City Council - Regular Meeting

everyone thank you council for being here we do have one counselor that is on online joining us so she good to go all right with that um we'll go ahead and get started i'll turn over to you raylan for our next round of budget work so before i turn it over to departments i wanted to just go over the packet that's in front of you it's the same one that i gave you last year or last week except

Some of the numbers have changed based off some directions. So the biggest change that is the city administrator job title has changed to chief of staff. And it's been reduced on the hourly pay amount from $70 to $50. And so that has been adjusted in the budget. It was about a reduction of about $50,000. So you'll see that also on the second to last page I send this to you in your guys's email but it shows the updated cost of the total position instead of that 206 number it's now 155 so that's the biggest change here the other big change that you'll see here kind of behind the scenes is that, as you recall, I talked about the Percy increase that I was going to shift from Percy to health insurance. And so when I did that, it affects different departments differently. Even though it's cost neutral within the general fund, you'll see like police went down significantly because they were impacted by that Percy increase significantly, but some of that shifted. with that health insurance increase. So we looked at the total cost. And so the total reduction in the budget was about $150,000. And the total increase in health insurance was $150,000. It just spread across not just general fund, but across all departments a little bit differently. So that's a big change that impacted a lot of different departments kind of behind the scenes. The last change that we did, so We talked about the admin allocation a lot. And one of the things that we wanted to identify, especially in the budget, that wasn't initially there last, because I was going back and forth in it. So four general fund fee departments. So that includes fire prevention, mapping, engineering, planning and zoning. We allocate a cost of, we allocate the cost to admin for internal services, city clerk, finance, all of those. However, I did not put them in the budget initially. And the reason was is because it's just a general fund transfer to general fund. But after thinking about it and going back and forth, we decided to do that. And the reason why is our fees are set based off of the cost to cover services. And so when we set our fees, if we're not charging those departments to cover those internal services, then it's not defensible. And it makes sense to do that. And what that did after doing it, I sent you an email earlier today, it does free up sales tax revenue within the top portion of general fund that we can talk about later. that we can allocate differently if we want. So instead of using building fees to supplement police and fire, we'll be using sales tax revenue to supplement police and fire. So that's a broader discussion that we can continue having, but I just wanted to bring that to your attention that it does look like the budget's grown, but the revenue has grown as well to offset that. It's not a... it's a dollar for dollar so it's not something that we're making money on and with admin allocation we only charge for up to what we actually spend so a couple of the things there in addition to that if you look at the back pages of the cash balance you'll see some changes such as I went through a lot of the enterprise fund fees, water, sewer, and we did recognize those. We know that we're getting a little ahead of council with not passing those fees yet. But these are staff recommendations for the increases. So you will see significant increases in both water and sewer based off of those connection fees, not necessarily usage fees. So that revenue did get increased. which then does change those cash balances so be happy to answer any questions but those are the biggest changes and then just with the positions no other positions changed in here when I sent this out I added the funding source so you can kind of see where everything is allocated to and what what revenue pays for which position. And then that last page is the positions that were requested but not added to the budget, which I know I sent those out to you guys. It was on a second tab, so I don't know if you guys saw that, so I wanted to just make sure you guys were aware of that. So I'd be happy to stand for any questions. If there's not any, I'd be happy to turn it over to Robin to start with community development and economic development.

So Raylene, we were asked relative to fees for enterprise water, sanitation. They're not going to go up. It's just going to be a connection fee part of it.

So what was presented by SanTech is residential is not going up, but industrial and commercial will see a significant increase. So we recognize that increase.

And just to confirm, to further that, residential that uses less water, this would be kind of incentivized, right? You could actually see a reduction in costs in your month-to-month bill, correct?

What about sanitation? Is there anything coming down the pipe?

Sanitation, it looks like it's a significant increase. It's actually not, because the fee recommendation for sanitation was less than 5% of CPI. I think it was 4.4. What ended up happening, and I missed it last year. I will say, I will follow my sword. When I put revenue or expenses in for... recycling the revenues and expenses. I underestimated what we were actually, so it looks like we're getting this huge increase. No, it is just what we were actually collecting. So.

Where are these you're talking about? I'm

For water and sewer, they're not in the packet. It's from the SanTech presentation that was at last city council. So, and I know that public works will go more in depth in the exact fees and the percentage of increase at the fee workshop in July 9th, I would say. So, but I did want to be transparent that we are recognizing those fees in the revenue and the cash flow, so that you guys are aware of that, so.

This chart is general fund only They would be on when you're looking at a smaller one that looks like this It's gonna be at the top.

It's gonna say enterprise and

Under water and wastewater, so Fund 70 and 72 is where those revenues have increased. On Line 8, so for example, in wastewater, that projection went up about $10 million. So it's pretty significant based off of that. We double checked the math. We went through it quite a few times. But it is about a $10 million increase in revenues. For water, it was about a $7 million increase.

Last meeting, we discussed changes to Workman's Comp. You gave us a notice. And emergency services, Workman's Comp went way up. Is that a dollar for dollar charge to their budget?

So how workers comp works is there's a couple of things in that. That's why even though I sent you the totals, I want to dig into that data a little bit more to say this is what due to our claims modifiers, this is the increase. This is due to the actual state insurance fund rate increase. And then this is due to new positions. So let me do a deeper dive on that to get you that increase. But that is the total amount that we're expecting to increase. Based off of the salary, yes.

Yeah, and that's why I'm asking, because fire was well over $100,000. Is that something that we've got to put into their budget?

Well, it's already in their budget, and it's part of that deficit. And when you add 12 positions, I'm not surprised that it went up that much, because police and fire have one of the highest workers' comp rates. And then they have additional modifiers as well that make it to where we pay more because of the amount of claims we have.

Yeah, that seems like a significant hurdle there.

Yes, that's why I want to dig into it a little bit more to help you guys identify and make that decision on those new positions, how much the new positions are costing us.

Thank you. When do you need a final on these positions? As we go through each department? Because I'm not settled on these yet. And I sent you an email, but it was late. It was my fourth Monday this week at work. Um, so I'm sure you haven't had a chance to look at it, but when do you want. Kind of a final nod or direction on these.

I think as departments present I would like to definitely get that but the sooner the better on them for sure but I would like departments to speak to the positions because I think they can help resonate the need why they requested those we went through deep dives as you saw there was a lot of positions requested that from a lot of different departments that didn't even get you know move forward. And so with working with Michelle and myself and Kelsey, we went through a lot of these to really, and the mayor, and prioritize a lot of these positions. And so that's where some of those didn't move forward. Other ones, obviously I've heard the request of police positions, like that's an added thing, which I'd be happy to add to the budget. I just haven't had that direction to do that. If that's something you want to see with the numbers, I can do that as well.

Yeah, definitely. I think we need to consider that. I think we need to take from some of the non-essential sales tax, property tax positions. If there's other creative ways to fund those, fees, et cetera, maybe we could make that up. But public safety has to be number one. And we can discuss these other positions, as you said, when they come up. But I was reluctant to reply at all because I didn't want it to be an open meeting law violation. And so I replied to you, not to everybody, my specific concern about that chief of staff position. I don't think this is the year to do it. I don't think it's the time. I think the parks positions might be able to be paid If we increase other fees, and I asked you about that, not sure if we can do that. But now we're in open meetings, so I can say that. Everybody's here. But I do think that public safety has to be number one. And that's where I'm landing at the moment.

I can definitely make sure in the presentation next week to add the two police positions of, like, two police officers so that you guys are aware of the cost and the impacts of the budget.

The sheet that we got the other day has the... These are the positions that are in the budget.

That is correct.

And so the... But this list here is the one that the shorter list are those that were requested So when the departments come and chat with us will they be chatting with us from the Standpoint that they already know these have been taken out of their budget Or will they try to convince us to put these back in place?

Everybody knows the positions that are in their budget and have been funded. So police knows that they do not have two positions. But when I add them, I will make them aware that they will be funded. However, any position, and we always caution this, any position, pay raise, determination, it all lies with getting the budget passed. And so nobody's hiring or saying you're going to be promised this because We recognize this is a budget process. Things can get added. Things can get cut. It's still open to your guys' discretion.

I said at last meeting as well, taking a bite of 12 firefighters in one shot, I think along with Councilor Williams, that even if we have to reduce that number to add some police officers, we just cannot keep adding. We've got to keep adding to the police force. We can't go for two years without adding. If we have to come down to it to make the budget work, We have to reduce that firefighter number to get some police officers willing to look at that. They're just running their tails off.

So question for you, I guess, as direction. Right now, we have the 12 positions funded at a half a year starting in April. Is it your request maybe to look at funding six positions for a full year? Request or would you still like six positions but starting in April I?

Can go either way to make the budget work You know Unlike the federal government we have to balance so so whatever it takes to make it balance I Just I don't I'm not willing to skip a year without adding anything And I will say

Last fiscal year, we did not add police officers.

And what we're contemplating is two more years.

in the question mode. You sent out an email that had some historical increases in personnel costs. And as I look through this, I see over the, since fiscal year 2022, that's a five-year period, we had seen a 100% increase in fire cost personnel. So does that represent a 100% increase in fire staff over that time period? There's no cost doubled in a five-year period.

I would have to go, I wouldn't say 100% increase in fire staff. I do think that we've added a significant number of fire positions. within the last at least three years that I've been here. Let me go through the history and I can give you the count because I don't have it off the top of my head.

So one other question, and I apologize for asking questions I already know the answer to, but for the public's purpose, also if we go down through the general fund positions, it appears that our general fund employees, just the general employees,

personnel increased by 100% over that same time period.

And then to Councilor Alderman's point and to Councilor Williams' point, I noticed that the police department total personnel cost has only increased just a little over 50% during the same time period. So is it fair to say that we have slighted our police department over the last five years?

I would think by those numbers looking at it, probably. I can get you the total of what we've added in position lines in the last few years so that you guys are aware of what positions have been added. I do think there was some significant raises, I know, in 23 and 24. some that were approved and went through council during the budget process, some that went outside the budget process. And so those are hard to track, but I can, I know last year we kind of gave you a list of all the increases that occurred throughout the year. I'll see if I can get that data for you again.

One last question. So with regards to the trend that we've seen over the last five years with 100%, I mean, total increase, 15% increase in personnel costs. Are we on that same trend of increasing costs with this personnel request, or has that plateaued a little bit?

Well, I think some of the things that we have to think about, so in the personnel request, one of the things that Percy has increased, which significantly increases for sure, So when you look at that personnel in the last five years, Percy, our contribution has increased. So that's a significant increase. Health insurance is another one that has increased significantly. You know, when we talk about it, sometimes those are double digits. Unfortunately, we try to keep them minimized. And we are very cost effective here, but at the same time, we can't control those health insurance costs sometimes. So that's a bigger discussion as well. So overtime is another one that's increased significantly over the course of this last year. That's included in, and I would say for the last five years, overtime has probably doubled with quite a bit department. So that's another thing that happens. And I think when you look at the economy from five years ago to the economy of salaries today, there is a significant pressure to pay more because of the inflation, because of UC Oliver. I get from other cities what's happening, and we're right in line with what other cities are doing. We're actually less than... All the other cities are doing 2.7 to 3%. We're not even doing that 2.7. And so it's hard, I think, for departments when we get those conversations that they say we're losing people to other cities. We're losing people to other, you know, it's not the corporate world we're losing cities to. You know, for example, I look at the state. The state's a great example because they haven't increased wages and so they have so many vacancies that they cannot recruit, which creates great savings accounts but doesn't create great operations, which is unfortunate. So I think it's a tough battle between competitive wages and competitive benefits in that salary is 90% of our costs and how do we provide the service without over overdoing it so it's a valid conversation i can provide you some of the history of what ftes we've added over the course of the year um for the last three to five years to see what data i have on that so and if you have the time to do it i mean you want to take away from the other things that you have i have a great assistant that is great at diving into data so she's gonna that's how they do that thank you ray lynn yes

Real quick, kind of along the same things. My problem is the fact that I know we need a staff station four. I know we need the firefighters. That's not the question. The question becomes, we didn't do police last year. Not doing it this year. Falling behind. I'm just looking at the numbers. Looking at City Council, we're taking a cut in the budget. The mayor's taking a cut in the budget. Then I look at it in community projects.

So I can explain that one.

Went up 40 grand. And I'm just doing this more for public as well. Then I'm looking at mayor admin, which went down in 25, back up in 26 to where it was in 24. which was only a $40,000 increase, and now it's going up 81,000.

So that created cost savings in police because we moved, police and fire, because we moved the PIO 100% under general fund instead of being split between police and fire.

Okay. I'm just kind of doing, I'm doing an idiot.

No, and that's okay. I think those are just a file.

Just what most people would say. I mean, and then you add in a new position of a chief of staff, and right there I've got 300,000 and I can fund two cops.

Yeah.

And so I'm just kind of, I'm looking at it from a, you know, kind of a layman's perspective of somebody who was just looking at this online going, right in those three numbers, everybody's taking a cut except those three, and I have the top sitting right there.

So for example, in the community projects, let's just take that. That's a pretty easy number. We did some shifting. So that number includes now 4th of July fireworks, um the security for fourth of july and for the nightlight parade and the employee dinner at the end of the year those three things like that's what it includes um so If we don't want to do that anymore, that's an easy line to cut. We can do that. But that is 100% paid out of general funds. It's not necessarily allocated to other departments. But those are the types of things that we would be cutting. So I think that's the conversation. I'm happy to cut things if that's the things that we want to cut. I know every department looks at cost savings and says, what can we do? I know that was a directive that came from the mayor. Only request needs. And I went through... a ton of budgets and cut things because they were duplicate or we hadn't discussed them or is this really something you need to ask for? Is this something that we can do without this year? And so all those conversations happen, but there's also a lot of needs that I know are coming up that If we delay one more year, that's a conversation, but at what cost do we delay it one more year?

That's my fear in police, is that we've already delayed once.

Which is a valid conversation as well. So I think those are all decisions that as departments make decisions, their presentation. And you can get the line items. You can kind of see what's increasing and what's decreasing. Because a lot of times, if you see an increase, it's going to be health insurance and personnel most of the time. I would say about 90% of time, it's going to be those two things. So not necessarily increasing in their operating budget.

Thank you. From the outside looking in, and even from the inside looking in from this conversation, it appears we're defunding the police. So that's that's the fact I'm just saying and and there's some stuff that we're not discussing where we're removing other Programs and cutting contracts and doing other things. We haven't even gotten to yet. We better be very careful about But I think a lot of- This isn't something that we're going to be caught off guard, surreptitiously doing, and I'm not in favor of it one little bit.

Yeah, I think the need for police officers, that's a discussion. But I do think with police, their contracts have moved. For example, their lease vehicles, they are under police capital instead of in the operating. So it used to be we used to budget them all under police and the general fund. Those are no longer budgeted there. So that's an additional $300,000 that got absorbed in their operating and personnel that they were able to absorb that we have out of the capital and is a transfer. So I think those are also discussions that need to happen as well. And this is the hard thing, and I think this is a broader discussion on the economy. You label anything police and fire, and the price goes up 50%. And that's a bigger thing with capital. That is a conversation of how are we outpacing ourselves with those costs because they are getting so costly that it makes it to where our taxpayers are having to pay that cost. And we can't invest it in police officers at a point in time because we're investing in capital and to just keep our police officers safe. And then what do you do at that point in time? And those are hard decisions. Don't get me wrong, those are hard decisions, but those are ongoing costs that are happening. So, good discussions.

Just a general comment before we go on and at the end for general comments. These six people up here, these six city council members, have the vast majority of the statutory authority for putting Years past, there's been this general comment like, Mr. Mayor, you just need to bring us a budget we can approve and bring us a budget that we can hang our hat on. This year, it's gone.

There is none of that.

So I would suspect that you will find every city council member asking a lot of questions about how we proceed with this budget because There is no trust and lack of trust amongst most departments in the city. And so we need to make sure that this city council is the guardrails for the lack of trust in our organization, which means building a good budget, a reasonable budget, and a .

Anyway, thank you.

Ready to move on?

Yeah.

We'll turn it over to Robin for .

Afternoon, Mayor and Council. I am here to present our budget. I will just say, preface it with, I gave you a handout right here that has some reports. that you can look through along with the presentation. You will notice that some of the numbers in these reports and in the presentation don't necessarily match what Raelynn gave you, and that's because the numbers we did were before she did her admin allocation. But it's still going to tell you the true picture of our operations budget, where we made cuts and stuff, because the admin allocation, we don't have any control over that. So this is still going to give you that picture that you need to see it. So this is the only thing I'm going to go through as far as mission or anything like that, because I think it's important. We have a big department, and so our mission is to cultivate economic opportunity, grow our talent, and ensure quality, well-planned, and physically integrated development of the built and natural environment in order to promote, protect, and preserve the public health, safety, welfare, and quality of life of the community. And this is done through a commitment of delivering prompt, professional, and consistent services to the citizens and development community that exceeds the expectations of those we serve. It's a long mission statement, but there's a lot going on in our department, and so it kind of captures it all for all of the different divisions. So this is the org chart. It's pretty small. I'm not gonna go through it in detail. I'll go through the different departments and the leadership. I wanted you to have this so that you can always refer back to it. The two that are shown in kind of the light tan color, those are positions that are currently vacant, but we are filling them. So hopefully those should be filled within the next month or so. They're both in the building side of things. Just a note, we also, as the community development director, I don't know if many of you know, but I also serve as the city's building official. So kind of a dual role there as well.

Excuse me, Robin, so those, the tan color ones, they're not add-ons, they're just filling positions that are vacant now?

No, they're not add-ons, they're just vacant positions. We had some people leave, and now we're filling those positions. Okay.

So just a little bit about our department.

We have 34 team members. The photos up there is our leadership. We are primarily 50% building safety, 25% planning, 10% economic development, 6% code enforcement, 6% parking enforcement, and 3% community development block grounds. That's kind of how it's divided up. So we'll start with building safety division budget. This encompasses all of our plan reviewers, our record staff, our inspection and compliance staff, our permitting staff, and a percentage of my salary as well. A little bit about our permit activity because I know that has been on the forefront. This goes back clear to fiscal year 2022. If you look at commercial permits, last year we got 242 commercial permits all year. We have already received 153 year-to-date. So we're pretty close to what we received all year in fiscal year 2024. On the residential side to the far right, Last year we did 1,341 residential permits all year. We've already received 991 year to date. So if you think about where we're at eight months into the year, we are tracking to make those numbers if we continue as we are right now. I think when we talk about revenues, I'll touch on that a little bit. Some of the revenues are down because in the last couple of years previous, we had really large projects. We had like Home Depot. We had, you know, MB. We had... The Canyon County Sheriff's Office building. So we have some really large projects that are not typical that you would necessarily see every year. So that's why the revenues are down a little bit. But as far as building permits, I think... I'm optimistic. I think we're tracking well, especially with what Haley's going to talk about as far as what we've got in the pipeline for construction drawings. And then when I start going through what we've got in planning applications, I think I don't have a concern with it at this point.

Do we have a swag guess on... The percentage of commercial versus residential, are we getting behind on commercial again versus residential?

I don't, but we could probably get those numbers.

Once the assessment comes out from the county that I get with the property values, I can ask the assessor for that split again. He updates it yearly with the totals.

So the building safety division, we are not asking for any new staff positions. The fiscal year 2026 budget, based on this report before Cori Lynn did her little adjustments, we were at $2.3 million for our budget and proposed for 2027 is just a little over $2 million. So we actually cut our budget by 12% on the building side.

Robin, is that because of a reduction in staff, or how do you account for the 12% decrease?

We just went through the line items and just looked at what really is our needs and what we don't need. There was also a pretty significant line item for credit card processing for building that the city was paying for that credit card processing. And that's now been passed on to the applicants. And so that's quite a bit of a cost savings. I think that alone was $200,000. Yeah, and then we just went through the rest of the budgets and looked at, like, a five-year overview of what we've been spending and just cut it.

I do have a question that might be a broader question that may come across all departments. And Raelynn, you might be able to answer the question. As we look at the police department and the numbers on the safety of our city don't lie. We've invested highly in technology that is working for our city's favor. Do you have the technology you need? Because I'm remembering a couple of things from my filter. which I went, how come planning and zoning doesn't do this? And the answer was, well, because. And so, Anne.

Absolutely.

It's pretty vague, but you get what I'm talking about.

Yes, I do. Great question. Mayor and Councilman Dittenberg, we are in the process of that right now. The council had approved us to get new software that is for building, planning, city clerks, engineering, and fire department. And we're in the process right now of going through that implementation of the software. So we're customizing it. They're building the software right now, and we're hoping to have some of it up and running by this next fiscal year. But even with that increase in cost in our budget for that software, we were still able to reduce our budgets.

So it's in this year's budget, or was it in part of last year's budget and this year's?

It was in part of last year's budget. The upfront costs, but the annual fees that will be charged annually are in this budget.

Well, I actually say it was part of fiscal year 25's budget, not 26's budget. Yes, I'm sorry. So it was in 25's. We approved about $500,000 out of the building department for that software and implementation. And then the ongoing fees are now in the 27 budget.

So I just want to go through a little bit, because I know, again, there's been some concern with building permits coming in. So just on this table, it shows a little bit about the top line item building permits. We are down about $477,000 right now, which we're about 26.5% lower than what we'd like to be at this time of year.

electrical permits we are up twenty six thousand dollars that number and the miscellaneous number are huge drop numbers so but it's also against budget so that just means that we Rayland did we maybe overshoot what we thought we were gonna get coming in is that why we're a little off

So when you set a budget for expected revenues 18 months before... That's what I'm saying.

Did we maybe overshoot just a little?

Especially on building revenues, we've talked about that, where I looked at averages and estimates, and we never can guarantee that any permit revenue is going to come in. because it's a service we provide. It's like catering permits. I'm always conservative and try not to overestimate, but I look at trends, and the trends 18 months ago were different than what we're experiencing now. And so, yes, I would say that for budgets, To consideration, I overestimated. And that's why we've talked about there were several city projects that we budgeted that we ended up not doing this year to offset this revenue not coming in.

I guess my question then is, are we now going to undershoot for next year in hopes of making some of this up?

I still...

Do you kind of see what I'm saying?

Yes. I don't think I undershot. I thought it was. Let me look at the top of my head because I can't remember the amount that I. I don't think. It was not significant. It is less than this year, but in budget wise.

I think it's 1.8.

Yeah, I don't think I was so conservative that I thought that it was.

And the only reason I ask is because, Robin, on your previous one, you were saying that, you know, eight months in, we're actually doing fairly well.

Yeah.

So the question just becomes, were we too, did we shoot, you know, shoot a little too high? And are we now going to maybe come back down to earth a little bit?

And I think it goes back to permit-wise, the number of permits are still actively coming in. It's the type of projects. So Raylynn and I went back and we compared the building budget to fiscal year 2023, when it was more like normal, where you didn't have the DMBs and the Home Depots and everything. And we're tracking about what we were in 2023. Moving forward, we just need to take into consideration, like when we're looking at those years, not only like, OK, what were our revenues, but what happened during that year.

What projects were they compared to?

Yeah, did you have projects that you're not going to see on an annual basis necessarily? And so again, we're down in revenues, but not necessarily down in activity, if that makes sense.

I just wanted to make sure that we're correcting whatever it is that kind of.

Yes.

Gave us the speed bump in the unit.

So I went from projecting for 26, 2.692 to 1.865. So it is down, but it's not saying nothing's going to happen. There's still activity. It's just more, you know. I'm still looking at is I'm going to be a little bit more conservative. But I am that way with revenues anyway. If revenues come in over the projections, that's always fantastic. We have no issues with that. And then I do a deep dive. Was I too conservative? And I do that even now. So I originally set revenues in February so budgets can be set around them. But then I go through in May and June and update them to see if there's any updates based off fee revenue or fee increases that are projected, based off of new trends that I see coming in, all of those things. Because more data has come in, so I have a bigger picture of it, too.

Perfect. Thanks. So did Fred Meyer hit in this year that we're in? Talk about big projects.

Oh, Will Fred Meyer? Yeah.

When did we see that?

I feel like it might have been this year, but I'll have to look. It might have been at the very, very end of last fiscal year or two. I can't recall when they pulled their permits.

Okay. I mean, their walls are up.

Yeah. Yeah. It depends on if they hit before or after October 1. And I can't recall off the top of my head, but I can definitely look.

You were talking about large projects. Yes. Yes.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So again, on the very far left is all of the budgeted revenues, and then I did go through just as of today and ran all the actual revenues year to date. So in the building permit category, we have received 1.3. So if we're budgeting 1.8 for all of next year, and we've already this year received 1.3, I would say that's a fairly, I think it's a good estimate. I think it's a good projection. Again, electrical, plumbing, plan check fees are up higher than we anticipated for this time of year. The re-inspection fees, those are all like when inspectors have to go out and do re-inspections on stuff, so that amount is up as well. We allow them two inspections on the same thing and then the third inspection they get charged for it. Miscellaneous building permits is down. That's kind of a catch-all for the really small stuff like repairs, remodels. Mechanical permits are up. And then our last category, re-reviews, that's plan review when we have to re-review something after we've reviewed it three times. Then on the fourth time, we start charging people extra money to review their plans. And then sign permits are down just a little bit. But overall, if you look, based on the total estimated revenues of 5.1, we've already received a little over $3 million. So we're about $402,000 short of where we should be this time of year, which is not, it's down, but it's not as huge as we thought it was going to be a few months ago. I thought this screen up here was very interesting, this slide, because it talks about the revenues that were estimated, the 5.1, what we received, 3 million. And I know there were some discussions during the overview of the budget last week where building permits stayed down, there may have to be layoffs or whatever. But I think it's important to look at what our expenditures are for our entire building department with staff. Our 26 budgeted expenditures were 2.3. Well, we've already exceeded the revenue for that this year, even with permits down. So we're bringing in the money to support our staff and all of our operations. And then fiscal year 2027, we were at $2 million. And again, that's prior to the admin allocations, but still we're... We've already brought in enough to pay for all of our staff, all of our operations, everything. I just think that's important to bring to light. Do you have any questions on the building side of things before I move into planning and zoning? The planning and zoning division budget, this one's a little bit larger because it does contain planning staff, code enforcement staff, parking enforcement staff, 40% of the salary for our community development block grant staff person, and a percentage of my salary. So on the planning applications, I didn't put them all up here because there's a ton of them, but I put the most major applications for you to take a look at for comparison since fiscal year 23. And if you can see, our busiest year over the last four years was fiscal year 24 at 23 preliminary plots. We're already at 21 preliminary plots this year already year to date. Final plots, the next category, the largest was also in the red, which was also fiscal year 24. We had 41 final plots. We have already had 36 submitted year to date this year already. Annexations, our highest year was actually 2023. At 23, we have already had 30 annexation applications year to date already this year.

And most of that is what, county stuff or?

Annexation applications are unincorporated property that is in our impact area that they usually want to annex because they need city services.

Could be mostly county then?

It's only stuff in our impact area. We do not annex outside of our impact area.

Robin, one question about that. So if we're talking about the number of That 25 one-acre parcel annexations versus 1,400 acres, what's the land-wise value of the increase in?

So these are just applications submitted. Those are not necessarily 30 that have been approved. These are just 30 applications that have come in. If you want numbers of ones that have been approved annexation with the acreage, I can certainly get that for you.

No, that's okay. I just wanted to make sure that you were representing a similar size pot, that annexations represent the amount of land that's been taken and that has value, not the number, which may have a decreased value.

Right. No, this is just the number of applications. And so the acreage could be all over the place with those different applications. We've seen some that are a single lot up to hundreds of acres. So it's kind of all over the board. The next category is rezones. Our busiest year was fiscal year 23 at 13. We've had seven this year. The next one I'm pretty proud of, and I want to highlight it. It is our comp plan amendments. In fiscal year 23, we had 17 comp plan amendments. That was when we decided, OK, we got to fix this. If you've got that many amendments, something's wrong. So we went to work at redoing our comp plan. In fiscal year 25, we adopted that comp plan. And as you can see, we had zero comp plan amendments since that plan has been adopted. So pretty proud of that, actually.

So one of the things it's telling by looking at this to me, our revenue is always delayed. 25 looks like it's a pretty rough year for you in comparison to the other year.

Yeah, I mean, 2025 was slower on like annexations and rezones, but we had, if you see the final plats were high, that's kind of where you get that slowdown. I wouldn't say it's a slowdown, but things are in the pipeline. So somebody comes in for their prelim plat, right? They get it approved. Then they got to go get their construction drawings designed and their final plat. Then they got to submit that, get that through plan review, get it approved. Then they go out and they have to build all the infrastructure before they can even start going vertical. It's usually anywhere from 18 to 24 months from the time they get a prelim prep before they're even building their first structure. So I think what you're seeing is like when you saw those final plats, 41 in fiscal year 24, 34, those are just those prelim plats from the previous years now starting to come forward.

I'm seeing 12 prelim plats in 25. versus like 23 to 24?

Yeah, we were down. And I think I can tell you why that is after talking to developers. We were in the middle of redoing the comp plan, and people were holding onto their prelim plats because they did not want to submit until that comp plan was adopted because they didn't want to be in the middle of it, and then they had to redesign something. So that's why we were a little bit down in fiscal year 25. That's a good question, though. Thank you. So for planning and zoning division, again, we're not requesting any new staff positions. As you go through our line items, you'll see that our salaries actually went down. And that's because when we lost Joe, he was a planner four and he was a supervising planner. We did not refill that with a supervisory position. We backfilled it with a planner one. We could not find anybody even remotely qualified to be a Planner 2-3. So we have underfilled that. So that affected pretty much everything on the salary side down from health insurance to all of those line items. So those are less in the planning budget. And then again, from our fiscal year 26 budget at $1.6 million, opposing $1.4, so we reduced this budget by 10%. And that wasn't even including the staff salaries. That was just the operations at 10%. So again, just a little bit of a highlight. Fiscal year 26 estimated revenues, 1.1. We are currently at 948,000 in revenues. So we are tracking ahead of schedule with our revenues. It's supposed to be 1.6. Did I flip it? Yeah, revenues. Okay, so 1.1. So we are planning and zoning is tracking ahead on their revenues of where we should be at this time of year. We've almost got as much revenues as we anticipated for the entire year. Budgeted expenditures for 26 were 1.6. Our budget expenditures for 27 is 1.4. Now, I know there's going to be a question. Why is your revenue is only 1.1 and your expenditures are 1.6 and going to be 1.4? Because we have a lot of, we have several services in the planning and zoning that is not, We don't get fees for services for those things that are not development related or whatever. And the three biggest ones are code enforcement, parking enforcement, and then a portion of the CDBG administration. Those just come out of the general fund. And there's not fee recapture on those. The only time we get a recapture is Somebody pays a parking ticket, which isn't very much, right? And then code enforcement, if we do an abatement, we recapture it, but it's really not a recapture of much except for maybe some administrative fees because the contractor does the abatement, we pay the contractor for what it cost him, and then we just charge some administrative fees on top. So there's not much of a recapture on those three areas within P&Z.

Before you go, I have a question for council as regards to parking enforcement. So currently we have the parking fund. We set it up when we first had paid parking. It's still in the ordinance as we have a special revenue fund. The only fee revenue it gets is when we charge a fine and we collect it from parking enforcement. We are wanting to get some direction on what you would like to see with that. There's a couple things we can do. We can leave it as is and collect the fine revenue and let it accumulate at like $15,000 a year at most. Not very productive, it's a very small amount. We can let that revenue accumulate in that fund and then parking enforcement has a software that we use to help collect the fines that we could charge to help cover the cost of that. I believe it's about $7,000 a year, if I recall. So that would be one option to use those funds. Or we can amend the ordinance, get rid of the parking fund completely, have all the revenues from the parking funds go into P&C. We would just like some direction, especially in finance, because we have it as a special revenue fund, but right now we kind of consolidate with the general fund, but if the fund balance is larger, we would have it tracked as kind of a separate special revenue fund.

So we collect the fee If someone wants to buy a parking spot for a few days or close a sidewalk, where does that fee money go?

It goes into the parking fund. So if we lease a lot, monthly parking spots, any of that. Because that's what the ordinance says. Any parking-related revenue.

What's the expenses out of that fund?

Right now there's not any. We have nothing budgeted. So what we're asking, what I'm asking, Robin didn't even know I was asking this, but we've been thinking, Rochelle and I have been thinking, there is a cost that we did. It's called T2 systems for parking enforcement to write the parking ticket. And that software, I believe, is about $7,000 a year. And that would be a way to offset that cost.

Whatever you guys say.

If it was my recommendation, just for ease of one last fund, I would recommend that we change the ordinance and have these funds go to general fund. However, future parking, I don't know if that's a priority. Do you want something that designates that? But that would be my recommendation from finance. We could also put it into the planning and zoning into the general fund with a different division to still have the ability to track it but not have a completely separate fund.

Okay, great. My question would be this. Outside of the software, what other expenditures exist? So personnel, anything like that that are tied to parking?

Just personnel.

And this doesn't cover that at all?

Not the way the ordinance is written right now.

Well, no, no. I'm talking about the amount in the fund.

No, it would not cover it. It's about $20,000 a year in revenue on violations, permits, rentals, such as that. So it's a small amount.

But we're looking at, what, about 13 left over after the software? Yeah. 10 to 13 left over in there that could go towards something.

Yes. So that's what I... If it was finances recommendation, we would change the ordinance, have all that fee revenue go into the general fund planning and zoning is our recommendation. We just want to, before we make that change and bring it to you guys, we wanted to get your feedback. Because it does impact the budget. It would change the revenues around, so.

They could still put it in its own, like, fee code or task code line items so that we still know how much, you know, we're getting annually from revenue for parking tickets. It's just it won't be in this, like, enterprise fund, like this reserve fund all by itself.

Makes more sense. Can we just put it in general just for you?

So, Robin, before we move on,

you have what you need in code enforcement where you need to be there right now do i have enough staff no you have one and a half or two we have two full-time people but they're covering the entire city and they're trying to be not only reactive but proactive um so it That's hard to do with the city being as large as it is now, but I did not request any more employees just due to budget constraints.

Maybe one we can put in the back of our, it looks like you saved some money here and there, maybe keep it in the back of our head.

Before you go on, I have a question for Ray Lynn about this very thing. At what point can we devise a code enforcement system that generates revenues? I don't want to say anything that's going to bite me, but Mike has always told me there would be times in my life when being not smart costs me money. And so at what point do We drive down Blaine and Cleveland and go, rather than us incurring our costs to tell you it's terrible, when do we generate revenues on court enforcement? How can we do that?

I mean, a simple answer is we kind of set fines and fees, and we make sure to hold people accountable to that. That could mean definitely using the prosecuting attorney's office more. You know, looking at our ordinances, I am not as familiar of our process, so I can't say this is the exact way to do it. But there might be other ways, but Robin might have more in that.

So that's a good question. So currently right now, we do either abatements with contractors, or we have the opportunity to issue a criminal misdemeanor citation. courts don't like that they don't love it at all because it's code enforcement so it goes to them they usually end up dismissing it a waste of the court's time which i don't disagree because it's shouldn't be in criminal court it should be more in like an administrative violation so i have been working with legal counsel we are going to come up with probably an ordinance that will allow us to do infraction tickets so that we can actually write civil infractions instead of criminal citations. And I think that will help, and they'll be escalated for people that are, like if you've been in violation once, you're gonna get an escalated ticket. The other thing you'll see coming before you when we bring the fees forward is we are going to create a fee for repeat abatement offenders. because now what we're seeing is we go out and people don't want to clean up their yards or their mess and so the contractor cleans it up and then next thing we know they don't want to clean it up again so we're sending the contractor out again to clean it and although we bill them for it right it's that's delayed too because either they pay it or it goes through a process where it then gets put on their taxes and they a lien and they have to pay it when they pay their property taxes Now, if they don't pay their property taxes, that doesn't get paid either. So we are coming up with ways because there is a lot of staff time that's put in to the code enforcement when they go out there with not only sending out the notices, but just the contractor abatements, the paperwork for special assessments and liens and all kinds of things. So we are looking at different avenues for that. Does that kind of answer your question?

Sure, it answers my question. I just want to go back to the technology stuff and whether or not, because in another career that I have outside city council, I know that we have handheld devices that are push button Violation, violation, violation, violation, and it generates something within 30, 45 seconds. There is no report writing. There's nothing. Do we have the capability to buy an airline ticket? And my wife gets an email message to come down to the Seattle market. That's how connected we are in this world today. Do we have the technology that we could do code enforcement more effective where we can?

We don't at the moment, but they are also part of the new software, the Tyler software. So when we implement that, hopefully next fiscal year, code enforcement is also linked into that software and there'll be more stuff that's automated for them. The problem... Just going to open this can of worms right now. The legislature has caused us some issues by a new bill that they passed on not allowing us to go onto private property to abate stuff without an administrative warrant. It has pushed all of the communities across the Treasure Valley into a complete stop mode right now until we figure out the process for doing administrative warrants. The law was not meant to be for that, but it's vague enough where it applies to code enforcement officers as well. So the process to do an abatement could potentially be a lot longer per abatement and a lot more paperwork.

Sorry, didn't mean to open it again.

No, but it's good for you to understand that that's kind of in the process right now.

There's also talk of streamlining. Is that correct? There's several municipalities that are working on that.

I think the bottom line here is, oh, this is one of those things that you're never going to recover your costs unless you do a Jordan Valley program in a couple of years.

You know, it really is. I mean, I've worked in a lot of jurisdictions over a lot of years. I've never seen a code enforcement or even a parking enforcement where you've recovered all your costs. It's a service that you provide for your community. But if we can at least recover some of the staff times costs of processing those abatements and stuff, then at least we're getting something back. I'm just gonna really quick go into the CDBG budget. I'm gonna skip over the economic development one because I'm gonna have Raelynn help me with that one because we did some shifting in the budget and I know I'm gonna mess it up if I explain it to you. She's gonna be able to explain it a lot better. On the CDBG budget, as you're probably all aware, we received an annual federal HUD funding allocation. We'll receive it here pretty soon, but for this next fiscal year. And it goes into effect October 1, just like our budgets do. I just wanted to give you a little background on what those costs look like, because once we start talking in the future about projects, it'll help you understand the money side of it. So when you get CDBG funding, you can use it for some administrative costs. That's for staff salary, but other administrative costs too, like supplies, whatever. They cap it at 20%. So 20% of your allocation, that's all that can be spent on admin. That's why 60% of the admin allocation comes out of CDBG, but 40% comes out of the general fund because the 20% that they cap us at doesn't cover it. The other cap is on public services. They provide a 15% cap, so we can't spend more than 15% of our annual allocation on any kind of public services. And then that leaves us with a remaining 65% for other project funding. That gets confusing, too, because out of that 65%, Well, out of the overall, 70% has to be utilized for services that benefit low to moderate income persons, and then 30% can be spent for other things like infrastructure projects. So I know when we were talking about the north end and stuff, I'll get into that in just a second on the next couple slides. So funding for subrecipients is done through a competitive application process. And then we look at city projects, and we vet those individually. And that's because of that 70% rule, but then also to make sure that they're actually eligible to be funded with CDBG. So onto the right where it says that 70% LMI test. So that 514,000 is what we're gonna get this next year for our HUD allocation. We take 70%, 360,000 of that has to be spent for LMI benefit. So that includes public service. You cannot include admin costs. And you can include infrastructure like sidewalks and lighting, but only if it's in an LMI area benefit. So if it's in an LMI area, then you can do it. What that means is that within that area, 51% of them have to be low income, low to moderate income. And they have to be primarily housing. So for like the north end, it'll probably work. But if we wanted to go do like, sidewalks and stuff in another area of caldwell and ucdbg we may not be able to because we might not meet that 70 percent rule so it's it's tricky so when we start talking about projects maybe just keep that in your mind we don't have any projects yet for this next fiscal year The grant is open, but we won't award any of those until we get closer to October 1 because we want to make sure we receive our full allocation. So we haven't budgeted any specific projects yet.

So Rob, remind me, I believe our good councilman here in Autumn Gold built houses down in the north end, kind of stimulate that area. Didn't we help fund some of that out of this?

We did. So we didn't fund the actual building of the housing because you can't use CWG to actually construct the housing. But what we did is we gave them some money towards land acquisition. And then when they built some of the housing, we also did some down payment assistance for home buyers to help them get into the homes.

Is that still in the works?

We are on our last one for them that we did, but they are requesting four more down payment assistance. So it's been a pretty successful program, and it's been really cool because most of these people are one-time or first-time homeowners and have never owned a home and have never been able to get into a home. So it's pretty cool to see that happen.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, Robin, real quick, you were talking about the north end. How are you going to affect that? possibility of, because it sounds like North End is probably where a majority of this could be used because of the LMI factor. How's the URA going to, the new URA going to affect that? Or is it?

I don't think we'll see a direct effect right away. The good news is is that we'll be able to use your a funding and Coincidentally with CDBG to do maybe finish a whole project because the CDBG has limited funding So that's like a positive in it as to the LMI factor I think because of how the economy is right now, and because of the demographics within the city of Caldwell, it might limit 10 years, 15 years from now, when we see significant investment in there, that we could do projects as a whole, maybe. But the city has enough, I think, significant investment demographics that we still will be able to hit that LMI and other projects that we choose. We just might not be able to do sidewalk in a significant or playground upgrades in a significant thing. It just might be limited to smaller projects.

I guess I was going more for funding.

Funding?

URA funding and

It coincides. It just is.

Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to make sure they weren't going to collide and end up not being able to be used.

In fact, the more you can coincide, the better project you can have. Like Haley and I have been working on, well, mostly Haley, has been working towards getting a grant to help with a sidewalk and lighting project in the north end that we could combine that grant funding with CDBG to do a much larger project. Right. So again, just some of the CDBG staff, we do housing rehabilitation, emergency housing repairs, which we've used a lot this year. That's where a owner-occupied homeowner is low income. They have some type of emergency repair. We just completed one not too long ago where they had a sewer line failure. They didn't have the money to repair it. They were low to moderate income. They qualify. We were able to repair their sewer for them. And we've got another one that's happening right now, too, for a sewer line repair. And then economic development, it's really kind of a simple budget. It's just staff and operations. They don't receive revenue through fees for service, like planning and building does. And the rest of it, I'm going to let Raylynn explain it. She knows what she did with all the investing of funds.

So economic development used to be its own fund, Fund 28. And if you recall, I sent an email to you guys letting you know that we were looking to move economic development from 28 to the general fund. And there's a couple of reasons for that. So what was happening is urban renewal has always contributed to economic development but not paid the entire offset the entire budget. And so what was happening is we were transferring from general fund to economic development. And economic development impacts every single department within the city, every single service. When they do something, it really, it benefits every single fund within the city because they have growth, they have those conversations. And so I moved it to general fund So instead of like internal admin allocations where we have 40% paid by sales tax, 40% of economic development is still paid by urban renewal. That's going to be the request from urban renewal is to pay that 40%, which should be because Ophelia is the urban renewal executive director. So 100% her total cost should be covered by urban renewal. So it's about 216,000 is what it is, which is about what they've been paying for economic development, so not a huge increase in urban renewal. The rest, the 60%, is now added to the admin allocation and is paid by every other fund within the city. So water, sewer, wastewater, among that allocation. Instead of being paid by general fund, with either fund balance or sales tax or something to that effect. So that is the change that is there. And the reason is because that is, like I said, economic development's work. They work with every single department within the city. They help with a lot of different bring projects, project structuring, all of that. So they are in all of those conversations, so it makes sense. that they are funded by all the different departments as well. So that is a big change. As to urban renewal funding, I know that urban renewal budget hasn't been set. I haven't done the workshop with them. But last year, there was a significant increase in urban renewal funding to the city due to admin time. With the switch of Ophelia now becoming executive director, We have the 216 that's to fund economic development. And then right now, just as a detailed discussion with Urban Renewal, what I have plugged in there is $50,000 in admin reimbursement is what I have. So that number could change. It could add more to the general fund. I don't see it decreasing because there is this minimum level, but that's kind of the number that I have added in there in the general fund.

I'm happy to answer any questions. Couldn't have said it better myself.

I can make sure I'm reading it correctly. Basically, under 28, under fiscal year 26, it cost, their budget was 497. So now what you're saying is under 27, their budget will be 542. Yes. Those are the two numbers that we're looking at of the difference.

The budget revenue still portion is funded by urban renewal. The other portion is still.

I'm just saying their budget number, that is the. Yes, 100%.

That's all I have for you, and I'll answer any questions you might have.

I was wondering how long it would take you guys to notice.

I did that on purpose. No offense, Dan. Okay, Chuck gets the gold star. All right, thank you for that.

All right, would you guys like to take a break real quick or move on to the next?

Let's stand up for five minutes. No, I think we have golf.

With that, I'll turn it back over to you.

We're going to do Parks and Rec, so I'll turn it over to Tiffany.

Yay! Everybody loves Parks and Rec. I'm fighting some allergies, so if you can't hear me, just say, huh? I'm going to speak up. Okay, so welcome to the Parks and Recreation FY27 budget presentation. In front of you guys, you have the slides so you can see them unless you want to look up. And then there's also our budget proposal book as well. We have line by line and operationals in each department if you want to review that too. But I'll try to get through this quickly. So this is just our overall structure of Parks and Recreation. including my four departments, parks, forestry, recreation, and golf. This is the overall. And keep in mind that golf is not included on this because they are an enterprise fund. So this is just park, recreation, and forestry. And that also encompasses the pool. So on the slide, you can just see the difference between FY25, 26, and then our variance. So starting with our parks department, our parks department does a really amazing job maintaining 16 parks.

This includes roundabouts.

There's 36 auxiliary spaces that maintain, whether that's other facility buildings, spreadages, medians. What we call pork chops is kind of like the medians. They're grassy areas. Here's the park structure. I'll just briefly go over that. We have a couple of different divisions in our parks, including our parks and park maintenance. And then it's also structured out for our building, which is the bathrooms and facilities. We have a mechanic that oversees the mowers and then our chemical specialist.

Here's a little bit more about our Parks and Recreation.

They do a really great job maintaining all of the landscaping as well as the playgrounds. They're responsible for inspecting and making sure that the playgrounds are safe, replacing any bark or mulching during the fall. And then they also, as you guys are aware, they are in charge of the Winter Wonderland light display. That typically starts September 1. We're anticipating to start some setup July and then returning the setup mid to end of August and then hopefully will be done Beginning of November and then the light show begin mid November and then they maintain that all the way through the middle of January Quick on that So starting with the budget request, we are requesting two maintenance specialist one positions. So you guys are aware, going back to our work organization, the maintenance specialist one is the lower level. We have one, twos, threes. And then at the top is our park supervisor. And in charge of our park supervisor is our park superintendent. So these two positions are to help maintain our new and oncoming park, Mosaic Park, that is anticipated to come online next year. So we'll need two more maintenance positions to help maintain not only our current infrastructure, but also the new park.

Okay, Tiffany, real quick, is that why the 23% increase in operations?

That is correct. There is a couple other, if you guys look into your budget book that I sent you, or gave you, sorry, you can see it's all lined out here for you. I know it's pretty lengthy, but you can see where there are increases, where there is correct majority of it is because we have two new staff come online of course there's always the anticipated increase in cost of supplies trying to maintain our current infrastructure as well as working with Destination Caldwell to help maintain the plaza and Indian Creek Park so Tiffany how much

You are still getting temporary staff in the summer, or how long do you know?

Yeah, so if you guys can notice in our labor services line, you'll see a $100,000 change. So we only budgeted $50,000. That $100,000 is actually just going to get moved into our salary line. So to go off of our temp, we use temp services for... like our trash on our weekend trash and bathrooms where now we have transferred money into our salary line to have city part-time maintenance specialist ones. So yes, they are seasonal, but we are responsible for them instead of using a temp service. So we're budgeted for four, I believe, and I think the increase goes up to six.

So to kind of explain that, the difference between part-time seasonal versus labor services. So on the labor services, they were working full-time and we were paying about 35% is what we pay on that. When we move a position to part-time seasonal, we are able to get them about eight and a half months that they can work full-time, but we only pay about 10% because we only have to pay workers' comp and Social Security. And so we don't have to pay health insurance or PERSI or any of that. So it's really a cost savings for us to go through that process of hiring the part-time seasonal through the part-time salary line instead of the labor services.

And we're getting people willing to do

Yeah, it's really great. Does that answer your question? So parks big requests under impact fee and capital requests, we have a handful of equipment. fees are coming out of the capital. So the only item on here is our Toro lawnmower. This is the really big lawnmower just to replace the lawnmower that we currently have. As they age, they get outdated and get too many hours on them and we need to replace them. But all the other items trailer, a dump truck, an articulation loader. If you have any specific questions about any of these items, I do have all of my staff here, and they can go into a little bit more detail. And then on our projects, so we have a Mallard Park Amphitheater shade structure. This is to go over the amphitheater. If you guys have ever been to Mallard Park, the lower level, there is a really, really beautiful facility out there, but it is hot. If the sun is shining, it's hot. There's no shade, and we're hoping to increase the usage of the amphitheater and increase revenue by providing shade to that area, whether it be we've had churches reach out to do church services out there Sunday mornings, whether it be bands or just some sort of event, but there does need to be shade to get it to be more accessible. The mini park listed on here is one that those that have been on council last year, this is the same one as last year. It's just a carryover. compliance it's so we can get that park underway it's just we're currently working on the application as we have been for the last five years it's just a process and I could answer any questions if you guys have any about that and then the Lincoln Park Road Park is also known as Mosaic Park we don't have a dedicated park name for that one we are carrying over funds from this year for to next year, so it is a carryover for 3.5 million. Do you guys have any questions about capital for parks?

Just one quick one for Ray Lynn. Impact.

Impact, please.

How much is this leaving in parks? And what kind of time frame do we have to use it?

So one of the bigger things that I did in impact is you'll see that the revenues are definitely, I was probably much more conservative in the impact, especially for parks because of the residential impacts. And so for parks impact, based off of these projects that they have requested, it will leave just under $3 million in cash if they were to spend all these projects all at once in one year.

And then what's the time frame on that $3 million that we have to spend it?

We are within that eight-year time frame. So we've been really good at spending it. It's eight years from when we clicked.

No, no, I'm just saying the $3 million that's left, how many more years do we have?

I would say probably like five and a half if I looked at it.

So we've still got about five years on that $3 million.

At least, yeah.

Okay. Moving on to recreation. So recreation utilizes the parks and helps program them to provide services to the community. They also work well with a lot of our other organizations that help program the parks, such as Inferno Soccer, CYB in Baseball, Sockeyes for the summer baseball at Wolfe Field. They also work with the companies that come in, whether it's contracts or an instructor for our recreation department, the building down by my building. They do karate, boxing, gymnastics, there's cooking. So they do a lot of programming and provide many services, babysitting, all sorts of stuff to reach every community member, no matter the age or ability. Here's how the recreation department is structured. They are a very small department. There's four full-time staff. Everybody else is part-time, or they are the program instructors. They do a really amazing job and reach as many members as they can with only four staff. So just a little bit more about their core responsibilities that I already touched on. all sorts of leagues during the winter months, partnering with the school district to use their facilities. We do volleyball, adult volleyball, youth basketball. They partner with the C of I basketball team to provide a Yotes junior camp. All sorts of really awesome programs for our youth. Recreation's goals are always to provide safe and high quality programs and high quality facilities. This includes, this last year we were able to get a turf tank. It's a cute little robot that paints all of our field lines. It's super efficient and that was something that we asked for in our last budget cycle and it has done wonders and saved a lot of staff time. They strive to be meaningful partners in the community and create connections throughout. Recreation, just so you guys are aware, have no capital. Underneath recreation is also the pool. The pool's mission is to provide a safe, clean, and welcoming aquatic environment where individuals and families can learn to swim and play and connect. Through exceptional customer service and safety, they strive to create positive experience that promote recreation, wellness, and lasting community members. So the pool structure, the pool manager is also the recreation superintendent. He oversees all of the lifeguards, cashiers, the swim instructors, and programming that happens at the pool. Our pool staff are obviously seasonal, being that we're just a outdoor pool during the summer. And then, again, here are some core responsibilities that the pool, strives to complete every year. And last year, there were accomplishments. So in FY26, we installed some new shade structures, which they look really good. So if you guys haven't seen them, they recently just got up. Much prettier than the ones that we had prior to and much more permanent. Last year we served 19,462 patrons for daily swim and then provided swim lessons to 1,033 participants.

Do we track revenue from the pool?

Yes, as a separate line item. It's about...

I'm just not seeing it here, so I was trying to offset whatever.

It's about $60,000. Yeah. I'm not going to cover all of the expenses. Do you want to talk about that?

Just real quick, we have it in the budget, correct, for the boiler?

I did add $100,000 to the budget, yes.

OK. Do you want to briefly cover that?

Yeah. So currently, our boiler is being repaired as we speak. The boiler was the boiler from the previous pool. We didn't get a new boiler. I believe it's about seven to eight years old, if we had to guess. So it sat for, it was new. at the time, but then it sat for the five years that the pool was down. And it does have some cracks in it, but nothing too significant. I'm currently working, so I don't have an answer for you right to replace it. We do have a placeholder in the budget on the instance that we need to replace it, but I currently don't have a yes or no on that. So hopefully within the next couple of weeks before the final budget, we can either move that $100,000 or keep it in case we need it.

So that is not part of the $115,000 that's in here?

So it's already, in the numbers I gave you today, it is already included in the capital fund as a replacement boiler.

I'm putting cautiously on this because if that goes down, our $9 million pool is not going to be usable. Cold punch. Hopefully. Any questions about the pool?

OK, the next department is forestry. As you guys know, last year you approved to have a city forester. So that is one of the new department heads that we so thankfully have. He does an amazing job. He is a department of one. So the forestry's mission statement, they strive to preserve, protect, and grow the city's trees, canopy, ensuring public safety while maximizing the environment, economic, and social benefit of the community forest. Here's the forestry structure, very simple. So the core responsibilities of the Forester is not only to maintain the canopy in our parks, but all over the city, that we have city right of ways, any type of frontage that we maintain, any buildings that have trees on it, medians, the plaza, all of those places. they are to maintain and oversee the . So the forestry's request this year is another wood chipper. They currently have one but need another one. This is coming out of impact fees to show that he has a lot of work to do and a $95,000 request. Any questions about forestry? This one is the biggest one in your guys' book that has quite a bit of an increase from the last years. And that's because we haven't had a forester in the past. And so we have to, you know, his training, what it takes to run his department, his equipment, safety supplies, all of those items. So if you have any questions about that, I'm happy to answer those as well.

And just to add, so that budget started as we were adding three positions. And we have reduced it down to no positions. So you can see where there was big requests that we did cut beforehand.

Any questions about Parks and Rec before I move on to golf? So golf is both Fairview and Purple Sage. The golf budget is the very last page. They're divided up into two. The top is Purple. The bottom is Fairview. You'll see the titles on there. So golf's mission is to provide exceptional and inclusive golfing experience to the community by promoting the game of golf through professional instruction, outstanding customer service, and well-maintained facilities, ensuring accessibility, enjoyment, and integrity for players of all ages. and skill levels. So our golf structure, we made some changes. There are no new requests. We did get another additional golf assistant pro last year, but we have no position requests this year. We did just make some tweaks to move the golf superintendent to be over the golf pro on operational standpoint. It makes the flow a little bit better throughout courses and makes my job a little bit easier. Golf's core responsibilities is obviously to maintain the golf course and create an exceptional experience. Our golf course is one of the best in the Treasure Valley and the best maintained by far. It's amazing if you guys have not golfed recently, I highly encourage you to go out there and check out the greens. Ken does a really amazing job. One thing that we pride ourselves on is keeping the cost of golf at a municipal level instead of a country club level, while providing that country club-like feel and experience through the course conditions.

Yeah. Seeing a change in structure, Is this a new position, or can you tell me how this came out?

So we had a golf superintendent beforehand. You might be confusing it with a golf manager. So sometimes communities or golf courses have a golf manager. And then underneath that golf manager is your superintendent and your pro. So the manager would maintain the relationship between the golf pro and the golf superintendent, manage the budget. But we don't necessarily need that extra position to have another oversight, as those can be pretty costly. So instead of doing a golf manager position request, we had just moved the golf superintendent to be over the golf pro in an operational standpoint. This is not to say that the golf superintendent is going to go out and say this is how you do lessons because that's not their role. Their role is to maintain a good relationship between what we call the inside or the pro staff. do the snack bar, help run and facilitate tournaments versus the outside or the maintenance. So superintendent position is mainly maintenance, but their job really requires to have The inside go well because if there's frost on the ground and the golf pro decides to let people off 15 minutes early, the golf superintendent still has staff out on the course trying to get it ready and prepped for the day. And we can't have people going on the course if there's frost on it.

Who's the golf superintendent? Ken. So you're still at Purple Sage, correct, Ken? Yes. Yeah, both golf courses. OK. And the golf pro?

It is currently open.

Currently open.

It's a vacancy. That is correct. Yeah, we're actively in the hiring process right now.

Tiffany, did I hear the assistant golf pro is leaving also?

Yes, that is correct. The one at Purple Sage. So we'll still have one assistant golf pro. So by the end of this month, our Purple Sage assistant pro is leaving, and that position is open as well.

What's a golf mechanic?

Do you want to speak on that? What's that?

Do you want to speak on the golf mechanic?

What's a golf mechanic?

What does a golf mechanic do? Keeps all the equipment running. He's got two golf courses, and I think we've got 75 carts, plus all the autonomous mowers. Okay. You need two mechanics, basically.

Ray Leonard, Tiffany, the revenue, does that include the suggested revenue?

So I just got some reports. The proposed revenue right now, as it sits in the budget, is the same as last year. It has not been adjusted. I just got some reports from the system, because usually those come from the golf pro, and we don't have one right now.

I just know from our committee meeting that we had talked about a couple of adjustments. So I wasn't sure if those had made it into this.

They have not yet.

What are the proposals for the fees from the committee?

The proposals were for mainly golf cart rental to go up. And season passes.

And season passes.

No green fees. Green fees would stay. Because they did green fees last year.

Do we contemplate charging non-residents more?

Yes. We currently have a resident and non-resident. That was put in last year, I believe.

Right. But I mean, to raise that, it's just I look at this, and the residents of Caldwell are paying for this out of their taxes. I don't have a problem raising them even more, especially for non-residents. I appreciate the country club analysis, and I think we do the same thing for the library, don't we? We charge non-residents a higher rate to use our library than they do Yep, so I I just think we gotta look more closely at that and find especially during year when we're struggling with funding sources. I would be interested in pushing level up there from what I gathered at the time.

It mainly the fee increase on the carts was because of maintenance issues with the carts. We are behind on that so that's going to help offset a lot of that, because it stays with those cards. That fee does not go. What's in that enterprise fund?

The good news is that I still project that the golf fund will be in the black. That's why we do have some capital purchases in there. And we're saving towards replacing the irrigation.

That would be my next question. So that could end up coming out of general fund, though, correct? Or more than likely will.

I think, I mean, I'll let Ken kind of talk on it. The irrigation plan that you kind of have for the next five years?

Yeah, so, I mean, we're looking at a master plan that'll to figure out exactly what it's going to cost for the two golf courses to replace down the road. Fairview will be slated first. It's pushing 65 years old irrigation system. So it definitely needs some help.

But I think the goal, yes, it can come out of general fund. We've done that before as capital where we purchased it. And then the assets get transferred to the golf fund. That's something that council can decide at that point in time.

My question is, on things like that, can we dedicate the fact that we need a new irrigation system based on growth and use any impact in that?

The only thing I can think, and this would be up to the consultant that we get, is when we have the discussions with the impact fee consultant, whether Now the irrigation is replacement and not growth related unless we are expanding the courses. But if there is an expansion of the course, whether that could be built into the parks and rec impact fee, which is charged to residential. I'm not an expert on if state law allows just for Because, and this is why I think that we could if it was an expansion, because a lot of other city golf courses are not enterprise funds and they are general funded. And so there is the potential that we might be able to collect some impact fees that go to golf projects if it's for expansion or due to growth. It just has to show up as a capital project.

not the i mean i know i'm an expert in impact fees but i'm not the expert so that i think would be based off the consultant and the impact i guess my only question was just in the sense that if normally a mower would last 10 years based on the number of people we have using the golf course but now the golf course is using more because we've grown so now it only lasts eight years could we get two years of capital back on a new boat. Does that kind of get what I'm saying?

I know that Parks and Rec is doing a master plan and I would assume that golf courses are going to be part of that master plan because it's recreation. So after that master plan is done, then the impact fee study would be done at that point in time.

Where are we on green fees relative to Centennial and our competitors? Are we

Centennial is still a little bit lower. That's why we didn't move. We made last year in Greenpeace. Want to stabilize the Greenpeace. We didn't touch the season pass, so that's why we're moving those and moving the cart revenue.

Well, I got a lot to say about Parks and Recreation. And saying this, I want to apologize in advance for . This is kind of a subject where I kind of started with technology. Do we have technology? It's not about your autonomous mowers and stuff. We are living in an age where people want to live in the county and criticize the city and tell us how terrible we are. And the cities are ruining our lives, but yet they want to drop their kids off in our parks and in our pool in our library to take care of their boring life in the county and and so we. We are constantly looking at the county saying, oh, we need to increase your prosecutorial fees, and we need to increase your dispatch fees, and we need to increase. But yet we're still expected to provide this great service to the people who live in the county who don't want to pay city taxes. And so do we have the technology where we can scan driver's license, scan stuff, and say, yeah, you live in it? Because they're not only using our parks, they're driving in our cities, they're using our streets. They have a definite impact for using our city resources and our city services. Where the county wants to continuously charge us more, we continually take the That's the job we do. That's the things we provide. That's our nice stuff. And so I'm just wondering in these tight economies where our budgets are tight, whether or not we need to take a serious look and say, okay, if you do not live in the city, not only are you paying 10% more, maybe you're paying 35, 40, or 50%.

Yeah, and that is definitely a possibility we could look at for... Not only our golf, but we do have a residential and non-residential fee for pool passes. Admission is a little trickier because then we would have to have everybody justify where they're from. And that could be a decision that if council, you guys wanted us to check every single time a patron came into the pool for admission. a couple dollars we could definitely do something like that um we could do residential and non-residential fees for rentals of our facilities at our parks such as like our park shelters um and our overall park usage because we do have a entire park rental stuff part of the city or you're not? What's your organization? So that's something we definitely could look at. Okay. Just really quick on golf requests. I do want to touch on that Ken was able to get 10 new autonomous mowers for Fairview this year, which is really awesome because increase maintenance to keep the cost low at Fairview for families for seniors for juniors to help encourage the play of golf and we try to Have autonomous mowers out there instead of physical people sitting on a mower, and I think that does help decrease cost out there They were able to finish the car pass at Purple Sage, which is really awesome. So the car pass are completely done. And thanks to coordination with the streets department, they come out and help facilitate that and install that for us. And then this year we are planning on, with no fee increases, or sorry, excuse me, no budget increases, we are planning to expand the parking lot at Purple Sage, which is needed. So with that, the golf request is the irrigation design master plan, which is right at $30,000. This will tell us what we need to do, how much it's going to cost, what the irrigation design is going to look at. And then a vent track for $50,000 and a ground master for $50,000. So just some equipment requests.

What does fertilizer look like this year?

Fertilizer cost? I haven't made any, hardly any increases over the last few years. So the prices are still climbing, but we're keeping the neck down. We're doing pretty good.

Yeah, I know they're going.

Oh, it's tough. It's going to be interesting to see what the fall rates come in. So I've already laid down the summer application. So it's sitting and waiting. The year's been really tough. So only put one application on the golf course a year. And I usually set it in the spring time. It'll release during the summer time.

I got for you guys. If you have any questions or specific questions, I do have all of my department heads here. So if you feel like you want to pick on them, I can bring them up as well.

The budget line items are off by one.

Yeah, they are.

Everything shifted.

They did.

So you need to move everything up.

I apologize.

If you're looking at it.

All right. Quick break before we move on. I got over time for being here. Five minute break. Start it again.

Get out of here so I can go home.

I know it's a little later.

We'll just get the slideshow pulled up. So we'll be presenting here before you for the public works departments. Really quick, Public Works is made up of several deputy directors and several departments. So we have Deputy Director Harmon, who oversees our water systems and our water quality. So he oversees water, wastewater, stormwater. We have Deputy Director Mills, who I'm sad to say will be retiring and leaving us here within the next month. He oversees our streets, our electrical, and our sanitation. WE HAVE OUR NEWLY PROMOTED CITY ENGINEER HIDING IN THE BACK. HE OVERSEES OUR ENGINEERING AND MAPPING DEPARTMENTS. AND THEN WE HAVE HE OVERSEES THE CALDWELL EVENT CENTER AND THEN OUR ADMINISTRATIVE COORDINATOR WHO HELPS EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE DEPARTMENTS. For Public Works, I just want to kind of do a brief overview of all the departments as a whole. We all take a master plan approach so that we can be very proactive rather than reactive. And so we now have master plans for our transportation, our water storage, our sewer collection system, our sewer treatment plant, and our pressure irrigation system. And we use these master plans not only for budgeting purposes to help us determine what capital improvement projects we need to proceed with, but also with development. So we can ensure that development occurs in an orderly fashion for our master plans. We also have our asset management program. We previously were using a pretty basic asset management program that was really just helping us track what pipes needed to be cleaned that day or what road needed to be repaired. And we have since been proceeding with an asset management program with OpenGov. We have just completed our implementation, and so we are just getting started on heavily using this system. And this asset management program is actually going to help us track how much maintenance different types of systems are requiring so that we can help budget and plan for when systems need to be replaced. It's going to be very robust. The more we use it, the more it's going to help us with our budgeting. So we're really excited to really dive into it. Our sewer department specifically has really been diving into this. And they have all of their treatment plant and all of their lift stations heavily detailed of tracking all of the different pumps and systems within one one lift station and we're going to get there with our water as well so that we can track all of our wells, all of the mechanical systems in our wells more closely with this asset management program. We're really looking forward to that. Recently we presented to you the cost of service analysis rate study. We're seeing more and more jurisdictions doing these studies to make sure that what they're charging for use rates and connection fees appropriate so that our master plans can be funded and our ongoing operations and maintenance and then in conjunction with our cost of service analysis written rate study we have our fund balance utilization and so we recognize that some years we carry a larger fund balance than other years and that's because a lot of the public works projects are multi-million, if not tens of millions of dollars. And so sometimes we need to start cushioning our fund balance in preparation for some of these larger projects. So we do utilize our fund balance in that manner as well as just ensuring that we have funds available if there was a catastrophic emergency, we're prepared. As everybody here knows, Caldwell is growing rapidly. I found all types of numbers showing different estimates. But really what I was seeing is over the last five years, we've increased somewhere around that 30% range. About 6% year over year was the numbers that I was finding from Compass. We're projected to be over 100,000 by 2050. I would probably think sooner than that, though, just based on how we have been growing. So Public Works is requesting several positions, but we are also a very large department. We have 131 staff currently, and so through all of the Public Works teams, we are proposing 14. These positions are very necessary to maintain our level of service. As our city continues to grow, the demands, just like the demands on every department here at City Hall, our demands are increasingly growing. Especially, you see this, With water and sewer, you see this where we can collect rates or we can collect those usage fees, but you see this a lot like with our streets department where they're not necessarily collecting fees, but they are taking over the ownership of a lot more roads. And so their role is constantly increasing with a growing city. We also have to meet a lot of regulatory requirements. So as we grow, the threshold that we have for requirements to meet with groups like the DEQ. We have more stringent requirements as we continue to grow. And so we have lots of regulations that we need to make sure that we have enough staff to meet. Growing infrastructure demands, I kind of touched on that already. And then we're seeing just the workforce is getting harder and harder. I think a lot of groups are seeing that. But especially we're seeing this in public works construction, where you're just not seeing you're just not seeing a lot of young men wanting to go work at a sewer treatment plant anymore, unfortunately. So we're just battling with a reduction in the workforce of people who are not just wanting to be in the public works departments, but are skilled and qualified to be in the public works departments. So here is our just overall requested budget for our enterprise funds. I'll come back to this slide. But I just wanted to pull it up really quick so that you could take a look at this. This was the one that Raelynn sent yesterday. So you'll notice I gave everybody a handout I'm not an accountant, and so my brain works a little bit differently than Raelynn's. So I've been tracking budget numbers a little bit differently than she has. But budget, as you know, is very fluid. And so my numbers aren't as up-to-date as Raelynn's. So this one that she sent yesterday is the most up-to-date, and I'll finish with this as well so that it's up on the screen for you to all look at. So for this going through Public Works, I will get started, do a quick overview of the Caldwell Events Center Engineering and Mapping, but then I'm going to pass it over to Deputy Director Harmon and Deputy Director Mills to go over their departments. They'll probably spend a little bit more time in the budgets of those as they are quite a bit larger. than our Caldwell Event Center Engineering and Mapping departments. And then I will wrap up going through with our capital improvement projects, kind of touch on how the different ways our funding works, and then we can go into some questions. So the Caldwell Event Center, as mentioned, that is overseen by Kwan, and YOU CAN SEE JUST A REALLY QUICK SUMMARY OF OUR BUDGET OVER THERE FOR OPERATIONS AND MAINTENANCE, PERSONNEL, AND THAT TOTAL BUDGET. THEIR ROLE IS TO OPERATE AND MAXIMIZE THE USE OF THE CALDWELL EVENT CENTER. SO THEY WORK IN CONJUNCTION WITH ALL THE DIFFERENT PARTICIPANTS AT THE EVENT CENTER, SO THE RODEO, THE COUNTY, THE SCHOOL, THE the RV reservations over there that we have newly constructed. He manages and oversees all of this, as well as making sure that the grounds for all of these different users are in good shape. His major request is going to be for a motorized sweeper. This is going to be about $17,000. And this is going to help the event center staff keep the grounds clean and functional for all the various uses that occur at the event center. He told me that this sweeper is going to save a ton of time, staff time, and so we don't need to hire any more people out there with the use of a sweeper. It's going to be more efficient to have a sweeper rather than those guys hand sweeping the area. So with that, We are also proposing to actually modify one of our positions, but it's a cost savings. We have the Caldwell Event Center supervisor who is going to be leaving July 4th, and we are requesting to change that position to a Caldwell Event Center maintenance and event specialist. So we're actually going to see a cost saving in our staff this year to Caldwell. for that speaker.

One other thing I would say, because of hierarchy, Juan's position used to oversee facilities, and so a portion of his position was coded to facilities in that budget. That's no longer coded, and so that's why you see a much higher increase in the personnel in 27. It's not due to additional personnel, it's just due to reallocating that from facilities back to CAC.

Is Juan retiring or is Juan leaving the organization?

No, this is his supervisor. So he just realized that he doesn't need to have a supervisor and then staff below the supervisor, that he can manage all the supervisory roles and just have more boots on the ground getting the job done.

Can I ask a question about fees again?

Yes.

How are we doing on fees? And have we looked closely at whether or not we need to increase our fee rates? And Juan at time on the plaza was overheard saying City Hall has been dictating fees or giving away things that Juan wasn't responsible for. Do you know anything about that?

I'll answer the first question is have we looked at fees and yes, we have sat down and we've looked at fees We are raising some we are trying to stay Competitive with our fees and so we are trying not to raise them too much We're trying to keep that that increase minimal, but we do have some areas where we're increasing fees And I think we were adding a couple of fees also for different types of uses at the event center as far as city hall dictating fees to him there there's always so he we we have the ability um at city hall to propose to council to do a fee waiver or a fee reduction for certain types of users and there have been some users that have been coordinating with city hall that would want to see that reduction that need to come before council

I would say some of those have not always been documented or going through the proper policy. And so I'm trying to figure out, because mom did bring this concern to me, trying to figure out which ones so I can do some research. I haven't done enough to figure out which ones so I can figure out how that process was skirted.

Yeah, we need to stop that. I think if Juan's operating CEC for us, he needs to do that. And if it needs to come to council for approval of that, then it should happen that way. But if anybody else is giving fee deals or fee specials, we need to know about that.

Because we have our fee waiver policy, which allows for 50% to school districts on certain fees, 25% to nonprofits on certain fees, and that has a form that gets filled out. Any other waiver of that should be coming before city council. Those percentages are approved in a policy by council that can be done administratively. Anything more than that has to come to city council.

Perfect. So, Ray Lynn, how close are we, red to black,

We are not. There is, on your spreadsheet, for CEC, I believe it's about $200,000, if I recall.

We're supplementing about $200,000?

Yeah. If you see online.

Raylynn, turn your page around so I can see what it looks like.

This is one. It's the general fund special revenue. So the first column is general. The second one is CEC. And you can see I have proposed revenue of $252,500. And then transfers in from general fund of $196,514.

No, the gap is is maintaining

The amount we raise fees is covering the personnel increases, but it's not necessarily closing that gap any further. We looked at trying to figure out what's the best solution, how do we close that gap? Is there different ways? I don't know if a fee is a way to do it. I think it's gonna be a change of use or how we structure that entire area is gonna make it to where it's gonna, I think my recommendation would be a lot broader conversations of how that area is structured and outside of budget conversations to really see what the best utilization is. I've talked to many different people that come to my office about this area. And I think even with Juan, he'll give you his opinion. I mean, I don't know if it's worthwhile to get a study, not like a planning study, but just a study to see what would be best uses or what recommendations or even internal a task force to really say what is going to be the best uses. It whether to Chelsea or Albertson stadium, or give it to the college, whether to give the rodeo like. I think there's a lot of things that could happen in that area. What would be the best solution for the city? Whether we stay in the game or we get out of it because. 100% based off the leases we have with College of Idaho, with the Rodeo, and even with the county. We lose money because of those three entities every single year, and General Fund is supplementing them. I mean, that's the hard truth of it, because those leases do not cover the wear and tear deferred maintenance on those buildings that we own.

One of the other possibilities that Juan and I were talking about on this matter of we're losing money with our partners and our leases out there is that they're doing all of the property management and the property maintenance, but we're not receiving any partnership on that cost. And so he and I spoke about it would be similar to a CCNR or an HOA, where there are certain fees that could be paid to the event center to make sure that those maintenance costs are being properly recovered.

VALENT. One of my conversations with Mr. Brooks was his recommendation that we need to give those properties back, let them run it.

I mean, if that's the best benefit for the city, to give them back. I mean, if we gave them back, there's pros and cons, right? Like, we wouldn't have the deferred maintenance. We wouldn't have the cost. But then there's the discussion, well, What about parking? What about how we utilize the CDC? All of those things. So it could be the best option, it could be the worst option. I think that's why further analysis needs to be done on it, decision making, and weigh all the pros and cons from the, From the perspective of the city and have the partners do it on the same side But I think it's a discussion that needs to be had because in my three years here I think we've had this discussion over and over again and no decision has been made and that really is a decision because we're just staying with status quo and Allowing this transfer from general fund to happen Same thing came up with the golf course when I was on the board and

Either we get in the black or we let somebody else lease it. This is not fair to the taxpayers.

Are there any other questions at the Caldwell Events Center? I'll just touch on engineering and mapping real quick. Again, this is managed by John Cavani, our city engineer. So engineering's role is to oversee the construction and the design within the city of Caldwell. So they oversee all of the sewer, water, storm water, irrigation, roadways, street lights, not just for the construction of these utilities to get in the ground so that we can have a good system with good long-term maintenance, but also ensuring that while these are being constructed and designed, that it's done so in a safe and timely manner. So they are quite busy. I think last I checked all of the projects that they had, you count all of the private sector projects that they manage and all the public sector projects that they're managing, it was over 100 projects that this department is managing right now. So very busy. As Robin indicated, we have already received the amount of construction documents for this fiscal year that we received in the entirety of last fiscal So again, just touching on, there's kind of this slug that you see with development where a lot of developers now have designed to put the water, sewer, stormwater roadways in the ground. And probably in a year from now, so next fiscal year, you'll see this big slug come through in building permits where everything's in the ground. Now they can go build on it. So we do have a couple major requests in the engineering department, and they are all related to our staffing. So I did want to just touch on the way that the engineering department funds work is engineering funding also includes the public work funding. So myself, our deputy directors, our stormwater team, they're all part of this engineering funding bucket, but they are they do operate separately. So our SCADA engineer and our public works cost and revenue analyst, though it's under engineering funding, those two positions would operate on the public works team as a whole. Both SCADA engineer and the public works cost revenue analysis were approved in previous years. However, due to the large amount of development that was seen this year, we needed to not fill those positions and instead use the funding for those positions to go to more line locators. Our line locators, anytime somebody calls Digline, They have 48 hours to get out there and mark all of our utility system. That is a hard and fast date or timeframe that they cannot miss. And our utility locators were just being bombarded and they couldn't meet these requests. And if we can't meet those requests, that means that when a contractor hits our water line, it's our fault because we didn't go out there and mark it. So we made the decision to not fill some positions because we needed to make sure that our line locators had the adequate staffing that they needed to keep up with the Thank you. rapid development that we're seeing, not just in homes and businesses, but we also have this rapid growth in communication companies. Now that we have a lot of homes in Caldwell, lots of communication companies want to get their fiber in the ground. And that's where we're seeing this huge influx of DIG line requests that we needed those line located positions for. So those two positions have been approved in previous years, and I'm just asking for them back since we Had to do some shuffling during this fiscal year.

And then on that note, just real quick, do you see those line locators going away anytime soon?

I don't see them going away. And that's because the big increase in dig line tickets has been with those communication companies. And so we are just seeing more and more communication companies wanting to come to Caldwell, which is great for our residences because it gives them a variety of networks to choose from. You know, before we were pretty narrow in what internet providers we could have, and we now have four or five different internet companies wanting to come and we're entering new ones that haven't started working with us yet but want to enter into MOUs with us, memorandums of understanding so that we can make sure that the infrastructure that they're putting in the ground meets our requirements. So one way that we're trying to help our engineering department and our line locators is we're putting in those MOUs and we're looking to see if we can put it into ordinance that they have to pay for overages for our line locators. And rather than we used to have engineering staff go and inspect all of these, this infrastructure, we now are using an outside consultant that is going to go inspect everything. And it'll just be a pass-through fee where these communication companies now have to just pay the pass-through fee for a consultant to go inspect everything because we just don't have the bandwidth to keep up. We are, though, historically we had line locators in our water department, and Tony and I have been working on how can we reshuffle our locators into a different public works department so that when we do see this huge influx, how can we use other public works staff to help our line locators? And when I say we get a dig line ticket, it's not just for a little area. We get a dig line ticket that's several miles wide in radius. It includes several subdivisions. They want us to go mark everything in two days, and that's just not feasible. So we're constantly trying to see how we can work better with communication companies on that.

We've got a couple questions here. Tell me a little bit about franchise fees. So how do the franchise fees work, and are we receiving franchise fees from all these companies? and fiber optics drilling into our streets.

Yeah, so we have quite a few franchise-free agreements. I know we're working on some additional ones as new providers come in to set that franchise fee agreement up. So for example, when TDS fiber came in, it's at 5%. And so that's what they pay us based off of it. So it is something that- 5% of what and for how long? Usually it's net profit.

Do they give us some sort of a net operating?

Yeah, based off of the area, so within the city limits, off of the specific area.

And I believe that's set at the state level.

So there's certain ones that are, yeah, so state code allows for certain percentages, and then you can always negotiate, and then once you reach the max, you can always go lower, but once you reach the max, it's the max, so. And we, I think, when you negotiate those, that cost gets passed on to consumers. So it's always, you know, we don't want to overcharge, but we don't want to undercharge either.

They did. They put fiber on my street. I'm in an older neighborhood by the hospital, and my street looks terrible. I mean, there's white marks, yellow marks, green marks, blue marks, and they just up and left. Yeah.

Unfortunately, the franchise companies are regulated at the state level, and so we don't have as much power over them as we do some of our other general contractors. It's an ongoing battle. I've been working with other public works directors in the Valley to see how they've been managing them a little bit more. Most of their systems go into the public utility easements at the rear lots, and we don't have jurisdiction over PUEs. So we're trying to look at ways to have a little bit more jurisdiction over them when they're working in our right-of-way. One jurisdiction in the Valley told me that they have started charging a damage deposit to franchise utility companies as part of the right-of-way permit. And it was a pretty high number that they were charging a damage deposit for. And then after a year, once we were sure that things like irrigation lines weren't hit, they were returning that damage deposit back to franchise utility companies. Or they said, you can be waived of your damage deposit if you enter into this agreement with us. And it was a pretty strict agreement that laid out if you cause damage, you have to get it repaired. Some utility companies are really willing to work with us on MOUs and agreements. However, they recognize that they're governed at the state level, not at the local level. And so they also don't always want to agree to all of the terms that we first propose. So using something like a damage deposit could give us a little bit of leverage to get a little bit more out of our agreements with these franchise companies.

How much are you going to give to franchise companies?

Depending on which one. So electrical, we get about $400,000. That's split between police and fire. Gas, we get about $60,000. And cable, we get about $60,000.

So we're at about a half a million dollars a year in franchise fees. And that goes straight to public safety?

No. Well, no. Electrical goes to public safety. Gas and cable go to just general fund.

So I realized I told you the positions, but I didn't even describe them to you. My apologies. So the cost and revenue analysis, we are proposing that that can be a go-between between public works and finance. Right now, we manage a large amount of projects, but we have a hard time making sure that our budgets are being tracked properly on all of these projects. And so I see that this position would really help be that, like I said, that go-between between our two departments. make sure that we are tracking budgets, change orders, asset management costs, capital improvement costs, those types of things better. So it's something that Raelynn and the previous public works director have discussed for several years about the need to get this position. And then our SCADA engineer. Tony can speak more on SCADA, but SCADA is a software that helps us manage our pumps, so our well houses, our lift stations. It helps us just track how those are operating. If any issues arise, our SCADA lets us know. If there's inefficiencies or something odd is occurring, it lets us know. And so our SCADA engineer is going to help us maintain and track our systems better. and make them more efficient and make sure that they continue operating at the highest level for our businesses. And then in engineering, the engineering position that we are requesting is for a plans examiner too. Last year, when I was city engineer, I did some kind of shifting around of roles in the engineering department previously. The public work sector and the private work sector were all just commingled, and all staff worked on everything. And last year, I made more of a clean delineation of this is the folks working on public projects, this is the folks working on private projects, and so that we could have a little bit more and some added efficiencies so people weren't just bombarded with the large amount of projects that were occurring. In doing that, I created the position. It wasn't a new position, just promoting a gentleman. And I made him the land development manager so that he could oversee all of the private sector work that was occurring. What we're seeing this year is that he's now doing two jobs. He's managing the private sector staff, and he's still doing plans review. So he is just really bogged down. And I would like to have another plans examiner hired so that he can just focus on managing our staff and making sure that infrastructure is getting in the ground properly rather than getting bogged down with permits. The last major item that engineering is working on is our partnership with the community development team, transitioning to Tyler Technologies, which is our current portal. So this is just going to have a lot more capabilities for staff, it's going to streamline a lot of our processes.

I apologize, I wanted to say I misspoke on the gas franchise fees. It's about $400,000 a year, not 60. So a big difference, I apologize.

In the past, when we've had these stresses, and I'm sure John and his team don't have any right now, we've allowed developers to opt to pay someone that we contracted with. Are we still allowing that, or have we gotten away from that?

We do that in certain circumstances. So when we have roundabouts or signalized intersections come in, which we don't see very often, but they're very technical designs, we sub those designs out to a consultant to do our review. We currently are not subbing out review to other consultants for just us being backlogged. And the reason for that is because we found that there was a lot of things that were getting missed. when we sub it out to a consultant. And then when it gets missed in plan review, it's really hard to hold a contractor to our standards when they can say, but I have stamped drawings right here. And so we always have that opportunity to use consultants to help us keep up with our plans. But we just find that We just find that a lot more of things get missed, and then by the time so many developers want to start using outside consultants, we're finding it really doesn't save them time. At first, a lot of developers thought that they could pay extra for expedited review by using outside consultants, but if But then when all developers want that expedited review, it really doesn't become expedited. And so we found that it wasn't producing the best set of quality plans, and it wasn't saving much time in the grand scheme of things. Because then we still have staff do a final review to make sure. They don't go through every item, but they do want to make sure that some of our big items don't get missed. So we still have staff review those plans, even when they're reviewed outside.

Fair enough. What are we telling people our expected turnaround time is at this point?

We try and turn around construction documents in 30 days. However, the building department has a hard and fast, we will turn around documents to you in 15, 10 days.

Except we have made a caveat that we do our best to turn them around, but it's not a guaranteed turnaround.

Yeah, so we don't guarantee a turnaround. We try and shoot for that 30 days. But then we have developments like a Verbena Ranch, where they submitted all of their off-site improvements. Their off-site improvements were broken into seven or eight different construction document packages. And then they were also submitting for on-site improvements. And that project, if you recall, had six separate preliminary plots. which meant that they could do two on-site improvement packages per preliminary plan at once. And they submitted just about all of those at the same time. So suddenly, in one day, we had no plans that were being reviewed. And then the next day, we had 20 plans that needed to be reviewed for civil infrastructure. We try and shoot for that 30 day, but we are always working with developers and working with engineers and telling them, this is what our current backlog looks like, but tomorrow it could be different. So we try and keep them updated on where we are with our reviews.

Thank you.

And with that, I will move over to mapping. So our mapping department, really what they're best known for is managing our GIS web map system. That GIS web map is used across the city hall. All departments use our web map. And that shows all of our infrastructure, all of our zoning, all of our future land use, all of our master plans, anything you can think of that could be shown on a map, it's shown in our GIS system. They've been doing a huge overall this last year as they had to update their system. So people are going to see a new web map here pretty soon. It's going to be new and revised. It's not going to look outdated. It's much friendlier on the eyes. So I think people will be really excited to see that. But that's been taking up a lot of their time recently. With that, they work closely with our Public Works team on tracking all of our assets. They help the Public Works team track assets a little bit more in detail than what's seen just on our web map, and work closely with zoning, updating our land use maps. Also, just any special mapping projects that pop up. So any type of URA map. They get a lot of requests through the public records requests where people want to see maps produced. So they do all of that. They work with economic development to help show developers things in their area. And then they prepare general legal descriptions for our team. We are requesting one position in the mapping department. It'll be our GIS analyst. um our mapping superintendent is retiring this monday actually so that department is going to be seeing a little bit of a shake-up we're actively looking to get that position filled for a new superintendent but with the ongoing growth not just of our city but of our technologies our mapping department has been really getting bogged down and that When I say the ongoing growth of technologies, that includes our OpenGov transition that the Public Works Department just did. It's great for our public works teams, for our guys' boots on the ground. But once we started implementing that, we realized that that is a lot more work that our mapping department now has to start tracking. And that's a lot more layers that they need to start managing. We're learning that with our Tyler transition as well. So we were originally looking at hiring, wanting to hire somebody that could just manage Tyler technology layers. Because once we started digging into it, we've realized that this software to use its full functionality is going to require a lot of time from our mapping team. It was much more in-depth than what we were expecting. We're really excited for it, don't get me wrong. We're still really looking forward to our implementation, but we just didn't realize how much GIS time it was going to take. So rather than requesting that position, We are requesting an increase in our operations and maintenance so that we can hire an outside consultant to help as needed with that Tyler implementation transition. So one position and then one add to our operations and maintenance for that consultant to provide more assistance.

So is that the nearly $60,000 increase in professional services?

Yes. Yes, that's what that is. Any other mapping questions? Well, with that, then, I will pass the clicker over to Tony.

Sorry, I know public works is long.

I have just a little fish house.

So Hannah, could you pull up presentation number two? Thank you.

Mayor Phillips, council, thank you guys for the opportunity tonight. We're going to try to get through water, irrigation, wastewater, and stormwater. If you guys have any questions, I'm going to ask them as quickly as I can. Here's our public works structure for water. I am the director myself. We have new superintendent Andy Zimmerman over wastewater. Terry is over the water. You all know Terry. Christina Beeson is over the storm water. I can't really see that well. So utilities, all the public utilities are enterprise fund, self-funded, and

Sorry, I didn't want to print out all of our slides like some of the other departments, because there's a lot.

We have a lot. We're going to try to hustle through them. What we do is we keep the water pumping, the sewers flowing, the surface water cleaned. Our staff holds numerous different licenses, from wastewater licenses to wastewater collections to laboratory licenses to water distribution and water treatment. The storm water holds numerous floodplain management things, environmental compliance certificates. So a ton of regulatory, or we are required to hold regulatory licenses. The common themes here is to comply with state and federal regulations. failure, choose safe and cost effective methods to compare. We're going to jump into the water division. This is, I believe, L21? 17. Thank you, Gary. Here is our water division structure. We currently have 37 staff members. We're going to talk about some personnel requests that are going to come out. what we do in the water department we provide customers with a reliable safe potable water supply and maintain compliance with state federal regulations primarily to safety we currently operate and maintain 375 miles of water mains 15 domestic wells three booster stations 70 million gallons five hundred thousand gallons of two million gallons storage reservoirs peak demand city's 25,700 active water service. One of the great things that we pulled off in fiscal year 26 right now, water department wrapping up on well 17 project, provide a significant increase to the city's water supply. This project will add approximately 7,000 gallons per minute, just to ensure a clean and reliable fishing to serve our community. Our 27 goals, we have a couple of things. We'd like to upgrade our operation, automatic metering infrastructure, complete well 17, motor upgrades, call treatment at well 21 to remove arsenics. violet sand. Hopefully we'll pump our water through. Pretty amazing. We want to activate a lead and copper surface replacement plan from our EPA requirements, operate and inspect all fire valves, fire hydrants once a year, fire hydrants twice a year, prioritize maintenance and rehab We need to continue to work on structure for the water department. Finance. This is a long gone out process. I want to prioritize staff retention. So currently, or we recently looked at an AWWA study. The city is up to 5,000, 5,000, 25,000, 25,000, 575,000. And where Caldwell lands there. We're pretty close. We do have some work. Caldwell, I spoke to quite a few folks. Several people come through the world. And with this, we're trying to create also a clear path Supervisor we create Coordinators We built a Same thing with the water department right now. Something to work for, avenues for them to see that, yes, there is . A list of professionals. Take a couple of the bigger ones. These are drinking water, the sampling, the IOC, BOC, SOC for nitrates. We do deal with consumer confidence reports. looking to add a pump and distribution operator, two of them, a service operator, So we just touched on it earlier. been able to maintain that very emergency fund. We haven't been able to gain anything. Except that $5 million emergency fund a few years ago, lots of things have gone up. up on O&M. We would like to build that emergency 5 million that was suggested. So we have worked on things, and with the new cost of service study that we had done, we're going to bring it to you on July 11th. That will put up... with the projects that may come up some of these that we have to do to easily eat up that I think we're currently on the right path cost of service that we have. We should be able to fund all of our . Any questions on that?

How are we doing on well levels? Are we monitoring that pretty close relative to we losing any elevation on any of the waters?

Not at this time. So we're holding strong.

And we just drilled another well and we still got lots of water. It's got water levels.

And that well that we just drilled, it should be online this fall. So we are going through the DEQ process to get all of the approvals, to get the well house up. They approve the construction at several steps throughout the project. And normally, it takes about a year to get DEQ's full sign off on a well construction. We've been able to expedite this construction. And we're still thinking fall, right?

So Tony, I heard something, and I don't even remember where I heard it. So that could be totally off base. But I heard somewhere that we had some discussion about finding a way to reuse some of the water that leaves the sewer plant that runs back into the river, repurposing that water. Did I hear that right? Was there something about that? I can't even remember where I heard it. If it's coming later on, that's fine. It's just something. Let's jump into the sewer pipe.

I would be thrilled to talk about that. I mean, giddy to talk about that. As soon as we get to wastewater. Irrigation division, what they do, they provide couple minutes for the irrigation. The water supply depends on... Currently operate and maintain 17, operate and maintain 70 pump stations and 100,000 gallons a minute by a customer. Fiscal year 26, a couple of the main things that we are publishing right now. Pressure irrigation station upgrades, pumps and motors. These upgrades were needed as equipment becomes worn out. Every of these guys have done. Couple of things that we'd really like to accomplish next year. Couple of happiness to continue SCADA. SCADA allows us to monitor each well site, whether it's sewer system, a pump house, a power system. Irrigation is a little bit behind. part of our compliance regulatory. But it does take a lot of our time. It is a huge on arms. So when you can open up your phone or you get an alarm that says, hey, we have a pump that has tripped, be able to capture that right away. That's kind of our priority on that. Put that that we have. Start to walk. It's water side of things. Hill House. The wastewater side was. Pretty far ahead. So as I sit down with the water department, we started building our asset. We become really clear. Set up a maintenance schedule, set up a replacement schedule, get notified as to should be able to forecast for us once it is all set up. First, allow us to pop up and give us preventive measures. Arms, like they invented. Building those programs in an effort to get it to . They touched on it earlier, SCADA means Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. It's a system that gathers and analyzes data. It's constantly running. Let's see how much we've been talking about. 15 seconds. professional services just pressure irrigation system the SCADA program Materials request. You need to look at system filter replacement, brand filters have been discontinued. Equipment storage has been discontinued. We'd like to build into historic parks. Other teams in the water division, we have backflow prevention. Socialized licenses from the state program. Water system. D-Line locates. fortunate but this department needs to continue the same with irrigation change I know I just want to talk about that you'll see that personnel went up to

quite a bit there was a bit of change so we didn't add new personnel what's been happening is that the water department has been housing it housing these personnel they've been charged to the water department and then when they work on irrigation they've been overriding their time but that's not necessarily and then we charge the expenses what we have done now is identified i believe it's five staff that permanently work on irrigation year round and charge their entire time to irrigation. So it took those staff off of water and moved them to irrigation. And so that's why you see that increase in personnel on irrigation, because we did just move it from where they were just overriding time to actually just coding all of their time as 100% irrigation.

wastewater division structure currently has 28 staff we are several new positions um we saw the stats when we started here treatment facility runs exceptionally well so we recently included weekend work we do have one swing shift operator we will add one more operator to that weekend Part of some of the challenges with the treatment plant is the nutrient loading that happens from the dewatering process. So when we can really turn that belt press down and run it a little bit slower, we can minimize that nine to 12 hours of impact of that high nutrient load from the side stream. And so by then, we can turn that 60 gallons a minute for 18 hours a day, We really do have a compliance school that is coming up. We do have to meet a boss resumment that the team set forth for us during the winter and summer. We are currently getting that number of projects in place If something went wrong, direct the side stream to the building so that we can meet them. But with that, you know, having that 24, not 24, seven day a week coverage. It also has actually reduced our on-call time. A ton of calls that some of our SCADA system will get a valve and get stuck at 100%, stuck at 0% and operator used to have to come in, drive that valve open, drive it closed, reset it, go back home. Do that, so now that we have coverage going, midnight for at least four days a week, and now we'll have it come midnight seven days a week. That's when we cut back on it. So what we do, we provide reliable and safe sanitary sewer collection and treatment systems. Operate and maintain over 300 miles of sewer mains and 17 sewage waste treatment plant. We treat 8.7 million gallons of sewage. We meet all national and Idaho community discharge elimination systems. One quick thing that we did in 2020. Discussed and we had a few We have gone through the city collection system. massive root intrusion, broken pipes. These things are happening all over the city in some of the older infrastructure. We purchased equipment that allows us to go in and repair that pipe as it sits in the ground. Bigging, no blocking of traffic, no disruption of the flow at all. We were paying anywhere from $5,000 to $12,000 per repair. We're trying to get 10 to 15 of these done. System to do this. We have currently, last week, we had completed 29 of these things, saving roughly $100,000. Just over the past few. We are... it gives us a 40-year warranty it's the same as The goals that we have coming up, the collection system maintained for a very long time. Remained up to three years. Continued development of staff and equipment for sewer pipe repair. By and with the requirements of the test, improved our preventative maintenance practices and so on. Professional services, again, we belong to a bunch of them. The Boise Water Council. Quality testing program. Tissue testing at the City of Boise. Water Quality Coalition. In the collection system, we have . We do have a few new position requests. We are creating a new assistant superintendent. Expand our collection system staffing. We would like to do far more of our own repairs rather than outsourcing $1,000 this year just by increasing the staff that you guys took last year and gave us the ability to point repairs. would uh like to create then a superintendent that oversees all significantly over the next couple of years so we have a superintendent overall wastewater assistant superintendent on collections and assistance on the industrial uh we'd like to add industrial We have great people in the past who did a fantastic job maintaining our pumps and pipes and structure. We would like folks rather than . Different trainings and bond and different pumping. And we're going to add two more. the requirements that are going to come out. Again, with the cost of service study that we had, we did identify that . We do have a year and the year before, we carried a fairly large fund balance. Fund balance looked really nice, but we had really focused a lot of our time and in for a few of these several of the councilmen last year we did these pilot studies on watering and sludge drying that project is about a year and a half behind because we did want to get away from going to the landfill I have some great documents in my office. Pine tree grown in the dirt, and a pine tree grown biosolids, and it's about three to five times bigger. Any more on that? Any agricultural stuff? Davis. to get this stuff off the site but we did want to make sure we do our due diligence and prepare did bring our fund balance back down As we get closer to some of these watches. regulatory requirements, we can meet you. Some of this stuff done, if not, how can you go about it? We have an exceptional plan. Any questions? We'll be able to provide safe, secure, drinking water system, irrigation system. Any questions on this side of things? If you're interested in a tour, I'd love to have you guys come out. Probably one of my favorite things to do is walk and talk to people. All right, so we did have some questions on some review stuff. If you'd like, I can touch base on that. So there is some discussion that Amy and I have been having. So because the requirements are going to get very small, we are trying to come up with solutions to help minimize it. So if we are, our wastewater permit, our discharge permit is based on 8.7 million gallons of discharge. If we can minimize, increase our, it is based on a PMDL that is set on the point. We can take, let's say we take 20%, flow and we are able to put it to the canal would be able to potentially get credits towards our it's an easy easy have tried this in the past. Reduce clean water, the water that we have coming out of the treatment. Swam in that river 10,000 times. Yeah, I've drank hundreds of gallons of that water. I've laid down on my belly and drank it right out of it. So if we can get that water and put it to use somewhere else, other stuff. I have another concept. There's a new fire training station across the river from my discharge. They have recently asked for numerous hydrants to use for their treatment. How the regulations on this work, it would be a really easy to put this charge and hydrants, they can put 25 hydrants out there if they want, all at the same time. not going to make an impact. So we all know that fire suppression hydrants fear a large draw off of the city. If we can get approved and get these hydrants plumbed at the training facility, in the future it might make sense that we look at putting it to systems in the streets somewhere. Against structure, but getting it to this training facility pretty simple project on my side. easy to get. There are also the concepts. One pipe over there. It is a group are putting pipes over there right now. If we can get the approval from the regulatory agency, we would be able to isolate the city water system from this park system. It's not allowable. There is quite a bit of paperwork and legislation going on with that kind of stuff. Extremely doable, right? The IDEQ are really supportive We're talking about this drought. This is a great way to help . That sewer will never stop running. As much as I would love to go and knock on everybody's door and say, hey, I got a big project. How about I change these pumps? Could you all just put a run in your water for a day? It will never, never happen. That water never stops flowing by what we do . We can take that and use it to provide it to the farmer's union down the canal. We can provide a service to the fire department over at their nutrient facility to help the draw that we'll have on our city water system. We can get it to the parks to help irrigate some of these lawns to all benefits to the community

And so I'll just add to that really quick, Councilor Allgood. We tried to really make all of our budgets lean this year in recognition that a lot of departments are struggling. And so we wanted to really make all of our public work budgets as lean as possible. So we do not have any of what Tony just spoke about in our budget this year of putting that to water. call it to another source. But if that's something that you would be interested in us pursuing, even just a small little pipeline over to the Riverside Canal, that's a pretty minimal project. So if that's something that counselors that you're interested in, we would certainly be happy to add that into our budget.

Tony, you said that would help us with DEQ if we were blowing off some of that water. Absolutely.

There is a credit-type program that they offer. So my previous employer, before I came here, we set up a program where we built a large treatment facility of phosphorus removal where we catch a lot or where they catch a lot of the runoff from the farmer's fields. Instead of it going to the river, they send it through a seedering project out there. It's a city of poisons. phosphorus there. And then they just let it circle right back and go right back into the river. They built that because they were going to have challenges meeting their phosphorus requirements from where they discharge into the south channel of the West Point It's a very small channel. There was no way they were going to probably meet those requirements for phosphorus. So to do that, they said, what can we do to help the community? What can we do to help the state? They came up with this idea. If we can remove phosphorus for other people, for farmers outside of Caldwell and whatever else that's discharging out there, if we will build something there to remove phosphorus, would you give us credits? So if we can aid or assist in helping to feed a canal, there's all kinds of cool little projects out there to get credits toward your limits. And then it just also minimizes your discharge. So now you are having a smaller impact to the TMDL that's on the Boise River. So then our requirements would probably

Can you guys get us a number on that?

Yeah, we'd be more than happy to.

To that maybe, it seems that no matter what factual information we put out there from hydrologists, from our wastewater treatment experts about how we're able to keep up, that our infrastructure is solid and healthy and robust and all those things. misinformation continues to go out there related to that what kind of battles will we have to fight with people hearing we're dumping water that is purer than the water in the Boise River but now we're dumping it into a canal and again I'm glad you said it again Tony because that's what I understood that it's cleaner than it's not potable of course but but what kind of challenges are we gonna face with the public when misinformation starts going out there about, oh my gosh, we're dumping our sewage into the canals?

So there is, that's a legit question. It will come, it will come. It's really hard to get past the, the eye test for people. You can take them in, you can bring them in for tour, and we can set up a clear bottle at the info, and we set it up at the primary, we set one at the secondary, we set it up at the filter, we set it up at the UV, and then we walk right out to the alcohol, and we scoop it up, and I can hold it up with my bottle of water, and you can. But people know where it comes from. But I think out here, particularly with things such as the canal, Simplot does an application of their water. Shoot it out through a big giant cannon. It dissipates in the air. It just goes right in. Greenleaf, they have a land app permit where they take the water and they do the same thing. They irrigate it. I think for some folks to know that it's it's going out here and it's going on to our land somewhere I think Maybe what what some of the challenges are is recently there was utility a little farther east in the valley They wanted to do a similar project there is the challenge with It's PFOS. It's a forever chemical. It's everywhere. It's in the rain. It's in water. It's single everywhere. It's in all of us. There are very, very few ways to really get rid of it. So the challenge that just happened east was they were going to discharge it into a canal. same thing the water is cleaner than the canal but because um somebody got word that there's pfos in wastewater you're putting wastewater into my canal like my kid or my dog or somebody is going to get pfos and have it forever there will be those conversations there will be those colleges I don't think out here it travels from here or from out. As it is already happening, we're not discharging it right into the middle of the plaza. It's cleaner, that's pretty much. I don't think it'll be as big of a challenge as there has been in other places.

Let me go a half step further, and I know I'm wasting time right now, but I'm intrigued. But the canals that aren't lined or concreted, we like because they feed the aquifer of those private wells especially, right? It's probably not getting to the wells we're at at 400.

Deeper than that. What's our latest one, Terry? I thought it was 530.

But the canals actually feed the local aquifers for those residents. Will we get pushback from those people?

Potentially. Potentially. There will have to be, you know, number one, we'd have to reach out to the regulatory agency. This is what we would like to do. These are some concepts that we have. I've spoken to quite a few people about this. We would want to hold town hall. We would like to open this discussion up to people and really have a face-to-face. I've been a part of quite a my time in regards to regulatory things and how we explain this to people, particularly when it comes to land applications. who are very up to speed on this. This is happening everywhere right now. It will be happening everywhere. It's not a new thing, but it is something we should certainly invest in.

Not to mention your pure water in that canal going through another 50 or 100 feet of ground will be even purer by the time it gets to their well. Probably. Probably would. All right, just plain devil's advocate because...

But back to Councilman Allgood's, yes, we have some concepts to...

And I'll add on water reuse. Sorry, I know that we're just kind of killing, like you said, killing time on this one. But I think it's important to remember, too, that in the Valley, we are incredibly spoiled to have the water quality that we do and the water quantity that we do in our aquifer system. I know I'm saying that in a drought year, but our potable water aquifer, we are very fortunate here in Caldwell where we're situated. A lot of other jurisdictions throughout the nation, they accept their water through surface water, not through groundwater wells. And so throughout the nation, people are already accepting the sewage from other jurisdictions and then they're putting it through a treatment plant to drink. So I think that's, we kind of forget that here in the Valley because everybody just has a well, but a lot of other places are already drinking somebody else's sewage.

And the canal and the river are side by side. The water's going one or the other. And they both end up .

That canal goes right into the river. There's a head gate right there. We would just, hopefully, if we can get approval and get support, then we could just go right to the head gate.

Go on with this line of questions with regard to the misinformation that Councillor Williams talked about. We're not running out of water, are we?

No, our potable water, we're not running out of water.

And our sewer system is not at full capacity right now. I mean, we can't take any more sewer. Oh, we can take plenty more sewer. Okay. I just want to make sure because that's out there every day that we're running out of water and that our sewer system is at capacity.

So we're currently treating 8.7 million gallons of sewer per day. We have capacity up to roughly 15.4. Not even a half capacity, and we do have a few lift stations throughout the city, smaller ones, older ones where that happened that are nearing capacity. They are small lift stations. We do have plans in place. We're currently working on the Woodgate lift station. We decoupled it from We are decoupling it from Virginia Park. We've just added, that will add a ton of capacity to those two smaller lift stations. The large Lincoln lift station that we're building, as you see it in that budget, it's gonna finish around $25 million. It should be done in the next two years. That will give us all that capacity. The treatment plant, as we go forward, I think our bottlenecks are the The influent flow meter, it's currently on a 24-inch pipe. It only has capacity to hold up to 18 million gallons. We are currently, right now, we have a project going. We're adding another pipe right beside it. We will increase that capacity right there. We, like I say, with our cost of service study, and if we can get that pushed through, we will, year after year, pick the certain projects out that need to add that capacity to. I expect.

I didn't get my math app out, but based upon my understanding of math, we're at a 50% capacity on our sewer.

That's true. Change next year. We'll have just one pipe. One pipe. All right. Sorry for the delay, everybody. STORE WATER DIVISION. THIS IS AN INTERESTING ONE IN REGARDS TO THE BUDGET. IT IS SPLIT BETWEEN STREETS AND ENGINEERING. It's a pretty simple department, extremely critical to what we do out here. They do environmental audits and ensure compliance with federal and state regulations so the city can continue to drain storm water and protect the surface water areas such as Basin Creek, Indian Creek, and the Poison River. They execute the city of Caldwell's pollutant discharge elimination keeping community education, stormwater sampling, and stormwater pollution prevention at the airport. Monitoring and ongoing construction sites for compliance with erosion, sediment control, dust. We've heard a little bit about this recently. Building sites respond to any illicit discharges, dumping, and flooding of drains that city limits the stormwater system. They receive and review plans for development of floodplain It is a pretty small division. They do have a superintendent, Christina Beeson, environmental science, Jake, another environmental scientist, Madison, A couple of their accomplishments that they're working on right now, they're pretty darn proud of. Completion of expanded wash racks, completed the AP09 pond on Aviation Way for airport stormwater. Updates to the Stormwater Division webpage. Numerous community outreach programs. They go to the schools, they go where they can and set up a booth and try to talk to the kids. The 2026 General Permit MSGP was published by DEQ for the city. The airport has an MSGP for stormwater discharges, so the SWPPP updates the new permit cycle. Ongoing education efforts for these elected officials. Professional services, much of the same as all of our departments, Same thing, Boise River Water Quality, Watershed, Lower Boise River Water Council. They are certified as floodplain managers. They have three of them now. Construction inspector, that's Brian. He does a great job, extremely knowledgeable. Professional services, MS4, extraordinary tagging supplies. City storm, rain storm, water sampling, the airports, field tablets upgrade. Request, they wanted to upgrade their tablets, airport storm. Request, no new positions, no new vehicles. Any questions? I know I took up a lot of your time. I do apologize. There is a ton to get through through those departments. I would love to sit and chat with everybody here a little bit more about some of the concepts that we're looking at on the water side of things, on the wastewater side of things. We have a lot of really cool projects coming up that I'm excited to get started and start showing.

If you haven't had the opportunity, I recommend doing the wastewater treatment plan. It's quite impressive. Greatest human invention that we've made, I would say. Just being able to carry that stuff and clean it. Quite complex. So if you haven't done that, thank you. We want to take a quick bathroom break. Is this the last that we still got?

We have streets and electrical, and then I'll go through the CIP. Let's try to get through it. I'll pull it up so it's here. And then Hannah, can you pull up presentation number three?

Tony, one perception you're never going to overcome is wastewater coming out of a french fry plant versus sewers. I can't.

I can't. I can't. But I've toured both. I've worked with both. It's far nastier out there.

Okay, I think I'm the only thing standing between you and get something to eat. So he's got a wrap up. So, real quick snacks, 3 divisions that I oversee. The street division has 25 employees. Striping, signs, we have to sweep for our MS4 permit, and clean catch basins, as Tony mentioned. And of course, winter maintenance, which we were fortunate this last winter, we didn't have quite the winter maintenance we normally do. So looking ahead to this coming year, some of the projects we're looking at. Our big one is we want to replace our paint stripe truck. It's about $800,000. It's a big expense. We'd like to enter the new technology that Nampa and ACHD have with their trucks. Currently, our truck is pretty old. We have to spend a lot of time maintaining it. It seems to break down a fair amount of time. Even when it's running great, it doesn't have much capacity, so we're constantly running out of paint, coming back to the shop, filling up. These new trucks can carry 250 gallons each of both yellow and white, along with, I can't remember what the, some crazy amount of the reflecting beads too. So we can actually go out there and run it almost the whole day It's a lot more efficient. So this is our big ticket that we'd like to do for the street division coming up. As far as other things we're doing this year, we're actually out chipsing right now, kind of in that northeast part of the city. We should be done with that, the major part of the work on Monday, and just go back and do a few cul-de-sacs and catch up on some corners. proposing three pavement overlays next year uh 10th avenue um we left off on everett now we'd like to take it down to the golf course to logan it's really bad part of the road as you're probably aware of cleveland boulevard also from simplot over to 10th you can drive it's got a lot of patches on this it's it gets a lot of traffic it's getting pretty hammered an aviation out near the airport is very alligator like to actually do a full depth of work on reclamation on that project where you actually basically wrote it to the road up mix in cement and roll it out and then put asphalt on top of that you want to get about 15 years on that so sidewalks we're continuing to fix items we just finished up the lane corridor from the college down to 10th this year. And I want to talk about one thing with streets before it leaves. So this bomb was kind of dropped on me a few weeks ago that there's a need, I guess, to find funds. And so what's being proposed is a reduction of $500,000 in street fund revenues. And, you know, we're a team player. More than willing to do that if somebody, some department is in a bind and needs help. But my understanding is this would not be a one-year thing. This would be a permanent $500,000 reduction. And all of a sudden, $5 million over the next 10 years, that's a lot of overlays and a lot of things that we can do. So I know you're the ones that are going to have the tough decisions to make. It's not my decision to make. i can tell you i'm not happy with it and i know that it will have impacts to you know our sidewalk repair program we won't be able to extend sidewalks and build a lot of them in the school zones if we'd like to the overlays we've gone almost 20 years without doing overlays so the last few years i've been here we've been doing quite a few overlays we'll have to scale back on that You know we've started fog coating chip seal and the residential side vision something's gonna have to give I guess A lot of old culverts and bridges to replace too, so I would just say again. We're team players But I hope that there's a solution that maybe This doesn't have to be a permanent reduction On streets where did that money go to okay?

To police and fire.

So we funded them, correct?

Yeah, we've added more to police and fire.

Where does that money come from?

There's three. For the increase in police and fire, it's the property tax. So based off the allocation, pretty much everybody, every other department except police and fire, their property tax stayed very much the same. 3% in the the 3% calculation and inflation, the new construction and annexation, all of those funds primarily went to police and fire. And it's still, we are still showing the deficit, even with giving over $2 million to both police and fire because of the increases in budget, increases in percent of all those things.

Well, I've just, All of this stuff, this road repair, this sidewalk stuff, is also public safety. So it's kind of a juggling act here, which public safety we're going to prioritize. You know what I mean? And so I'm just trying to figure out how we work that out.

And before I came here, I know that there was kind of this similar thing that happened. It happened with the library. And I know Jerem specifically, when we got the urban renewal money, said the library needs to be refunded this money, like given this money back. And I can't really speak to what the impacts the library saw with that reduction, but that's something I know that, you know, any reduction in revenue impacts services 100%. And streets is going not only this $500,000, but we talked about the state funding of $1.1 million. So streets is not just getting a $500,000 impact. They're getting a $1.6 million impact to their budget. which means ongoing that they're going to use a lot of their fund balance. If you look at their projections, I think their fund balance is the lowest it's ever been when I look at it. So based off their spending, I'm projecting at the end of fiscal year 27, $241,000, which is not a significant amount. It's not enough to maintain. So it is very concerning. It's another problem. It's another solution. I don't know if moving that $500,000 is the right move. I don't know. I moved it because I think that was on the table as discussions. But whether that's the right move with all the other things that are coming on board and the request, the discussion around streets and how to fund that. I know we have added impact fees, which has shifted a lot of the capital projects, but that only pays for growth projects. That doesn't pay for repair and maintenance projects. doesn't pay to maintain sidewalks or just think about if we redid a roundabout it will pay for the expansion of maybe an additional lane but it won't the impact fees will but it won't pay to repave that original lane that was there so we still have to have funds in the street fund to cover the the repair and maintenance and just the rebuilds of certain intersections

Expansion will be paid by impact fees, but not but not everything One of the things Bruce said that you know if we had to take five hundred thousand This year to make somebody whole That's one thing, but if we say we're going to take What is that twenty percent twenty five whatever? Out of streets budget, and it's a permanent move That's a whole nother discussion seems to me

So, I mean, and that's something I can change. I can show you the difference between what it looks like in general fund, what it'll look like in street fund. I can make those changes next week and update that report. So you have this.

Just one person. I have others here.

Is the 800,000 placeholder, I think you called it, for the donation to the county from their sewer to the jail still in the budget?

It's in the wastewater budget.

Sorry, can we move it out of the wastewater budget over to streets and let county pay for their own sewer extension?

We can't transfer enterprise funds to the street fund.

They're not both enterprise?

No, the streets is a special revenue fund because it receives both property sales tax, pass-through money from the state. The street fund is actually one of the only funds that doesn't really receive any fees. It's all pass-through money, either from the state from gas tax, from fuel tax, like property tax. It's not necessarily a fee-based service. So there's not a way for me significantly to raise revenue in streets unless, for example, I know Haley talked about the registration fee. That would be a way to raise fees. But that is not something that we have passed, so that's not within the budget right now.

That would be years down the road before we ever saw the board.

And so I let Bruce decide if he wanted to talk about this item or if he wanted me to talk about this item. So I do just want to reiterate that if council chooses to move forward with removing 20% of the streets department funding over to police and fire, we would also ask that you tell us what you want us to cut from our ongoing operations and maintenance. The three, as Bruce mentioned, that seemed Reasonable to us would be the sidewalk rehabilitation the pavement overlays or the seal coat that we put over our chip seal that we all of all three of which are things that we've recently started doing because we've had such a outcry from the public to operations and maintenance items. So we would ask council to provide us direction on what you would like the department to cut as well if we need to move that $500,000.

And if I could just throw gas on the fire.

Hey, you're going out the door.

You might as well. Well, it's just that every year more mileage is added to our streets from the development, John Potter, I we district for we're taking over three and a half miles farm way. John Potter, we're not getting additional resources to do anything anything additional, so I think this is a really important item, I hope. John Potter, Some sort of solution can come to that it's not as drastic as losing this type of money. Let's keep going then. Electrical division.

Bruce, real quick before you jump into electrical. Yes. Just because I didn't know if you were a monon. This jumped out at me and it's one of, Ray Lynn knows it's one of my biggest pet peeves. Across the city. But public works tends to be the worst offender. Okay. You have a 258% increase in cell phone use. I don't know what that is.

It's trades.

It's in streets, but here's what I did a quick ad across public works. And it's just, you know, it's one of my biggest little things like this start to add up. We're budgeted for $98,000 in public works just in cell phones.

I would bet that's an area.

$48,000 increase in cell phones just this year. Like I said, it's one of these where nobody thinks about it, but you start looking at the individual numbers and they start racking up really fast. And I'm just using this one because it's a pet peeve, but it's just little things like this drive me nuts when I see a 258% increase. I'm sure they're probably needed, but it's just one of those that drives me nuts. Parks and Recs is another one that does that, that drives me nuts.

We can definitely take a look. I would bet we did find when I was going through the budget, I was like, oh, let me. We did find where there was a bunch of miscodings and we did fix them in Springbrook with some journal entries. But then I would bet they were they were pulled before we did that number. So that would be my 100 percent guess. But I will we'll dig into that because that is really high for self.

Like I said, I just it's. It's one of those I start adding up, and you're talking about $500,000 being pulled, and I'm looking at just in one line item. Now, granted, most of them are needed, but we're looking at $98,000 budgeted.

At most, I mean...

I did not put that in the budget. No, no, no, I know. That's why I'm more... I just throw you under the bus because you're leaving.

So this was the biggest increase. You can do a lot of that in the next few months, bro. Yeah, thank you. Okay, keep it going. We have... Five people in our electrical division, we take care of the street lights, traffic signals. We have 22 and we have more coming. And we now have the new schools on flashing beacons, quite a few new pedestrian signals we put in place.

And boost those losses.

Yes. We got a great crew they save so much money, but the work themselves rather than putting out the contractors say it's it's really great. So coming up this coming year, first of all, let me say that. The linden and aviation intersection which has been a horrible forever if you've noticed out there, we have the polls up, we have to span wires across. As soon as chip seal is done, we're going to move back in there and get that signal running. And I've made Bob Nelson promise me that he'll have it done before I leave. So we'll hope so. So again, this coming year, we have three more signals that we've ordered the materials this year. It takes sometimes six months to get holes and mast arms, all the steel components. So we're putting in a new traffic signal at Linden in Indiana, at Blaine and 24th, right across from the event center, and at a fire station and pedestrian signal at Ustick. And additional pedestrian signals as well, because the schools love them and they're they're a great thing to do. So we're going to keep doing that. We've also been analyzing all the intersections to say, where can we actually do a cheap thing and just put higher wattage bulbs to get better coverage? And so we're doing a lot of that. And we're trying to upgrade Right now, we have camera detection at each of the intersections. But it doesn't work well in fog. It doesn't work well if it's sunrise or sunset with a glare. So we're replacing our detection systems at each signal with radar. And it's foolproof. So that's electrical. I don't know if we have any questions on that. sanitation, just a minor thing, because, you know, it's a contract that's in place with public services until 2033. Shell did lion's share of work on that. And so we just monitor that contract this past year. Well, let me see. John Potter, So. John Potter, As you're aware, we just had an addendum to that contract we're now any resident can have 10 trips per year, where people don't come in bulk materials from. John Potter, From the residents it's really a great deal. John Potter, So coming up. John Potter, candy county i'm on the solid waste advisory committee and. They're actually considering out at the pickles be landfill, a gas reclamation project. Where they would try to get a private entity to come in, capture that gas, turn around, sell it back. To your mountain gas, it's going to. It's going to be a long project take a lot to get it 1 cool thing though. I just found out at the meeting this week was. Any county use their enterprise funds from pickles butte and purchase 53 acres for a future transfer facility, this is right out there at middleton exit highway. 44 right next to highway district for his office just to the west of that so they've got that site you're going to develop about 15 acres into a transfer station that will be full service in recycling bring your tires. All these different things. So it's pretty cool. It's going to take many years to get in place, but they've got the land now for it. So it's kind of exciting. And, yeah, that didn't take too long, did it? Questions? Yeah.

Bruce, any thought about a stoplight there at Indiana and Lane?

24th and Blaine?

Yeah, it turns into 24th.

Yeah, that's one of the signals that we're going to put in.

Because we've got one on Cleveland there, but when traffic goes just to one block there by the Albertsons, then you've got to wait for all the traffic to come down the other way.

Yeah, so we're actually repurposing a signal that was, there was a pedestrian signal on Ustick close to Santa Ana. that you may have seen. We're actually going to take that, repurpose it with some other new equipment, and we'll have that thing installed. Hopefully, well, these three will be done in 27, and we certainly want to get that one done before the summer events that occur out there. So it'll be good for the pedestrians, and it is a bit awkward getting out of there by Albertsons, absolutely. Everybody hungry? Back to Haley, sorry.

Can we go back to number one presentation? Starting over. Starting over. I'll run through the CIP quick. I did, in the last couple pages, sorry it printed the wrong orientation, but I included our descriptions of each CIP so you can have a little bit more information if you wanted to dig into some of our projects. And then I'll just touch on the main ones because I know people are anxious to be getting home. Okay. Excuse me. So first off, these are the major sewer projects that we're proposing this year. I won't go through all of these, but as you can see, we have some mainline projects, which is both our trunk lines and our main lines. Kitt Avenue is one that we are wrapping up design of this year. That's a pretty significant project. trunk line that is going to be upsized per our master plan so we have it designed this year and we're hoping to construct it next year um and then you can also see where um our partnering with the fire station our public works team tries to be good stewards with our other city hall departments and so the sewer department is the one who is extending the sewer line to fire station four on behalf of the fire department so that they can keep the 20 million allocated to the buildings specifically and then you've been mentioned the 800 000 that we have for the county jail so bruce mentioned at the end of his presentation the county has purchased some property for a transfer station they're also looking to put a county jail there i know that we have a upcoming um shop between yourself and the county commissioners to talk about this project in more depth and so we have 800 000 but in the budget for next year in case council chooses to proceed with a partnership with the county on extending sewer to their project we're doing some lift station upgrades These are just upgrades of existing pumps and other ongoing operations at the lift station. So we expect about $500,000 per lift station that we need to upgrade next year. And then Tony touched on a lot of our planned upgrades that we're doing, so I won't spend too much time on that. If you have any... Oh, I... Sorry, I left a question mark in my slide that I forgot to remove. But we're looking at the administrative building being able to proceed next year for the construction as well. So if you have any sewer project questions, otherwise I'll move along. I did want to just touch on one sewer project in a little bit more detail, just because it's such a large project. Hearing that we're doing a $25 million project can be kind of scary. So I just wanted to make sure that everybody understood how large this project is. So you can see in the middle of the screen is Franklin. That is our large regional lift station that serves almost everything east of I-84. We have two temporary lift stations online that are over on the right of your screen, Virginia Park and Woodgate. Those again are temporary lift stations and so our master plan shows that we need to take those offline and they will be gravity flowing into the Lincoln lift station. We have been working on design of this lift station for a couple of years now and we would like to proceed with construction next year. the design and construction has been broken into multiple packages and the reason that we did this was because the project includes the lift station itself some really really deep gravity sewer um we're talking 30 35 feet deep in some portions of gravity sewer main um as well as some pretty large pressure lines so we're the first phase originally we were just going to route Lincoln lift station into Franklin lift station. And then we realized Franklin is, we need to take some load off of Franklin. It's not over capacity. I know we were asking about the capacity of our systems. We're not over capacity at Franklin, but we're getting close to that threshold. So rather than just dumping Lincoln into Franklin, we decided let's do our full master plan of Lincoln and route Lincoln all the way, follow the orange line, and then follow the yellow line all the way to our discharge point. As part of that, we also are going to redo the pressure line for Franklin lift station and add some redundancy. Right now, we have just one line coming out of the Franklin lift station with no redundancy. So if there was ever, I hate to even say it, but if there was ever failure of that pressure line, there is no redundancy for that lift station. Like I said, it's taking just about everything So we want to get a redundant line in there for the Franklin lift station. For this project, because it is so large and it has so many different technical aspects of it, we decided to go out to bid a little differently than we have in the past. We're going to do an RFQ and pre-select what contractors are even allowed to bid on the project. So we're going to do that for the lift station, the pressure line, and the gravity line. So it's gonna be three separate packages that we go out to bid for. And again, we select contractors before they can even bid on the project. So hopefully that brings us a good quality set of contractors to proceed with this project. So it'll be 11 million upcoming fiscal years, 2027 is what we're requesting. And then an additional 11 million we'll be requesting for fiscal year 28 for the full construction of this project. And then I'll jump over to our water projects. We are wanting to do some work on our wells, as well as add a booster somewhere in our system and a reservoir. So whether it's the treatment of wells or just the design of wells or construction of new wells, these are all systems or projects that are going to add not just to our supply, but also just help stabilize our pressures so that we can just ensure that the The pressures throughout our systems are stable, and we have, again, the most important thing with water and wastewater is redundancy. We want to have that redundancy available so that if there was any kind of catastrophic event, we make sure that we have multiple wells available to stabilize the system. So we're doing treatment, which Tony talked about. We're working with a private developer for well 24, where they are taking the lead on the design and construction, and then we are reimbursing them. So that's what that one is. And then well 25 will be the next well that we want to work on. That's down along Karcher Road. So we'll get started on the design next year, and then the construction will fall in 28.

I want to see it change.

Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you, Terry. I got my wells mixed up. Well 25 is the well up north at Caldwell Housing Authority to serve our northern urban renewal area.

Armway and 44, correct.

And then we have a lot of conveyance projects as well. This isn't all of them, but just a couple of the big ones, which again, I think Tony has already touched on some of these. So These projects are to upsize a lot of our lines. In older parts of town, we have a lot of main lines that are only two inches, four inches. And so we're just constantly trying to go in there and upsize a lot of our water system throughout Old Town, as well as some of our larger master plan projects. And then we have a couple I-84 crossings. So long as ITD continues to do construction along I-84, We have continued to be partners with them to get all of our crossings in while they're under construction so that we don't disrupt the interstate more than once. So our hands are a little bit tied on that one, but we want to make sure that we get all of our crossings in while the project is under construction. And then similar to the wastewater department, we are needing to expand our administrative building. And so we're wanting to get started on the design of that. We have the property already procured. It's over off of Chicago, right across the street from Elevate Academy. I'm sure everyone that's driven around that area has seen that we put the sign up showing that this is where we are wanting to expand our water department. Are there any water project questions?

Do we have similar needs when we're crossing Highway 55 with the new construction, or is that?

Yep, so we already have that agreement taken care of, and we already have the funds allocated for ITD. Yeah, so we have some locations are just sleeves. Some locations are sleeves and pipes. Other locations we have are running parallel lines. So we worked closely with ITD and our master planning documents to make sure that we have all of our water and our sewer infrastructure included as part of their construction. And highway 2026 was delayed in the expansion from Middleton to star, but we also include our water and our sewer and their design on that expansion as well. And then lots going on with our streets department. Bruce touched on our overlays, but we also want to look at widening tenths. I think anyone that's driven down tenths during rush hour knows how important it would be to get that center turn lane in along that whole stretch, and so I would really like to start looking at widening 10th Street from Logan to Eustick. So I'd like to be able to get that design started. That is going to include some property procurement, some canal relocation. So it could be a larger project than what we're initially thinking. But until we start diving into the design, I don't have any hard numbers to project procurement.

With that, I have for years thought that 10th Avenue should be one way. One way? All the way from the overpass all the way to Ustick. And then Kimball should be one way coming back the other. And so as long as we're looking at widening that, can we also look at maybe that being a possibility?

Yeah, we can talk to, I would want to talk to our consultant who did our Caldwell area transportation system plan and get them to look at those models to honestly haven't even considered that but we can certainly run it through our models and yeah okay again couple overlays we're continuing to work with the highway district on Plymouth Street bridge that bridge I'm sure everyone's very familiar with is going to be turned into a pedestrian bridge and we are going to construct a new bridge that will have direct connection to the interstate overpass location. So it's going to be pushed north a little bit more. That bridge that's existing will remain. It will remain as a pedestrian bridge. I get that question a lot. We're not going to demo that bridge. So I'm only projecting that we're going to need about $30,000 for that project because we're still just kind of working through some environmental and design items before we start pursuing the funds. We're going to pursue a lot of federal grants and federal funding to do the construction. So I'm only projecting that we need a small amount of change for that one.

On that project, the thing I'm struggling with is the hundreds of millions of dollars it will cost to put that bridge up.

Yep. Is that correct? Yeah. So right now, we don't have any plans to repair the road getting to the bridge. And that's just because it's a matter of not knowing the timing of that funding. So once we start, once we get the design fully approved, we go through all of the environmental hoops that we need so that we can seek that federal funding. Once we have a timing of when we can actually go to construct is when I'll come back to you and ask for some repair on the road. Leading up to the bridge, but I don't want to put the cart before the horse I want to make sure that we understand the funding timing of that first And then we just have a lot of intersection projects and a lot of our intersections We have been designing this year so The Montana and the Lake roundabouts on Homedale, we are in the middle of design right now. Normally we like to do for intersection projects, we like to do one year of design, one year of right-of-way acquisition, and then one year of construction. But for Homedale and Montana, we want to do construction and the right-of-way acquisition in one year. I want to tighten that schedule up a little bit just because we have had so much feedback from Council from the previous administration and from the just the general public because of the proximity of this intersection to the Schools we wanted to make sure that this one can move forward with construction this year So we are tightening the time frame up on that one a little bit and then just doing right of way acquisition of Holmdale Thank you This year as well And then the Middleton Lincoln roundabout, we're partnering with the highway district and with the city of Middleton all three of our jurisdictions that Roundabout qualifies for using impact fees on. So we're partnering with them. This year, Middleton and the Highway District fully funded the design, and we managed the design consultant. So as part of our agreement, next year, we would fund the right-of-way acquisition, and then the following year, all three jurisdictions would then split the cost for construction. So we're budgeting $200,000, but I think it'll actually be a little bit less just because we have so much development in that area. The right-of-way will be dedicated to us rather than us needing to procure it. Ustick interchange, we're still working closely on a Ustick interchange justification report, trying to get another interchange for the city of Caldwell a little bit further east. We're pushing for it to be close to Ustick, but we were preliminarily approved by Federal Highways to examine locations between Ustick and Middleton Road. So we're in the justification report. It's quite a process to get a new interchange approved by Federal Highways. but we're getting started on that, and so that report is going to just be continuing over into next year so that, again, we can try and get another interchange location here in Caldwell.

Just FYI, they are connecting to Euston or connecting to Middleton more towards the Nampa side. We'll know soon the direction.

Yeah, so the justification report will provide seven, give or take, scenarios of where that interchange should be located and how it can connect into infrastructure. So we will provide our preferred route, but really the consultant is going to work closely with us to provide the federal highways the option that works best for the entire system. And then we're in the, we have started design of the intersection for Linden and Cleveland, and we will need to just be wrapping up the design of that one next year. So we just need a little bit more to finalize the design. Just that one's just a larger intersection. So our design is taking a little bit longer than typical.

Bailey, is that one going to need any land acquisition?

Yes.

That also includes widening Linden all the way up north of the railroad tracks.

Yes, thank you, Bruce. So yeah, we'll be very similar to the Houston-Cleveland intersection where we do the intersection improvements, and then we also do the widening over the railroad tracks. And then Bruce mentioned the signals that we're pursuing. Again, we try and work in good partnership with the other city departments, and so we are completing a signal for Fatter Station 2 as part of our proposed budget. And Bruce talked a bit. I was going to kind of go into our funding a little bit, but I know it's late. And so I won't drag on this for too long. But being enterprise funds, we are funded with our usage fees, our connection fees, impact fees. Engineering receives plan reviews and internal allocations. As Tony mentioned, we don't have any bonds, any debt with our systems. And I think that you as council members should be very proud of that. And not very many jurisdictions Besides that we are can make that statement So again, we're losing We're losing some funds both at the state level and at the local level this year for a total about total of 1.6 million and Our population is continuing to grow We all we all see that all the departments see that but the streets department specifically is a department that mainly focuses in construction and And on top of having growing infrastructure needs, the cost to construct, depending on which source you look at and depending on what type of construction you look at, anywhere from 30 to 45, 50% increase in inflation of just constructing. So we're seeing a huge increase in the demands on our streets department. And with that, I will stand for any final closeout questions, and I'll leave Ray Lynn's Great.

Thank you. Real quick, from council, we have police and fire next week. So would you like us 12 position requests to fund our field fire station four once it's attracted for next year? So you want us to reduce that to six?

Let's hear from them first, because the Question of the fire district will depend on that. Yes.

So let's hear from them before we make that decision.

Just one quick statement.

a wonderful job preparing. We spent a lot of hours meeting different rooms. And we thank council for an extra long day today. Hopefully next week won't be that long.

I'd like to thank the public works guys that said nothing the entire time and just sat. Thank you for sticking around.

And we'll thank you. We are adjourned.

Thank you.