City Council - Special Meeting

Please use your higher friends.

Okay.

All right.

Meeting will come to order. Let's begin with roll call and determination of quorum.

Meyer.

Here.

Evans. Tamang. Here. Beberdorf. Secrets. Here. Armstrong. Here. Stroman. Roberts. Maher. Here. Lehman. Here. We have a quorum.

Thank you. Next, we will proceed with the Pledge of Allegiance. If you're able and willing, please stand.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Next, looking for a motion to adopt the agenda. I have a motion and a second. All in favor? Any opposed? We have an agenda. I have no public comments before me, so I will open and close that and next move on to non-public hearing items one through five and begin with number one, the 2027 Human Resource Budget Presentation by Director Amber Cornella. Ms. Cornella, the floor is yours.

All right, thank you everyone. Can you hear me okay? All right. I wanted to start off today before getting into details of the budget by taking a few minutes to share the mission of the HR team because it's the lens we use to shape our priorities, our investments, and the way we serve our fellow employees. Our HR team is about people, not just about policies and paperwork. We are committed to creating a work culture where employees feel supported, valued, and empowered to grow. That commitment guides every decision we make, including how we allocate our resources. Everything we do is grounded in excellence, connection, and purpose, and in building a workplace where individuals can thrive and the organization can succeed. I'd also like to take a few minutes to share achievements from the past year. The work we've invested in modernizing HR systems and operations has created efficiencies that allow us to shift more of our time towards proactive strategic work. We kept a steady focus on strengthening the foundation of our HR operations. We repurposed open positions and transitioned to an HR business partner model, creating clearer alignment with departments and improving service delivery across our functions. We also expanded Tyler Technologies to support recruiting, new hire onboarding, benefits enrollment, document management, and position control. As one example of an efficiency gained from this work, employees used to receive a multi-page PDF packet and completed their paperwork manually when they were hired. Today, all onboarding tasks for employees with city email access are completed directly in Tyler, which reduces manual work improves accuracy, and creates long-term savings by streamlining the entire employee lifecycle. Alongside these system improvements, we developed updated HR tools, policies, and procedures that support consistency across the city. And by transitioning compensation studies in-house, we reduced reliance on external consultants and built internal expertise that will continue to benefit the city year after year. We made significant progress in strengthening the employee experience through targeted improvements that directly support retention, engagement, and workforce stability. We expanded our benefits package with stronger ancillary offerings, improved our dental coverage, and transitioned to a better vision provider all designed to enhance the value of employment without significant cost increases. We implemented an improved employee assistance program at no additional cost. This included expanding eligibility to part-time employees, increasing the number of covered sessions per topic per year from three to five, and adding access to a digital platform and mobile app. Our new interactive real-time recognition platform reduces manual work and supports a culture of appreciation across departments. And in order to strengthen onboarding and leadership readiness, we created standardized toolkits for employees and supervisors and launched Leadership Connection, which is a key component of our leadership development framework that supports consistent communication, targeted training, and ongoing networking for people leaders across the city. These initiatives represent strategic investments in people and are designed to reduce turnover-related costs, strengthen leadership consistency, and support long-term workforce planning. And finally, we spent significant time and effort in the area of labor relations. We, earlier this year, reached a mutually beneficial agreement with IATSE, which is the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees who work at the monument. Negotiations with IAFF, the International Associations of Firefighters, began in June and are progressing well with collaborative discussions underway. The third set of negotiations that are expected to take place this year are with the AFSCME Union, or American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The contract is up at the end of the year and negotiations are expected to begin soon. These efforts reflect our commitment to maintaining strong, collaborative relationships with our unions and ensuring that agreements are both financially responsible and supportive of our workforce. All of the improvements we've made were possible because of the skill and dedication of the entire HR team, most of whom are here today. Their commitment to operational excellence and service delivery continues to make a meaningful impact on the city and our employees, and I appreciate all of their efforts. As we look ahead to 2027, our focus will shift from the foundational work that we completed this year to the initiatives that will strengthen our longterm workforce strategy. These goals build on the efficiencies we've gained, support future planning and align directly with the areas where we're making targeted budget investments. We intend to establish a clear succession planning framework so we can identify critical roles early, develop internal talent pipelines and ensure we're prepared for future organizational needs. At the same time, we're expanding training and leadership development programs so employees have structured, meaningful pathways to build skills and advance in their careers with the city. We're also continuing to refine how we use Tyler technologies, continuing to improve accuracy and efficiency in recruitment, onboarding, performance management, and benefits administration. Another priority is elevating employee health and wellness through data-informed enhancements to our benefit offerings, supporting both physical and mental well-being of our employees. And finally, all of these goals are in support of our broader vision of delivering exceptional service and positioning the city as an employer of choice. You also heard about becoming an employer of choice during Mayor Solomon's budget presentation last week. What does that mean and why are we talking about it in budget presentations? When we talk about becoming an employer of choice, we're talking about creating a workplace where people are excited to be and they're proud to stay. That starts with inspired leadership, meaning leaders who communicate clearly, set expectations and support their teams. It means modern systems that make work easier instead of harder. It means meaningful benefits that support employees and their families, growth opportunities that help people build their future here, and a culture of appreciation where contributions are recognized. And when we do these things well, it has a real financial impact. We see reduced turnover, meaning fewer vacancies, fewer recruitments, and lower onboarding costs. We see stronger recruitment with better candidate pools and faster hiring. We see operational continuity with fewer disruptions, less overtime to backfill positions, and smoother transitions. We build long-term stability through succession planning and internal pipelines. And we gain efficient systems that reduce manual work and errors. Being an employer of choice is a strategy that impacts every employee as well as our entire community because exceptional service to the community starts with a thriving workforce. Getting into the numbers, this shows the 2026 budget as well as the 2027 budget, the dollar change for each of the categories as well as the percent change. So you can see overall, the Human Resources Department has a budget of $1.7 million. 86% of this is personnel costs, so the vast majority goes to our employees. The team consists of 11 full-time employees, and together we serve over 1,800 employees across the city. The overall 2027 budget has a decrease of about $14,000 from 2026. There are increases and decreases in various line items, which I'll cover on the next slides. So as I mentioned, the majority of our costs are for salaries and related expenses. We are expecting a decrease in 2027 just due to lower than expected health insurance premiums per employees. So that's the change you see on this slide. Some of our line items have increases from 2026 to 2027. Most notably is the increase to software maintenance contracts, and that's because of our intent to purchase a learning management system. The estimated cost of that for citywide use is about $68,000. That increase is offset because we moved about $25,000 from software maintenance contracts to the miscellaneous supplies and materials. that's because we do points through our online recognition platform and those are replacing prizes and things that were awarded previously so rather than being captured as software they're being captured as miscellaneous supplies and materials There are several decreases as well which you can see on the screen now. The most notable is the decrease in the wellness incentive and that's because we now recognize wellness through that online recognition platform. So those incentives are included in the miscellaneous supplies and materials category on the previous slide instead of being a standalone budget item. The other notable change on here is in subscriptions and that's because we are renewing our LinkedIn contract at a different service level than what we were paying for previously. The line items you see on the screen now are remaining neutral from 2026 to 2027. No significant changes to any of these. Because the 2027 budget includes dollars for a learning management system, also known as an LMS, I wanted to highlight how this would strengthen our training compliance and workforce development efforts. An LMS is simply a software platform to create, deliver, track, and manage employee training. It gives employees access to consistent, accurate, up-to-date courses across all major training areas. And one of the biggest advantages is consistent training delivery. And LMS ensures employees receive standardized safety, compliance, leadership, and soft skills training completed at a time that best fits operational needs. An LMS also reduces compliance and legal risk by ensuring that required courses such as harassment prevention, courses related to ADA, FMLA, workplace safety, and those kinds of things are completed and documented. Another major benefit is accountability because an LMS provides automated, centralized tracking and reporting of course completion. And LMS will allow us to deliver safety training at scale, everything from driver safety and bloodborne pathogens to ergonomics, ladder safety, workplace violent prevention, and more. Beyond safety and compliance, a learning management system supports leadership and soft skills development, which helps us build internal talent pipelines, reduce reliance on external training programs, as well as strengthen retention and succession planning. And the system won't just be for HR. The systems we're evaluating will allow custom course creation across all departments, meaning that IT, finance, legal, et cetera, can quickly deploy training on new policies, procedures, technologies, and legal updates. From a budget standpoint, a learning management system gives us a predictable cost that we can budget for while also reducing potential costs that are associated with worker injuries, workers comp claims, vehicle accidents, property damage, legal exposure, and associated operational disruptions. So in short, buying a learning management system for use across the city will help us improve consistency, reduce risk, support leadership development, and in turn create a more capable, confident, and future-ready workforce. A learning management system is just one piece of our overall workforce strategy puzzle. One of our key goals, as I already mentioned, for 2027 is to build the systems and tools that will help us understand our workforce more clearly and plan for the future with intention. The learning management system, as you see on the bottom left of the screen, is our foundation for this, giving us consistent training delivery, centralized tracking, and scalable development tools that will be deployed to all departments. We also plan to develop a standardized supervisor toolkit to ensure leaders have clear guidance, resources, and expectations for managing their teams effectively and consistently. We're establishing a workforce risk and succession planning framework to proactively identify future staffing gaps, strengthen internal mobility and support longterm workforce stability. For example, we could analyze what percentage of our workforce will be retirement eligible in the next five years. And then we can help supervisors plan for knowledge, transfer, preserve operational expertise and avoid disruption to those critical frontline areas. Finally, we plan to launch a leadership development pilot program and a defined competency model that clarifies what effective people leadership looks like across the city Together these initiatives create a cohesive scalable approach to developing leaders strengthening our workforce planning and improving consistency across the city and As to the numbers, this is the same slide I showed previously, just showing that overall decrease in budget from 2026 to 2027. And as I've shared, the investments we have in here, particularly the learning management system, will help us strengthen our workforce at every level and fund initiatives that help us improve training and prepare for future workforce gaps. With that, I am happy to answer any questions.

First up is Councilor Maher.

Thanks, Amber. I have a question. I believe you mentioned that the employee health care premiums would go down next year. If you could just spend a minute explaining how that happened.

Yes. So that's not the premiums that we pay overall for health insurance. That's just specifically for the HR department because of what employees were previously enrolled in and what employees who've come into the team now are enrolled in. So maybe in the past we had a bunch of family coverage and now we have single coverage or something like that. That's what's reduced the expected costs going forward.

Okay, and one more question. I served on the health care committee one year, a few years ago, and the health care, the reserves got really dangerously low, so we had to put a kind of a catch-up fee on all employees. How is that reserve level now?

We have a pretty healthy healthcare fund now. I don't know the exact number off the top of my head because the most recent update I saw was from a few months ago. So Daniel might have the specific dollars, but we were able to stop that additional contribution that employees were making. And we keep an eye on it. We're working with our insurance broker, analyzing what's budgeted out for claims expenses and what the actual ones are so far year to date. And it's looking pretty good overall. We're not anticipating having to make significant or significant increases to premiums in 2027.

Great, thank you. Chair, I'll recognize the finance department. Yeah, sorry.

I wanted to provide you the exact number. The current reserve balance is $6.6 million. Our policy does aim to maintain a reserve policy, or I'm sorry, a reserve of $4 million. So we have exceeded that. When you were serving on it, there were several months that we were below a million. I think the lowest was somewhere around $700,000 to $800,000 in that range. So with some of the changes we've made as well as that additional fee that we imposed for the employer as well as the employee, we were able to catch that up, but we have even surpassed that. And so our health policy or our health plan is in very good shape now.

Councillor Armstrong.

Thank you. Thank you. Amber, rentals jumped out at me. Could you give me an example of that? Can you expand on that?

Yeah, that is a strange category for an HR team. We host an employee appreciation picnic every summer, and we host a holiday lunch for employees in December. And so that's what that cost is. That goes towards the monument for renting their facilities.

OK. and then professional services?

Professional services is our employee assistance program, and that's estimated to be about $21,000 in 2027. And that's the new one with all the added features that I mentioned. So we were previously paying about that same amount, but we didn't have a digital platform. It was only three counseling sessions per topic per year, and it wasn't available to all of our employees. So we're pretty happy with what we were able to expand without increasing the cost of that.

Great. Thanks for explaining that, Ayel. Councillor Sechrist.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you, Amber. I had a couple of questions. One, in the learning management system, would that be an annual cost to the city, that $68,000?

It would be an annual cost. And that's based on the number of employees that would be using it and 50 courses. That would also likely include, depending on what model we go with, the ability to create our own courses that didn't count towards that.

And you mentioned other departments having the ability to utilize the software system as well. Do you have the buy-in from the other departments and willingness to provide those trainings through the system? Whereas I know we get emailed updates once in a while for some trainings. I've never done them, but. I believe so.

So for example, there's quarterly IT security trainings that are done through a platform called Know Before Right Now. And I believe that runs about $26,000 a year just for those quarterly trainings. And there might be other things that it's used for, but that's the one that most employees see. With the transition to a citywide LMS, we'll actually start doing those IT security courses through there. And so for a little bit more money, we'll be able to cover the IT security. There's been requests to do bloodborne pathogen training. We could significantly benefit from having driver Defensive driver training so that we reduce the number of incidents we have Other departments do have training systems and budgets So for example the airport does a lot of specific courses for their employees as well as non employees who are in the airport And so we'll be having conversations with Patrick about what we can maybe do to streamline some of that into the system Excellent.

My second question is regarding your FTE count I have a note in our budget spreadsheet that there was one FTE included in the 26 and 27 budget that maybe wasn't housed under HR, the city safety position. And so will we see an overall line item reduction if that position moves back to Public Works?

We took the safety position from Public Works, and we used it to create our organizational development manager position. And that's who's largely been driving things like our transition to the new employee assistance program, our performance management, all of this training and development. There's a safety emphasis. She's on the safety committee. There will be a safety component to the LMS. But I believe Director Tice has a different headcount that he's planning to use for another aspect of safety, which would be more of that frontline support.

Okay, so that's the operational management position.

But there'll be some partnership between the two just to build an overall culture of safety. Absolutely.

Okay, and then what is your final FTE count, or what is the total FTE count in HR?

11 full-time employees. Okay. Thank you so much, Amber.

You're welcome.

Not seeing any more questions. I just would like to add your year-over-year budget with explanations and breakdown was the cleanest and most precise I've seen, and I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

OK. If no more questions, we'll move on to number two, the 2027 IT department budget presentation by Director Jim Gilbert. Man alone.

Yeah, we got stuff going on.

Go ahead, sir. The floor is yours.

Okay. Hi, my name is Jim Gilbert. I'm the IT director for the city of Rapid City. We are a small group. individuals that are responsible for everything that happens within the city we support the ones and zero movement for the Civic Center the police cars that respond to life safety events we provide email we provide phone communications so As the quote would imply, there's very little today that is done in either the government or business world that doesn't rely heavily on IT in one way or the other. So this first slide I wanted to go through. We currently have 13 FTEs. We'll be up to 15 when we get fully staffed. Again, our responsibilities cover everything. And in light of the county events of earlier this month, cybersecurity probably shouldn't be last, but that's the way the slide was created. In areas of concern, we are dealing more and more with cyber security as we go through what I would consider a bump to the ability for people with less than You can now attack surfaces in a faster manner than you used to before AI was used to do offensive attacks against cybersecurity. So what we were seeing before was just a fraction of what we see now in terms of probing and intrusion detection on our systems. Another area of concern on here is hardware costs. We'll talk about that a little bit later. Due to the, I'm going to call it what it's kind of jokingly referred to, AI tax that is happening right now, when data centers are being built, they are buying, in some cases, all of the RAM that is produced by one of the three major RAM manufacturers in the world. So for example, Micron is the largest RAM producer. And when I say RAM I also mean the memory that's used on storage devices too. They no longer produce for our sector. They no longer produce for business or consumer sectors. So right now we are seeing a dramatic increase in all types of hardware costs, specifically ones that have RAM and storage in them. So that's a big concern. And then the other major concern I have is The infrastructure or the environment within technology is shifting away from the traditional model where you buy a piece of software, you own it until you buy the new version of that software, and moving to a subscription service. is challenging to an organization like a government because we cannot write off that operational expense, that OPEX, as we move forward. So those are some of the concerns that we see in our budget. First, I'd like to talk about my personal budget principles. I always believe in a zero-based budget, so every line item that I have is either within expectations for what we're going to spend to do things like replace switches during that year, or is spent day one. Um, most of the, uh, 68% of my operational budget is already accounted for due to software licensing costs, support costs, things like that. So, so we really work on that zero based mindset. Uh, I would say that it is one of the, um, organizations within the city that maybe even sometimes tries too hard to determine our total cost of ownership and ROI and we are always looking for ways to use the taxpayers money responsibly and make sure that we are staying within budget. We also do not do the end of cycle spend unless we see real value for that meaning at the end of the year if we have money left over and we have switches to repair we will buy those switches out of the end of year money that we have left over but we will not spend if it's not for actual allotted purpose that we had before the end of the year. And finally our guiding principle is that all of this money comes from the taxpayers so we always spend it like it is our money. and we make sure that we're spending it responsibly. Instead of going through just the numbers, these are some of the items that are of concern to me that are directly related to the budget. The first one is a testament to my team. As was indicated through our 30 plus hours we put in the weekend of July 4th during the cyber security incident at the county. I have an awesome team. They are responsive to requests. They are fast to act and they work with the service to the city in guiding all of their answers to questions and their responses to incidents. Having said that, we, looking at seven, sorry, eight different communities, some within our region, some out of our region, of municipalities our size, we have a much worse FTE to IT ratio, meaning Gartner would say we are understaffed and we are going through right now looking at ways to handle that and this has been a struggle for a while. Some of that's on me trying to be more responsible with budget. Some of that's on the strength of my team. We can handle probably more than some IT departments can. due to the knowledge and expertise that we have. So we're long-term plan, three to five years, we're probably looking to ask for more FTEs as we extend that out. Our IT budget, to be frank, we always have done well with our IT budget. And there's a caveat here that probably should be a little bit higher this year because of the Office 365 being placed in our budget. However, you could make an argument that that's not just IT budget, that's everybody's budget. But based on the operational expenses, we usually come in at half or less than what other cities our size have in their IT budgets. Part of that is just the attention to detail we do, but a lot of that is because we do a lot of work in-house. We don't outsource. An example of that is if we were to outsource, for example, the camera project that was approved through Vision Fund, the cost of that would, in our estimation, be three to four times higher than the fact that we do a lot of that work in-house. That goes back to the external spend, so those two are kind of related. We try to spend our capital, meaning both our money and our time, in ways that we can focus on the needs of the city and do so in a very responsible fashion. And then finally, an area of concern, and we'll talk about this a little bit later as well, is there is some... growing disparity that number has actually slid down this year from last year in our employee salary so we'll be looking at ways to work with hr over the next few years this year and into the future to make sure that we are staying competitive in terms of salary because our my team is very much on the forefront of of what an i.t department should be so Now, this slide talks directly to the idea of one of the challenges that I have within my budget, which is the shift from a perpetual software or a buy once, own forever, and a subscription. And not to go over every point on here, but in the past, when we would update our Exchange stack and our Office stack, that would be like... ninety to a hundred and ten thousand dollars depending on where we were with what people had bought for office and in the preceding years that would last us five to seven years sometimes eight to nine years depending on when exchange was end of life to buy microsoft so that was a ninety thousand dollar one-time purchase that was capital we could use cip for it now in the shift to office three sixty five we will be looking at spending for the same general type of software, but also we get some additional benefits, we will be spending $500,000 a year for that software function, email, office, communications like Teams. So the cost of doing business at that level, the cost of doing business on what would be considered a very basic level will expand 3,233% this year. That's just kind of the way it is. We struggled. We tried to stay on the on-prem for a while, but the truth of the matter is Microsoft's gonna pull that rug eventually. It makes them too much money. So there was no choice. We did actually go out. I worked with Secure SD, as we'll see in another slide, and this first year is actually being paid by the state excuse me, through a program by Secure SD. So we are saving money this year, but in subsequent years we will be spending that money for our office stack. Talking about the computer costs, this is just a brief slide to show what we're up against here. That first number there is October 2025 for a laptop computer. We were paying in the area of $880 for a computer. Obviously there were some higher end models that we had to buy for like GIS and stuff. The last number there is April of this year, and it is up to $1,340. In my 30 years of working in IT, I have never seen increases like this, not during COVID, not during the issue where there was a tsunami in Thailand that wiped out pretty much all of the hard disks that were available. This is unprecedented, it is a topic of discussion at every conference and meeting I have with other IT professionals, and I don't see an end to it anytime soon. This will continue as long as there's speculation, speculative building data centers within the data center market. The big numbers out of mine, I didn't go line by line because quite honestly, my line by line focuses on just software, software licensing and hardware. There is a 32% increase to my overall budget this year. Some of that is web hosting, however, that one is offset by the fact that the money was moved from another department into mine to be the host of the ongoing new website when it spun up. So during development it was in another department, now it's in mine. I am asking for an additional $60,000 for cybersecurity software. The big ask for that is to expand our threat locker, which is a system that runs on every machine and helps to isolate those machines and is a zero trust environment so that people that cannot, people cannot just get in and run software in a malicious fashion. And then finally, Next year, we will need $40,000. We are currently in process of rolling out GovAI, which is a citywide AI that uses ChatGPT as the large language model and is focused solely on government, provides us with data governance, provides us with data security in the means that we can't You can't even put a social security number into it. It doesn't even transmit to the LLM. So we have a little bit more control over the type of data that we offsite to the LLM because obviously we're not running those on prem. The $500,000 from Secure SD is greatly appreciated by me and by the city. It gives us a little time to get Office 365 rolled out correctly and securely and make sure that we are doing it in the best manner possible. So we will be looking for completion of that certainly by the end of this year. We were expecting three months, but then we kind of lost a month due to something that happened at the county. And then finally, I want to thank you guys for allowing us to... have the bucket of money available to expedite our purchasing due to the AI tax. So you guys approved last month the ability to spend up to $400,000 so that we can buy enough computers to be able to extend through the rest of this year and into next year so that we don't have to absorb more of that rising cost. And that's really appreciated for us because we have had quotes in hand for less than an hour before we are told by the companies that those prices are no longer valid. They have said that now it's $200 more or $50 more or whatever, but they will only honor quotes for an hour or less now. So that's just the world we live in. So it's very different than it's ever been for me before. So with that, I will go over the big challenges. First one, OpEx, CapEx. I will be working with Daniel if a state law needs to be changed, although Daniel informed me that that is not necessarily true. We're going to look towards the model that Texas is using now. think about the idea that it's not just because it's a subscription that makes it OPEX, it's how crucial is that to the actual day-to-day operation of your business, and does that form a multi-year use agreement? So if we are signing three-year contracts with, say, Microsoft or Office 365, maybe we can start to identify CIP funds for that so that we can alleviate some of the pressure on the general fund budget. The next one is staffing. Like I said, this is a part of a longer term plan, but we are looking to expand our staff so that we match better with not just the region and what typical departments and government our size has, but also with that Gartner number, which says we should be based on our employee count, be around the 22. We probably won't get there, but we probably don't need that. Also, staff is very concerned. recently about whether or not we're staying up to speed with the IT departments in the community and the region on our salaries. So I'll be working with HR to make sure we cover anything on that. And then finally, our support costs keep going up every year. Storage costs keep going up every year. But for the most part we'll be stable for the next two to three years I do worry that as the AI tax affects not just the manufacturing but the actual implementation of things like storage that our cloud expenses Will be path those cloud expenses that the larger companies are paying will certainly be passed on to us so I I have a very little wiggle room in terms of support costs, those are told to me, and we have to be cognizant of the fact that everything we do is controlled by 68% of our budget being spent day one. And that, I believe, is that. So any questions?

Councillor Maher.

Thanks, Jim. I'm just curious. So does any of the vendors at the airport use your network in any way? And I'm talking about the TSA and the FAA and the airlines.

So the... The short answer is yes. The long answer is it's complicated. So they use our infrastructure. To say that they use our network is probably less accurate because we segment it off logically. And there are some that are, Completely separated but rental cars and things like that. Yes. They use our our copper our fiber They run maybe through some of our switches, but then ultimately they go to theirs So in a network you can segment that traffic off so it doesn't actually touch our network per se And that's what we do out there.

Thank you counselor secrets

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And this might be a question better directed to Daniel, our finance director. But for those support costs in the Office 365 subscription fee, are those costs that are then prorated out to the departments through the interdepartmental charge and reimbursed back to IT? Or is that something your department's absorbing wholly? And Daniel, if I may.

Director Ansley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Interdepartmental charges are calculated looking at the previous year. And so for 2027, it will not be allocated through the interdepartmental charge across everywhere beginning in 2028. It will be because we'll recapture that. so beginning in 2028 there will be an increase across the board for everyone's interdepartmental charge to account for this but in the meantime no it's it's kind of a one-time hit and we have the secure South Dakota funds to help us with that first year so yeah that started that'll be June 1 of 26 to June 1 of 27 at June 1 of 27 we will have a

approximately $500,000 bill for Office 365.

gotcha that's seems outrageous and then final question you had mentioned the hosting fee for the new website what is the status of that when can we anticipate seeing our new website hit the ground so the last update I have seen on the website because Jamie is is running most of that but the the last update we've seen is that they have completed

the data migration and they're doing internal testing. I believe we're talking month or two till final go live. So.

Thank you.

Not seeing any more questions. Director Gilbert, thank you for the presentation. We can move on to three if it pleases the council. We can do a five minute recess or just carry on. Looks like we will just carry on. Next item is number three, the 2027 mayor's budget presentation by mayor Jason Solomon. The floor is yours, sir.

Not to be confused. My budget address. You won't have to deal with me that long. So I'm standing in today for Leah Braun. She is, uh, she left today. Her daughter's getting married. So here I am. You're, you're stuck with me. Couple of things. I want to touch on before I get into the mayor's office deal based on the previous discussion When I say a big thank you to everybody working on the website brepit ice Jamie Tenney's The whole crew have done an outstanding job. You're really gonna like it when it's done. So It's a long time overdue. We've had a vendor and we're very very grateful for that also just so you're aware with IT I Ask them a question, same as I ask anybody else. What do you need right now that you're not getting? Jim is very frugal. So I'm hearing things in that presentation. I'm like, dude, if you'd have told me, we might have tried to get more positions for you or something like that. But I always think that we have to be vigilant when it comes to our IT infrastructure. So the mayor's office, not a big office, but an impactful office. And I want to say a big thank you to the mayor's office staff. The title of this department is not completely accurate, because it's actually a support staff to the whole city. You have people in there that answer customer service calls, that deal with the public day in and day out. You have Darrell Shoemaker, who is the public information officer, not for the mayor's office, but for the entire city of Rapid City. He's the go-to for all the others. He's a great resource, really helps with media relations. You have Brett Matice, who's done an incredible job with marketing. Things that used to be contracted out are now done internally. It really helps speed along the website. We really appreciate that. But you see his work and quality on everything. You see the engagement, the improvement in social media, the engagement there. And we're working continuously to improve our communications throughout the city. The world is very different now. Uh, if you served on city council pre pandemic or worked in the city pre pandemic, you will know the demands are much greater post pandemic. Uh, people are very vocal. They demand service. Now we have a growing city, a lot of employees, and it really takes an incredible team. And, um, this is led by Leah Braun, who's come on as chief of staff. And I will tell you, my administration as well as future administrations will benefit from having a chief of staff like Leah Braun. One of the things I told her is this is a new position. So some of, uh, some of your challenges showing the value of what a chief of staff means to the city, not just to the mayor. You know Leah, she is on every project. I've never met anyone with greater follow through than she has had. She takes on so much, is able to multiply the impact of the city. We're able to have a voice and to be at many tables. It's hard for one person to be everywhere at the same time. She does a great job. She cares a great deal about the council and getting your input. She makes sure that you receive weekly communications coming out of our department meetings so you know what's going on as well as the rest of the staff. And that's really what it's about. This team exists to serve people. The whole city is here to help people. That is why we have jobs. Um, our jobs are not charity, but we're here to serve at each and every one of them at value. So grateful, uh, to sky and Sarah. And of course we've had great staff members in the past as well. So even though it says mayor's office, really what that means is it's a central place for the whole city, not just to serve the mayor specifically. And I think that's important to share because they are a service to all departments, all departments lean on the mayor's office. for support and they get it, whether it's putting together the budget that you see here today, you're reading budget books that are put together by our office. We develop that each year. We've had a great team that works on that. I just want to say a big thank you to that team. I know the council is very familiar with them. They also provide administrative support for you, for the commissions and the committees that we have in the city. Those are very important as well. And really at the end of the day, it's about serving our citizens. So moving on. So there's some priorities that we have within the mayor's office. And these are a lot of things that I spend a lot of my time on. Obviously, we have all the internal matters. you know, really a high functioning city that you already know this by hearing the budget hearings, but one minute you're talking about a public safety issue. The next minute you're talking about airport funding. Then the next minute you're talking about, uh, your water quality or the landfill or wind storm. I mean, there's so diverse what we do, but the whole idea is that it's a safer rapid city for everyone. So clearly supporting our police and fire, uh, Whenever we have big emergency situations, I'm involved in those discussions and often making decisions. But we also, safety is beyond that as well. We have a lot of support services, our water, ensuring our water and water reclamation, solid waste divisions, that's part of public safety. We have people that are supporting our park systems and everything else. There's so much about trying to keep the people as safe as we can and we support those significantly within the city. And you know as well that we deal with a lot of addiction and mental health challenges. Leah sits on a meeting that happens every Thursday morning with caregivers from all across the city that get together on that. So we have a permanent place within that. This is a topic of conversation we talk about frequently when we're dealing with those who are vulnerable and dealing with addiction. We are constantly fighting at every level, and I mean that in a positive sense to make sure that county, state, and federal resources are given to help care for people in addition to what we have right here. So whether we are working on opioid settlement dollars or whether we're working on state laws that can do more for our community or we're trying to get partners to work better together, there's always collaboration, always things going on to improve our city. Responsive and transparent local government. So that's a lot of what the communication is. And one of my mottos is that we try to use our turn signal. And I mean that in our communication. I don't bat a thousand on that. And we don't bat a thousand on that as a city because so many things happen. If you were to stop communicating everything that's going on in the city, you would notice thousands of communications pieces that are going to the community. Every time you watch the news, that is our team members that are sharing what's happening in their city. So people know what's going on. And the challenge with communication, of course, is signal versus noise. There's a lot of noise out there, but it's hard to get your message through. So we're all talking at the same time, but it's hard to get your message through. That's where I think Brett can really come in handy in really helping to spearhead some of those things with our website, social media. and marketing efforts. And when we say marketing, really that promotion to make sure people pay attention. Something capture their attention to say, oh, this is happening. Really appreciate that. This new website is going to be tremendous because we have high hopes what it will do, not just providing information, but being a service engine that people can chat through, that we can share data points and metrics more clearly, that people can find exactly what they need. Um, it's a challenge right now. I'm really, this website's been a long time coming since I first came into office and it seemed like for one reason or another, we had challenges getting it off the ground, but now it's almost here. Very grateful for that. And by responsive, um, you know, we are within our office. We try to contact people within a business day, if not sooner. And we have a lot of volume that happens in our office. People rarely call you because everything's going great. There's usually something going on. A lot of speeding on my street. Or we have a public safety issue over here. I need to tell the mayor what I thought about what he said on social media. My staff, I feel bad for them. But they take it all, and they serve. And they have such positive attitudes, and that's what it's about. expect that throughout the city we also want to try to eliminate any obstacles that make it hard to do business with the city and so trying to solicit that feedback and the council has been good with that i can think of east submittals that people would have their their plans and they have to print them all out to bring to the city and people say why can't you upload that online and We didn't have that capacity, but we said, well, other cities can do it. So clearly we can do it. And, and we did, it took some investment. Uh, we still have work to do. We try to figure out how do we use tools and technology, uh, to improve, uh, service to our citizens. And I will say I'm a, I'm a people first person. I believe technology is important, but people don't exist for technology. Technology exists for people. That includes AI, that includes other tools that will come on board. So while I'm open to using those tools in a responsible manner, I want to make sure that at the end of the day, uh, we are here to serve people, uh, strategic advocacy and partnerships. So I spent a good deal of time here. I talked to leaders at every level of government. I talked to community leaders, uh, the constant meetings about ideas and opportunities and often challenges. And you're constantly trying to go through hurdles on that. And so our office provides a lot of effort for that. So, you know, for example, uh, we'll work with everybody from the governor to our DC delegation, uh, during the legislative session, uh, we are engaged with, various bills in peer that affect the city of Rapid City. We've had some success. We don't always win. But if we're not there, if I'm not on the phones, if I'm not taking meetings even off season from the legislative session talking about our priorities, our voice is not heard. but our voice is heard because I build relationships with especially all of our Black Hills legislators. I know them all. We have new folks that'll be elected come November, and whoever's elected then will work on building relationships. We will hold meetings to bring them all together to talk about the priorities for Rapid City. This last year, we saw many things with that that I thought were very important. That includes Once upon a time, the state would never invest a nickel into airports. Now they do. Now, I will say that you had people advocating for a decade, long before I was ever mayor, trying to get the state to even pay attention to the airports and view them as great economic development, as well as great infrastructure. Because without an airport, your city is irrelevant. So kudos to them. But then I have to come along and really try to help carry that message along with Patrick Dame, who's done a terrific job and our airport board and our council members and try to make sure, Hey, I think it's worth investing in. And we have seen success. We've seen success from the state twice. in terms of airport funding. That's one example of how we work within our office. We try to do this with addiction treatment. I've had many conversations with DSS, had many conversations regarding public safety. In fact, we have a regular call between Rapid City and Sioux Falls. Not only the mayors, the chiefs, the sheriffs, the state's attorneys, judges, as well as uh, folks from peer, including DOC and the governor's office to talk about our public safety challenges. So when you heard about parole being an issue this past year, that was because of the call that we facilitate and that issue comes up in those calls and we make it a statewide issue. And now, things are actually happening, not just for Rapid City, but the whole state as a result of those conversations. Those are the kinds of relationships that you have to cultivate and build. We continue to do that, but also it goes throughout all sorts of communities, whether it's nonprofits, businesses that are wanting to expand their businesses here or downtown businesses that want to see a vibrant downtown or new businesses that want to come to town. And I'm going to tell you, we have had great success with that, because it's about building relationships. And I appreciate everybody's efforts on that. And then another one that's near and dear to me is strong families and resilient homes. The family is the foundation of a society. And so goes the family, so goes the society. And you've heard me talk many times about I want Rapid City to be where kids thrive and families flourish. A lot of things that we do is about the next generation. So we do things like visit many, many schools, talking about everything from city government to drug prevention and how everything works. And I love talking to everybody from elementary school kids up to college age kids. I've talked to the student senate at South Dakota Mines. talk to high schoolers at assemblies. I've talked to third graders in elementary schools and everything else in between. And that's what it's about. We want to promote that. We also work a lot with foster care. Encouraging people to step up to care for kids that may not have the families that we all wish we could have because we see a link between our public safety and Our the health of families and of course, it's about kids. So the one decision that I The one matrix excuse me that I use for make every decision is whether this helps the next generation or not I know you do as well. We're all very passionate about the next generation So we'll move on to the next slide With regards to the actual budget that supports this, it's slightly decreased from last year. One of the big reasons you'll see that on our salaries is slightly decreased just because we had some folks that had been here several years move on to new adventures in their life. And that changes some of those dynamics. You see some other drop offs like the initial website build out was under the mayor's office. And now you'll see the ongoing maintenance be presented differently than the initial build. So that would be good. When you see travel and training on any budget, that doesn't mean everybody's taking trips to Hawaii. Oftentimes, those trainings can be online. Some of my travel, almost all of my travel has been to Pierre or Sioux Falls or Chamberlain. That's where we meet. If I meet with the mayors, we're going to meet in Chamberlain. If we go to Pierre to meet with state government, we'll do that. We've taken trips to Sioux Falls to collaborate with them. We've had a great relationship with them. In fact, we probably struggle to actually utilize that whole budget, but with Zoom calls and everything else, we're able to try to do more and more. Everything else are pretty fixed costs within the department. A lot of administrative functions and paper stock and those sorts of items. So you will not see a lot of significant changes within our budget for this year. It's really about the people, making sure they have the tools to do the job, to serve the people of Rapid City. So with that, I'm open to any questions that you might have.

Thank you, Mayor Solomon. Any questions? We appreciate your time, sir. Thank you. That will conclude number three. Moving on to number four, the 2027 Parks and Recreation budget presentation by Director Jeff Beigler. There's a motion and a second for a five-minute recess. All in favor? Any opposed? We're in recess for five minutes. Sorry, Jeff. We'll get to you in five minutes here. I tried to put it in the middle.

All right. 35.

Okay, push your button.

Push it again.

How do people do that?

I have an idea. It's not on. See? I pushed you. Steven's muting, golly. Actually, I need to learn how to do that, too.

I'm going to write about this somewhere.

It's probably on the live feed here.

I should probably be careful.

The meeting will come to order. We are on number 4, 2027, Parks and Recreation Budget Presentation by Director Jeff Begler. Sir, the floor is yours.

All right. Thank you very much. Thanks for allowing us to come here and share a little bit about what we do in Parks and Recreation. We are a department that we feel is very important to the quality of life here in Rapid City for all of the residents and the visitors that Like to come here, so I'll get into here first of all I would like to Introduce two of my Compadres here Scott Anderson is our parks division manager wave to everybody Scott there you go And Matt Brandhagen is our recreation division manager has been in this role for four months four months so he's taken taking the bull by the horns and he's working really hard to Provide recreational opportunities for everyone that lives here. So getting into the Presentation here. First of all, I've got two numbers to look at here. This is our budget for our proposed budget for 2027 Fifteen point two million dollars and we have roughly well exactly seventy three point five full-time employees so we'd like to tell you what we are going to be doing with that money and with those folks and And so I would like to jump into a few of the priorities for the coming year. Uh, one of those is a new park development in 2027. You'll see three new parks coming online, which is very, very exciting. It's, it's rare that you see one park, uh, in, in, in a decade or more. And we've got, uh, we're positioned now to have several parks come online next year. One at Johnson ranch. the Johnson Ranch Park, Knollwood Park up in the north part of the town, and Homestead Park. That's part of the Homestead Park and Fire Station project. We will also be working this winter and into the spring to update our food truck policies and to update our special events policies. Those are things that we do in Parks and Recreation. We issue all the permits for special events and for food trucks as well as we do all of the rentals of picnic shelters in our parks. So that's the second big thing that we're going to do. And the third one is we're going to be starting to dive into the Parks and Recreation Master Plan that you guys adopted very short time ago and using that to coordinate and prioritize spending not only of in the coming year but in the next decade or more that this document will be relevant so with that I would like to talk a little bit about what our admin team does we have three divisions in Parks and Recreation we've got an administration administrative division that does all of the kind of the nuts and bolts day-to-day stuff they also Do the project coordination and project management of our CIP? Projects or vision projects are smaller in-house projects that we do our Robbinsdale play structure project All of those we do a lot all that project administration in-house We also do as I mentioned the special event permitting the food truck permitting the park shelter renter rentals and we manage all of the leased lease agreements that we have with the various sports and other organizations that utilize City property for their their programs Now as I mentioned I wanted to throw a couple of statistics in here These are the numbers for as you see the 25 and 26 numbers the 26 numbers are up through today so last year we had 183 special event permits issued. This year to date, we've got 125 special event permits. You can see there what the estimated attendance is and the revenue that was generated from those permits. Last year, we had 69 food truck permits issued. That's a lot of food trucks in Rapid City. This year to date, we've already got 64, and so I expect that number to climb before the end of the year. And again, I mentioned that we do all these lease agreements and manage those properties that are leased out to different organizations. We've got 28 different lease agreements. So we've got one person in our staff, our parks and rec specialist, who manages really all three of these things. And so you can imagine the amount of time that she spends working on this. It's more than a full-time job. She does a terrific job with it. And then you can see our park shelter rentals. This is interesting that in 25, we brought in nearly $50,000 in revenue just for picnic shelter reservations in our parks. And you can see in 26, the rental's to date. With that, we've got, I know Matt is going to discuss all of the wonderful things he's got going on in recreation, so I'll turn it over to Matt Brandhagen.

Council, so being four months in this position, I don't really previously have a lot of involvement with previous budget, but looking forward to next year's budget and strength in the Recreation Department. Just some numbers, some kind of cool numbers if you guys want to learn pickleball. Pickleball is a very fast moving sport. We had over 135 teams in pickleball the last two seasons. If you've ever been to Wilson Park and drove by, it's packed. Um, people call, text every day wondering how I can get a different court, where our court's at. So we're kind of in the process of trying to find a place or funding for a new pickleball court. Um, I think we need one. I think the time has come where the sports evolve and you can see with 135 teams. Um, I think it's time that maybe we're looking, kind of looking at a soup park, maybe build something there. But the funny part of it's where we're at and I, it's just a great, uh, Great sport, very fast growing. As you can see, bocce ball, another 44 teams, beautiful courts. The construction they're doing now with the restrooms and the shade shelters are going to be awesome. People don't realize how fun bocce is. I played it a few times, and it's an awesome sport. As you can see, we kind of maxed out with our teams with 44. That's a lot of teams, a lot of players, so it's been used a lot. A big recreation program of mine is volleyball. We had over 600 teams. in those four seasons the last couple years if you can think about that that's upwards of 2 000 volleyball players um we're maxed out we have no room our community gyms are full so thank you council for pushing the sports complex because that's going to give me an opportunity to move some of my volleyball teams out there during the week night which estimate probably 20 to 30 teams are on the waiting list to get into my volleyball program so it's a blessing to have something built or getting built to what about my programs? I get everybody involved and it sucks when 20 teams are sitting there waiting to be on the waiting list. So it's a lot of volleyball players, a lot of volleyball teams, same for basketball. Um, I maxed out with 40 teams. I think there was 10 on the waiting list. Same thing. Sports complex is going to help with that. Um, another big program of mine is a summer camp this summer. We had over 550 kids and it sold out within a half hour. Um, Huge. And I have probably 30 kids on the waiting list because I have no room, no money for vans. So that's one of my things now is to try to hopefully put in a budget next year for 2028 advance. We can offer this program to everybody. So that's a big deal. Um, I know Lindsay's kids were in summer camp and it's fast. I mean, you gotta be on your phone within that second to get signed up. So it's kind of cool. Um, as for golf courses, uh, we just hired Tina as our pro out there doing a wonderful job. Um, compliments her and Emily do so much out there. We hosted two SDG events. I think I had numerous emails on how the course looks, how Tina's handling things. It's just a wonderful place to be. Like I said, kudos for Tina and Emily out in the staff out there. Cause Meadowbrook looks awesome for the dry weather that we're having. So there's kind of the rounds, both Meadowbrook and executive have, um, very busy golf courses. Um, But again, excited for the future of those golf courses. As for the Ice Arena, you can kind of see we're on the sixth season of the Sabres team. Kind of cool. A little junior hockey league. Rush McCurling had 60 members. Figure Club, 30. Adult Hockey had about 300 players. We have about 75,000 people visit that annually. So the Ice Arena is a very cool place, a very busy place, and excited for the future of that too. As for aquatics, stay the same thing with my programming swim lessons. If you don't get on fast enough, you're going to be on a waiting list. We had over 1,900 kids sign up for that with two sessions ago. Water aerobics, land exercise, the attendance you can see is about 117,000 kids at our pools last year. So I'm going to hand this over to Scott now with parks.

Chair recognizes Councillor Strowman.

Matt, can I ask you a couple quick questions? Yeah. Quick questions. That's fine. You're no stranger to running the REC program. I know that you've been instrumental for years, and it looks like it's just bursting at the seams. And kudos to you for the job you've done in the past and what you're doing now. How does the... Proposed sports complex fit into helping to take some of the pressure off this lack of pickleball courts or lack of whatever, you know facilities that we have do you foresee that that's going to be something that's you're going to be able to be involved in to supplement that

Yes. The, the proposal, Jeff and I have been to all the meetings. The proposal is that we will be able to share the usage of the complex money through Thursday at a certain time, depending on what the other organizations are using it for. So I'm guessing three, two, three, four courts that we'll be able to use proposed, which is going to take a lot of pressure off my programming. When you, when you start at six o'clock and you're done at 10 30 at night on both community gyms, it's going to take a lot of pressure off that. And again, The teams that are sitting there waiting, texting me, hey, can I get in? And then we're going to have an opportunity for everyone to play. So a lot of pressure off the community gyms and teams.

The other question I have, it kind of follows with pickleball. And we have the Sioux Park Tennis Facility, which is really one of the jewels of the Midwest, I guess, in terms of what it has to offer. But I hear some rumblings about, which I think is not to be surprised by, but that kids are out there using it inappropriately or using pickleball playing pickleball where they're not supposed to be is is stuff like that going on or is there something we can do to it is going on okay what i did is i set a policy a couple weeks ago and kind of kept sioux park as just tennis so i said if you want to play pickleball parkview courts have

Two, one, three courts with pickleball lines on them. So I'm kind of getting them to go over to Parkview and play the pickleball. A lot of tennis people do not like pickleball. The noise, the kids. So that's going to kind of keep them away from Sioux Park, but it's not going to stop them. I don't know how to stop them from going there at 9 o'clock at night and jumping on a tennis court and thinking it's pickleball. But I just want some of them to play.

I agree.

And that's my goal with this new pickleball court eventually is to You know, we're thinking Sioux Park, because horseshoes are kind of, I haven't seen anyone play horseshoes, in that area over there, to put a nice concrete pickleball court with about six courts, and hopefully that relieves the pressure off.

And are the ones at Canyon Lake, do you have responsibility for those, or are those separate?

We don't, those are private, yep.

Okay, thanks.

Yeah.

Councillor Seacrest.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And my question's for you too, Matt. I think a few of us may be in the queue. Back to the summer camps and the capacity issues there, all we need is a new van? Or do we have the staff and capacity as far as the space? to offer more recreation opportunities for families or for summer camp activities. I know there's a huge need in the community for quality summer programming, and we've talked about this now for many years, back to lots of years ago when I was registering, and then even as recent as two or three years ago that you've said this need is there. So what can we do to support you in growing that

Um, we just got a new van this year, which pushed my participation up another 60 kids. So one from 52 kids is 62 kids. So I can eat 10 kids in a van. So a van would be awesome right now. Our oldest van, it's been in the shop like a couple of weeks, you know, so it's, it's tough. Now we got to take a little minivan and carpool, but I don't want kids left behind. That's my whole goal. And we have 20 kids on the waiting list. Text me every day. Like Matt, is there an opening? No, I can't. I just don't have room staff wise.

could find staff pretty easy and as a parent I really appreciated your availability to you were willing to call me on your cell phone and I think as a community as a city representative that speaks volumes and just thank you for that you're welcome I know that this is a huge value to the community if we can somehow ramp this up ten persons per year or however we could manage to do that in a sustainable way. Is there a cost recovery to this program that's substantial enough to, as far as the registration fees, isn't it just under 200 a week? And then I know it costs quite a bit for us to pay for the children's registrations at different events and things.

I try to make that fee reasonable to where it almost breaks even. at the end of the year. I don't want to gouge parents of $200 a lot because we take the kids, Monday we go to Cosmos, Tuesday we go to the bowling, Wednesday we swim, Thursday we go to Tramway, Friday we go to Waiteke. It's all fun and fun and fun. So we don't make a lot off it, but it's something.

Okay, so really the city is just investing in the staff and the space and we have both of those assets at this time. It's providing more of the transportation piece

Yeah, I'd love to enroll the program. OK. Totally.

Thank you. Yeah.

Councillor Meyer. I'll just stay here for a while. Sorry. Mr. Chair. Here you go.

My questions were pretty much in the same vein as Councillor Sechrist. I think I'd be interested if you, maybe as an action item, would bring forward what it would take for next summer. to have no kids on the waiting list. I mean, just to kind of echo what you're saying, we started a new program at Main Street Square this year. It was a couple hours on a Tuesday, free STEAM classes. We had 900 slots throughout the summer, and they were all claimed within a day. So I feel like we're seeing this theme of wanting something to do. And so I think I would be interested just to know what like a van costs. But you don't have to tell me now.

I won't. I'll keep in touch with you guys. I want to do something because it's just hard for me to grasp that no kids can join the program. And the Y is full, too. And a lot of kids are going from the Y to me and back and forth. And so it's a very booming program for sure.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I think that's it. Thank you.

Yeah.

All right. I'm Scott Anderson. I'm the Parks Division Manager. Before I dazzle you with a bunch of parks numbers up there, I just wanted to take a moment to say thanks to Jeff Begler for his 13-plus years of service to us. He's really led the way and got us to where we are now. And even though this is his last budget, he didn't rest on his laurels. He helped us through looking towards the future, so. Kudos to him and good luck in all his retirement activities. So he's been awesome Anyway, I want to just add a few slides just for some projects we're working on or have done or or that are upcoming that kind of parlays into our Operations budget too. So which is what we do with projects we have a few different avenues of funding and Obviously the CIP funds the vision funds We're trying to get grants when we can and we do have some in-house projects that we will use our operations budget for too so On this list here of note want to thank you guys for supporting our parks and rec master plan Hopefully that will guide us here for the next 5 10 15 years. We've never had that document that can guide us like this one is going to spend it's a good plan we haven't dug into it really deeply just yet but that'll give us uh... the opportunity to parlay our money into the best direction that we can uh... vision fund is a second uh... source of funding we uh... fairly well very well in our last round of vision fund with the limited amount of funds we we did uh... Did get quite a bit of funding there, a little over $12 million. The couple on there that are really dear to me would be the Vicki Powers Park Dog Park. That's very much needed in town. We have the Braeburn Park that's not fully fenced, but at Vicki Powers, once we get going on that, that should be a huge hit for everybody, especially in that area up there where there's a lot of apartments and people with dogs. The one I mistakenly took off this list was the Canyon Lake Park revitalization. I guess it's the pond wall project. It was about three and a half million dollars. Canyon Lake Park is probably our busiest park as far as people going out and enjoying themselves, you know, for cookout and shelters. Sioux Park is really busy with activities, but Canyon Lake Park has that aura that, you know, those pond walls need to be fixed, and that's going to be an awesome project, just like Dinosaur Park was, too. The other bits of funding, the grant funding, we're utilizing some of the community development block grant funding on a couple projects. The TIF funding on Homestead Park, the TAP grant through DOT on the Mary Hall Path project. We were talking about that project actually today. I had worked with the street department back in 2013 to try to redo that pathway through Mary Hall Park. in the fall of 2013. If you remember what happened in the fall of 2013, the storm Atlas came in and kind of ruined our plans for that, and we never really picked it back up. So this TAP grant's really going to help us get that path back into good shape and very much usable. So a few of the in-house projects, that's kind of what we do with our funding. The bottom one on the list there, the median revival on Mount Rushmore Road. That's $15,000. We did have a donation from Dream Design of $15,000 to go towards that project for plant material, for fabric, rock, whatever we need. So I just want to give a shout out to Hanny on that, because that's going to help us a ton. If you've noticed around town, that's a crew that we started. from your guys' support from last year when we had acquired four new FTEs and we started basically a non-parks property crew. So they're geared towards the non-park stuff, like the medians. I believe that crew is digging on the fountain out here, doing stuff like that. So they're really doing a good job. The guy we have heading that up has been with the department for quite a while and really has a passion for getting that stuff looking good. That big number at the bottom, the 18.5 million, that's what we have for major projects. And that's incredible. Just to, we're really busy. Our project people are stacked to the gills, Melissa and Darren. We have a lot of stuff going on and hopefully we can get through all these and get things going. A little bit on what we do. This is just a tiny snippet of what goes on in the Parks Department. 116 irrigation systems we have. We're trying to get the majority of those on a central control system. So actually, I could pull my phone out right now and turn on a zone at Memorial Park if you wanted to. That's how integrated this stuff is. We have about 40 controllers on that right now. So that's been a huge help to our crew to get those going. Obviously, the restroom buildings, playgrounds, the 70 miles of sidewalk bike path, that's just for plowing snow. We do have all our parking lots and different areas to do with that, too. And about 1,000 acres of maintained turf that we do mow that's irrigated. Pretty big stuff. With all that, with all these new projects, we did acquire the new FTEs, but on the back end, we've kind of sacrificed some of the repair and supply line items to actually I'll call it feed the workers. So I think we can get through this year, but I think in the future we really need to look at those line items where we do a lot of stuff in-house with our guys, fixing the irrigations, fixing the restrooms, fixing the playgrounds, all that kind of stuff that we're really going to have to look at bolstering those line items so the guys can get the work done that they're tasked to do. They're getting by pretty good right now. We do have 30 FTEs in the parks department. We do have higher between 30 and 50 seasonal workers too. So they're the mainstay of our summertime is those seasonal workers. So they're on mowers. They're on their hands and knees pulling weeds. They're cleaning restrooms. They're raking wood chips in the playgrounds, doing all that good stuff. another part that I'm in charge of the park ranger program and A big thank you to you guys too from last year. We did acquire another ranger So we have Lou as the supervisor and we have four park rangers now So what that's doing is freeing up the schedule a little bit. So they're not all working from 3 30 to midnight and we'll have the opportunity to schedule some people on the weekends or at least one ranger like a daytime shift and the weekends when you know as well as I that's the busiest time our parks are is on the weekends and taking care of reservations you know any disputes on that that's been I I believe one of the best programs we've ever started we've talked about that for a long time and kudos to you guys and the mayor for making this happen that's been a been a super, super program for our department. So our guys have somebody to talk to to relay what they're seeing, and the park rangers will relay what they're seeing to our maintenance guys. It's been a great, great program. TODD BANDUCCI- Sir, if I may pause you, I'll go to Councillor Stroman.

Scott, I'm sorry, I was back on, you brought up irrigation, which obviously is a big deal in this kind of weather in the summer we're having. How is your irrigation needs affecting your budget or your projections? Do we buy the water from the city? Do we use treated water? Do we take it right out of the creek? Can you tell us what's going on? How do we get all this parkland irrigated?

Yeah, primarily everything's treated water. I think that both golf courses pump out of the creek. They do pay for the water, though, the water rights. But yeah, pretty much everything we have is treated water.

I believe Director Ainslie would like to weigh in.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That is one of the free services that's provided by the Water Department. So the actual cost of the water itself is not charged out to the parks department for that. So that is the cost of treating the water and everything else and then putting it on the parks, all the fields, everything else that's really borne by the water utility rate users that do that for the incremental cost of that additional water that's treated.

Just to follow up, thank you, Daniel. Is there any thought, can we not use treated water and just use the, just take it right out? I mean, we have the lagoons on Meadowbrook. We have at various places, and we have obviously the creek running through town. Is that a possibility to somehow extract that and water? Maybe that's not an idea. I don't know.

No, it always has been an idea, and I'm not sure if there is water rights that go along with the creek stuff. I'm not really up on those. We'd have to talk to engineering or the floodway guys about that if that's possible. One thing we did years ago when they redid the irrigation at Memorial Park was to try to plan for something like that, so they did put in a transmission main. There's an 8-inch main line that kind of runs around the park that... They're in hopes of pumping out of the pond, but it never came to fruition. But with that one, it was going to go down New York Street, I think, all the way to the Journey Museum, but it never did come to fruition. But we sure could look into some of that. There's different issues, I think, with pumping out of the raw water with filtering, and it'd just be a different setup. I know they had in Sioux Park years ago, Kind of in the southeast part of the park. There's the old pump house He used to run it from there, but it kind of went defunct probably 20 years ago now But we could definitely look at it Okay, thanks Councillor Maher

Thank you. I just had a quick question. I noticed when you went through the vision projects, I guess I was going to say this till the end, but the vision project, I didn't see the bump park, bike park across from the Founders Park.

Yeah.

That was supposed to start earlier this year.

Yeah. Yeah. I must have went by that one. But that, yeah, that's actually in design right now, I believe. They're kind of on the homestretch of design, so it should be... probably shovel ready here any minute. I can't remember where we're totally at on it, but they do have the design just about done, so it should be on the ground here by this fall.

Okay, thank you. Councillor Citrus.

Mr. Chair, speaking of irrigation, when I toured Meadowbrook, I know that was a huge need at the Meadowbrook Golf Course was an irrigation line, and I too would just like to kind of leave My thoughts that we should be looking at either detention or retention ponds or pulling from the creek to use if possible. I don't know, maybe Meadowbrook is already doing that, but once we move forward with a replacement project. I know we addressed Arrowhead. The executive, yes, irrigation lines recently. Thank you, but what's the future look like for the Meadowbrook irrigation request?

Um, we do have some, some of our CIP money and in subsequent years set aside, we're going to need more than what we have available in that. So we're probably looking at maybe the next round of vision fund to, to supplement that. So whatever that is, 20 29, 20 30. Um, and we're looking probably. upwards of between three and four million dollars for that. And they do pump out of the creek, there's the pond right there on Meadow Brook that they pump out of.

Okay, I was vaguely remembering that as I was speaking, so thank you. I just think as kind of a crown jewel to our community, it's very important for us to consider that for future funding and keeping The fields maintainable right now. It's causing a lot of turf issues and longevity of that field is gonna be the Course which sorry, I'm not a golfer but is gonna be compromised if we're not looking ahead to that.

So, thank you Yeah, definitely in that if you notice if you're a golfer at all and I've golfed at the executive golf course that Recent irrigation improvement really turn that place around. It's it's really nice.

It's looking beautiful. Yes. Thank you. Okay

No further questions? Got one more, a couple more slides after the park rangers. We do have, under my purview, is the Mountain View Mount Calvary cemeteries. One thing of note there that the cremations the last two years have exceeded the traditional burials, which is kind of weird to think about. But things have shifted a little bit in the use of the cemetery. So we're kind of running out of room. We're looking at an expansion project just down on the south end, utilizing the rest of that south end. But what you see in this picture here We have a hillside kind of below Sheridan Lake Road that is unusable for traditional burials. It's too slopey. So we had a project when we did the new shop building and some roads probably five years ago. We flattened out a spot up there and we're putting in some columbariums, which are niche walls for cremations. So those two that you see, I believe they each hold... each have 144 niches, which would hold 288 cremains. So really utilizing that unusable slope and hopefully extend the life of the cemetery a little bit. On the right there, there's a little retaining wall. We already have a spot for another one. So when we're sold out of that second one or getting near, we'll occupy that other space with another column area, which we have room for probably I think we were gonna look at probably a dozen of them on that hillside. So there'd be quite a few burials.

Councillor Strowman. Yeah, in terms of years, do you have projections as to how long it's gonna last? I mean, Stephen's prompting me to get my spot now. He thinks I'm on the verge.

Yes, you probably should be thinking about it. Everybody should be thinking about that. I talked to Craig about it and no real time frame. I'd say probably in the next between 10 and 20, probably 20 years. You know, we'll be at least built out there and filling in as we go. So that's one question, too, to bring up is if the city wants to be in the cemetery business, we need to find another spot if we want to keep moving forward with that. So something to think about.

Thank you.

Last but not least, the big word of the year was from the mayor, his momentum. I really believe our department has a lot of momentum right now. Jeff has propelled us into a spot where we're doing some really good things. We have such a great team. The team under me, the parks guys, the maintenance guys, are incredible. We've separated guys out, and they're all raring to go and getting stuff done. Craig at the cemetery is doing a good job. Lou with the park rangers, unbelievable. We have a meeting once a month with our whole department leadership, our rec specialists, managers, supervisors. And just the enthusiasm and the passion that everybody has for their position is incredible. And as you see from Matt, Matt's been a good addition to the rec manager position. I think we have great years to come, and I think we're doing some really good things. Just wanted to share that. And as far as momentum goes, we just want to keep it going. So hopefully we can.

Thank you very much. Any other questions from the council? We greatly appreciate everything you guys do. Any other direction or discussion? If not, I'll entertain a motion for adjournment.

Second.

I have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. We are adjourned.