's down there and it's really hard to cross yeah it's just i i'm worried with our concert series at night when it's low visibility of what that could end up being

Jenny, you and I should sit down with Caitlin Lewis in development services about wayfinding and connectivity among the rail trail and downtown and wharf. She's got some really neat ideas and low-cost ideas. So let's sit down with them. I would love to. Okay, great.

Do we still have connectivity as a topic area, right?

That's the next topic. Next month, right? Oh, well, great. I think Fairmont has a... connectivity plan. Maybe we should look at it.

Good idea. Jody. I do want to highlight, sorry, I know you're going to launch into a big thing, so I want to highlight, um, the, 15 minute parking and library parking. Like I think those are, that's, we all understand the issues with parking in downtown and what people want versus what actually works. But I would like to see more of those short term parking spaces that are free for a period of time and particularly a couple across the street. So like the folks who have like 72 library books in their arms also, Sarah's not here. I'm motioning over here. Like Sarah's still here. Right. Um, one of my like new favorite activities is sitting in the third floor conference room here and looking out the window and watching people struggle with that parking thing. Like we have a lot of older folks who maybe don't use apps and we have a lot of people with children that they're trying to keep from running into the street. Like over here with people going to the library seems to just be a real pain point for her parking. So yeah, maybe setting aside a few of those for even for, visiting city hall during the day, just during, you know, weekday business hours would be fine. Exactly. Like three or four parking spaces, like 15 minute parking for library or city hall. If you have to come in and pay your B and O taxes, or if you have to drop some library books off, like you should not have to pay to park to do that.

Yeah. And downtowns, you're supposed to have your turnover of parking. So 15 minute spaces should be great. And the same with any of the restaurants that have been needing them. And I know that we don't make spaces particularly for particular restaurants, but I know that in front of the Blue Moose during COVID, there was a space. And then I think there's probably a space there again, but I think, for people who are trying to make money from, and people who are trying to get their takeout food, to make sure that we have those rotating spaces in front. I'm pretty sure.

Delivery takeout's probably, I mean, it's exploded much more than it was.

They said sometimes it's 80% of a restaurant's business. So we do need to evolve. We better be sure that we're giving them the $15.

We do need to evolve around it, because that's the main way people eat out nowadays, pretty much.

Not me, I'm the one who wants to sit down. But that's what they report, so we should be sure we're with the times. Do you think he should get a turn on?

Well, OK, thank you. So the first topic, Gary, I wanted to bring up was culture and arts infrastructure. It's near and dear to my heart, and I think we have kind of an incredible foundation to build upon. In general, it bolsters our identity, enhances our quality of life, it drives tourism, civic pride in our economy. We have incredible staff and I think we need better infrastructure in a couple cases for both. I think specifically if we provide the better infrastructure, we can have better programming and events and activation and those things drive public engagement and utilization. I'm specifically thinking about the library went through the exercise of completing a facilities master plan. And I think we need to undertake the process of engaging in formally looking at how that is funded. The other opportunity that I want to highlight is our museum. And our museum staff is incredible. Vincent and Jason have done a great job. And I think it is in a location that isn't as prominent as it should be. And I'd like to see it, I'd like to see that kind of be also undertaken as part of that, this study to look at, okay, how do we, what does a more prominent location for the museum look like? it doesn't mean that it necessarily needs to move from where it is, but it could, you know, I think it deserves to be more prominently located than, you know, on a, on around the corner off the beaten path. Um, but so, um, I guess what, what I would, the kind of the ask I was coming, coming with tonight was if, if we can explore maybe a subcommittee or something like that to look at, how a funding stack or capital stack or how we could look at putting together funding for specifically some instantiation of implementation of the facilities master plan for the library and also consider the needs of the museum in that.

Do you want them together or do you want them in separate locations? Because they're nice anchors. Wherever they end up, they're nice anchors.

I don't think that's something.

You're just talking about it needs assessment.

Yeah, we need to fund it. I just want to look at funding.

But you want to know what you want.

Well, I think the library just went through a big process.

No, no, no, I meant the museum.

I think we need to talk, I think we need to work with Vincent and Jason on that.

That'd be good.

But, you know, if we don't deliberately sit down and look at our funding streams or what funding streams or levers we have available to ourselves, then, you know, we're never going to, they can talk until they're blue in the face about what they want or what they need. The opportunities we have but you know We also need to be open to have a common hope they're having a conversation and exploring alternatives around funding So that was my suggestion Maybe maybe I don't know Got to do the work Well, let's do the work and then go from there, see what it looks like, see what our alternatives are, what's the gap, if there is one. So.

I have no business being on it, but the subcommittee is a great idea. Pardon? I have no business being on it, but I love the idea of a subcommittee to start exploring the funding option.

Do you envision that being mostly council and staff, or do you want stakeholders involved in the planning?

Yeah, again, I'm not...

I'm just, in my mind, there's a Friends of the Library and a Friends of the History Museum group that may be of some use.

The Facilities Master Plan went through, and the library went through, Pain state a painstaking process of inclusion including folks from all over the communities. You all know many of you participated in that process and so, you know, I think but but I just look around and say, OK, we just went through this big process, developed this big plan. And I wish Sarah was still here. But developed this great plan. I think the plan's fantastic. But if we don't, again, look at prioritization and opportunities around funding, then we're not going to ever get to any kind of implementation.

So would step one be a group meeting with each of those entities and just asking them where they are and what they've been thinking about as a starting point and then we could see what we could do to augment that?

I think that'd be great. That'd be a great starting point is to you know identify a group of folks and include those members of staff and sit down and have a discussion I'm gone a little bit but when I'm here I would love to go to any of those meetings and I don't know who else would we probably have quite a group that would like to yeah we don't have to decide right now but I don't know nor do I think we can but just putting the idea out. I'd like to see us own that a little more and help drive that forward for both of those amenities, the library and the museum.

Seems like there's general. Oh, for sure. Let's do it.

OK. The next one is our riverfront in Deckers Creek. preaching to the choir a little bit, right? But, you know, we're truly blessed in Morgantown to have the natural assets we have. They are amenities, and most cities in the world would kill to have the riverfront we have as unfinished as it is in some places. But, you know, in the trails and the creekside access of Duckers Creek all the way up to our city limits in Saverden.

But we're activating the heck out of the creekside. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, sure. We are. Through a lot of hard work, a lot of volunteers, we're doing it. There's some good things happening. And we undertook that because we undertook that specifically to show, to demonstrate what is possible when we deliberately invest ourselves in an area and care for it and work to transform it. Big drivers of all the other things that I talked about before, quality of life, recreation, health and wellness. And I don't think any of us, I don't think it's really a debate about whether these assets are valuable to any of us, but there is a question I have about whether we're organizing funding or activating them like they are valuable to us. I think we have pieces, and we've talked about this a long time, Emily's been a part of a lot of these conversations, but there have been, through Main Street, when I was engaged with Main Street, I mean we have pieces of spread across multiple organizations that are responsible for individual parts And I'd like to see some more deliberate ownership and management and coordination component of those areas. Not to step on anyone's toes or anything like that, but just to make sure we're talking to each other and make sure we're planning together. We've got the Riverfront Task Force. I think that's a great vehicle.

It's a certain thing. It's not everything.

Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly, Jenny. Yeah, right. So, you know, I think there is real power when we work together when we're in sync with each other. I think, you know, we've seen that with the airport recently. A lot of success. Charleston just, you know, was, Amy Goodwin was on the radio all day talking about the $27 million project that they've got going on and the race grant that they got to support it. It was about connectivity. Uh, so, you know, uh, we put ourselves the, the better we are at kind of managing all of these different entities and coordinating and doing that coordination and filling that, filling that gap in the middle, um, the more successful we're going to be at capitalizing on opportunities like they've done in Charleston.

Certainly.

All right, the last thing I want to talk about is zoning. And, you know, zoning is an amenity strategy because, you know, we've spent most of tonight talking about public amenities, and that's great, but I think private amenities are something that I think I'm very interested in, the community's very interested in. like walkable neighborhoods, housing variety, mixed-use activity, neighborhood serving businesses, outdoor gathering spaces, less priority placed on parking. So, you know, we get the city that that the rules that we prioritize gives us. And many of us have talked many, many times about our zoning code being outdated and needing updated. We're working towards that end, but I wanted to highlight that it's a priority for amenities too.

This is a conversation I've had with everyone in this room many times through my role on the Planning Commission. This has been a huge, all during my last campaign three years ago, I was zoning reform, zoning reform, and I keep getting told it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. The Planning Commission is ready, willing, and able. And I know that we've discussed having a complete overhaul, but the speed with which that can be done is just not amenable to anything that we are trying to get done. So I have recently had conversations with the city attorney and the city manager about not waiting for a complete overhaul. There are a couple of things that, you know, seem to be ongoing. This keeps coming up, keeps coming up. Maybe we do some one-off changes to I don't want to say like band-aid or, you know, bridge us to that complete overhaul, but I think we're going to have to take action on, on some of those things. Like we've been discussing because all of these conditional use approvals and, you know, all of the trouble that we give people is just. Crazy. We all know what we want. I think everyone sitting at the table right now would say, we want to encourage neighborhood-based business. But in practice, do we do that? No. We give people a hard time about what kind of fence they're using.

I wrote this one and sent this email and asked for this to be put on the agenda after the BCA meeting last week. So the last BZA meeting, but so anyway, yes.

All right.

That was a frustrating BZA meeting.

Is there anything else anybody wanted to bring up for discussion? Go ahead, Jenny.

Do we have this public art on here? Is that arts infrastructure? It is now. It just seems like you could use some of the, I don't know, like public infrastructure with water or public infrastructure that's not necessarily just murals or not necessarily, but just thinking a little bit outside the box about what we'd like our... I've enjoyed when we've had sculpture added. We haven't had sculpture added in a while. It just would be neat to think about what else we could do to make our city, and then this idea of what sort of outdoor gathering spaces would be useful. I've always wanted outdoor gathering spaces, including a space that you could put a dance floor down so that... for instance, near one of the pavilions or near the waterfront, having public dance space. I know they come and they bring out a shaker.

I was like, I see those swing dancers everywhere. I know, I know.

But I just would like to see a space that would be easier on the legs. Could be for yoga, could be for dancing, could be for whatever, but some outdoor spaces like that.

To jump off of that a little bit, the one thing I wanted to bring up, I've seen in several communities now that I've visited these kind of ways that a lot of these projects that I've seen, I brought one of these up to you, Jenny, like a year ago. A lot of the projects that I've seen are like They're like a partnership with the county, the city that I'm in, and maybe some arts grants, some other stuff, usually to like a 501 , but like in I believe it's either Frostburg or it's one of those towns in Garrett County that they have an old county building that's there. And it was no longer in use. And so they just repurposed it as a gallery. And then in the back is like a maker space. So you go into the back and there's like all this, I mean it's just space that anybody can use. You don't have to pay anything. And it has like all kinds of painting supplies, sculpture supplies, audio visual equipment. all kinds of stuff, and it's sponsored by their county arts council, their county government, their municipal government. When we ended up being there, it was during a Christmas sort of celebration, which was the cutest thing I've ever seen in that town. They had a Santa and a horse-drawn carriage going through. But anyway, you went through there, and it had tons of local artisans. This is a town like half our size, I think. But just tons of local artisans with like honey, sourdough bread. I mean, just all the things you, there's some folks from Morgantown too that are artisans. And then, you know, and it was all throughout there. So that's how they were using that space that day. But in the front was just like every local artisan you could imagine from the county, they're selling all their stuff. There's a similar thing in Parkersburg. They have an arts gallery. I think it's just, yeah, Parkersburg Arts Center. I think the city kicks in like 10 or 12 grand or something like that every year towards it. But it's like this multi-leveled art gallery and maker space. And there's like places you can do pottery in there, jewelry making.

Didn't they have a maker space and then a library?

So it's an old county building, not a warehouse necessarily.

Right. The one in Garrett County.

Yeah.

Yeah. It was just, it was like, it's a weird building, right? It wasn't like, obviously how they got it.

Right. Yeah.

It wasn't like for this purpose at all, but like, cause you know, going through it, I was like, Oh, this is neat that somebody opened up their local business or whatever. And then when we went in the back and saw that it was funded by the government, I was like, Oh, well now I'm jealous, but yeah.

Pretty much, we lived in Finland for a year, and pretty much every town had a market hall. And the market hall had maker spaces or had people selling their handmade items along with food items. Every single town, tiny ones, big ones. So something like that, a maker space that had a variety, maybe somewhere to eat, maybe some...

That was one of the things that I saw in Iceland is they have, in their downtown, they have four indoor, outdoor canopies that have electric to it. And so people can rent them out so they can try out their business. Like pop-ups. Yeah. And when we have the mural that was just done in the alleyway by the Dollar General, that's an ideal spot to increase foot traffic and give people an opportunity to try their business without it.

like having to buy a brick and border yet.

If you install year-round weather canopy.

I think Huntington has a similar thing where it's like that arcade that's across from Pullman Square that you can kind of just set up business through there.

Was it you and I that had talked about that?

I think it was one of the suggestions just now in the economic development workshop they had. some sort of a market. You know, we need to have an art component.

Yeah, it's great to have our pavilion out there, but like something indoors.

I mean an indoor market. And I think that was the intent.

And focused on the arts would be really cool to see.

Woodburn's prime for the taking.

Is that whole like first floor essentially still? Currently rented. Okay.

Currently what? Rented. Oh. There's an entire second floor.

Maybe it's the second floor. It's not currently rented at all. Yeah, it might be the second floor.

We have several people who are interested in expanding their renters or new renters in that space.

Or could follow a council priority. Yeah.

That's it for me. We have anything else we want to discuss on this topic? Are we good to?

I like this multi-purpose indoor space.

Yeah.

I think it's also like Wilson Works type of market.

And it could be something we even just like seek out partners on, you know, that want to, that probably already want to do this kind of work, but we can... All right. If that concludes our discussion, I'll... To adjourn?

Second? I didn't think we needed a motion. I thought you just adjourned. We are adjourned. Thanks, everybody, for coming.