City Commission - Regular Meeting

Now call the June 9th, 2026 City Commission meeting to order. Jared, will you please call the roll call?

Mayor Adamczak. I'm present. Commissioner McCullough. Yes. Commissioner Fox. Here. Commissioner Morrison. Here. Commissioner Von Lentl. Here. Mayor, we have five commissioners present. The quorum of three is met. Thank you.

Will you please rise and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Before beginning our work session, we will have some updates from members of staff regarding the storm situation and city response to it. Okay.

You all can draw straws if you want to send Brian or Chief French or Director Stewart up there. Since you're already to the podium, thank you.

Thank you, Mayor, Commissioners. Don't worry, Scott, I got this one, okay? He was fighting me to come up. Quick update on storm. Obviously, we had a significant storm event last night. Lots of power has been out. We've been coordinating with Evergy. They're working hard to get power back on. As far as public works, parks and rec, fire, as far as city response. We're out cleaning streets and right-of-ways now, getting all the streets open. If you do have a street that is closed, please let us know so we can get it on our list. We are planning on having those open by end of day tomorrow or possibly into Thursday. Then next week, we've lined up all of our people and all of our equipment. We're going to make a pretty big rush at picking up debris off the curbs. So much like spring break if you have, or I'm sorry, spring cleanup, if you have debris in your yard or in your backyard and you want to pull it to the front yard and leave it by the curb. Next week we will be going around the city picking that up. We anticipate it taking a couple of weeks because we think there's quite a bit of debris out there. So we anticipate a couple weeks. We will probably come around at least twice, but if you would have it on that first time it would be great. We're also talking with private forestry companies and Also, private contractors have a possibility of helping us out a little bit. So, we are looking into lots of things. We're trying to get all the logistics sorted. We're also talking to some companies about renting some additional equipment. So, lots of conversations in logistics, but at this time, our plan is to hit it real hard next week on the private side and try to get all of the public rights-away street sidewalks open this week.

Brian, can I ask a question? I saw Topeka's going to do that, and they're asking people to saw things up in four feet. Are we asking for any official? Just put them out there.

Yeah, we're going to put them into a big truck, and we're going to haul them off.

Okay.

At this time, we're not planning on using the transfer station. I have talked to Riley County, and we've coordinated. We think we have some other spots that we can haul that to, and it'll be a little bit quicker. We're working with several state and local partners to find some areas to get that debris placed. Commissioner Fox?

I do want to give kudos to your crew, the Parks and Rec crew. We were out there this morning early and Here they come with their chainsaws at a neighbor locked in.

Yeah, the crews were very helpful. We had six crews on call last night. I think Park Network had five crews on call. So total, we had 11 crews on call. And they all came in. It takes a certain kind of person to come towards the trouble and not run away from it, especially that late at night. But yeah, they came in. They worked all night. That's part of the reason why we're going to wait till next week to do the pickup, because right now we have crews on different shifts, so we're only about half staff during the day. We're going to get everybody caught up on sleep over the weekend, and we're going to hit it hard Monday.

How did we do on the water? Did we have any more?

Yeah, so I had about three inches of rain in my gauge. In the downtown watershed, that'd probably be a 20-year storm, 25-year storm event. Third Street, Fourth Street, Underwater, Overture, the usual candidates, which is quite funny because the selection committee met last week to look at that watershed. So I think we got some pretty good ideas for that. That'll be coming up in a future legislative piece. But yeah, the usual suspects. Wildcat Creek did not leave its banks or it got bank full, which we were really happy about. I was I thought maybe we were going to get a little bit more than that. So maybe that watershed still has a little bit of capacity in it. But these back to back storms is really what triggers Wildcat Creek because all the farm ponds get full, the ground gets saturated and then those back to back ones are tough.

Yeah, they are talking about more water tomorrow night.

Later this week and a chance tomorrow night, too. If you're in the public, you're walking around on sidewalks, just please be aware there's lots of branches broken up in trees that haven't fallen down yet. In fact, I was just helping my neighbor right before this meeting get a branch out of his tree. So lots of stuff hanging up in trees and, you know, good windstorm, lots more stuff's going to come down. So please, as you're walking around, just kind of, you know, pay attention and make sure you're watching what's above you. And there's going to be lots of things falling out of trees. So until next week. Okay. Any other questions? Thank you all.

The only thing I wanted to add, mayor and commissioners, is that we had city staff across the organization who have been working for over 16 hours, the last 16 hours. Fire, streets, utilities, parks, cemeteries, forestry, customer service, and administrative staff, our CPD dispatchers, and everyone who has really been coordinating this response. Our teamwork has been really outstanding and fascinating, and I just want to say thank you to every single one of those folks.

Thanks. Scott, is there anything you'd like to add?

Fire has fielded over 100 storm-related calls in the last 16 hours or so, mostly related to power, downed power lines and trees on houses.

Yeah, I did hear our salt storage suffered a bit.

We did. Mother Nature is trying to save us a little bit of money on demolition in 2027 for our salt storage.

And... Director Stewart, do you have anything?

The only thing I would remind people of since we have the opportunity is some of the delay of getting some of these trees removed is because they are entangled with power lines. Please be vigilant and make sure that you're not engaging with anything of that sort. Once those power lines can be cleared and we can safely remove them, we'll get to that tree. But just have patience with it. Make sure that we need to make sure our staff are safe with that. And obviously, if people are around that, don't walk into downed power lines.

Thank you for that great segue. I had a call this afternoon from Chuck Casely, who is the director of utility operations at Evergy. Last night in this area, there were over 100,000, close to 120,000 outages. By this morning, it was down to 30,000. Right now, they have 400 line and vegetation people deployed to the Manhattan area. They're being dispatched from Kansas City, Hutchinson, Wichita, and El Dorado. Some of these are private contractors. They're not necessarily going to have Evergy on the side of their trucks. We have had approximately 150 poles either down altogether or sheared off. So it's a pretty substantial amount of work that needs to be done. It kind of makes me think of that ice storm we had about 12 years ago or so. Hopefully the power outages, they anticipate, depending on the weather coming in tomorrow, they anticipate power being fully restored by end of the day tomorrow. So people shouldn't be going for days and days without power. Virtually, there are about 2,400 customers who are without power right now. 16 of those are businesses, and the vast majority are residences. Obviously if we're without power you are probably not listening to this update if you are Hearing this and you have friends family acquaintances who are without power. Please try to fill in on what to expect Thank you very much and I'll just echo as Commissioner McCullough did an appreciation to all the staff for pitching in and Getting on this staying on top of it as it was going on

Susan, could I just add that if you've got neighbors that are elderly or whatever and don't have power, the heat index today was 105. So make sure that people know that heat can kill as easily as cold. So if you know somebody that needs some relief, go over and knock on their door.

Actually, I will add on to that, Karen. Flint Hills Volunteer Center does have people available to help with those 55 and older who may need some assistance in moving those limbs from backyard to front. So they can't move very large limbs or cut down trees, but you can contact the flinthillsvolunteercenter.com and request assistance if necessary. Okay. We'll now begin our work session. And the first item is to discuss Morrow Street options.

Thank you, Mayor, Commissioners. On April 7th, the governing body entered into a construction manager at risk agreement with BHS. We also had an engineering services agreement that evening with Olson to further the design on Morrow Street. Since that time we've met with multiple partners including VHS and Olson but also including Aggieville Business Association. We received quite a bit of feedback. We quickly came to realize trying to go down a couple paths with Morrow was going to generate a lot of A lot of discussion, a lot of bantering back and forth of options to put together to re-approach. We met specifically with the ABA and their leadership to try to get some guidance on their preferences. We took that feedback and approached BHS and Olson to develop the concepts that we have in front of you this evening. There are plenty of folks in the room that I know have a lot more expertise and a lot more familiarity about these topics. And we'd love to hear from them this evening. But I did want to give you that background. At one point, we talked about bringing multiple options back to the governing body to decide after about 30% design. Time and money are valuable to everyone. I didn't necessarily personally believe we were going to gain a whole lot spending a lot of money and time. fishing for what it is that would fit i really do appreciate the aba showing up and giving us their preference so we could bring it back to you all so hopefully we can leave this evening with a preferred design to turn bhs and olsen loose on creating that final design and a gmp for construction in doing so they've also created an estimate and a range along with a timeline The feedback we received and internally talked about really had a lot to do with the landscaping. The concepts that were in front of you in April had a pretty significant landscaping, seating area, pedestrian streetscape component between the angled stalls and the building facades or between the driving lane on the south end and the building facades. A lot of concerns were expressed about pedestrian movement, maintaining 11 and a half feet, two, three, four person, possibly wide walking through there. Moro is a major mover of people and vehicles. I think we have enough amenities on 12th and North Manhattan to give people an idea of what we were talking about, and they preferred to have more space for the pedestrian to actually move. It led us to the concepts that you're seeing now with street trees. If you're out in front of the parking garage across the street from the old Rodina's, or you're even moving towards Rally House, this is the type of streetscape that we're seeing on North Manhattan. It is a line of street trees with tree grates. They're at grade. You can walk right underneath those trees today. I do it frequently just to get down to the district to pay attention to our construction. And it's moving traffic. I'm moving with two and three other people along those sidewalks. And I think the district owners and the businesses recognize that as well. It is their preference. It is what we have done down there. um and we have removed a lot of that streetscape landscaping that would occupy space possibly even leaving only four or five feet between building facades so again we remove that to give that full 11 and a half an opportunity for people to walk and frequent those businesses this concept has roughly eight Trees per side, 16 per block, 32 roughly overall. You can see there is a little bit of a variation towards 11th Street on that bottom concept where we have the parking lot on the north. The preference for the angled parking remains on the north with some opportunities for lighting to occur. This is a sidewalk between O'Malley's and Jimmy John's. with a opportunity to light the area that it connects the pedestrian to the roadway and then on the 1100 block this would be essentially between what's labeled as the high low and the goose on the south and the tasty china house on the north one thing that i will acknowledge this spacing is equal We're really gonna have to get down there. There are a lot of awnings and a lot of signs that I believe most businesses are gonna want us to work around and not be directly in front. If you really pay attention when you're down there, it is tight. If you move beyond the awnings and the signs to the curb line today, that 11 and a half feet gets really narrow. We're going to have to space these things appropriately as we get into actual construction and final design. The next concept gives you a bit of a feel of trees when they're planted, trees after a period of time post-install, and then looking at that canopy when it's mature. We wanted to give that perspective just so you all could grasp. It's not going to be tree to tree. There's going to be space even between the trees after maturity in this plan. Provide a few more concepts of what that will look and feel like. Again, a lot of the frontage and the street tree and then the blockage where the parking stalls and the post would occur. Another angle and concept of that. Trees are, again, spaced. Pretty much by distance here, we're gonna have to alter that to get to a point where we're not impacting those businesses' doors or signs or awnings. This has five per side, 10 per block, 20 overall. Similar concept, though, on the north and the south side, removing the streetscape landscaping. The post, I think you'll see in a lot of the concepts, they're at each parking stall as you're on the angled side of the road. We would also have posts and blocks that are currently along the drive aisle in other areas of Aggieville on the south side of Morrow. the item there were some cost estimates and some phasing plans BHS is here this evening and they can provide clarity for you all but you can see we have a 16 month duration on the two block construction concepts on the maximum trees were anywhere between 10 and 11 10.1 and 11.1 million we have concept with the 10 trees a little bit less in density. For the trees, 9.8 to 10.8 million, still 16 months. I know that's not going to meet a lot of the desires that have been expressed previously about scheduling, but it does fit with how construction has been managed in Aggieville and other places throughout the community with this type of density. I would stress the 40 to 50 businesses along Morrow are gonna need constant communication, engagement, and acknowledgement of what is occurring on a day-to-day basis. You don't have that everywhere else in the community, and we've set ourselves up with the experience that we've had in other streets and other sidewalks and other alleys in Aggieville for this very, in my opinion, important project of our community. Finishing Aggieville, constructing Morrow Street, and returning the district to its patrons and its businesses, been a goal of the city's now for over 10 years, and we are getting close. The phasing that was also attached to the item gave you an idea of where BHS is at today in terms of streets being open, streets being closed. This gives you an idea of just the sequence of when the roads would be open and closed. The next phase maps try to give you a sense of, okay, when the 1100 block is closed for that six to seven month period, traffic is still going to be able to access off North Manhattan, down Morrow, down 12th Street, continuing to use 12th Street. When the 1200 block is closed, October 27 to July 28, again, movements on 12th Street and the ability to use the new Morrow would be available. We do have a period of time where the intersection is closed between May and June of 28. That would make it very difficult for either 1100 or 1200 block to be open. Wanted to provide that, I know that's a major concern and a major question our businesses and our community are gonna have for us on Morrow. When can traffic move in and out of the district and how can it move? So this evening we're looking for feedback. We'd really like again to give BHS and Olson solid direction from the governing body to go reach that guaranteed maximum price so we can get started with construction by spring of 27. Question.

Jason, I'm sure a lot of discussion and opinion went into the phasing. Can you just tell us how you came to do the 1100 block first versus 1200 or vice versa?

I do think BHS can expand on that. The feedback we got, the infrastructure that's in existence at 11th Street, building it west towards 12th and eventually North Manhattan ties in with the infrastructure in a better phasing plan than any other. Again, Adam and his team can expand on that. From the city's perspective, I think our main objective as we chop this up is to be able to tell the public in most circumstances you're going to have one way at least in and an ability to leverage accessing Morrow. Closing down both the 1100 and 1200 block at the same time and our past experience hasn't necessarily resulted in the outcome most would desire, keeping one of those legs open is the feedback we've heard most often. We obviously have a month there like we did last June. in 2025 where we shut down 12th and Morrow. It functioned, we worked through it. There are a few businesses that have just different reactions to that. But we navigated it, VHS did a good job communicating, got the work done at 12th and Morrow and we're able to move on and grant that access. Again, this is preliminary, but I stress to VHS, this is important. This is a topic that's gonna continue to happen throughout this project, and the businesses are gonna be paying very special attention to when they can access more, when vehicles and pedestrians can. The goal is to keep pedestrian access throughout the entire project. And with this approach, we believe VHS will be able to accomplish that. Any other questions for me can certainly bring up VHS and Olson.

Several notes I saw on the various documents. One is removal and reinstall of building signs and awnings. Why is that a city responsibility, number one? And while we're making this the Taj Mahal for Aggieville's history, do we need to revise and review our sign and awning requirements for that kind of district?

Lot of opinions about that topic. I don't think I'm going to be able to express or capture them all in the event. Tearing out the street, using the equipment is why I'm assuming they need to remove Commissioner Morrison, but I will have BHS comment on that. The type of equipment they'll be bringing down Morrow to remove the streets, dig up the water lines, replace those water lines, I'm assuming the swing and the distance they're gonna need would require them to possibly have to remove some of those awnings and signs and replace them. but I'll let them comment on that. Sign regs in Aggieville, we've had a lot of discussions on. Design guidelines, requirements for the entire district were put together, 2015, 2016 timeframe. We can certainly bring those back for your consideration if you'd like.

Also, we talk about subgrade root structures, approximate cost per tree for that. I think I saw in here the proposal to buy or install different size trees, calipers, small, medium, and large. And as I recall, the caliper number doubles the cost for each step. So why do we have to have four-inch caliper trees to start with over three?

Yeah, I think there's a good discussion to have there. Cody Peratt with Olson is here as well. He can expand on those two subjects for you.

And the last one I note that is of irritant is 28 conclusion, 16 months. Far cry from my arbitrary projection of six months was obscene, three months was possible.

Again, I think BHS can have some feedback for the commission if you desire a shorter time frame. I've seen some numbers. I'm not gonna share them. I don't think they're realistic for our community to swallow, but they can share them with you all.

I would like, I like trees, but I do see trees in municipal settings like, you know, Kmart parking lot and that kind of thing not doing well. Will there be some irrigation that goes with these or okay?

Yeah Yeah, there would be in the environment that Commissioner Morrison talked about the Silva cells that are underneath our trees in Aggieville with those Silva cells Are doing really well. We created a map and put it in your packet Thanks to Cody with Olson But you can walk the district and the growth and the maturity of the trees that have been there for five years or less in the green dots are significantly more progressed than the ones in the red, just in that district in the last five years. Pretty impressive just how much those trees have grown. The area next to Tanner's was one of the areas that we did first. And it is just occupied that space dramatically. I don't think we're very far away from those trees climbing above the Tanner's roofline and even casting shade for so long in Takalucha earlier in the evenings than they do today.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jason. How about the representative from BHS?

Hello, Adam Crow, Pre-Construction, BHS. Happy to answer some questions. I'll start off with the ones I wrote down. The silver cell cost per tree, we can figure that up and get it back to you. Silver cell is the subgrade root structure. And while we do have it included, off the top of my head, I don't have a per tree calculation. It does change slightly per location as we try to make the amount of cubic footage required fit within the individual location. So I can get that to you and I can follow up with that.

Maybe you could just explain what's the purpose of that

infrastructure for the tree what does it accomplish absolutely it gives the roots of the tree space to grow in a soil which is conducive to their growth and it really accelerates their their growth and creates a healthier more robust tree much sooner than not using it so enhancing our investment in the trees to begin with correct

Commissioners, as Jason and I did review the cost on this, we ballparked that it would cost about $25,000 to $30,000 per tree. Thank you.

You said per tree?

That is correct, Commissioner.

So can you speak to Commissioner Morrison's length of construction time issue if you try to shorten it and how much it increases the costs?

Yes, I can the current duration which you have in front of you at 16 months is roughly eight months per side and that schedule was put together by a Gantt chart where we put together the construction tasks in their correct sequence of predecessors and successors What work is usually here? You start with the surface you go down first then bring back your building back your construction deepest to the shallowest and in that process, that's where pushing a schedule that is similar to the time frames we're seeing now on the work we're doing in Aggieville comes in at roughly that eight months per side to accelerate that schedule to from 16 to a total of six It would be considered schedule crashing and in that situation Costs would escalate quickly. It's not a linear escalation when you start doing that. Unfortunately They they climb almost recklessly at kind of cut the 16-month schedule down to possibly eight total, which would be a 50% schedule reduction. Studies show that in that scenario, you're looking at a 50% to 60% cost increase on the overall project at this point of the project. Some of those are due to items such as overtime, multiple shifts, overmanning or crew stacking, parallel work, which brings in more crews at one time trying to work simultaneously, Expedited procurement where you're paying extra to get the materials to the site in an earlier time frame You're paying premium for logistics. You're paying an additional for management costs you're trying to Avoid rework in these situations, but when things are so tight and moving so fast quality control is an issue and then on top of that talking to local trades and contractors, you might have to start looking at using contractors from out of town to meet the manpower requirements that it would take to accelerate a schedule. Again, from 16 to eight, I'm not even getting to six yet. And once you start doing that, you're gonna also incur costs such as per diem and travel for larger companies to come work here who don't reside here normally. To go from eight to an overall of six or faster, from what we're seeing in Aggieville, I just, I don't know if it's possible at this time. There's a lot of front doors to keep open.

I suspect you're, I mean, you'll also be working more hours in the day, probably.

If you were looking.

24-7, maybe.

You would be.

And those owners aren't going to be there.

You're starting to have that conversation.

A lot of those times, so that creates a problem.

It does, and in Aggieville specifically, there's a wide range of business hours. Some shops are open very early in the morning. Some businesses stay open very late at night. So if you're there in an extended work hour range, unfortunately you're affecting somebody all the time by being down there with extended hours. but that the costs do climb significantly to look at cutting the schedule at a rate like that.

Thank you for that explanation. I think that's very helpful for us non-construction people to be a little bit more aware of the multiplier effects of some of those elements in the project cost. At this point, are we in year five, six of the Aggieville development project?

We started in 2018.

Okay, so we're talking. And BHS has been on this?

No, BHS joined us on 12th Street when the hotel and the Handy Corner in Midtown were all part of the concepts. McCown Gordon managed a lot of the project over on Laramie by the parking garage, North Manhattan, and 14th Street.

Thank you. My understanding from informal remarks with some of the Aggieville business owners is that they have been satisfied with communication with BHS. Dennis, would you like to come and just address the nature of communication and collaboration with them? I'm sorry, I should have asked first. Are there other questions? Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah, Dennis Cook with the Aggieville Business Association. We had a great relationship during those initial times with McCown Gordon. They did a great job of always communicating with, not only through us, through the office, and through our board of directors, but daily with the businesses that they were impacting. And this has been equally successful. uh amazing you know you know people really enjoy uh you know getting out there and getting this information you know they you know they know who's in charge they can walk out there and talk to anybody they're always being notified of what's going on so it's been it's been an ideal situation for us so we have no problems with continuing on with this given the scope of the project. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, but it's really, really good to be working with somebody that you know cares as much about it as we do, because this is a local thing, so we're very happy about it.

Thank you. And I was glad to hear Jason's remarks that the Aggieville group did have as much input and feedback on possible scenarios that we face. At this time, commissioners, if it's okay, I'll call for public comments.

Mayor Adam Czach, can we hear from Mr. Peratt, our landscape architect from Olsen, to address Commissioner Morrison's comments about why we have different calipers of trees and additionally why that sub-root structure is so important over the lifetime of those trees?

I apologize for not recognizing.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Commissioners. My name is Cody Peratt, lead landscape architect with Olsen. To, I guess, reiterate on the Importance of the Silva cells and why that's needed it is for the health of the tree It limits compaction and there's a ton of studies that have been done that show that It just increases the growth and health and we've seen that firsthand here in Aggieville thus far Commissioner Morrison, can you please repeat the question on the caliper of trees? I

Well, I'm no landscape specialist, but I've planted a few trees in my life. And it's interesting, the last article I read was if you have a healthy plant and then you try to buy growth, a smaller tree will catch up within a reasonable amount of time and exceed the larger tree. And so I don't see... maybe a justification for the cost increase for the size and the $30,000 per tree total expense. I understand, pardon me? 25. 25,000? Oh, inflation hits, I'm sorry. Only in my own mind. The issue seems to me that I understand the irrigation, the growth issues and patterns. It just doesn't seem to me that that kind of expense is appropriate. Some part of it can be done at some level different than 25,000. Everybody wants us to be nice, but at some point in time, we have some expense limits.

So you are 100% right on that statement, the studies that you've read of smaller caliper trees catching up, surpassing larger caliper trees due to shock and things like that when they're installed in a typical situation. That does not mean that's untrue in this scenario as well. But what we are weighing, it's a cost benefit analysis. You're seeing the cost, obviously, but there's a significant benefit to bringing in these larger caliper trees in this scenario for immediate impact. And the cost between a two and a half inch caliper tree and a four inch caliper tree is relatively insignificant. So of that, let's say $25,000 per tree, You're only going to recognize a cost reduction of approximately max $500 by decreasing from the four-inch caliper to the two-inch caliper, two-and-a-half-inch caliper. A lot of the money, the majority of the money, is sunk into those underground infrastructure costs for the tree health. So it doesn't matter the size. We could put in little saplings. It's still going to be $25,000. It'll be close. All of that money is sunk below ground. So what we're looking at, what we're proposing to do since we're viewing this as the trees are the amenity, really highlighting Morrow as its own entity and the heart of Aggieville, approaching this a little bit different than we had on North Manhattan and as we had on 12th Street, which Is a lot more pedestrian in nature. We had a lot more room for shade sales and outdoor dining and things like this Where Morrow being a people mover? Taking a little bit different approach having the more naturalized architectural element of these trees providing the shade and then having the correct foundation Underground for these to survive for 50 hundred years so they don't have to be replaced all the time and they struggle and

So these magnificent trees, are they going to be compatible to awnings and signs that may not be compatible to your tree?

So as Jason had mentioned, we are going to go through right now, all of the trees are placed on a rhythm, can be slightly adjusted either way, east or west. Also, we haven't totally nailed down the variety or the species of each of these trees. So we're planning on using a combination of vase-shaped trees, which tend to arch up and then out. That would include things like lacebark elm or zelkova. In certain instances, if the design warrants it, if we strategically want to place a different type of tree, maybe a columnar English oak or Apollo maple or something that gets very tall and columnar and smaller, that would be a lot more compatible with instances with awnings or blade signs, things like that. So it'll be a case by case instance, but right now this is a little bit more of a zoomed out approach. Get this idea, this concept, make sure everybody can buy in on the idea, and then we can figure out the final detail of what tree goes where exactly.

Just don't plant whatever they put downtown for the first two times.

OK.

Thank you, Cody. Thank you. At this time, we will take public comment. Is there anyone who would like to remark on this plan?

Good evening, commissioners. Travis Worrell, Solong Saloon, Tako Lucha, and the president of the ABA. Obviously, as you can see, Morrow is the elephant that is going to keep giving all of us, right? It's going to be a challenge. I think what we've tried to do is compromise the best we can. Not every business down there is going to get what they want, right? There's just not enough room in between buildings to do that. I think this design is the best compromise that we're going to get. It maximizes parking. It gets people moving. It gets the sidewalks opened up. It takes the curb out of the you know, streets to where people will be easier access down there. The timeframe is always going to be the challenge. I'm scared to death that businesses that are open today will not be open by the time this thing is done. I hope that's not true, but I will give kudos to BHS in seeing the product they've done on 12th, the way they've worked. If we have this storm and we have a hole in front of our business, that creates a problem. There was flooding that happened on 12th. That's going to be a challenge that's going to be presented to us when Morrow is tore up. That's a real concern. But I think the BHS is the best equipped that I've seen handle that so far. And that's a big plus, because I think all of us, whatever 40, 50 businesses we have, are going to be scared when that happens. But like I said, I don't think everybody gets what they want in this situation, but I think this is the best compromise amongst all businesses. We did have a little town hall with Morrow Street businesses, and everybody pretty much agreed that this is the best case scenario we can get. So you guys have any questions? No? Thank you.

Thank you, Travis. Travis, I'm sorry. Would you sign in at the?

Yeah, Dennis Cook again with Aggieville Business Association. Yeah, we did have this open meeting last Wednesday, and we did have a number of businesses and a large property owner that showed up, and we spent some time talking about all this. Everybody was positive on this. I can tell you one thing that was a... A huge positive piece to this was, as of June 1st, being able to park in the garage for free. It's making a change right now, a significant difference. And the restriping of all that, I think these are all positive, positive things for Aggieville, and we really appreciate that that was done. By taking a look at these drawings, we do know, I mean, it's easy to recognize, we're gonna lose some some street parking but we didn't lose all the street parking you know that we know that we're going to go from like seventy four to forty six and you know and so that is a loss but at the same time what we want to express to the public is that in twenty eighteen when everything got started we had as far as public parking we had four hundred forty one spaces and as of today we've got i don't have the the new accurate account uh counting on the garage i i called and i didn't get that today but uh but we're uh approximately about about 140 more than we had when we got started and now we know that there's still gonna be some challenges for for people who are a little bit more limited with their ability to walk. And we have a parking garage at the West End, but we know that there's still some ideas out there, maybe some private development on the East End that could help us out a little bit. But at this point, Seeing what was done on North Manhattan Avenue and what was done on 12th Street, finishing Morrow and getting that same overall look is a huge thing for Aggieville. And we really need to get that done. And I think that's, you know, and we know short term there's going to be some, you know, it'll be tough. But we're trying to look down the road 25, 50 years and knowing that this is exactly where we need to be. So we really appreciate everything's been done so far and excited to get this to this next level. Thank you.

Thank you, Dennis. Oh, Dennis, I'm sorry. Next time you get up. OK.

Gorgeous. Amber Starling, 408 Houston Street. Assets are things that cost money, but they also earn money. Liabilities are things that cost money and don't earn money. Albeit imperfect, Manhattan's residents are inheriting an asset with the Aggieville parking garage. I know it's inconvenient. I know that it involves a walk, but it also raises funding for its own care. And city staff have huge kudos, like proactively made updates to that garage that like the angling is better, the space sizes are better, it's a lot more user friendly. And they took it on themselves to do that. A plus, when we're adding the street parking, we are inheriting infrastructure that is costly. This is a $10 million project. and it earns none of its own keep. What's potentially challenging with this is it's a liability that competes with an asset. So why would people use the inconvenient garage that costs money when they can have VIP parking for free? And so when this first came up, because it is a big, sticky, hard to wrestle with project, I had originally advocated for street parking to accommodate two use cases, ADA parking and then 15 minutes or less, which would accommodate for people of all abilities to access Aggieville and for people who are picking folks up, picking up food, dropping someone off, to be able to use that. I understand that commissioners Fox, Morrison, and Von Lintel all ran on a campaign platform of fiscal responsibility, and I can see how hard you guys are wrestling trying to balance what people want with what we can afford. You still have options. Unfortunately, they aren't popular. You can meter this parking. You could put up signs with a QR code. that lets them access the payment software that you're already using for the garage. You could limit it to one hour or 15 minutes or something else. You could take the loss here and find budget money elsewhere for this. The important thing is just to remember that you guys are still in the driver's seat. There was one more thing that caught my attention. The city manager mentioned lighting where the sidewalks cross the roadway. That was an excellent consideration. I have worked pedestrian versus vehicle accidents. They are not pretty. I would strongly recommend putting a stop sign at these crossings. So it's not like stop if there's someone there. It's you have to stop and actually check both ways before you keep going, especially when we have, you know, it's nighttime and there are drunk humans wandering around. Thank you.

Thank you, Amber. Is there anyone else who would like to make public remarks? All right, public comment is now closed. Commissioners, what feedback or direction would you like to offer?

Well, I mean, I'm in favor of the metered parking on Morrow, but I think we decided that was something that was going to be decided down the road later with possibly the next commission.

I have a question I'm not sure whom I would ask, not the landscape person from Olsen or Bryan. We're worried about water in that area, North Manhattan East. Nothing is described here about our storm water out of this area and is it going to be compatible when and if we ever figure out how to get rid of water in that area and who's in charge of that one?

If you recall we have talked about the downtown East and West watershed master plan that master plan has about 13 projects and it's We are at a project for project for you will be seeing very shortly an agreement with Kansas Department transportation to build large diameter storm sewer under Tuttle Creek Boulevard in 2030 when KDOT rebuilds TCB. That leaves us five, six, seven, and eight to get to Aggieville. Aggieville has two issues. First one is all of the water coming from the stadium to the south of the stadium, comes down by the Riley County Health Department, down to Tecumseh-Corvera, down Hunting, goes down Anderson. It gets split into two boxes. One goes to 14th Street, one goes down 16th Street. They both meet over here off of North Manhattan. Large diameter, huge storm sewer. Put in the ground, unfortunately, in the 1930s, and it's way undersized. we have projects to oversize that and you're going to see that in my presentation june 23rd when i talk about storm water rates until those large diameter structures are put in place there's going to be flooding issues at north manhattan and bluemont nothing else you can do about it that's a a good round robin

for response, but is what we're designing in Aggieville going to be able to be plugged into all that fancy stuff when we get it built?

So what the infrastructure we've been putting in Aggieville is designed for that seven to 10 year away project, we can plug and play, tie into that new infrastructure, get it down to Third Street.

Commissioner Fox?

So I would start out, I really like this plan. I think you guys have done a great job of incorporating the parking. I'm glad you got rid of the bump outs. This plan looks very clean. It keeps some parking down there, you know, to Amber's and others' points. I've always thought, you know, I don't wanna eliminate parking on Morrow. some of us older folks that I go down there quite often, and I at least have a shot at a parking space. If it's a busy weekend, I know I'm not gonna get one, I'll go to the garage, but if it's a quiet time, and I've always said, I think parking helps the businesses during the slow times, when the students are gone. Some of us townies go down there, and at least we have a shot at a parking space. And we know that, and if it's not available, we go on, you know, park farther away. So I like this. I would prefer the fewer tree option. The five trees per block versus eight, I just think the eight is too many. It just looks cluttered. Plus it's just more to maintain, it's more cost. The fewer trees still gives us trees on the block, but it's a little cheaper, a little easier to maintain. So, but I think this is a great plan and I look forward to the day when it's all done.

I agree with the fewer tree option I Disagree, I mean I like trees and I like to be able to walk in the shade and in Kansas in the summer It's very nice to go from one tree to the next and we know that trees can even lower the Temperature in areas because they you know really bring in Greenness I think Once again, we've chosen well with our advisors and our experts and I think we should listen to our advisors and our experts because I am not an advisor, an expert on parking or trees or that kind of thing. But I do think we want to do everything we can to add to the ambiance of pedestrians in Aggieville because quite frankly, there are never gonna be enough parking places. And so, you know, I always park across Blumont in the university after 5 o'clock, and it's just a wee bit of a way to walk. But if we can kind of convert our car-minded people that they can possibly go someplace and walk there and enjoy the walk, not just the bar or cafe or restaurant that they get to, I think it's a real positive.

Not that I don't like trees, Karen, but I think I concur with several of the other commissioners. It's a relatively minor cost savings, but I think going with the somewhat smaller number of trees would be acceptable because they're all going to have fantastic growth because of the subsystem they'll be with. So I think we have consensus among the commissioners that we're ready to move forward and to bring this to design build. Are we building even when we're installing trees? That we're ready to move forward to the next step. And I do appreciate the work that staff has done in fostering discussions with the contractors and appreciate your patience and willingness to continue to work with staff on coming up with different designs. And let's get her going.

Thank you, commissioners.

Is that adequate guidance and direction?

It is adequate guidance, and we will get a final tree count to you before we sign any additional paperwork.

Thank you. And thank you all for your additional comments and clarifications. So we'll move on to item number, item B, discussing the Workforce Housing Sales Tax Policy Manual Resolution, presentation by Stephanie Peters.

Peterson I'm sorry good evening commissioners My intent here is to keep this pretty short and then give you all plenty of time to discuss amongst yourself and hopefully gain Consensus on where you would like this policy to go. So this evening. We're just focusing on the workforce housing sales tax policy We do have three other housing policies that have been adopted. But tonight our focus is is this one and So kind of the way that I approached this is I took our current policy and I kind of did a track changes via presentation. So here I have what the existing language is and then a recommendation that I would make on striking out some of that language. So that's what you see in the gray and then the black would be additional language that we could add. So all of our policies, they have an objective. It's what are we trying to achieve by having this tool? What I would recommend here is that we strike out the workforce The term workforce housing we've had a lot of conversations about that But we can just say within a defined range then that gives you the opportunity Anytime a proposal comes before you you get to determine if that specific project is within whatever range you want it to be at that time and Um, we did have at one point, uh, the, the last part of that sentence is that we wanted to give priority to existing, to projects that utilize existing public infrastructure. Uh, we've heard from you that the infill, uh, component of housing is maybe something that you don't necessarily desire. So we could take that out. It doesn't mean that we don't, uh, we don't incentivize projects that are utilizing existing public infrastructure, but it also doesn't give a developer maybe a different idea than what you're intending. And there then at the bottom is another way just to say that we're encouraging the private development of a variety of different, or it's the same statement as above, just a different way of stating it, if you prefer to that better. So there were four requirements within the policy. My recommendation is that we eliminate the third one, that the proposed units are within the workforce housing range. Again, that just gives you flexibility as projects come before you. All of those others I think are important to keep so that we can properly vet an application before it gets before you. One of the biggest- Stephanie, can I interrupt? Yes, absolutely.

So when I was preparing for tonight, kind of bothers me a bit, given that we have been promoting this and that stipulation within the sales tax language is that we are going to be focusing on workforce housing. I know we've talked as a group about looking at housing that doesn't quite fit in that range, but it's usually less than what we would typically, could we not completely eliminate the language referring to workforce housing but qualify it by saying, or another band of percent of AMI lower than workforce? I feel uncomfortable given that this is specifically what this sales tax is intended for, moving away from referring to it.

I get what you're saying. Yeah, I think that's part of the discussion. I have a couple of other slides to give you perspective on what that workforce housing range might be. But unless we, if we're able to come to consensus tonight on a definition, we can certainly keep it in there. If we cannot, it would maybe be better to strike that and then each time a proposal comes before you all, you get to define is it that within your range or not without having this policy kind of dictate what that range is. I'm open to it either way. This is your policy. It's just a suggestion based on feedback that we've heard to date. So something I heard quite a bit from applicants, I think that you all have as well, is that the application cycles that only occur in April and October are rather problematic because construction doesn't just happen in April and October. It's a year-round activity. So our recommendation would be that we would take applications to the commission four times a year. So that would, we would have this kind of rolling application period once we, and there's a couple of different ways that this can work, but either we set months that we bring those to you for consideration, or we can say after we have a couple in hand, we can bring those before the commission. But I do think that this change would be something that our development community would be rather pleased with. Some additional modifications that would be made to the policy that weren't really easy to put in a track changes format. First, there's a two phased approach to our applications. There's a preliminary application that the applicant has to go through. It's to verify that they meet these four requirements. That's really the only purpose. We don't need that anymore. It's just an extra step for the applicant and it's an extra step for city staff. So we would eliminate that preliminary application. They would just move straight to a formal. We would also add language that if an application is not taken to the commission within six months because the applicant hasn't moved forward, then it's going to be considered withdrawn. We do have, I think, just one application at this point that's been out there for well over a year that's never moved forward. That was under a different policy, but we want to make sure the same thing doesn't happen here. We would bring all projects to the commission for consideration. That would be something very clearly stated in the policy. So anything that we get, you guys would see. And then we do not currently have a scoring process within the policy. That was struck with the draft that was adopted. However, and I would say that we haven't received a lot of applications. So in the October round, we received one. In the April round of this year, we received one. So the initial thought was that we were going to have a lot of applications in any given period, and that scoring process would allow you to better evaluate which ones receive funding. We would just make a statement that at any point, the commission could direct staff to prepare a scoring matrix to use to evaluate those projects if you would like us to. This is kind of an area that I think that we need additional direction on if you want to keep what we have or if you want to make changes. So here's the funding limitations that we currently have in the policy. The one that's underlined there, that second bullet point, that's the one that most applications bumped up against. where no more than 10% of the total project cost could come from workforce housing. We would recommend eliminating the projects within the TIF language, mostly just with the feedback. Based on rental projects, most of what would happen within our TIF district would be a rental project. And that's also in an area that is something that you have expressed some concern about that being student housing rather than workforce housing. So this is part of our conversation of how we define workforce housing. And I really want to clarify here that this is for new units. You can easily go somewhere in our community and probably find something for $500, maybe even less. But when we're talking about new units, the cost of construction just continues to increase. So the top table here, this is 50% area median income or below. This is Section 8 housing. This is subsidized housing that Manhattan Housing Authority provides. And so these are fair market rents that HUD just released, I think it was last month, that they released these for 2026. I will tell you that these rates for 50% AMI and below are almost identical to what we had for our workforce housing last year. That is how expensive housing is. That is how expensive cost of living is. So what HUD is saying is 50% area median income, a studio apartment, MHA could, if they wanted to, charge $870. The bottom table, this is also from HUD. This is the low income housing tax credit. So these are projects like the Unger Complex. There's one up at Colbert, Cypress Ridge, that's a LIHTC project. These are subsidized housing units as well. This is 80%. And you can see there what a private developer, because that's who develops a lot of our LIHTC projects, what they could charge for that 80% considered low-income type of housing. Unfortunately, HUD stops here. They don't provide us any additional guidance because they're really about low income housing. So we have to use these as a way to kind of look at our housing market and if we wanted to exceed the 80%. So for owner occupied, this is not something that HUD provides us with. We have to do a calculation internally. So this upper end of 120% area median income, that would equate to a home price of about $336,000. That is the same upper end that we used in 2025. What I will call your attention to is here at the bottom, HUD does give us a median family income. For 2026, it is 112,000. In 2025, our median family income was 90,000. They use these numbers to help calculate fair market rents and the LIHTC rates. This is a table you're probably very familiar with by now, but it has not changed since our last work session on workforce housing. We have the project still pending from your April round. But I think really what this conversation boils down to is how you want to use $800,000 a year. And if you can help us to provide some direction on where you want to go with this funding, I think that we would be able to bring back a policy that you see fits If we're still struggling to define or to gain consensus on how we want to use this money, I would recommend that we keep our policy very broad, and we just continue to bring every project to you for you to evaluate and determine if that meets your definition of the workforce housing sales tax. That is what I have for you. I would be happy to stand for any question, but I will also sit down at any point and allow you guys to talk amongst yourselves.

Stephanie, I... Your last comment is a little unsettling because the whole rationale for having a policy is to have a set of standards, to have a consistent guideline that our developers can be looking at, that our housing authority can be looking at. I would very heartily, vocally oppose having no standard and having no limit such that every single project is going to be decided on the whim of who's sitting up here on that particular day. We've been talking about this for the three years, two and a half years that I've been on the commission now. I think if we want to make changes, we should be grappling with that right now. I don't know if we will make all the satisfactory changes tonight, but I disagree with your suggestions to remove the phrase workforce housing. That's what we're trying to accomplish here. And I don't like the idea of not having a targeted range of housing that we're looking for.

I would just say I think our development community would agree. I think they like having a little bit of the known of what you're looking for. If you can give us any sort of parameters of the type of project you're looking, that would be ideal to be able to insert it into the policy. That's something that they really, I think that has been helpful in the past.

Can you remind me, I apologize for not having it on the top of my head, are we using 80% of AMI as our bottom? 60. 60. I still think that given that we do have resources here from the Manhattan Housing Authority from the Manhattan Housing Partnership? Yes, I can never remember. Manhattan Area Housing Partnership. That we do have developers who have access to LIHTC support. I think that there is still a demand for this segment of housing. Some of the resources that I've looked at, do we specify anywhere the use of rehabilitating existing properties or second story or upper story apartments or housing?

So one of our core requirements of all the policies as they're written now is you have to have a gain of two or more units. So rehabilitation would not, as it's written now, would not be an eligible expense because we were, at the time, trying to generate more housing units. But we do have, as far as for rehab, we do use a portion of the workforce housing sales tax. We contract with Habitat for Humanity to do rehab for families that are 120% AMI and below. So you could add a second story if you're able to create two or more units, as it's written currently. That's of course up to you if you want to adjust that.

At one time, nothing was decided, but I thought we discussed that there were several of us that were not excited about the 120%. I thought we had suggested 90 or 100 was a range to try to encourage housing other than the 120. Am I mistaken or misunderstood what I thought we were doing?

That was part of the conversation. I think it was just seeing if there were three of you that were in alignment, that that's the direction you wanted to move.

And one other thing, again, I don't live in your world, so I don't understand all of your paperwork, but if we take that defined range where it talks about housing structure types within the defined range, do we actually have something that says what our defined range is now?

Currently, yes. It goes from 60% to 120% AMI. It's based on rental units and on sale price. Those rental units would look very similar to this.

So that defined range talks about that income issue, nothing else?

It talks about number of people in the family. So the number per- Yeah, bedroom count.

It's the number of bedrooms. So the table looks very similar to what's on the screen.

Stephanie, I wonder if instead of saying a defined range, we said the defined range. Because when I read that, I want to say, OK, is there a defined, you know, I mean.

You're saying take the out right here?

I just say within the defined range, because we have defined the range, right?

Well, I think that's part of the conversation this evening, is that range still 60% to 120% AMI? Commissioner Morrison, you said You know, maybe it's 100% AMI is where you're comfortable. I think that's part of the conversation and the guidance that we need this evening. And if we come to that consensus this evening, I am more than happy to revise this and we can keep workforce housing range and we can say it's within this AMI. But I would say that knowing that, I give you these numbers because if we're going up to 100% AMI, it's going to be above this bottom table. Those rents will be higher than what is shown here.

Yeah, I'm agreeing on like a 90% AMI or 100% AMI. That's kind of more.

Okay. I am not. I've been reading other resources, and certainly we can develop our own policy, but across materials that are available through the Urban Institute, through law websites, through the Iowa Economic Development and Finance Authority, other sources consistently use that definition of either between 60 and 120 or 80 and 120. Now, we can express a preference for, lower cost housing, that that might be an extra box that that particular project ticks. But we've been hearing consistently from developers, and certainly the impact of tariffs in these last 12 months, 18 months, have had a tremendous impact on the inputs into construction materials, building anything, and I think if we make this too restrictive, A, we're getting very close to the LIHTC range where there are other resources that people can use, and B, we're cutting out any, I'm sure there's a reason why we've not had applications in the last six months or the last eight months, because the builders can't build at that level.

So I think you bring up an interesting point in that if you wanted to have the policy go up to 100% or 120%, you could say, but preference is given to projects that are at 80%, whatever that number is. So rather than having the projects within the TIF, you could say projects that are at 80% or below, and you could offer them an additional incentive. Because we know the construction cost is the same amount but they're charging less in rent. So that would be a way to incentivize somebody to get to a price point that you're looking to see.

The other, and I think this may have come with the Manhattan Infill Project, another way of grappling with this is to allow for a mix of rents charged such that you have market rate rents for some portion of your town homes or your apartments, but within that same complex you have below market rate units that they all look the same, but you're allowing the developer to recoup some of those costs by charging slightly higher rents for that proportion. And again, we don't really I think it did come up during the Manhattan infill discussions.

Yeah, that was with the KRC. Was it the? MIH. MIH, yeah, sorry, MIH. I think one of the things, I think that's a great idea. I do think one of the challenges we would have if we did allow a mix of rates, and I clearly wants Stephanie to weigh in on this conversation as well, would just be how we tracked and how we enforced. The thing that we had working to our advantage with that particular project is that they were also getting funding from the state. And so the state is working through the tracking and enforcement of those market, of those different rates.

You're right, yeah. We currently don't, for the workforce housing grants that we have awarded to date, there has been no compliance. That's not the right word. There's been no sort of reporting that they have to do. Now, several of these were tied with a property. That's not true. One of them was tied with a property tax abatement. And so they do have to report back on what their rents are for 10 years. But as of now, if you just received a workforce housing sales tax grant, you are issued that grant funding at different times in the process. It kind of depends on the project. But we don't go back and check, are you still charging this rate? Is this homeowner still paying this amount for their mortgage? That has not been something that we've done, just so you're aware.

So I just threw out a few comments here. And my comments focus more on ownership versus rental. There are a lot of projects out there being built to this day in the $300,000 range without city help. In my opinion, tax dollars, community tax dollars need to be helping uh... the lower in the two hundred thousand dollar range which nobody is building those without some kind of help they can't i've had several people show me that so if we if we want that two hundred thousand range available then that's where we need to be focusing our attention in my opinion and i think that puts us under that hundred percent AMI I don't really care about all those other studies you speak of that mention 60 or 80 up to 120 percent. Our tax dollars need to be helping where it's needed most, and I think that's in the 200,000 range. I think we ought to be focusing also more on upgrading existing structures, maybe putting more money into those programs than new. save some of our older homes versus tear them down and build multifamily dwellings on them and rezone single family areas. Let's try to avoid that. No tax abatements. Get that right out there. That's just No tax abatements. I think we need to study land trusts. I know a lot of people have talked about land trusts and how they work in other communities and options involving using this money to buy land and then make it available to developers for these lower, cheaper homes, lower-end homes. Clearly with these $200,000 homes, 10% of the project cost isn't enough. Maybe we look at 20%. But if we're doing that, we also need to be looking at the developer's profit margin. Every developer needs profit. I don't have fault with that. We just need to know how much profit they're getting going in if they're getting 20% of the cost in some kind of a subsidy. And that leads to the next question. If it's ownership, if somebody's buying these homes at below market prices, then there oughta be some kind of a clawback on the profit over the first five years or so, just like Josh does with his projects. If people sell after a year or two, Those are the kind of things I'm looking at, and also, if we're gonna call it workforce housing, let's distinguish that from student housing. My opinion, a lot of the projects we, several of them we supported were more student housing than workforce housing. I do think some of those units became workforce housing, so we just need to make sure we're not adding more student housing. That's not the objective here. Those are my thoughts.

So you brought up community land trust. That's actually, I don't have it within this slide deck, but at the very beginning of the policy, it talks about workforce housing and how it can be used. And so what really this is focused on is private development projects, but it also says in there that it can be used for Manhattan Housing Authority, for LIHTC support, Community land trust is specifically already included in there as an eligible expense. We would just need a developer to propose a project that includes a community land trust. It wouldn't necessarily go through this process because it kind of lives outside of what we're talking about this evening. Although certainly some of the principles as far as what the home prices are, the clawback portion, that would be part of that conversation as well. But that is included as an eligible expense. Two more that I'm, oh, the rehab that we have, the partnership with Habitat for Humanity, that's listed as an eligible expense. And then I think the fifth one was the private development projects.

The problem with the land purchase and all that is just finding the land.

That is difficult. That is one of the reasons why housing is so expensive here.

That's the problem.

Yeah, having been on the Manhattan Area Housing Partnership Board forever, finding lots is very, very difficult. But I would agree with Larry. You know, I thought the study we did, the housing study, was excellent. And it showed we needed houses across the board. But I think if we're using public tax dollars, we really need to focus in the lower middle class costs of housing and housing rents, those kinds of things, because we really need to find housing for people want to work here and really can't find the kind of housing that they need. I mean, I think the people who have the ability to buy a half a million dollar house, probably, we supposedly still need those, but probably can find something, you know, in their price category. I would urge us to, to really, yeah, try and see ways we can make that $200,000 house a doable activity. I realize

That's up to the developer. I don't know the solution there. They may have suggestions.

And I know that the Manhattan Area Housing Partnership has all kinds of tax incentives and things like that. So we can build them for $199,000. But just perhaps, I mean, I don't want to build something that's not up to par. But on the other hand, do they need granite cover table talks or that kind of thing. And I also think, I've always thought can we explore somehow other ways to help people get into housing like assistance on down payments and things like that that can get that young family over the threshold so they can get into housing and they can have a return on their housing and as it accrues in value then they can move up the scale.

Commissioners, I think one of the reasons we were so successful in 2025, the last year, that commission had really wrapped their heads around they wanted to use these funds for the end goal of getting more new workforce housing units in the market. So I would really challenge this commission to start thinking through what is that goal? And I have heard that we are looking at a price range. I've heard in the 200 range. But then that 200 range, of course, is still $100,000 difference there. So if we could really hone in on... where this commission wants to focus on price range wise. And then I think if we could really hone in on if we are more focused on new units or if we are more focused on trying to uh rehabilitate some of our existing housing or if we are more interested in maybe even doing something like a community land trust i think if this commission can build consensus around what that goal is on how they want to use these workforce housing sales tax dollars for the next 18 months that this commission is sitting on the dais i think that that would be very helpful for staff I'm still hearing a lot of different ideas from each of you on what we think we should be doing with these dollars.

I'm pretty much I'm in agreement with Larry with his commentary. I mean 100% AMI land trust I've been Stephanie, will you please pull your?

Chart back up there again. So I would just say that that 100 no the other one 100% AMI is at three hundred and eight thousand dollars and that's not What I'm hearing when I hear a two hundred thousand dollar range home. I

I said was under 300,000 okay and I also said 100% AMI okay thank you so under 100% AMI under 300,000 which is pretty close to the 308 so this median family income right here I don't remember if I said this this is a hundred percent AMI so this is the middle in our community

the middle ground of what people make is $112,000. That is one of the reasons why our 100% AMI is so much higher than a lot of communities. That's why that number looks so large is because that is the median income that our families make in this community.

I find it hard to believe that families in Manhattan have seen a $22,000 increase in their income over the past, yeah, one year. Yeah, I do. HUD, so I actually have them here. Is that because of the new basketball coach, or did he push everything up?

I'm not sure how HUD calculates these, but I've been tracking them since I've arrived in 2022. In 2022, it was 85,000. 2023, it was 100,000. 24, it was 92,000. Last year was 90, and this year is 112. So it is very, like, it has fluctuated. But that doesn't change the fact that when somebody goes to apply for LIHTC, these are the numbers they use based on that 100% median family income.

So tell me how you arrive at a $308,000 price from a $90,000 income.

It would be $112,000 income for here. And this is actually lower than what it would have been. I have a formula that I, so when we did our housing market analysis, This is very proprietary information that we got from our consultant on how they came up with how much a family makes, how much they can afford. But it's roughly about 30% of that income is what we use. But there's a more sophisticated formula that I have in a spreadsheet that I do not memorize. But I can certainly get that.

In the old days, it used to be about 2.5%. 2.5 times your annual income was what you could afford for a house.

I've always heard that too, Larry, but I do think what I've read recently is that housing expenses are higher, a greater percentage of people's earnings than they used to be.

Just as an FYI, the most recent building permits that I saw for the Manhattan infill project were at about 295.

And just to let you know, on average, building permits are about 25% less what the market value will be. So that's something that we found on average. Those are always lower than what they will end up selling for.

I concur. I'm happy to continue exploring land trusts. I don't agree with restricting ourselves to the 100% AMI, though, as I suggested, we could have an additional incentive should the developer be targeting that lower end of the target range. And I can't remember what the third point was, Danielle, that you mentioned.

Oh, new units versus rehabilitation.

You know, I think when we're talking about rehabilitation, my understanding is that Habitat is not spending more than how many thousands on a single house? 5,000 is it? 25,000.

But that's...

Sorry, I didn't understand your question. Sorry, I kind of didn't finish what I was saying. Is that sufficient to do a full rehab that would be necessary for an older home that hasn't been updated since the 1950s? Probably not. Do we want to start thinking about that as a target. My impression of the $25,000 that's being spent is for things like HVAC. Correct me if I'm wrong. Roofs, control issues. Nothing that's going to make the interior more attractive or more updated in order to appeal to a new homebuyer or a first-time homebuyer.

Yeah, that program really, the way it's written now is focused on structural integrity, making sure that that structure is wind tight, water tight, that it's not falling down. That certainly can change at your direction.

I'd be curious to hear from Josh at some point on how it's going this year with the applications for the money. I know we approved more money for this year and how that process is going.

Sure, I think there's probably a couple people here that are planning to speak

We jumped right into our feedback and or direction and conversation without hearing from the public. But perhaps we can take a break and hear. Oh, Andrew, I'm sorry if you want to say something.

I was just going to say that, I mean, I'd be interested in new builds and also extensive rehabs or even like the small rehabs. I mean, I think all of the above is what we need to be looking at.

Stephanie, why don't you take a break and we'll have some public comment. Sure. Thank you for your presentation. So is there anyone from the public who would like to make a comment?

I guess I'll go ahead and answer the question about the RRAP program update and then give a public comment on this, if that's okay. Yeah, the program's going well so far. We've seen a lot of interest, just like before. People call, they're kind of curious about the program, and then you do need to fill out the application, and there is underwriting requirements that we need to get through. A lot of follow-up with individuals who've marked that they're interested on our intake form. I would say that we probably, we do have more interest this year. Part of that is just the success from last year. People are telling their neighbors about the program. I think one message we need to continue to get out is that the household income that's eligible for this is up to 120% AMI. And so I think most people assume, and we hear this regularly, is if I don't qualify for traditional benefits, if I don't qualify for food stamps, for example, I might not qualify for this. So we need to keep getting the message out that, hey, you know, more likely than not to qualify for the program so and it's tax dollars so you've already paid them let's get it back on your site we are seeing everything from mobile home repairs you know we've got one right now where we just got it through the homeowners agreement phase so we're ready to order some some windows someone purchased a mobile home that did not quite look like the pictures and had some interesting choices for windows. So they're gonna have some real windows now. And roofs, we've got one comprehensive that was pretty challenging that just from a, construction repair point of view we met this homeowner and started working with them last year and so it's taken this amount of time to really you know move into okay we've walked the house a couple times we talked to you a couple times now we're getting documents together there's some support on getting those documents together getting into the estimating phase of that that's a pretty you know it's gonna be a pretty significant comprehensive just limiting the comprehensive on that to the roof and to a concern that we've got with the basement wall starting to buckle. So there'll be some structural stabilization. So you're not really doing any of the interior finishes, but you're stabilizing that home. So just that sort of work is pushing the project cost into the upper 30s, lower 40s. that's where we start trying to see are there additional sources of funding are there other things that that we have or is that something that we're going to need to lean on uh... our endowment at the community foundation for and and those gap and so we did that quite a bit last year i think we reported on that that With the $100,000 in funding, I believe we had about $50,000 worth of outside funding that we were able to secure on those projects. All those things do take time, so we don't want to sit around forever getting the perfect funding package, so it's kind of a balance. Sometimes you just got to go, especially with those comprehensives. So I think it's going well Just I do think we're just gonna have to keep reiterating on the income piece is Just because you don't qualify for other traditional assistance sources does not mean you don't qualify for this. We just need it Kind of keep reiterating that Yeah any questions on our app specifically no, but just um

Have you thought about any sort of non-traditional things you can do? I mean, I know Hillsboro has brought in those giant container things and built housing out of them. I'm not suggesting that, you know, but it's housing. It's a roof over somebody's head, and if you're really at the lower... class income. You know, have we talked about any of the kind of prefabs or, you know, there are things, you know, I know the K-State architecture class is building a prefab that they're going to put in.

Yeah, that's our house. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we have done... We've prefabricated and delivered two houses, two panelized, well, I guess we've delivered three prefabricated homes. Two panelized, one volumetric, the third was volumetric, in six pieces. The one that we're building right now behind the airport is in two pieces. And so we're just experimenting with that sort of innovation because, and then testing it and measuring like, is this actually creating affordability for the homeowner? You know, thinking bigger picture in Kansas, we know in some rural areas, you know, we're probably going to need to be delivering units. So prefab makes a little bit more sense when we're talking about rural delivery versus like, if our construction team could just drive to the site sometimes that's a little bit more controlled but yeah we're always pushing the kind of pushing the maybe not the edge of like material science or design but we're pushing what's happening here and we share that with the building community to say you don't have to take the risk on this let us work on it let us test it and if we find something that works we're an open book

You know, sometimes old ways are the best. The house behind our house is a Sears house that came as pieces from the Sears catalog and they built it into a three story full basement house in 19 something, 20. I just think we need to explore other opportunities and maybe with the cost of lumber, with the cost of everything, there may be some ways we can do some things innovative. I don't want to go back to sod houses.

Yeah, the Sears, I think my home is also a Sears home. So systems thinking with construction, it's like it's not a new thing. And yeah, it worked. So any other questions on RRAP specifically? Okay. Just want to say thank you for comments on what was presented tonight. Thanks to Stephanie and thanks to the Commission for staying patient with this topic and persevering. It is a conversation we've been having for several years. Craig and I were trying to think when exactly our Workforce Housing Steering Committee met to start you know, working on that, that study. And we think it was 2022. So that's four years now. And and I think what I appreciated about those discussions at the Workforce Housing Steering Committee was a certain level of strategic thinking and listening to other people in the space and and really figuring out kind of at a system level, you know, thinking about the Sears House like this also operates at the housing system level. What are the challenges that we're facing? Where are the flows stopping in the supply? And then, of course, there is a homeowner that needs to get through underwriting. So there's some real concerns and stress in that space. Despite the median family income going up, we remain a persistent poverty county. So we know we know people are really struggling still to access homes. And you probably hear that. And within that strategic conversation, I think that's kind of where I want to raise the plane a little bit. And I appreciate staying in the details. But if we just bring it up, a few of the strategies that we really honed in on during that initial Workforce Housing Steering Committee was a revolving instrument so so habitat the way we have historically done this through a mortgage product there's lots of other revolving instruments so we're kind of leaning into that sort of finance community land trust model we heard a lot about that on the workforce housing steering committee i think we had some passionate advocates in the space that convinced me to go and get one of those started in the community took us two years to do it We did it. We have several homes in trust now. The third piece is a community asset transition program, CAT, and really finding a way that we can strategically acquire properties and we can either rehabilitate those properties, we can, if necessary, demolish those properties, and then abate the conditions on the site that are incredibly risky for the private market. And that private market, we hear that a lot, is that there is risk in this, and they're going to bake that risk into the cost. And whether that's a risk of time or whether that's a risk of real cost, they've got to bake that in, and it kills projects. And so I did send a letter that I'm happy to answer questions on last night proposing that we use these funds to support the community land trust acquisition process where it can do that cat activity. It can go out and actually purchase properties and it can, you know, de-risk the situation for that private developer that right now is having to bake the risk into it. And instead of, you know, these funds being used one time, $25,000, can I finish this thought? $25,000 at a time, one time. And then that affordability is lost. Really thinking about how you can get into that site strategically, de-risk it for the future development, and then you can put a $25,000 permanent subsidy plus the discount of the land acquisition cost, which is also a huge barrier for our builders. And in exchange for that, that value you're creating for that resident, they will exchange the permanent affordability of that property. And so you're making your $25,000 go significantly further. I mean, what we're seeing over in Lawrence is they're seeing everywhere from like, I think Rebecca said, seven to one return on investment on. Because over time, and that's especially true in a cyclical community like this, you're going to see the savings increase because of the limited resale formula that's inherent in the land trust mechanism So the proposal that I sent is very, very high level.

Mayor, Jack, and commissioners, I know we are all very interested in hearing Mr. Brewer talk about community land trust, but in the interest of following our policy, I think we have other folks in the audience who are interested in speaking. I have heard direction. I think I've seen at least three folks who are interested in hearing more about community land trust, so we can certainly bring this back at another work session. if that is amenable to you all.

Thank you. With that, happy to stand for any questions or call up later. Thank you.

Amber Starling, 408 Houston Street. I really appreciate Mayor Adamczak's pointed and fierce pushback on maintaining definitions. And I also appreciate Commissioner Fox's sentiments on subsidizing only what the market cannot independently create. Sure, there have been discussions in the community about what workforce housing means, but it has always been very clearly defined in Policy Resolution 120324-A, which aligns with the 2022 housing assessment, you know, the one that we paid for. This proposal, as it is, would allow the government to subsidize housing for high income and upper income families. And I'm sure that you can imagine how outrageous it would be to take taxes from a low income family in a rental house in Northview and hand it to someone building a brand new single family home in Colbert Hills. The sales tax was a ballot measure. The definitions are a load-bearing wall. Subsidizing luxury housing is not what your constituents agreed to. We want you to stick to the plan. They ask, what do we want? We want another Prairie Glen East. We want missing middle housing. We want a workforce housing apartment complex. We're fine if there are complications. We're fine if there are market rate or luxury units mixed into a complex, as long as those units aren't being subsidized. We're fine if you have to subsidize a higher percentage per unit because labor and materials costs have exploded. We get it. I've been to the gas station lately. I've also been to the grocery store, and I don't even want to talk about Menards. Its costs have definitely gone up. We're definitely fine with applying multiple years worth of this $800,000 a year to a multifamily project. Habitat for Humanity has even proposed a multifamily project that meets these metrics. If you eliminate the definition though, you guys are going to have to buy way more comfortable chairs.

Thank you, Amber.

Craig Laupe, 3821 Silverleaf Drive, Manhattan, Kansas. I am here to focus on the for sale side of the sales tax. Took some notes here, so I'll kind of go through them. But one, as a developer, we've asked multiple times to the city to create a written document that is that would prove to us as a builder what stipulations we need to stay within when we go to sell this like type product to the community. And there isn't one. So I challenge the commission to give direction to the city staff to create an agreement that a developer would need to sign to then put us in a position to know what we're saying yes to prior to you guys saying, yes, here's your funds. So I recommend that be a part of this. What I don't agree with, and this is a personal opinion, is putting parameters on payback after that property is sold. It creates a lot of chain effects down the line in the sale process, disclosures that create a potential burden to that type of property to be sold in the future, and you may not have buyers. Doesn't say you're not going to, but it could create issues there. It's been brought up multiple times already, but the AMI that you're trying to reach towards as a builder It's very, very difficult to make you get down to that $200,000 range with the subsidy at $25,000 or 10% of the total gross of that per unit cost. I highly recommend if you want to get to that level, you need to increase those parameters in this policy to allow these to be spent down. And the perfect example is a furnace at a house costs $8,500. guess what, in a 600 square foot house or 1,500 square foot house, guess what, it still costs $8,500. And so to my point, the square foot price doesn't change, it actually gets more expensive as you try to get lower and build smaller houses. That cost for some of those items and the build costs are still quite expensive and they don't change because of your square foot price. Acquisition cost of infill caught infill side of this Again, the land trust has been brought up I am in favor of that acquisition cost killed one of our projects over this year that acquisition cost of of a project that some of you up there have spoke with us about Personally outside of this Guess what killed that project? Not the only, but one of the things was acquisition of the current land. And so finding a way for some of these funds to go, that would be a good idea to help the builder then also then be able to build the unit at 150,000. So that acquisition cost of the current land to demo it, to build it, is part of the pilot Josh was speaking on there. Greenfield. I highly recommend adding this to the piece of the pie. And I am in support of the application going to more than two a year. And I'm also in support of getting rid of the pre-application process that was discussed earlier as well.

Thank you. Thank you. Commissioners, do you have additional comments? Sorry. Is there anyone else who would like to make a public comment? We will now close public comment on this topic. Commissioners, do you have additional remarks or comments or suggestions for the city manager or for Stephanie?

Well, it's going to be a process to figure this out. Hopefully, we've given you enough information. You can at least start on it.

Yeah I think we you all did receive some documentation from a developer a while back I think we'll dust that off and pull that out regarding what that incentive level could be possibly for approximately $250,000 home But what we are hearing just so we can be clear is that we are interested in using tax dollars to help incentivize housing products under 300,000 Which is that that 100% AMI range we are interested in seeing new homes, but also interested in rehabilitation and rebuild I Am hearing from our development community and from our community members that keeping a workforce housing definition is important, but possibly putting a preference towards that 100% AMI. And then also that we are interested in taking a look at those community land trust and what that could look like for us. Is there anything I'm missing for future work? Okay. Sounds good. I will touch base with Stephanie and her team, our planning and development team, and get a timeline back to you of when we can bring this back. But we do have pretty packed work session agendas the next couple weeks or so. Your next work session agenda will be June 23rd, where we will start kicking off budget conversations And then we will have the city managers recommended budget on June 30th. So we are definitely probably looking at July Before we can bring this back to you all if that's amenable Thank you July or August I think I heard Stephanie take a deep breath in back there We'll move on to our final item which has to do with

an update on the Oracle permitting and licensing system, although I don't see Jared in the room.

I'm just going to move over to the camera so I can catch his good side.

Mr. Wassinger, we are ready for you.

Sorry, Jared. I was looking stage. left instead of stage right.

My apologies, commissioners. I had a Dr. Pepper during the first two items tonight.

All right.

OK. Good evening, mayor and commissioners. Thank you. Just want to give you a little update on Oracle Permitting and Licensing, our new online system that's going to be launching here in a few weeks. Very excited to give this presentation because there's been a lot of work that has gone into this over the last 13 months, a lot of work from our staff to develop this and really kind of transform the way we do business with the business and development community. Just do want to give you a little bit of background on how we got to OPWL before I go into that update on the implementation and really what we've all done over this last year. And then just give you a little timeline on what's going to transpire over the next couple weeks to get us to this go-live period. And then I do want to take just an opportunity to pull up the system, walk you through it a little bit, give you kind of a sneak peek of how we're going to show this to the public and what the public will see here soon. I always just like to remind the governing body and the community about the strategic plan that we adopted five years ago. And we had multiple goals and action items Specifically pertaining to this area goal number one with a well-run city organization and how we can modernize our technology and software and systems But then this one really ties closely with our fifth goal of a strong and diversified local economy how do we support our existing businesses and how do we offer solutions and systems that will attract new businesses to the community and We began working with the Government Finance Officers Association, GFOA, back in 2021 to help us procure and replace our 30-year-old financial operating system, our IBM IAS 400. So that was really the first request for proposals process that we worked with GFOA on many years ago, about three years ago. And we chose Oracle Fusion as our new ERP That in and of itself was a 12 month implementation process that we did a few years ago and we went live with that last summer. So we've been live with our new ERP for almost a year now and that's been going great. We worked with GFOA on a similar procurement process to really streamline and modernize our permitting and licensing system. We have a very fragmented solution across multiple departments, some of them online solutions, some of them the application is online, but then everything else is kind of scattered. Others, we have people filling out PDFs or filling out paper applications when they're coming to City Hall or other locations. So we did a similar procurement, narrowed it down to 10 submittals, narrowed that down to five and had demos with many solutions, and then went with Oracle permitting and licensing. I do like to remind folks too that we're working on another modernization effort with our utility billing system for our customers. We are in the implementation process for that now and looking for a first quarter go live in 2027. So excited about that. And then we have always also talked about how we tie all this together with our asset management solution across the community. we're gonna work on getting permitting and licensing live and Utility billing and take a breather and then talk about asset management here in a couple years So we We chose Opal Oracle permitting and licensing because of just the intuitiveness of the solution Not only for city staff and how we process our applications workflows you know these these processes but also the ability of this solution to really be very transparent for the public. What you're seeing here is just a screenshot of an end user who's going to have an account with our online permitting and licensing system, see their open applications and processes. But when the staff is working in this system as well, they're going to see the exact same thing. We're going to be able to really talk with our customers and see what they're seeing, see what steps we're at in the process, whether it's internal or external, and it's gonna be just a great way to increase that transparency for residents, contractors, businesses. It's gonna tie in all the workflows that we're doing so that we know where we're at in a certain stage of a permit or a license. It has a lot of cool features too when it comes to plan review, digital plan review, reviewing applications and attachments. This has been about a 13-month implementation process, so we brought the OPWL contract back to you all in April of 2025. And it started with kickoff meetings in May. We did what we call sprints. So we chunked up the project into multiple four-week processes. Sprint zero was what we called just generating our backlog. We looked at everything that we're doing now. We found every application that we have out there, the format, the questions, the processes that we take today to get things from a submitted application to issuing someone a license or a permit and how they pay for it. And then we created these six sprints that we call them, where we were working to develop and configure this system. So we were working with our partners at Oracle and city staff to really build out the solution over the course of six months. During that time, too, we were also working with a lot of integrations that I'm going to be talking about, too, and migrating some of our existing data into this solution. These last two months, in April and May, we did what we call user acceptance testing, UAT. So we took every license permit process that we created in this system and we tested it from end to end. From creating an account, applying, having the workflow go through, making sure that the email communications were being sent, making sure that you could pay a fee. start a plan review session, inspect a permit and go through the inspection process. All those things we tested, each one of those records. And then we identified any bugs that we were finding, any things that needed to be changed. And there were some, nothing alarming by any means, but there were some things that we identified as critical that said, hey, If this isn't fixed, we can't go live. So we identified those. And then there was also some more smaller bugs that we found that, OK, we can get through the system and go live and then fix some of those things during the post go live month that we have and time that we have with Oracle. So we've been very busy over the last year. We have built and configured 39 licenses in this system, 27 permits. fourteen planning applications and processes and fourteen code enforcement issue types i do want to take a second to uh... acknowledge some of our city staff Over a year ago, when we were negotiating this contract with Oracle, we identified about 90. We call these records, so licenses, permits. In general, we call them records. That's the nomenclature that they use. But we identified 90 of them. And in order to save a couple hundred thousand dollars on this contract, we decided that we were going to configure half of these. with the support and help of our partners at Oracle. We could have paid them more money for them to just build all this for us, but we had a lot of staff who dedicated a lot of time on top of their current jobs. I want to mention Susie Mullen and Eric Matthews with Customer Service, David Graham and Iris Gilbert with Risk Reduction, Ann Gaziano and Lance Wackerla with Planning and Development, and Jordan Knight with Public Works. These are individuals who got their hands dirty in the system and learned how to build these processes, these applications, workflows, configure fees, all of these things so that, one, we could save the city some money, and two, after Go Live, when we lose that support, we can continue to keep the system up to date, make new changes, add new potential permits and licenses and applications in the future. So I really want to give them a kudos. I mentioned just all those things that we've configured and that Oracle configured with us. An intake form is a fancy word for an application, right? So all the questions and conditional logic that we put in so that people can type in a question or an answer, click a button, and then that helps calculate and start the process for the fees. Very complex workflows in a lot of these so that when an application is submitted, it automatically sends an email to the individual that says, we've received your application. When the status changes from approved to we need more info to this is being processed all those automations are occurring too fees are automatically calculating and letting them know even automations in the system so that when an application has been submitted and fees are owed and an individual hasn't paid fees they get a notice that hey you still have fees due that is going to help you pay those and move this workflow along all those things built into those workflows The FileMaker system is the system that we use within risk reduction in Manhattan Fire Department and have for over 30 years. So a lot of records that we are converting. So that was part of the process that Oracle and their partners with GovPath have been helping us convert all of that information because that is a system that is just no longer supported. So we needed to ensure that that information was transferred. David Graham and Iris Gilbert specifically have been working additional hours just to ensure that we could get all that history into this new system. Part of this integration came with a lot of Part of this implementation came with a lot of integrations. All of our GIS address parcel owner data is in this system, so when you're applying for a permit and you're selecting a parcel on the map, it is tied to all of our information so you know the same things that you see when you're looking at Riley County GIS. So you can see the parcel owner, the acreage, zoning layers that are on there. All those things are going to be tied to it. Bluebeam integration is just a really great integration, especially with some of our permits. I don't use Bluebeam a lot, but there are a lot of developers, a lot of contractors, our staff who use Bluebeam to electronically review plans all at one time. So you can have multiple people in a document making comments, providing feedback to the developer. All that can happen within plan review sessions within Opal. and you can start those sessions, use Bluebeam, you can finish a plan review session, and then all those attachments and comments are going to stay within Bluebeam, which is really, really great. Paymentus is our third-party payment provider that we use for utility billing, so we were able to integrate that as well, so we can have secure online payments through debit, credit, and ACH within this system. And then there was some integration work with just our Oracle Fusion ERP environment. This is all Oracle, one environment, but there is ways that we need all those 94 built and configured records to tie to an account code in our finance system so when someone pays a building permit, it goes to the right revenue line item. So I am very excited to announce officially that we're going live on June 29th. We have a lot of work still to do this month. We did let everyone know in the insider newsletter last Friday that we are going live. And if you're not a subscriber of the insider newsletter, you certainly can do that through our website. But on June 15th, we are going to start really a kickoff campaign. I'm working with all those departments I've talked about who are really tied to this system. I'm getting those spreadsheets of every email of every person that we do business with so that we can let them know about this system. And during that time, we want to kick off a new part of our website. It's going to be called our business and development part of our webpage and that's really going to direct you to OPWL, to permitting and licensing to apply, but also other resources that we offer when it comes to guidance on building and construction, planning and development and those things. Just to give you a little bit more detail on what we're doing, we have what we're calling a configuration cutoff date of Friday the 18th. So all those fixes that we're doing post our user acceptance testing, we have to do by the 18th. And then we are going to cut off, for a short period of time, cut off new transactions in FileMaker Pro because of that migration of data. And during that week, the 23rd, is when we're doing just all of our go-live prep to make sure we can flip the switch, for lack of a better phrase, for the 29th over the weekend. In our contract, we have what we call a go-no-go decision that we make just to, we're all on the same page, but I'm very confident that we're going to be saying, go live, and then we will go live on the 29th. And we have... scheduled, and this will be part of that email communication and campaign that we're going to do on the 15th, public meetings with the community. So we're going to have one here in the morning of Monday the 29th here in City Hall where we can kind of do what we're doing tonight, showcase the solution, but also allows people to bring computers, bring laptops, register their accounts because we are live and they can see those things. And then we're going to hold a few late afternoon and early morning sessions at the Manhattan Fire Department lecture hall and they were also working on holding a virtual session in that campaign there'll be like a link where you can register for a virtual session and then join us so people can do that at their computers at their offices and do something similar and then we're going to continue to work to promote this but then also provide as much support we can with how-to videos and instructions for the public too. There's going to be a lot of people who on June 29th will not need to log into this system, but in four months they're going to need to renew their business license. And we're going to continue to have conversations, phone calls, to show people how to use this. So while we're going to do a big effort early on, it's going to be, you know, just evolve over time as we continue to show people this solution. This is just a screenshot of kind of the website, webpage that's gonna go live on June 15th. So when you're on the homepage, you can hover to business and development. That tab is there now, but right now it directs you to economic development and some other business resources in the community. But it's gonna take you to this new page where you can click a button that's gonna take you right to OPWL. to create or sign into your account you know a button that'll take you right to our page that i'm going to show you here soon that just has all of our licenses and permits that you can apply for and then other just resources that we have available on our website but we really want to get into one place people don't necessarily care that risk reduction oversees a certain part of development or planning oversees another We know people just need to come to an area where they can figure out where they need to go without having to know necessarily what department it is. So that'll be part of that Go Live, and I'm excited for that as well. Any questions before I show you the solution?

Could we go back to the calendar?

Of course.

You've got two June 23rds on there. Oh, no.

goodness so this is the 22nd right here this is a word document I used the same go live calendar for ERP and the dates back in 2025 didn't line up so I hand typed to make this work so thank you for catching that Commissioner I'll make sure that's updated

June 23rd is a Tuesday. We will be having our first budget work session. We will be covering valuation.

Oh, no. So what do we got here? 19th, 20th?

You got it right. 23rd is on a Tuesday.

22nd, 23rd is the work session? Yeah. Okay, excellent.

I just want to make sure commissioners know 23rd is a Tuesday.

I don't want to mess them up and then not show up.

Not a Monday. Thank you.

22nd then is when you're doing the...

Nothing will be happening on the 22nd. The 29th, which I know that is correct. It is on Monday. It's the 29th. We're going live. Get excited. So that date is right.

Okay.

So if your only business with the city is you buy water from the city, do water customers get accounts on this or...?

Nope, this is a separate system. I mentioned earlier, right now you have your water billing account, which isn't really a lot. You log in and pay your bill. That'll be a new system and solution that'll go live in 2027. That was SpritePoint, which we approved that contract. I can't even remember now, but we're going on about six months. I think it was last fall where we did that. And yeah, we're working on that new solution for our customers to have a much more robust way to see their bill and pay their bill. But this is the City of Manhattan's online permitting and licensing system. This is that landing page. If you would have clicked create or sign into your account, there's a register button where individuals can fill out their account details and accept our terms of use and register. Just like any other solution, you're going to get an email with a verification to know that it's you, just to authenticate that like you have to with pretty much any other account that you create. But then you can also sign in using my Gmail account. This is our fake public user, just so you know. Let me make sure I got the right password. Let's see if this works. Okay, there we go. This is getting into the weeds, but we're in our development environment right now with Oracle. It's great. We have multiple environments, our development environment, our test environment, and then our production environment. So right now when we're using ERP and doing all our financials and requisitions and accounting work at the city, we're in our production environment. When we click Go Live, we're all going to be in our production environment. But when we do testing and when we're creating new forms or applications or tweaking some things, we can go into our test environment without messing up the whole system. So this is one of our test environments that we have here. But when you sign in, you can see here, much like a lot of other online accounts, you got your notifications. We've done a lot of testing in here on this account. So I have over 100 notifications about all the permits and licenses that this individual's applied for. And you can manage your account. You can see here just some things like action needed. Looks like I owe $85 on a couple of applications that I have, so I could go ahead and make those payments. One thing I want to mention here is code enforcement is going through this as well. So this is now where you will go to report code violations. So we are kind of splitting duties with the C-Click Fix mobile app, which is really going to be more towards public-facing things, potholes, issues in parks, things like that. Whereas if there's a specific code violation that you want to report, you would go here, and then that would start that process so you can click here and see the issue types. Very similar to what C-Click Fix is where you could click some of these things and submit a report. And then you could of course track your issues here. Here's one I submitted for Fire Station 2. Chief French has been abandoning multiple refrigerators. Apparently that's against the code so I wanted to want to let folks know that the account summary is a great tool here too where you can just see all the applications licenses that you're working on one thing I want to mention too is this projects tab right here so you can actually city staff or members of the public can create what we call a project so you've seen a lot of these things that from beginning to end they take a lot of applications. They're in front of you a lot of times because you did a pre-application meeting and then you did a rezoning and then you got a building permit issued. So you're able to, this example that we did for Cedarhurst in Manhattan, we were able to create a project and actually link multiple transactions together so you can see everything that's happened for one project. So that's a really neat thing that we're going to be able to track. And when we go live, it won't be this slow because they put all their speed to the production environment. So sometimes our development and test environments are a little slow, just to note. But then we have our application page here. You can click apply and then it's gonna list all of those permits, licenses that we had talked about that we have configured here. We created these buckets that we can tweak and change over time too, but really put in these areas with definitions of whether you're looking for a permit or if it's an occupational license or I know I need to get my tree license so I can just type in tree and click tree maintenance license, click on that, get an understanding of what the application is and then start the application process and go through it and start filling out your form. And then the only other thing I really want to show you, I could spend until the meeting ends going through a lot of this stuff. But just to give you an idea of what the members of the public can see as it relates to their applications right here, there's probably only going to be a handful of people who are going to be having as many applications as this, but as you can see, I can look at all my permits. I could see what status it is in. I could see the property. I could go to my licenses or my planning applications and see where those are at. And then you can go into these and really see the full application. And here's just the only one I'll show you, but it just gives you an idea of what you can see. I wanted to show you this subdivision application here, just everything that kind of goes in to these. But I can dive into my specific application. I could see all the details, property information, attachments. You can relate other transactions to these things. You can go directly to the workflow as an applicant and see, all right, where are we at in the process? Is it my turn? Is this ball in my court? Am I waiting on something from the city? So you can go through all of these things, whether it's a public hearing, a plan review, and see whether it's completed, how many days it took. And then I mentioned here plan reviews puts all those conversations that we're having with developers, with our architects, our contractors, and puts all that plan review into this area. And you can have multiple review cycles and see all of that information. And the last thing I want to mention is contacts. So we have a lot of people in the community who work together on these projects. So if I work for DHS, as an example, and I'm applying for a permit, but I want my architect at Anderson Knight to also be on this application, I can go into contacts and add that architect so that they can view and see and even comment on behalf of us on a project. So another really cool feature there. I'll stop because I'll just keep talking. Any questions?

Did you find this a fun project to work on?

There's so many.

Jared, you did compliment and acknowledge the work of so many staff members on this, and I would like to... Underscore our appreciation for that as well. It was no small task And I'd like to call attention of the other commissioners to the fact that you did this while Oracle was laying off workers and There were external factors that caused the team to have to work with new advisors and consultants as this was going on and

Yep. About 10 months in, pretty much our whole implementation team that we've been working with for so long and really understood how we operate and our nomenclature and all the things that we do, we're no longer there. So we got new individuals from Oracle to help us get to the finish line who have been great and really jumped into to help us get here. But yeah, that was a fun hurdle.

I get the feeling this is why we need all these data centers that we're building around the country.

That's part of it, I think.

One thing I think this highlights, and I've mentioned it, I've become increasingly aware, even this evening, Director Johnson commented on a KDOT project that will be taking place in 2030. And four years out, we are already starting to consider how our plans are intersect with KDOTs and how do we optimize our collaborations but there are external forces that impact our decision making our ability to continue our work and I think it's important for the public to understand it's not always us dragging our feet or not wanting to make decisions or have things happen rapidly but there are a number of factors that get taken into each of these decisions. So, Jared, thank you for that, and congratulations. It's been a, between the ERP installation, this, it's been a substantial project, so congratulations to you and your whole team. Thank you.

I will move to adjourn.

A public comment? Oh. Is there anyone in the public who would like to make any remarks?

Okay.

I take it not. Public comment will be closed.

I just wanted to say before I move to adjourn, I would just like to invite you all to see the bison arrive next Monday. We have a crane. I don't know what time, afternoon.

This is at the Discovery Center.

At the Discovery Center.

So I move to adjourn.

Second.

All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Thank you all for your work. Thank you for your participation.