Budget Committee - Regular Meeting

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Here's my, here's your arm. And that was half of it. That was half of it.

Five bucks an hour. That was half of it. It is. It really does pay. Oh, okay. I think the wire insurance is really good.

31. I didn't even have to pay.

I didn't have to pay.

You're just starting, too. I know.

You've got so many documents. I know. That's pretty impressive. My son. Brandon, you ready?

Yeah, right.

Brandon, Cindy. No, I don't. You've got to take kids to death. She's actually an open house. She has no kids.

All right, let's go ahead and call the budget committee meeting of Thursday August 27th to order we have roll call

Mayor Brendan Pratt. Here. Council Member Dale Stuber. Here. Bruce Thielen. Yep. Matthew Bieren. Here. Susie Zilmer. Here. Susan Rowe.

Here.

Finance Committee Member Mark Willer.

Here.

City Administrator Mike Golot. Assistant City Administrator Roy Atkinson. Tina Nelson, Finance Director. Scott Quick, Director of Public Works. Christian Hubert, City Engineer. Kelly Bakken, Police Chief. Mark Renderman, Fire Chief. Taylor Greenwell, Planning Director. Julian Emerson grant and housing program manager Chad Dirkup parks and rec director Shawn elders from elders associates and Cindy Bauer city clerk. We have a quorum.

All right. We have the budget process overview Up to this point

It's very much appreciated, and I realize all the time that effort we've put into this so far. I think every year we get a little better with our CIP, our capital improvement plan, and planning for the future. Tonight, what we're going to go over is just a budget process overview and the budget schedule and kind of talk why we schedule things in the order that we do. And then I'll look at an overall financial position for the city where we're at. and some policy key factors to look over, sorry, year to year. And then we'll look at the 2027 to 2028 capital budget committee recommendations. And then Sean will wrap it up with discussion on current and future borrowing and how this allows for future planning.

So you get me first.

These are the schedule for this year's budget meetings. It's going to be a little later that it's adopted this year, December 3rd, because the first dollar credit and the lottery credit don't come out until November 21st. And as you can see, that 11-19 meeting is prior to that. But we can have an extra meeting in between there on the 19th if there's questions that need to get wrapped up. At this time, there's not one scheduled on 11-19. but we can finalize it on December 3rd. Today, we're doing the overview. The next budget meeting is gonna be the enterprise funds, all the water, sewer, and stormwater budgets. And then in October, we'll look at the library budget, the yard, and the general fund budget and mill rate guidance. At that point, we'll kind of look for some guidance on what we can do to finish off that general fund budget and what you're expecting. On the 5th of November, we'll have general fund the second draft, and then we'll have to put it in the paper. so that we can get it in at least 15 days prior to it being adopted, and we'll talk about the TIF number four and the affordable housing fund. Just also so you know, as every year, on that final budget meeting, I will have a sample tax bill for you, and you will see exactly what the property taxes are gonna be before you vote on the budget. So we budget for many different funds. And this slide kind of shows what the different how the funds work with The red I have is tax levy funds. So the general fund, the library, the capital projects, and the debt service all come from tax dollar levy funds. The enterprise funds are different types of funds. They're like a business. They're utilities. And they come from the fees that we collect on our utility bills. tax increment district. We only have one left now. We have number four that's open, which its expenditure period has passed. We're just continuing to pay for the water, the wells that we have out there, and then our special revenue funds. The special revenue fund that we have right now is that affordable housing fund that we opened up when we closed the tax increment districts. But All of them come from different sources. So if you're looking at the tax dollars, that's the general fund, the library, the capital projects. The other budgets are the enterprise funds. But some projects that we have in capital are paid for with all of these, well, the water and the sewer and the stormwater and the general fund. So what are the top strategic planning priorities? Why we're talking about this now is this is where it all starts. When we sit down as a group and we wrote down what is the most important thing to the city? And we look at these when we develop our budgets. So how is the implementation of this strategic priorities progressing and has anything changed that would impact our priorities? Do you want to go over these, Mike, or do you want me to just say them?

No. OK. Go ahead.

So the strategic goal, what we came out of last year's meeting was community growth and development. Strategic goal two was financial strength. Strategic goal three was infrastructure and facilities. Strategic goal four was workforce benefits, compensation, and retention. And strategic goal number five was optimized technology for efficiency gains. And what does today's decision do to future budgets? As I'm going through the presentation, I'll point out some of those priorities that we're looking at it. What happens with the strategic planning priorities afterwards, after the budget is adopted, is it becomes a work plan for us staff. We identify who's going to do what in that space, and Roy will be going over at council meeting tonight where we're at in those priorities. Each year we have a work plan. But it has to get in the budget before it can become part of that. part of one of the goals that the workforce benefits compensation and retention what we've been doing for several years is to retain our employees we've had a wage and compensation study we're probably due for one again next year but what we've been doing is updating the the midterm rate by what the CPI is and we look at the CPI from August The previous year through the end of July and that that is like this year. It's 3.4% So when we hire somebody or our wages, that's the wage scale that they go on for that position This isn't something that you would have to do but it is a goal And I think it's been very good at keeping in employees and hiring additional employees that are very qualified employees Also, what I want to talk about briefly is the equalized value versus the assessed value. And this can be very confusing, but it's two different values and they have two different purposes. And when we start out in budgeting, we're looking at our equalized value because this is the number that we have right now. An assessed value is set by the local assessor. It's used to determine each property owner's share of the tax levy. It's finalized after the Board of Review, and then the state adds manufacturing values, and then we receive a final statement of assessment. But that doesn't come until October or November. So when we're budgeting right now, what we have is the equalized value. And the equalized value is determined annually by the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. It adjusts for difference in local assessment levels so communities can be compared fairly. Preliminary and final values are released in August. So that August 15th date is very important to us because then we know what our final equalized value for our city is, how much we've grown. That's a fair market value. So a simple way to remember it is the assessed value divides the local bill. The equalized value puts every municipality on the same measuring stick. Does that make sense? One of our goals is community growth and development. I just wanted to show you the growth that the city has had since 2015. We started out at $535.8 million. As of 2026, we are $1.43 billion. We've grown 167.68% since 2015, which... which is quite a bit. Our growth has slowed down a little bit this last year. We're about 3% compared to previous years, but we're still growing. I want to also talk about what goes into creating the assessment role, which is part of calculating the tax role, and why we complete market updates on a routine basis. Because we said we have that assessed value and we have that equalized value, we would like them to be about the same because And property taxes should be distributed equally. So DOR establishes the city's equalized value, and they compress assessed values to equalized value to measure the city's overall assessment level. Property classes do not always appreciate at the same rate. That's when we have different properties, older houses maybe increase value more than the newer ones. or land values increase more, where you're gonna have different properties are gonna be assessed different. That's why it's important to put that true number on them, and we're doing it every other year, so we're taxing fairly. We have the correct number that we should be using for calculating their taxes. Over time, inequities can develop both within and between property classes. So this is just a history of our equalized mill rate and our assessed mill rate. The equalized mill rate is the levy divided by the equalized value. The assessed mill rate is the tax levy divided by the assessed value. When we are, we just go through a reevaluation, we're at about 100%. And then you'll see that the equalized and the assessment rate should be pretty much the same. 2014, 627, 628. You look back in 2019, 635, 626. And then, so this year, we went through a market update. We should be... Around 101% is what I'm guessing at this point. So the equalized and the SAS mill rate should turn out to be about the same. Another number that we're looking at right now and the DOR comes out with in August is our net new construction. Levy limits for 2026, this determines how much the general fund may levy increase under levy limits, which makes it very difficult for a growing city to abide by this. But ours this year was 1.57%, which is lower than it has been. But when we're developing the budget, we know that that's what our levy limit is, and so we develop it based on making sure that we can meet that levy limit. And this is for the general fund. Of course, we can raise it by debt service payments. There is that adjustment.

So does everyone understand that? Do you have the percentages from previous years of growth? Can you go back to that? I just want to put a little finer point on that.

I don't have it handy.

No, go ahead. Back one more.

Oh, you mean the aggregate ratio?

You don't have the growth rates.

No. I can give you a bill.

I thought we looked at that today. Anyway, very small from this year compared to previous years, which means that budget's going to be a lot tighter on the operations side this year. And staff was given direction. understanding that basically we have to toe the line as best we can here. And we won't really know until we get through a lot of the budget and get the numbers. But I just want you to know that that's the direction that everyone's been given on this. Who sets the limits, levy limits?

The state. Great. And how long have they been set in levy limits? 2005. 2005.

I think that's worth noting, too. Yeah, it is worth noting, except what I always say about that is I don't think it's about the levy limits, per se, because our taxes in Wisconsin are not low. It's about the formula of how the state allows us to collect revenue. They need to overhaul the system. It's not that we need to assess people more property taxes. That's not the answer.

They need to give us more revenue.

That's why I bring that up.

Yeah, yeah. Yep.

And what are the major revenues that we received? Taxes is about 51%, and the other is intergovernmental revenues, which the revenues that we get from the state, the shared revenue, the transportation aids. We also get special assessments, licenses and permits, fines for forfeitures and penalties, which is very low, public charges for services, that's like our park fees, and then miscellaneous revenues would be like... interest income. And then like to show what this is our general government and our operating expense and you can see some of these items we really don't have a lot of control over our expenses. Our biggest expense is the police department and they don't really bring a lot of revenue in to the city to off balance what we have to pay out in there. And EMS 17.14%. So I just kind of want to go over where we're at in our financial position. And financial strength was one of our goals in our strategic planning. We always look at the fund balance accounts of the land sales funds. That's one of the fund balance accounts that we have. Those accounts were broken to three different categories. 50% of all of our land sales, and this is primarily from River Prairie land sales, has got us to where we are today. But for a tax stabilization, that's an unassigned fund balance. And what that means is we can use it for anything that we want. It doesn't say in our financial statement that you have to use it for this. But its purpose was to... Balance the budget especially through the closure of tax increment district number three we used to balance our budget about 400,000 from that fund to balance the budget we have we didn't last year and We we shouldn't this year 30% of that has gone into a land acquisition, which is a committed it can be changed by a resolution or by the the City Council, but it's for purchasing land which we've used to purchase different lands throughout the years. 20% is redevelopment, and that's also committed, which we've used over the years. But we look at, our policy has been, if we look at that tax stabilization amount, that $4,908,000, We want to keep 30% of that, 30% of what our general fund revenues and expenses are in reserve so that if something happened, we know that we would be okay. So what that amounts to is 2.6 million. So if you take the 4.9 million less what we need to have just in case something would happen, we still have an additional $2.2 million in that account. We have some other fund balance accounts, and we're looking currently on policy on how much should we have for these fund balances for our utilities and our general fund. We've been working with Ehlers. Later tonight at the council meeting, you'll hear Christine talk about the stormwater utility and her recommendations because of our large fund balance, how we should handle that. But our general fund went from last year at 812 and now we have 1.6 million. There's no these are they have no regulations on these other than they're in that fund They're they're not restricted in any way This general fund is mainly from the TID 3 closure. That's where that money was put it's put into an account and so that we can see that it's there you can at any time assign certain funds to for a certain purpose if you would like but as of right now this is what they are they're unassigned our water utility has 1.5 million our sewer has 2.8 but we do know we have an ongoing thing with Eau Claire too so That's in our cash balances, but this is in our savings fund balance. And our stormwater is $1.4 million.

Can I ask quickly about that last slide? So that general fund, the TIF 3 closure, that $1.6 million, Is that what we're going to expect every year, approximately? No, that's just one time settlement. That's just the one time settlement, okay. And how much, having closed the TID, how much additional tax revenue does that bring us to the general fund on an annual basis? It's about 600,000.

But we were budgeting $400,000 to go in the hole. Or that we were going to, you know, and we're not doing that anymore. So as of last year, we didn't have a lot to work with. We also have some other fund balances. These are considered committed and assigned fund balances. They will be in our financial statement. There's that land acquisition and redevelopment that we talked about. We're also required by DNR to have a sewer equipment. Quick question.

I have another quick question. What is redevelopment? What falls under redevelopment funds?

Like we use that money to buy the property where the yard is right now, for example. We're going to redevelop it into something else. Redevelop the property. As opposed to raw land. Sorry?

Okay, so land acquisition was like the 80 acres out on the east part of town, but we used the redevelopment money to purchase the other land. Is it all about land, or could it be used for other parts of redevelopment?

We'd have to go back and look at the exact language in the resolution, but note that the resolution is changeable by one vote of the council. I was just trying to understand what that fund was for.

And I'll... Look that up, and I'll send that out to you guys so you can see. I think it was a very wise decision on the council. I mean, otherwise we wouldn't have that fund balance that we have right now.

Where would the money come from if we were to relocate City Hall down the block?

Well, it would be rather elegant if it came from the TID settlement because it's around that amount, or it could come from land acquisition or redevelopment. Or fund reserves. I've never heard anybody describe it as elegant before.

It's nice. Or part of any of those funds, right? Yeah, or part of.

Oh, and also, because the utilities are going to be using it, it'll come apart from the enterprise funds as well. Okay, just a question. Yeah, no, good point.

So we have a savings account that the DNR requires for our sewer, and we report it in our CMAR report annually. that our equipment replacement fund, that's 13% of the revenues this year. It was like 327,000 we needed. We had 403 in there, so we're okay. Debt service can only be used for debt service. Our affordable housing fund can only be used for affordable housing. And then we keep track of the music series at the end of the year, how much revenues we took in, how many expenses we paid out. and then we add that to the fund balance and it goes on our financial statement. Also there we have a parks fees and that's fees that come from developers for fees that they pay instead of building parks they would pay and that has to be used specifically for park projects. And then we have an old fund, the CDBG Loans Fund. That's got $176,000. And then our library savings, which has to be used for library savings, which is $525,000. I want to talk the difference between a capital improvement plan and the 27-28 capital projects budget. We refer to it as the CIP. The CIP, you know, and I say the strategic goal number three is infrastructure and facilities, and we've been working on this quite a bit, wanting to get... our long-term capital improvement plan in a good position. I know Mike before he leaves, before I leave, I would like to have the future planned out. So especially these facilities, we know We can afford and how we're going to get them or what it's going to take to fund them. Is it going to take a grant? Just so it's planned out and it's on paper. And it goes a long way when you do your rating for your credit if you have a good capital improvement plan. You're looking into the future and they know that you're being responsible. That's kind of a working document at all times because the department heads are constantly looking at, okay, this piece of equipment, it needs to be replaced here. Oh, now that's going to go up. We're going to make sure that it gets, you know, that CIP gets updated to that value or, oh, I forgot to have that in there. Hopefully, eventually, we have everything in there. I know as it looks right now, there's less, but I'm sure projects are going to come up as those years go on. where this year we changed it to a two-year capital budget, which makes it, because we're borrowing every other year, it makes it more efficient for us to finish these bigger projects and look at it on a two-year basis. But when we're looking at these projects, we're also looking at strategic O5 optimizing technology for efficiency gains when we're purchasing equipment. We had two capital budget committee meetings thus far. We had Mark Willer was sitting on it, Matt was sitting on it, and Tim Lima was sitting on it. We've had some long discussions and from the first meeting we had questions on a couple of really big projects. One was the fire trucks and we asked Mark to come back with a presentation and the other was a couple of the parks projects and we asked Chad to come back with a presentation. Overall, I can say we're not completely, we don't know exactly what's going to happen with the fire trucks at this time yet because there's a lot of variables. I did have Allers look at because they gave us, we could get a discount if we pay for it up front. And that would be the best way to go. But if we're going to buy a different fire truck, we don't want to give them money up front because are we going to be able to get the money back? So I know Mark is looking at some different options for that, but I think what I got out of the committee is that they want to give the authority for him to go ahead. We know we need these trucks. Let's get the best truck for the least amount of money. Do you have anything to add, any of the committee members on that, or Mike?

Yeah, I don't know if that was clear, but it's a long... LEAD TIME ITEM. THERE'S TWO OF THEM THAT WE HAVE IN THERE THAT TOTAL ABOUT $3 MILLION. 1.8 FOR A LADDER TRUCK, 1.2 FOR A PUMPER. AND WE HAVE RESERVES. SO WHAT THE COMMITTEE WAS SUGGESTING IS THAT COUNCIL AUTHORIZE MARK AND FINANCE TO LOOK FOR DIFFERENT OPPORTUNITIES. BECAUSE WHAT WE LEARNED ON A CALL IN OUR COMMITTEE WAS THAT FROM TIME TO TIME THERE ARE LIKE DEMO UNITS THAT COME AVAILABLE. or there might be a good used piece of equipment that comes available. The one thing, if we buy these both kind of at the same time, then we get 25 years out and we have to buy them again at the same time. So perhaps if we could find a good used one or stagger them a little bit differently, then it would be more reasonable to time the future purchase of those in the future. So rather than just say we're going to do the $1.8 million next year and just go full steam ahead and order that, this would give us some flexibility. And that's what the committee recommended.

Well, and if we were to order the trucks that we had the bid on, we would have to, if we paid up front, we would have to pay this year yet for that. So we would have to do a budget amendment in 2026 yet to purchase these trucks. And I know it's, those trucks, it was 30 and 39 months from the time you place the order until you actually get the truck in hand. So that's a long time.

So there may be some better options than that that would get us the equipment sooner and be more reasonable to finance. So we're looking at our options.

But know that I've given these numbers to Sean to look at for the overall capital improvement plan and our budgeting for our debt service so that he knows $3 million is what we're looking at for two fire trucks. Hopefully it's a lot less, but I would rather be, you know, have a larger number than have a lower number to come in larger.

I have a public works question. Do we have a master plan for our sanitary and a master plan for our water? For CIP? Yeah. Well, no. Have we had anybody do a master plan that looks out 10 years on our list stations and our wells and age of the pumps and the condition of the facility?

We've had water system study done a couple years ago, so that identified that. How far out does that project? Yeah, I don't have it in front of me.

It looked at our immediate need. We were behind.

Those are probably the other two biggest dollar items that we have, and And the sanitary is also one of those things. Lift stations get old and they have problems.

Yeah, we're outside of one lift station. We're in really good shape. They're all really new, and the components are interchangeable. And we do replace those on a return basis. We do, yep.

And you've got the well rehab budget?

Yep, so yeah, well rehabs get done, and our future planning for wells are based on projected growth, so the additional wells and

So we're just looking out a couple years at this point, and that's great. I mean, would it be possible to look out further, five years?

And that's what we are. In our CIP, our capital improvement plan, that goes out ten years.

Right, right. Okay, okay. But the facility study is... We're only adopting a budget for two years. Gotcha. We're kind of, Bruce, we're still kind of trying to get ahead of the curve after falling behind. We've dug two new wells in the last couple years. And we're planning another one this year.

That's why I asked. Those are big-ticket items that are hard to just throw in one year.

Yeah.

Yeah. And as far as, like, the next big expenditure for, like, on the horizon would possibly be another water tower. But, again, that water system study said we needed more GPMs, not more storage. So, yeah. But that's prepped and ready to go, too. We're purchasing the property for that. But as soon as we see that identified need, we'll put it out there. Even if it's 10 years out, we can throw that on the CIP. And if you look forward with most of our equipment, if it's a routine maintenance item, I do that. That goes out to 2036, I think. I have it out there. And the big pieces of equipment are on a replacement schedule as well, and those are in there.

Are you going to be around in 2036? I do. Not here.

I wanted to speak briefly about the Capital Budget Committee in general. I was really impressed with how well the group worked together and went through concerns and comments and fact-finding. I thought it worked exactly as intended. And honestly, the last one was one of the funniest committee meetings I've ever attended. I've got to put it out there. It was fun. We had a blast.

We were laughing. Tim was on it. Tim was on it. That was a problem.

Yeah, and it was really funny. It was good. I just wanted to comment on that. It worked very, very well. It got us to where we are right now, and it's worth mentioning.

Definitely feel that, yeah, at the end of that meeting was definitely like we were all on the same page and had a good understanding of what we were all looking at here.

Yep. You were sent the PDF and the link. The link is going to always be the most up-to-date. I did print some of the PDFs, though, because I know some of you do like to look at paper. That budget book actually goes into every project detail. If you care to read, want to read it. If you have any questions on any of the projects, please reach out to us. Or if you have questions on going into the ClearGov link and how it works, please come and sit down with me or one of our staff members. We'd be happy to go over that with you. But overall the recommendation was to bring everything forward to you the Budget Committee based on what we had in 2027 2028 proposed capital budgets and again the fire trucks. There's 1.8 million dollars in there. That's kind of That's just a placeholder at this point he had in 2029 the next new fire truck so that doesn't show up in this one and And working with Sean, the other thing is the new well. We're looking at taking $600,000 from the water fund balance and borrowing $1 million for that project. So part of our CIP, too, is Christian and Scott working together and looking at all of our roads and bringing together the utilities, the general fund, budgets with the roads and the curb and gutter and the sidewalks and trying to get them in a budget that we can afford. It's not always easy. But this is our proposed 2027 to 2031 reconstruction CIP project. So all those projects are in that long-term CIP that we've given to Sean from Miller's.

This is really aggressive based on if we can get that much done in a year. I wanted to give Tina the most that we could bite off, but that 2030 Spooner job is a big project. It does have grant funding, but that will push the limits of our million dollars that we allocate to street reconstruction for a given year. Similarly, the Clubview Lane that I've got in 2029 would be a really big project for one year. So this could change and probably will change from the outlook here. The 2027 and 2028 are in this budget. So the other three could move around depending on when the grant funds are available or budgets for those given years.

Would that 2030 potentially be part of redevelopment?

2030, the Spooner?

Yeah.

Well, that would be the, we've got the big grant, the federal grant for that one.

So I don't know. You were just talking about, like, pushing the million, like,

Yeah, so we've had different discussions. Depending on what comes up in the budget next cycle for 2029, 2030, we might have to skip Clubview and just do Spooner over a two-year period because of how expensive and how many streets we're getting done. Sure. But we'll have to go through that process in two years.

see how it shakes out yeah we're seeing like more of our paper replacement is kind of dropping off a little bit now because we can't just peel up the street without redoing the utilities in a lot of cases and sort of picked all the low-hanging fruit off there so but that is helpful because now that can shift more money into reconstructing so Yeah, this would exceed our million dollar a year or $2 million over two years budget cycle. It would exceed it a little bit, but we're going to try to get clever and figure out how to get these done because they're... And we have to based on the galvanized service replacement requirements over the next 10 years.

And how the million a year for streets several years ago must have been, Dave was still here, and we looked at all the streets and what it would take. And at that time, the council said, we're going to borrow more. We're going to put at least a million dollars in streets a year. And between pavement replacement and reconstruction, we have been doing. But now we're getting so it's hard to get those streets in that million dollars.

I know Kristen's probably still working on this, but it would be really nice to have that map someday color-coded to what all of our streets, what condition they're in.

Yep, I can send that to you.

Well, I don't want it. Give it to everybody. Give it to everybody. But it would be really awesome.

Piece of reading, is that what it's called?

And show it each year, you know, to see the progress that we've made. And I would say Altoona's end. A thousand percent better shape than the city of Eau Claire.

Oh my God. I know I gave a really, or we gave a really brief department update on it, but if you like, we could give a more. No, it's just, I like it.

I don't know what the rest of it is. I think that is a good point. One of those things that, you know, to give some reflection back to folks to say this is what we've been investing in. You know, every year we have little projects, but here's what it's been adding up to over time. And as long as we're on it.

I especially appreciate it because the majority of it is in my ward. I really appreciate it because I get a lot of them.

Interest from people of what's wrong with the road so I can tell them the futures coming it kind of goes back to I've commented before about performance measures For each department, you know what's happening each year What do you do and how much more have you taken on and it gives you an ability to justify an extra employee or? You know a damn fire truck or whatever Tina can you go back to the last slide?

I walk my neighborhood pretty much every morning. And the thought of replacing a section of Valmont before you replace some of these sections, basically they have no asphalt on them. They really don't. There are some short sections in between to the north of Valmont where there's There's just some of it's just dirt on the sides. And we've talked about it before, but the thought of replacing Valmont, that to me is probably the best street up there. And before we tackle some of these short streets off to the north of that, where there's overlay over top of overlay and patches of dirt. So I don't know how we address that. Within the next five years, they'll basically be gravel or just another overlay on top of another overlay. So I think that's more of a priority up there than taking a section of Belmont that's probably, like I said, to me is the best road other than the new ones that just got put in.

Yeah, and a lot of how I I tried to group the projects up in the addition based on similar size bites. And then I looked at the inventory of our galvanized services and was trying to maximize the number of galvanized services to replace as part of a reconstruction. But yeah, the work up there is a few more years of hitting it hard. It certainly can be tailored more to the pavement condition, but because we have to get it all done anyway within that 10-year period.

That stretch of Belmont could very easily become Princeton, or is that the right street? That cross street up there that goes in front of UPS. That could very easily be that many blocks. There's a lot to choose from up there for older stuff. We were really trying to get some grant money up there just to help offset the special assessment.

And we had grant money before that did a lot of basically a fourth of that, but since that other than this last street, there hasn't been anything touched on that.

Yeah, we haven't been able to get any traction on grants up there.

But if we don't have grant money, do we just let it sit and deteriorate?

No, we did get that drag box paper, so we are going to try to do some more a little bit better job of, instead of just filling potholes, maybe try to do a little better job up there. Let's look for that here pretty soon.

But to Brenna's point, just so does Velmont have galvanized services in it?

I think they'd mainly be on the property owner's side, so we've done some.

But still?

Yes, on their side, but it doesn't necessitate a reconstruct to do that. We can do that with the galvanized service replacement program.

We'll take a look at that. I think you should look at between Spooner Avenue and the Country Club in that area, Altoona Avenue, Sherwin, and Country Club. That is horrible. You can't even walk on that. You know, you've been up there. This is really, really, really bad. Even down on the addition is almost better than up there.

There's some sections of those roads that's not just a pothole. It's from here to the length of this overlaid, and then sides of it are deteriorating. It's pretty bad.

Big chunks of stuff, yeah.

Again, it's tempting to... To put a band-aid on it with like a paper replacement style, but it's just there's a lot of four-inch water main up there the utilities You just we got it.

Yeah, I know that yeah, that's better just to rip it all up and do it Yep, I said it's wrong more asphalt on top of asphalt We get a lot more But to me, it shouldn't be ignored as far as if we don't have to do all that. It's nice to do some of those side streets that really don't have any streets left on them.

We'll take a closer look.

And this slide is just showing the departments where the budget is coming from. Public Works is one of the biggest. Fire and EMS that's that fire truck that 1.8 million that we're not sure parks is 1.1 million There's two major projects in there and then our lease expenses for our vehicles And the fire truck we could could change we may need to grow yet this year if that if that comes up I Have like I said I gave you a The PDF, and then I printed off some copies. Also, I printed off a list of all the projects that are in there. If there's any questions on any that you see, we have department heads here, or else you can reach out to us.

Not to go too far in the weeds, but the forestry was $20,000 over two years. Is there grants or programs or anything like that to try and stretch that?

There is an urban forestry grant. We got it a couple years ago for the inventory. Oh, yeah. And it was a plan. And that's something that we are going to be looking at for this next cycle. We were just talking about that. Yep.

What's the money for the yard? What's the $40,000 for? What is that?

So it could be, well, do you want to talk about it?

I know a big one is the roofs, so we're going to get one of the roofs done this year on the tap room. That's the one that's currently leaking. But all the other three restaurants are also going to have that issue. I don't know how they could... Not have it. Yeah, we have to replace those roofs, just knowing the installation method that was used.

It just didn't work or...

It didn't work. It was bad. That's fair. I'm happy to bring people up on the roof if they want to look at it. Or maybe not. Yeah. So, yeah, that's about the last quote I got was about $6,000 per unit to put a good rubber liner roof on that with a pitch on it.

And we did this this year, too. We didn't know going into... last year's budget, what we're going to use money that we budget for the yard this year. What we knew is that we would have more information over the winter, seeing how they fared, to determine where good investment might be. We talked about last budget cycle maybe putting walls on the pavilion and heat in there in the winter. But what we kind of learned last winter is people don't want to go down there and sit around, right? I mean, even with the heated upper units, they're more in the winter. It's just pickup. So we didn't do that. We switched to more. trying to get more business in the summer. So part of that money is just that we know that we have to do everything we can for that not to fail. So one thing we're thinking about, again, is an ice reef down there. So that might be an idea. And the problem, of course, with ice is that it's contingent on cold weather. But we do have a good space here with the volleyball court to level that off real easily.

You guys could go out on your lunch period and flood it.

Yeah. Yeah.

I was thinking pickup game.

Anyway, so I'm concerned about the art. I'm concerned about the sustainability of it. And I want to just make sure that we're putting that asset in the best position to succeed. So we'll have better ideas as we go forward, but we know there is some work that definitely needs to get done as well.

I do appreciate the library, how much they're using that for different activities. They're getting people over there.

Were there any other projects that anybody had questions on?

And by the way, that was on me. There should have been a better description of that in there. I get on these guys, but that was on me. Yeah.

So now I'm going to hand it over to Sean. And now that we've provided him all this information, he's going to tell you how it works out for us.

Thank you, Tina. Good to see everyone again. And if questions come up, as always, feel free to interrupt as I move through the slides that I've worked on with Tina. So what we've done with the information that Tina just reviewed with you and you asked questions about and everyone was plugging in on is we've preliminarily, this can certainly change, we've taken... that capital improvement plan, the projects, the current budget, the current timing of those projects. And we put it into what I would call an implementation or a finance plan to allow for there to be a cash flow to make all those projects come to reality. And then as an output for that, for the council, What will that financial impact be of the capital improvement plan, of the CIP, on the city's debt levy, on your borrowing capacity? I think as many of the council members, if not all, know, you can use general obligation debt to finance pretty much any city project. But the state does put a limit on it, and it's 5% of the equalized value of Altoona, the city of Altoona. This, I can tell you, and Michael will remember this too, a number of years back, that was something that we really had to pay a lot of attention to. Because of the significant growth that the city's experienced that Tina talked about earlier, it's not nearly the concern that it used to be. The debt levy is only a part of your levy, so we also wanted to touch on the overall levy with some of these CIP factors. And then that brings me to the material that's on the right. When you start talking about the overall budget, you get into questions about expenditure restraint and what's going to be qualified of the city to make sure that that funding, which is available to the city on a year-to-year basis, Are you able to manage the requirements to get that funding to make it part of the revenue sources of your budget? Second bullet point, coming out of the closing of tax increment district number three, the city's equalized value was reduced, kind of as a sign that, listen, we had a successful tax increment district. We knew we were going to take some of the $600,000 that Mike talked about, that question that came from the council about what was the benefit of that. We knew we were going to take some of that to deal with the $400,000 that was in the budget. We also had another $200,000 to deal with operating expenses. But the council also expressed the desire to take that equalized mill rate from 520, 540, where it was, and bring it down a little bit for the taxpayers. And Is that going to be maintained in the future? We talk a little bit about that with the slides. And then the other bullet I put in there is when we talked last year, there was some extremely expensive projects on the CIP list. And I think some of those you've changed, but as the city continues to evolve and grow, some of those projects may come up again in the future. I won't go into this in detail because this is what Tina just talked about, but we put it into a different form to really identify how are we going to pay for the capital improvement plan projects. And it involves you have some grant and cash funding. Tina alluded to that a couple times as she talked specific projects. And then this also segues into the potential need to issue debt. Now, our model for today, as a starting point going through your budget, we have a debt issue in 26, and then every other year after that, 27, 29, 31, 30, and 35. One thing you notice, and this is not unusual at all in capital improvement plans, is you have fairly large projects the first couple iterations, really through 2032 projects, financed in 31, but including 32. The further you go out, usually what we start to see is a decline in the projects just because it's more difficult to identify what you're going to do the further out that you go. And that's where I note legacy projects. Over time, as communities get larger buildings like city halls, public works buildings, libraries, those legacy-type projects become projects that start to show up on the CIP list to a higher degree. And that may end up being the case with Altoona in the future. So we don't have all the detail behind this. Maybe I can even, yeah, you can see the mouse. What this chart is showing is, in orange, the existing debt that the city has already issued in the past and has committed to make these repayments in the future for projects that the city agreed to move forward with in the past. And what you'll notice, and this was by design from the city staff in the past, is it's a downward trend and significant debt is paid off by the early 2030s. So what does that allow for the city to do? That's really what the rest of the colored bars represent. They represent the debt issues to finance the capital improvement plan projects but do it in a way that's keeping the tax impact at a number that's very close to what you budgeted this past year for 26. So you did it in the fall of 25 for 26. You can see that orange bar here. That's the budget we're in right now. And then going forward, we're able, by doing the financings every other year, for the capital projects at the current budgets that you have them. The model is allowing us to keep your total debt levy very close to where it's been. And then it doesn't do that, though, going all the way out, say, to 2050, which this chart goes all the way out to. You see it drops off. And what that allows is when you get beyond that 2035 date, which is as far as the CIP goes right now, there's still the ability to add additional projects into the mix. and be able to hopefully do those and keep that debt levy around the same total that we're seeing currently. So does that make sense? I consider this very good news that you've put together a list of projects, you've prioritized through your committee, and because you've done very good planning along with successful closing of your tax increment district, I would call this a wrap around situation where you're able to wrap around new debt or wrapping that new debt around the existing debt but trying to keep the impact of the debt or the levy of the debt in approximately the same level. I'll just spend a second on this. This is the borrowing capacity. The orange bars and the pink you see here are really the same thing. That's principal on the debt that's already outstanding. The green would be new debt issues to finance the new projects that are on the capital improvement plan. And the orange line up top here is your current borrowing capacity, that 5% of equalized value that I mentioned. So you do have a significant gap between the limit and where we see the debt spiking out. Where I would see this potentially being impacted and getting closer up to that line is if If you did, as council and as a city, decided down the road to really do a significant asset change, so maybe some sort of combined community building, and when you see budgets for those, these guys could probably tell you better than me, sometimes those for a growing community get to 20, 25 million to do that stuff, and that can be very expensive. So that would have an impact on the borrowing capacity, but the projects you have on the list right now, we're just not seeing that sort of an impact.

That's kind of what we've been working on. We've really accomplished a lot this far with the public works, the fire department, the police department, the two main big projects we're looking at that are the fire department and the library at some point. But they are not in there unless we get grant funding for that. But I think we've taken a lot, as Mike did in the last council meeting, we've taken care of a lot of those big projects that we're identifying in that facility study a couple years ago.

So I think we're in good shape. Now, this next slide then is really looking at the big, big picture of your overall budget. The last slide was looking really at the capital improvement projects and then the debt to fund those projects and then repay the debt over time. This is just the last couple years, so the 25 fiscal year. 26 is the year we're in right now. So you'll see your operating levy, your debt service levy. The total levy was about 6.7 million. We spread that levy over the equalized value. of the entire city, except for tax increment district number four, which is the one district you have remaining. That's about, again, $1.3 billion in value. And that gives you a mill rate of $5 per $1,000 of equalized value. That's where you're currently at right now as a city in this year's budget year, 2026. Now, policy-wise, last year when we talked about this, again, we dropped from the previous mill rate to five with the closing of tax increment district number six. And you can also see that extreme increase in equalized value that you spread your general fund from $900 million up to that $1.3 billion in value. You did. The next year's budget we're working on right now, the first meeting tonight that Tina introduced, $1.4 billion is the tit-out equalized value for Altoona. And then I just did, working with Tina, backed into if we wanted policy-wise to be at about that 5 mils again, that translates into a total levy amount of just a little bit over $7 million. And I think that's kind of a framework in which you'll now decide the different components of that levy. It doesn't have to be that amount. If you want to stay at 5 mils, that's what the amount would be. But you could go higher, you could go lower, within levy limits and other things. But just to give you a sense, what is the maximum if you wanted to stay at that policy of the 5 mils? And then the last slide, I think Tina and City staff had the thought of you know, it's always good to have some context to You as a city compared to some of your neighbors in generally in the western, Wisconsin area so the state website and Other sources were able to look at that mill equalized mill rate for other communities to compare it to where Altoona is and What I would say in just looking at it big picture, you're very, very similar to a lot of the other similarly sized, similarly serviced communities in western Wisconsin. You see Menominee is just a titch. Below, Eau Claire and Chippewa are higher. New Richmond is exactly the same, and River Falls is a little bit lower than where you guys are at. They're a university community, and they do benefit somewhat from that in terms of more money from the state, which always helps. But we thought it would just give you a sense of are you guys where you currently have set yourself up out of whack and i would certainly say um no you're you're right in line with what we see uh communities trying to do in western wisconsin okay uh so with that this one is i think i had to i guess i cut my question one out but no i think yep was that the last one Oh, there it is. Yes. Okay. So with that, the hope was to give you just, again, that big picture. And then I'll, again, summarize. I found it to be good news. Hopefully you do, too, that with the CIP list and trying to implement that, it looked like we could keep that debt impact, which is really what people see in terms of paying back those sort of projects, at a pretty level spot from where the city currently is. Okay.

Any questions Everything's good All right, thanks, Sean All right anything else All right all right motion for adjournment then We're all second we have a motion in a second all our favor say aye opposed all right, thank you