Planning and Zoning Commission - workshop

All right, good evening, everybody. It's 5 o'clock. I want to welcome you to the City of Titusville City Council Budget Workshop, August 4th, 2026 at 5 p.m. We'll call this meeting to order. Bow our heads in a moment of silence for our invocation, please. Thank you. Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

All right.

Sorry, I lost my agenda, so I'm just trying to pick up.

All right.

We're on to 4A, which is the staff presentation. Question for this board. Do you guys want to do petitions and requests from the public now? Get into the staff presentation. What do you guys want to do? BECAUSE IT JUST SEEMS ODD TO ME THAT WE HAVE PETITIONS KIND OF RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TWO, EITHER DO IT AT THE BEGINNING OR AT THE END. BECAUSE I THINK THIS IS GOING TO BE MORE OF AN INTERACTIVE BUDGET WORKSHOP WITH STAFF AND THE COUNCIL.

NO?

ALL RIGHT. ALL RIGHT. SO NOW WE'RE GOING TO DO PETITIONS AND REQUESTS FROM THE PUBLIC, NON-AGENDA ITEMS. OH, SORRY. IT IS SPECIFICALLY ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP. SO IT HAS TO BE ABOUT THE BUDGET. MY APOLOGIES. SPECIAL MEETING RULES. All right. Mr. Buchanan.

Good evening, Mayor and City Council. My name is Stuart Buchanan. I am a resident of the city of Titusville. And I'm here tonight to ask you to please consider some items in your proposed budgets. I handed you out a copy of a letter that I wrote along with some photos that I took on the roadways. I just prepared this this afternoon in some haste, so I do see two spelling errors. The first one is I would ask that you please consider adding resources to our police department. You'll see in the photos the electrical bikes and golf carts, which are untagged, not licensed. They've become prevalent on the roadways. They're in the drive lanes on US 1, Hopkins, Highway 50. These electric bikes actually drive down the center of US 1 with cars on both sides. It's going to be ridiculous, and I think we need to increase the budget and give our police department the resources they need to address it. THE SECOND ITEM IS CODE ENFORCEMENT. I'M NOT SURE WHETHER, BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY FTEs WE HAVE AND WHETHER THEY'RE CURRENTLY FILLED, IF WE NEED TO INCREASE THE NUMBER OF CODE OFFICERS OR IF WE NEED TO CHANGE THE PAY RATE OF THE CODE OFFICERS SO THAT WE CAN ATTRACT APPLICANTS. BUT CODE ENFORCEMENT, ESPECIALLY IN AN AGING CITY LIKE TEXAS IS VERY IMPORTANT. AS I MENTIONED IN MY LETTER, IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT, I WOULD ENCOURAGE YOU TO READ. fixing broken windows and restoring and reducing crime in our community. It's a landmark publication. It was done in the 80s and it still holds true today. Finally, I'd like to talk about what would be necessary to increase the budget of the City Attorney's Office so that they have the ability to do the same actions that the City of Palm Bay City Attorney's Office does. So it's my understanding, and I've talked about it in the letter in more detail, But a couple of individuals that have been trying to cause our elderly residents to crash their cars, I've seen them myself multiple times. One of them is on a bicycle on US 1. He keeps looking over his shoulder when he sees an elderly driver. He pulls the bike out in front of him to cause him to be rear-ended or to avoid hitting him to crash. Then he circles the car laughing hysterically. He thinks this is funny. The second homeless guy I'm sure all of you have seen, he's the one that stands on the curb of the roadway. And as the driver pulls up, he leans into the window and screams at the driver. He sometimes beats the windshield with palm fronds or survey stakes or whatever he can find to try and get the drivers to crash. It's my understanding he's been arrested several times. But, you know, those kind of – Misdemeanors, you know, the state attorney is very busy. So in what the city of Palm Bay did was the city of Palm Bay City Attorney's Office got permission to prosecute cases on behalf of the city. In other words, there they've been given permission to prosecute certain cases on behalf of the city. So the state attorney doesn't have to do that. Thank you very much for allowing me to speak.

Thank you. Mr. Johnson, would you like to go next?

This is about the budget, and I'm holding up this money like I've done before, but this is for something else. This is about a budget item, and that is the budget item which is not included in here. So what I'm doing is I'm offering anybody, the first person who does it, $100 who will obtain a sane professional engineer. I consider myself sane. maybe you don't, who will write or publicly address council and Hill will dispute me by claiming that the two dams at the senior center are legal or not legal. In fact, the city has removed three illegal dams. There's two at the, and the reason I'm saying that this is an important issue because it should be on your budget. Your budget should include removing this dam because it's doing what? It is contributing to the flooding of homes. It's contributing to the loss of property, what these dams are, and they're taking property without legal process. That's something that has to do with your oath of office in the Constitution. So that's what I'm asking you to do is to also to recognize the city's false sustainability report. This budget is based upon things which were from the false sustainability report. In other words, they don't admit to the stormwater management plan city's failure to implement the stormwater management plan, which includes such things as legal positive outfall, maintenance of ditches, and so forth. So this budget is deficient because it doesn't include many things that should be on there that you're Now, I mentioned about this illegal dam. Here's some reasons why it's illegal, the two dams at the Senior Center. No compensatory storage. That's required by law. No survey of the flooded property. That's required by law. No survey of wetlands change. That's required. Violation of Amendment Number 14 of the Constitution. Well, we've gone over that before. That's the new process of law. And no examination and permit from FEMA prior to installation of these dams. These dams should be on the budget this time. I'm asking you to do that because... My goodness, these people deserve, they deserve less flooding of their homes. And that's what these illegal dams are doing. Any questions? I hope you got some questions.

Thank you very much, Mr. Johnson. Anybody else?

My name is John Daco. It's time to restore trust and remove the burden off our citizens. I'm a lieutenant with Brevard County Fire Rescue. I work at a firehouse that covers the northern parts of the city. Titusville, I see firsthand every shift, how our failing infrastructure impacts our neighborhoods and affects the lives of those that live there. It's also affecting them financially and psychologically. I'd like to know if the city administration is going to consider commissioning a forensic audit of the city. Before raising our millage rate, before increasing our utility rates, and before securing additional debts, our citizens deserve a complete forensic audit of the city. Accountability must start today. I'd also like to know what steps is the city taking today to prepare for the potential loss of property tax revenue should the property tax measure pass this coming November. Waiting until after the election is not a plan. The city should have already explored every available option to protect our essential services while removing the burden off our citizens. If the city administration is not going to complete a forensic audit of the city, I believe the city council should rewrite its city charter. The city charter should reflect the city of Titusville of today, not the city of Titusville from 1963. By rewriting the city charter, we can increase accountability and transparency because those two things are currently lacking in our current city charter. I don't have all the answers, but I do believe there are solutions worth pursuing. The city should aggressively pursue public private partnerships with aerospace industry and our major employers to help modernize our aging infrastructure. We should maximize federal grants, DEP grants, EPA grants and other opportunities because investing in our infrastructure Protects our neighborhoods from flooding and restores the health of the Indian River Lagoon. Another creative idea is going to be an infrastructure sales tax, but the city must begin working with their state legislators and the governor because it's going to need all the flexibility can to find the revenue that it potentially may lose this coming November. As it stands today, Brevard County is the only entity that can implement an infrastructure surtax. The city should not rely on the county for revenue. The city should be in control of its own destiny concerning revenue sources. Every day, thousands of visitors come through our city. Hundreds of thousands of visitors line our shorelines every year to watch rocket launches. This infrastructure surtax revenue can help remove the burden off our citizens. It's time to future proof our city, make it stronger for the citizens that are here today and for those are here for tomorrow that will be here tomorrow and we must begin removing the burden and putting our citizens first. Thank you.

Thank you. Anybody else? Fun fact about the infrastructure sales tax. I said, fun fact about the infrastructure sales tax. You hit the nail on the head. Only the county can do it. Your time's up. Thank you. I didn't know if you had questions. Nope. I'm rebuttaling what you just said. Infrastructure sales tax can only be done at the county level, and it's up to 1%. Currently, half a percent is currently being used. Do you know what it's being used for? It's being used for... That's right. It is. So thank you, sir. Thank you. So we again be very much in favor of getting the state legislature to allow us to do something like that. But I think that's a heavy lift and it's going to take a little while, but. whether it passes or doesn't pass, once it passes, because I anticipate it will, there will be a bunch of enabling legislation to follow. And so I've already been brainstorming ideas with our state reps to talk about some of that enabling legislation to help offload administrative costs for our city. But thank you for bringing that up. Did you have something?

Tim Curtis. How much is it going to cost? Do y'all have a cost of how much the infrastructure is going to cost to repair the infrastructure in this city? Does anybody?

Kevin, what did we figure out one day? What was it, a half a billion dollars, three quarter of a billion dollars for everything? Half a billion dollars?

I have it. Where are y'all going to get the money from? Ms. Musco, so where are y'all going to get the money from? Anybody? I mean, I still got two minutes and 20 seconds left. Can I get an answer of where we're going to get the money from? Huh? I mean, I got a plan for that, but I'd like to say that another time, but do you know where we're going to get the money from? Thank you very much.

Thank you. All right, that concludes petitions and requests for public comment regarding this special meeting. Is it city manager or assistant city manager that's going to lead us off?

I'm going to go ahead and go through the slides, sir.

All right.

As the agenda states, we're going to have a presentation much shorter than previous years and a departure from last year. We're just going to focus directly on the fund by fund comparisons, looking at the variances from the FY26 revised to the FY27 proposed. Then at the end of about 30 slides, I'll turn it over to our new employee health benefits advisor, Accentria, who's going to go over the EMPLOYEE HEALTH BENEFIT PROGRAM FOR FY27. AS YOU KNOW, THAT'S A $10 MILLION PROGRAM. THAT'S A SIGNIFICANT COST DRIVER FOR THE CITY. AFTER THAT, WE'LL THEN TURN OVER THE REST OF THE MEETING TO CITY COUNCIL FOR DISCUSSION ON THE BUDGET. SO WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, WE'LL GO AHEAD AND GET STARTED WITH THE PRESENTATION. ON THE COVER SLIDE, YOU'LL SEE THAT THE FY26 ALL FUNDS BUDGET FOR THE CITY, WHICH INCLUDES EVERYTHING FROM INTERNAL SERVICE, ENTERPRISE, GENERAL FUND, IT'S $178 MILLION. THE FY27 PROPOSED IS $180 MILLION, WHICH IS A DELTA OF 1.7 MILLION OR ABOUT 1% DIFFERENCE. AGAIN, $180 MILLION IS PROPOSED. SOME OF THE BUDGET HIGHLIGHTS THE CITY MANAGEMENT PROPOSED BUDGET, WHICH WAS PRESENTED TO COUNCIL AT THE END OF JULY, WAS BALANCED WITH A MILLAGE OF 6.200 MILLS, WHICH IS A 1.9% INCREASE OVER ROLLBACK. NOW, IF COUNCIL SO DESIRES, WE CAN GO BACK TO THE ROLLBACK RATE, WHICH WOULD PRESENT NO TAX INCREASE of 6.0812 mils, we'd have to look at adding about or subtracting about $500,000. And we can do that by taking a look at some of the revenue projections SOME VACANCY SOFT HIRINGS AND REVENUES AND ALSO LOOKING AT THE RESERVE. WE CAN DO IT WITHOUT MUCH IMPACT ON THE OPERATIONAL. SO THAT'S A CONSIDERATION IN YOUR DISCUSSIONS IF YOU CHOOSE TO DIRECT US TO REDUCE THE BUDGET DOWN TO ROLLBACK. NOW, THE GENERAL FUND EXPENDITURES HAVE DECLINED 3.5%. You'll see that $67 million was the revised general fund in 1970. 2026, 67 MILLION, AND IT'S GOING TO BE 64.6 MILLION PROPOSED. STAFFING LEVELS HAVE BEEN REDUCED TO 596 FROM 601. FOR COMPARISON, BACK IN 2005, WE WERE AT 430 FTE, STEADILY INCREASED, OUTPACING POPULATION. LAST YEAR WE HAD 601 FTE. And our goal initially through the Tiger team was to get to 590. We were able to get to 596 using metric-based research. And we also have some additional initiatives which will be coming for council to further reduce that. So we are earnestly looking at reducing staffing. As you know, personnel costs are 67% of our budget. So wherever we can reduce costs by still maintaining level of service, we're gonna try to do that.

City Attorney, did you have something, or is that Tom talking? It's showing up on my thing as City Attorney.

No.

Okay, I can't see the red thing. Thank you. I was just making sure you weren't trying to chime in already and say, all right, we broke it. But I do have a question, Mr. City Manager, while I got you talking about the revenue. So in FY26, we were projected revenues of $67 million. Currently, year-to-date, we're at $50.8 million. And that's with two months remaining.

Mm-hmm.

So if you actuaried out 67 million over 12 months, it's roughly 11 million a month. So you add 11 million for the remaining two months. So how are we supposed to get to our revenues that we projected for this year, given that we've collected 100% of the Avaloram taxes?

Well, I think more like 95% of ad valorem. We never get to 100%. But the revenue projections are not linear. They are seasonal. So I would turn it over to finance to explain the seasonality of the revenue collections and how we get to 67. And if 67 is still our projected number.

Yeah, and just so you know, the thing that you just emailed me today of our year-to-day actuals from start of fiscal through the end of July, it shows we've actually collected 101.07% of our ad valorem taxes. So we actually did better than we thought.

Yeah, no, we budget those at 95%, so that's why we'll collect above. So we do have three large items that are outstanding on the revenue side. Install person proceeds over $3 million waiting to come in, which is our repayment for debt on the vehicles. Then we also have $1.6 million of assigned fund balances used in the current year budget, which is fund balance, not cash coming in from outside source. And then we have additionally assigned $3.5 million, which is our items that are restricted inside the fund balance being used in the current budget to pay for a variety of items. Those don't show up in revenue lines because those are balancing items that come out in the actual balance sheet for the audit.

Okay, but it still doesn't make up about $17 million?

Yeah, that's roughly $8 million right there, plus receivables from all the general fund admin fees come in monthly. So those are still outstanding, and they collect at, if I highlight this real quick, almost $700,000 a month still left to be paid August, September.

So, yeah, two more million. Yeah.

Yeah. I can go through. There's a lot of line items if you want to go through them all, but we can help show where they can fill the gap.

To clarify off of that, I guess I could be wrong of what he's asking. Typically, because their tax bills are due, you can pay them starting in November and then up until I think it's March. Don't we receive a bulk of our money during that time? So right now, if we still have two more months, won't that be a lot less that we're projected to receive?

Correct. Yeah. From the ad lorem, it's already been Predominantly received on top of delinquent tax certificates are already paid to the city back taxes have already been paid. What is still collecting is utility taxes, franchise fees that come in monthly and state like communication, serve taxes, things that lag a couple of months. They're still coming in.

Okay. And then to that point of us being over 100%, Mayor, can you clarify what you're asking on that we're going to be short based on what you're looking at?

So I'm just looking at the revenues we've collected in this past 10 months. Okay. And if we're going to project out the next year, I'm trying to figure out how close we're getting to our projections year over year of how much we think revenues are going to come in and what that delta is, what's our margin for error. Okay. Because at the end of the day, we don't want to spend more than we make, right?

And I will tell you, just from the past years on here, and Member Nelson can probably speak to this, we've always been, every year, very conservative. Every mid-year, we have hundreds of thousands of surplus, so we've always been very conservative on our projections, and I think that's what the city manager was saying. We can be a little less conservative if we want to potentially go to rollback, is what I'm seeing. Again, knowing that Amendment 3 is still out there to potentially... But I know the city manager is working on some plans regarding that if that does pass.

That's correct. I'm very confident we'll meet that $67 million revised estimate.

Yeah, I was just, again, trying to see are we going to get there because that seems like quite a distance to go in two months.

Yes, sir.

So when you say our revenues are going to be this next year, I'm trying to figure out what the margin for error is.

Yes, sir. Moving on, the next bullet is a significant decrease in police and fire overtime. You notice in the proposed budget, the overtime projections are almost cut in half. And that's due to the collective bargaining agreement. We agreed to add a fourth shift for fire and a 2472 rotation, which will take effect. probably no earlier than January, and also police have changed their shifts to allow for additional overlap, and both of those are combined to save significant overtime costs without having to increase FTE. And as we stated at the last meeting, the utility rate proposals, 6% for water and sewer, 8% for solid waste, and the tentative stormwater is 100%. However, COUNCIL HAS NOT MADE A DECISION ON THAT, AND THAT WILL OCCUR ON AUGUST 25TH AT THE COUNCIL MEETING. SO BETWEEN NOW AND AUGUST 25TH, COUNCIL CAN DECIDE ON AT WHAT LEVEL STORMWATER ASSESSMENTS WILL BE MADE. AND ALSO THE BUDGET CONTAINS AN EMPLOYEE INVESTMENT OF 3.5% COLA. AND ALSO KEEPING THE EMPLOYEE HEALTH PREMIUMS AT 26 LEVELS, WHICH MEANS THAT WE'RE NOT GOING TO RAISE THE PREMIUMS TO THE EMPLOYEE, SO ANY ADDITIONAL COSTS FOR THE HEALTH CARE PREMIUMS WILL BE ABSORBED BY THE CITY, AND IT'S INCLUDED IN THE BUDGET. AND AS I STATED EARLIER, OUR HEALTH BENEFITS ADVISOR WILL GO AHEAD AND PROVIDE A PRESENTATION ON THAT AT THE END OF THIS PROGRAM. THIS SLIDE SHOWS THE INVERSE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PROPERTY TAX VALUES AND MILLAGE. FOR EXAMPLE, BACK IN 2015, OUR MILLAGE WAS 7.9 MILLS. AND IT'S STEADILY GONE DOWN. THE PROPOSED BUDGET, 6.2 MILLS, IS STILL THE LOWEST MILLAGE IN 18 YEARS. AND AGAIN, AS I STATED EARLIER, WE COULD FURTHER, COUNCIL DIRECT, GO TO ROLLBACK with minimal impact on operations, which would bring it to a no tax increase. And also, as the interest relationship goes, as the millage goes down, you have to have increased or assessed values, which has occurred. This is a comparison. Everyone wants to see how we are doing with our millage in comparison to our peer cities. You can say we are almost in the middle, and we are a full-service city. We have our own solid waste, marina, utility, et cetera. So we're comparable to like Palm Bay and Melbourne and Coco, and our millage is below all three of those at 6.2 mills. Thanks. What I consider one of the most telling slides in the presentation is what is the amount of property tax paid per capita? You can see we're way to the left, which is good. We're at about $472 per person in property taxes collected. Only Broad County has a lesser amount per capita. Where you see the beach, community satellite beach in Atlantic and Cocoa are upwards of over $1,500 per person in taxes collected. A lot of that is due to the assessed value on homes, but still it's telling that the property tax burden And, you know, we pay the same amount of money for our services. A fire truck costs $1.5 million here, and it costs $1.5 million in Satellite Beach. We pay the same for fuel, and we are very competitive with our wages. So the fact that we're able to have that per capita at $472, I think, is a testament to the staff. Okay. So this basically says that out of the $64 million of the general fund, about $24 million is collected in ad valorem, about 38% is ad valorem. So general fund is not just property tax, it's a whole host of other different sources of revenue. TO PUT IN PERSPECTIVE, PUBLIC SAFETY BETWEEN FIRE AND POLICE, THEIR TOTAL BUDGET IS OVER $30 MILLION. WE WOULD STILL HAVE TO FIND ALTERNATIVE SOURCES OF REVENUE TO PAY FOR PUBLIC SAFETY, WHICH OF COURSE IS ONE OF OUR PRIMARY CONCERNS, PROVIDING SERVICES TO OUR RESIDENTS. staffing levels, we are breaking the cycle of ever increasing FTE counts. We went from 601 to 596. And again, we'll be coming with another initiative probably the second meeting in August to further reduce that FTE count, but we don't have the details yet. And we're always looking at ways to outsource or to minimize the staff. THIS PIE CHART JUST SHOWS BASICALLY THE EXPENDITURES BY DEPARTMENT WITH PUBLIC WORKS, WHICH INCLUDES WATER RESOURCES, THE BULK OF THE $180 MILLION OR ABOUT HALF OF THE $180 MILLION TOTAL BUDGET. So just to recap, where are all the different changes? You'll see the various utilities, the partially self-insured fund, the info technology, general fund, what their percentage increases and also the dollar values for each one. Moving on to the one that garners the most attention because it's controlled by the millage is the general fund. SO AGAIN, WE'RE HOPING TO GET HIT THE $67 MILLION MARK ON THE REVISED BUDGET REVENUES, AND THE PROPOSED IS 64.6. AND BELOW THERE, YOU SEE WHERE THE CHANGES CONCENTRATE. YOU'LL SEE THE FOUR DIFFERENT ITEMS THAT MAKE UP THE BULK OF THE DELTA BETWEEN 26 AND 27. MOVING ON TO THE ENTERPRISE FUNDS. WATER AND SEWER. YOU'LL SEE AN INCREASE FROM 59 MILLION TO 60,951,000, WHICH IS AN OVER-YEAR CHANGE OF ABOUT 3.2%. AND AGAIN, THE DELTAS ARE EXPLAINED WHERE THE CHANGE CONCENTRATES. DEBT SERVICE, OPERATING EXPENDITURES, AND CAPITAL. MOVING ON TO SOLID WASTE, YOU'LL SEE THAT THE PROVISED BUDGET IS $11.1 MILLION. WE'RE PROPOSING $10.4 MILLION PROPOSED BUDGET, WHICH IS A DECREASE OF 6.39%. AND, AGAIN, THE DELTAS ARE THE OPERATING EXPENDITURES, PERSONNEL SERVICES, CAPITAL, AND DEBT SERVICE. Now the municipal marina, which is run by F3, we outsource the operation of the marina to a private vendor with great success. Their revised budget for FY26 is $1.7 million, and they're proposing a $1.5 million budget in FY27, a decrease of about 12%. And again, we control the rates. And they just go ahead and operate the marina. And they have a contract, I guess, for two more years. Moving on to the stormwater utility.

I would ignore that phone call.

Now somebody's calling on the PowerPoint presentation. They're teams. Okay. Oh.

Again, these are proposed figures. $7.2 million is the current stormwater utility revised budget and proposed if at 100% would be $10.1 million. And again, these rates have not been finalized for FY27. And the big bulk of the change is to allow us to start addressing the 22 problematic areas which have been identified through the October rainstorm and through various intense rain events which really have pointed out some issues that we need to address problematically and start doing some capital projects. So that's the bulk of the justification for the stormwater utility increase proposed. Moving on to the internal service funds. $5.8 MILLION IS THE 26 REVISED BUDGET. PROPOSED IS $6.5 MILLION, AN INCREASE OF 12%. AND YOU'LL SEE AGAIN THE VARIANCES WHERE THE CHANGE CONCENTRATES. CAPITAL, PERSONNEL SERVICES, OPERATING EXPENDITURES, AND THOSE ARE THE CHANGES. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES, $4.8 MILLION IN THE REVISED FY26 BUDGET. FOR FY27, PROPOSED BUDGET IS $5.7 MILLION, INCREASE OF 18%. AND THE CHANGES ARE DUE TO WE'RE UPGRADING TYLER TECHNOLOGIES, CAD SOFTWARE, LICENSES FOR THE VARIOUS OPERATING SYSTEMS AND WITH ON OUR NETWORK SEEM TO INCREASE EVERY YEAR, AND REALLY, WE HAVE NO DISCRETION. MICROSOFT OFFICE LICENSES AND EXCHANGE, AND ALSO, AS YOU KNOW, WE, COUNCIL AUTHORIZED US, INSTEAD OF GOING TO A NEW ENTERPRISE-WIDE SYSTEM, WHICH WOULD HAVE BEEN $5 OR $6 MILLION AT LEAST, WE ARE GOING TO UPGRADE THE CURRENT BS&A SYSTEM IN FY27 TO A CLOUD-BASED SYSTEM. GRAPHIC USER INTERACTIVE SYSTEM, WHICH HOPEFULLY WILL ALLEVIATE SOME OF THE ISSUES WE HAVE WITH THE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM. MOVING ON TO SOME OF THE LESSER FUNDS, SPECIAL REVENUE AND DEBT SERVICE. OUR DEBT IS BEING DECREASED. WE HAVE $2.3 MILLION IN THE REVISED BUDGET PAYMENTS FOR DEBT, NCRA, AND 1.17 FOR THE PROPOSED AND FY27. And again, the deltas are operating expenditures, the transfers out, capital, and the grants and aids. Next fund is the building inspections snapshot. In 26, it was $2.3 million. In 27, 2.2, relatively flat, a delta of about $56,000. Impact fees, forfeiture, and the ARPA snapshot. As you know, we've received $8.6 million in ARPA funds, and we've expended just about all of them. They have to be all expended by the end of December 2026, and we are on track to do that. But the revised was $291,000, and proposed is $274,000, a difference of only $17,000. How did we come up with that number?

That's our use of impact fees during the year.

Oh, so the ones that we use, because so far we've collected $375,000 approximately in impact fees year to date?

Yeah, $380,000 with investment revenue, yes. Locally, that doesn't count transportation collected by the county.

And do we approximately know how much they've collected on our behalf?

We can get that number for you for the year.

Thank you.

Moving on to the grants funds, CDBG Home and Ship. That's very dependent on the federal administration, federal government. We were successful in getting almost $2.3 million in FY26. AND IT LOOKS LIKE THOSE FUNDS ARE RELATIVELY DRYING UP, AND WE'RE ONLY PROPOSING OR BELIEVE WE'LL GET ABOUT $630,000, WHICH WILL BE A SIGNIFICANT HIT TO A NUMBER OF NONPROFITS WHO BENEFIT FROM THOSE FUNDS AND ALSO SOME OTHER SOCIAL SERVICES PROGRAMS. SO WE'LL TRY DILIGENTLY TO SEE IF WE CAN FILL THE GAP ON THE LACK OF GRANT FUNDING. AND LAST, WE HAVE THE HEALTH AND INSURANCE AND HEALTH PROGRAM, AND AGAIN, THE REVISED WAS $14 MILLION, AND IT SEEMS EVERY YEAR HEALTH COSTS GO UP, AND THIS YEAR IS NO DIFFERENT. WE'RE LOOKING AT $15.5 MILLION IN THE 27 PROPOSED, AN INCREASE OF ABOUT 11%. AS I MENTIONED EARLIER, THAT CITY IS GOING TO ABSORB THAT AMOUNT. IT'S EMBEDDED IN THE BUDGET ALREADY, AND WE'RE GOING TO HOLD PREMIUMS THE SAME for the employees for FY26. And this is the part of the presentation that I turn it over to our health benefits advisor, Accentria, recently just started on a new contract and we're really excited to have them on board. And they will go over the FY27 healthcare program.

I think that's you guys.

Good evening. My name is Robin Riley. I'm glad to be here again with some good news. And then we have.

Hi, I'm Ethan Sale. It's good to see everyone.

So Ethan and I, our team, we've been working very hard with the city, getting all of the information on your benefit program, health insurance, stop loss, ASO, all of that to make sure that we're coming to the table with a great program to enhance benefits, but as well as mitigate costs. So. So first we're gonna talk about your claims history, because we've got a little bit of turbulence with the claims that we just wanna, Make sure everybody's on the same page with that, where we're coming from. So on the 23-24, which is the first spreadsheet, that shows your claims for a year 23-24, where you've paid stop loss premium of $984,680, and reimbursement from the stop loss carrier is $457,639. This report breaks it out by your employee count by month, and then it totals out your cost. So that year was a great year for the city. But then the next slide shows for 24-25, your stop loss premium paid for the year was $936,729, and stop loss reimbursement was $1.3 million. So bringing you into this year, 25-26, stop-loss premium paid through June of this year is $641,445, and reimbursement to date is $712,400. So we're still in that negative with the carriers. So when we went out to bid for the stop-loss carriers... We went out to all of those carriers to request for a quote, and as you can see, we got a lot of decline to quote. They're not competitive. The claims are too high. We got two carriers that provided us a quote. Your current one was Sun Life, and then we got another one from the other carrier. But the other carrier, what is it, Prudential?

Prudential.

They're wanting to add a separate stop loss that's higher threshold on two of the claimants. And the rate is actually more competitive if we stay with Sun Life where you are. But we are still in negotiations with Sun Life. They have given us a firm, but we're still going back to the table to try to trim a little bit more to meet your budget. So now we've met with your insurance committee. We've had a few great meetings with them and looking at plan design and everything because we've got some expenses here and so there's going to have to be some cost sharing. So what we're looking at is the plan design. We had our actuaries look at your plan and everything and come up with the plans that are going to least impact the employees but give you the best

um reduction in in your your pricing uh so that's what we have um yep go ahead um a key thing i want to share that we identified with the committee which as everyone knows is a handful of employees from each sector within the city that allows us to get really great insight into how the employee benefits are digested and what we identified is that Employees the ones that we were working with would rather see their payroll deductions remain the same They would rather see plan changes rather than a payroll deduction So what we've done here, right Robin said with our actuaries is identified increasing deductibles not a lot INCREASING CERTAIN THINGS WITHIN THE PLAN THAT ALLOW US TO KEEP THE SAME PAYROLL DEDUCTIONS THAT EMPLOYEES HAVE NOW. SO I KNOW AS WE LOOK, AS WE'RE ALL SITTING HERE, IT'S HARD TO SEE HERE. The base plan has an increased deductible of $500. Something that I want to mention that I think is interesting here is it does create more of a spread within what we call the base plan and the buy-up. An increased deductible of $500 for individual and $1,000 for family. There's some key changes that we made to the PCP and specialist visits. The main reason there is that with the onsite health clinic, we want to have the ability to steer members towards that clinic and thus changing the copays for PCP and specialists. We believe that that will be achieved. I do want to note we did make a change to the out-of-pocket maximum. I want to note that there's a change to the emergency room visit. One key thing there is within a self-funded health plan, an ER visit costs quite a bit of money incurred on the plan, so we would encourage people to use the urgent care or the mobile app that they have access to. One thing I do want to note, and this is commenting, it's great that we get this feedback from the committee. One of the things that we put on that base plan is we said, okay, let's make a specialist visit 20% after you've hit your deductible. And they all look at us, they're like, Ethan, Robin, we can't do that. Our employees are not going to digest that well. Learning that we changed it to a copay. Something that success can be expected when they go to the when they go to the provider. But all that to say, you know there's changes on the on the high plan. The deductibles not changed. However, the out of pocket maximum is is increased. This is what achieves the ability to keep the payroll deductions the same and to our understanding fall within budget. By changing those those plan designs.

In addition to those, we've also added and educated the committee on how they work two new programs that are great that coincide with self-funded plans. One of them is a surgery program where the employees will receive different surgeries and we'll educate them and have that list for them and everything at a much lower cost because of the contracted rate that that provider has with them. but it's also highly rated providers. And then if there's a travel expense that will be paid for as well, but the overall cost that's going to be happening is gonna be a lot less than what you would have to pay through the health insurance and on the plan. So again, plan reductions. And on this plan, I have a few of my self-funded accounts on this program. So I know that it works and how it works. And they also provide the client reporting utilization and everything to where we can compare what was the surgery from last year compared to this year with the new program. So we can make sure that it works and also tweak things along the way if it's not being utilized correctly or whatever. But it gives us information to be able to keep tabs on it. And then Ethan, well, we're gonna talk more, we've got the, the other one is a pharmacy program. And we've got some slides on that, too. But you want to?

Yeah, we can spend a minute here just looking at the. So I do want to note, and again, it's going to be hard to see, but with the current plans, if we were to remain everything current with the stop loss renewal that we received from Sun Life, which is the most competitive right now, if we remain with the current plans, the renewal impact is roughly $1.69 million. It's a 22% overall.

With current plans.

With current plans. WITH CHANGES, WITH RENEWAL IMPACT, WITH PLAN CHANGES, IT COMES IN AT 17%, 1.39%, 1.39, 34 MILLION IS THE RENEWAL IMPACT GOING INTO THE NEXT PLAN YEAR. WE DO HAVE A LITTLE QUOTE THERE THAT KIND OF JUST DESCRIBES WHAT I SAID, THAT WE WOULD RATHER SHOW THE COST SHIFT TO THE PLAN RATHER THAN TO THE MEMBER. And then this is showing just what the payroll deductions are right now, where the contributions stand. The ability to offer that base plan at a $0 employee-only cost, monthly cost, is very special. It was shared with us that it was very special to those that we spoke with on the committee.

And then here's the information on the surgery. Yep.

So lantern again, uh, members, if they have an expected surgery, they're able to access that surgery for $0. Right. And then the cost that hits the self funded plan is roughly 30% below what that surgery would cost at Orlando health or at advent health. Um, so that is the mindset for, for this plan. And then we also have a new pharmacy program that we'd like to introduce. We're well aware that there's a current pharmacy program in place right now that allows $0 Medication specific specialty medications at a zero dollar copay This is a program that we've identified that has a significant higher decrease To the plan once those medications hit the self-funded plan But there's no savings to the the plan that's paying paying it so this plan gives savings on both sides and

So your vision, we did look at the vision, and we offered some plan enhancements and stuff, but the insurance committee wanted to continue with the same plan, but we also quoted a four-tier, and so the insurance committee approved that plan. And then on the ancillaries, so we reached out, I reached out to our contact at Aetna, said, you know, she sent me the renewal, and I look back at history. The city has received a renewal of 3% year over year since the three-year commitment has been completed. And with the renewal, there's no different plan changes, no different services. So I went back and I said, look, you know, the contract ends next year. You've got longevity. Aetna has longevity with the city. I said, with that being said, and knowing that they're going out, you know, the contract ends, so they're going to have to go out to bid, we're asking for a rate pass. No plan enhancements, nothing, no services coming back that are different. So let's not have the rate increase. They've come back to me and said that upper management is reviewing it, which that's been for two weeks now. BUT RIGHT NOW WE HAVE A 3% INCREASE. BUT ALSO IN LOOKING AT THE BENEFITS THAT THEY OFFER ON THE WELLNESS PROGRAM, THERE ARE SOME COMPONENTS THAT THEY'RE CHARGING A PEPM THAT IS PART OF THE OVERALL PEPM. IT'S LIKE $4. biometric screenings comes, the people come, the company comes here and does the biometric screenings in-house to the employees, and I'm like, why? They have a healthcare center. Let's put that benefit at the healthcare center, drive participation at the healthcare center, and let's, $4, no. So we're looking at that. So that's another thing that we're trying to get that increase reduced.

I DO WANT TO NOTE THAT THE FINANCIAL FIGURES THAT WE SHOWED ON THE PREVIOUS SLIDES ASSUMES THAT THE INCREASE WILL BE APPLIED GOING INTO THE NEXT YEAR. SO JUST KNOW THAT THAT'S THE WORST CASE SCENARIO. IT'S A BIT OVER THE TOP. BUT THAT WOULD DECREASE IF THEY DO PROVIDE A RATE HOLD. ASTRO PROVIDING A RATE HOLD, THAT IS.

All right, so we've talked about what we've done so far. We're excited and love meeting with your committee. And we've got suggestions for moving into the future. I talked about the ASO contract expiring, but we've also got your PBM. So looking at ASO and your PBM going out to bid next year, working with your procurement on that as well. That will help drive competition and lower costs. and maybe even bring in a better network pricing and everything. So we'll be evaluating all that as well. And then also bringing transparency with the competition and what's being brought to the table Encouraging the employees to utilize that health care center. It's here. It's a great program We have that in our office in Ormond and we love it But you know educating them and understanding what's there and and by doing that, you know making the biometric screenings happen at the health care center where employees are going there and seeing what's there and utilizing it, maybe having a better comfort level with the healthcare center. And then some other cities that I've had great with onsite healthcare centers, we've also gone as far as with the wellness program. If an employee's gonna do the wellness, and do the biometric screening and the health risk assessment and everything. And they're doing what's right, giving them a decrease in their premium. And then employees are just like, I don't care. I'm not going to do that. Well, that's fine. But then you don't get the decrease in premium. And that really helps a lot. I've got the city of St. Cloud, the city of Ocala, the city of Sarasota. They all work this way. That's what we have, and thank you.

Member Stoeckle.

Yes. There were a couple numbers that on the PowerPoint I received, it had different numbers than that was up there, so I was wondering what was changed.

No, there's nothing changed. That report that's up there just shows the overall. These numbers are, I calculated out from our actuaries and everything, so I wanted to give those numbers from the stop-loss premium pay and then the reimbursement. That wasn't on those reports.

So the financial results was the only slide that was changed? Is that correct? On the annual savings from the renewals, you had like 300, yeah, those numbers are different than what I have on my PowerPoint. I don't know which one was accurate.

Okay.

So I have a savings 272.9.

This one is the accurate run. What happened is Sun Life actually released lower factors to us this morning, yielding more savings.

Okay, so is that the only one that was changed of what we received?

So this one right here likely reflects.

Because I can't see that one. That's the one I was wondering if there were any changes.

That one does have changes. Okay. The final that we're presenting here is lower.

lower is lower okay okay that makes me feel better and then with the rx plan can you just explain so I know it looks like they already have a prescription plan as part of their health insurance plan so with this additional rx plan it looks like it's for employers does that mean we're having to pay for that additional rx plan and if we are how much is that

Yeah, no, great, great question. So, no, this isn't anything that is paid for by the city. This program, quite frankly, is targeted for, call it, I think, 5 to 10 percent of the members on plan that are using high-cost medications. Think about, you know, quite frankly, think about medications that you see on the television, on commercials that very, very expensive. This is a solution to source those medications. I do want to note they are, they can be internationally sourced. They are from the same manufacturers, but they are in fact internationally sourced. This is a completely voluntary program. Members do not have to partake in this. We've discussed it with the committee. Everyone feels comfortable with it that we've spoken to for the most part. But no, it is not a cost, a feed cost incurred to the city. It will be treated as claims just like on the standard self-funded health plan.

Okay, so just another...

But 40 to 60% less than what you're paying now.

Okay, so another option for our employees with no cost to the city. Yes.

So I want to clarify okay their claims claims will still come into the city just like when someone goes to Okay Yeah There's no fee involved the the just so everyone knows That specialty pharmacy provider, you know, they're they're a for-profit company. They take roughly 10% of the savings that's generated That's where they make their margin And so, for instance, right, let's say there's a $10,000 drug a month that's hitting the plan. We see that with this program, rather than $10,000 hitting the plan, if the member sources it through this program, $4,000 will hit the plan rather than $10,000. That's the goal. That's the idea.

And we won't know until we implement it and then look at it year over year to see how it's doing. Okay. And then lastly, for the vision, is the city incurring any cost for that plan or is that just as an employee needs vision, they pay for that and it's self-funded through the employee?

That's a voluntary benefit. The employees pay that.

Okay. So no cost for the city. Right. Okay. All right. Thank you.

Vice Mayor. I have a couple of questions. When you were talking about midway through your presentation, you alluded to the cost were compared to, you used Orlando Health.

And Advent.

Huh? And Advent.

Okay, but why Orlando Health? Yeah, that was just an example. I could have used any hospital in the United States of if someone goes to get a procedure done, the billed amount and the paid amount can sometimes differ. And what we find is that through this program that we're talking about, Lantern, That cost, for surgery specific, that cost comes in well below where the standard surgery would be done at a standard provider.

Okay. And you talked about the wellness program, and you said it's a voluntary program for the employees, and it makes their insurance less if they participate in the wellness program.

So that's just a suggestion that we can, something that we can implement next year for the wellness to incentivize the employees to participate.

How do you know whether they participate or not?

Because we have, we will receive reporting that shows that they've done certain... Is it like a sober sneakers program or something? Well, it depends on how, it's something that we will be implementing and creating.

Come on. Come on. I mean, give me a break.

They'll be doing biometric screening, so we'll get a report showing who's done the biometric screenings, not identifying anything else but who participated. THE HEALTH RISK ASSESSMENT, WE'LL RECEIVE A REPORT OF THAT, WHO'S PARTICIPATED IN THAT. AND THEN IF THE COMMITTEE WANTS TO DO OTHER WELLNESS ACTIVITIES THROUGH THE YEAR AS WELL, YOU KNOW, SO, YEAH, AND WE'LL HAVE A METRIC SET UP FOR THAT REPORTING AND STUFF AND THEN TOTAL TRANSPARENCY, YOU KNOW, LETTING EMPLOYEES KNOW, HEY, YOU'VE DONE THIS, YOU'VE DONE, YOU KNOW.

SO DOES THAT INCREASE THEIR DEDUCTIBLE?

No, no. If they're participating, then the way that we want to work it is that they receive a discount in their premium, monthly premium. If they don't, then you don't get the discount.

You know, and you mentioned earlier when Member Stoeckel asked about that, and you said prescription drug at $10,000. I was just in a presentation yesterday where there's a chemo drug that's somewhere between $11,000 and $12,000 with a single drug. So would the employee be, how much of that, still the deductible would apply to that?

No, it wouldn't. Specific to the pharmacy program that we were talking about. How about the hospitalization program, say someone's on chemo? How does that work? Well, that would be subject to the health plan, not necessarily surgery through Lantern.

So there's a specific list of drugs, high-dollar drugs, that are on this plan.

Okay.

Yep.

One thing I also want to note, because I appreciate the questions, Vice Mayor, as Afora, the pharmacy program that I mentioned is voluntary, so is Lantern, right? No employee is being forced to do anything. It's there through our education at open enrollment. It likely comes up, where I see it come up most is when we're doing one-on-one enrollment education with an employee. Sometimes we're trying to understand their specific health situation and I can't tell you how many times they're like, oh, I'm planning to get a surgery in six months. Then the conversation turns to, oh, we just introduced this new benefit where, hey, you have this surgery planned. You can get it for zero dollars. You'll actually work with someone that guides you through the surgery. They have care navigators within the program. I want to note sometimes the employee will be subject to travel. They might have to go to Orlando. They might have to go to Jacksonville. I want to note that Lantern actually accommodates the financial impact that the member incurs. Say they pay $100 in gas, right? Lantern will accommodate that financial impact to the member. That's their idea.

So you're saying the prescription program is an additive to that, which is an additional cost to the employee?

Not an additional cost to an employee. Both of those things are just additions to the health plan. Okay. Voluntary. Yeah, great questions.

Member Nelson. So Herman asked, well, Sarah asked about silver sneakers, but do we have health activities that will count toward reducing the premium?

So we have to construct the wellness program. Okay. And once that's constructed, then there'll be steps and everything, activities to comply with that to receive that reduction.

Okay. So Herman, silver sneakers.

Member Stoeckel. As much as I'm making fun. So to clarify on that, it sounds like we have some flexibility in that as a city to kind of say what can that look like for our employees to get that reduction or no?

Member Stoeckel, if I may.

Would you like to answer, Mayor?

There's no such thing as partially self-insured. We are self-insured. We create the rules of our own health plan. So everything's within our disposal to tweak and to twist and to guide and to steer. Just one little thing. I'm not really sold on the idea of reduction in premium for hitting certain things. I think a reduction in deductible or co-pays I think is a bit more appropriate because the idea of less funds in that, we obviously know that that fund is upside down. So I think the employees taking advantage of it and then the revenue drops, we still got to cover claims. So that's a concern for me.

Yeah, no, I like that.

And then just to hopefully clarify, you guys know in our previous conversations regarding benefits, I tore up the PBM quite a bit because of a lack of... Collecting of rebates, I think the contract was not very well negotiated, and we didn't get everything we should have gotten. And by offering an international source to help save the plan money and also in turn save the employee money makes a lot of sense. However, I'm not completely sold on Lantern. I think you guys need to do a side-by-side comparison of the actual price to our local hospital in terms of ancillary surgeries. And things like that because the cost of a knee replacement at Parrish is about 40,000 Orlando health they charge 160,000 So yeah, it's it's not apples and apples. It's definitely apples and oranges and and I think that the travel is a Challenge the school board I believe implemented this with Cigna not too long ago And it didn't it didn't land very well with the employees having to leave town so and I think With Brevard County being as special as we are, we like to keep as many of our dollars in Brevard County.

We understand that. Thank you, Mayor. I still would like them to have the flexibility to go where they would like to go still.

They can always do that.

Yes, okay. And then just going back to the wellness thing, because ideally, and that was a good point that I don't think I fully thought through, if we can come up with a wellness plan, the idea would be that we come up with some incentives that help our employees be healthier, which is great for them, but then also cost savings for the city and less claims. So obviously we're on council, so we probably aren't part of those discussions with staff, but I would really like to see those components just because we do have that flexibility and not every organization does have that. So I wish collectively we could move in that direction, but if we can here, I think it would be really great.

So once we meet with the committee and go through and get everything established, it would be nice to be able to present that to you so that you can see that and make any suggestions. Because we want to make sure we get it right. And there's a lot of opportunity. Like what Mayor Conner said, your plan is your plan. And we can bend, move, cross it, whatever that works.

Yeah, for many years we were just too beholden to Aetna and with them managing the administrative services, PBM, as well as the network. And I think us creating our own network and steering appropriately to incentivize the employees to use the more cost-effective but better health care option is important. I think what a lot of people don't realize in the health care world is just because you're paying more doesn't mean you're getting more. When you look at outcomes, you'd be surprised at how the lower-cost doctor is actually the better doctor because, well, they're not paying a bunch of medical malpractice claims. So it's pretty crazy. But I appreciate your guys' presentation and your feedback. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. City Manager?

Sir, if I could get the toggle back to the presentation. Next slide. SO WE ALREADY HAD THE PETITIONS, SO PUBLIC COMMENT HAS ALREADY BEEN TAKEN CARE OF. NEXT COUNCIL DISCUSSION. AND WE HAVE MEMBERS OF THE CITY LEADERSHIP TEAM HERE TO ANSWER ANY SPECIFIC QUESTIONS REGARDING ANY ADDITIONAL ITEMS ON THE BUDGET.

Cool. Thank you very much, Member Moscoso.

Thank you. This kind of goes back to your earlier presentation. I noticed on the non-department, you were able to reduce the budget by, this is in the general fund, by 20%, 3.53 million. Could you explain a little bit of what you were able to cut from that budget item?

I believe those are the capital items. Is that correct, Kevin? For non-departmentals, construction?

Are you talking about revenue specifically or just that fund?

Just that fund.

Okay. Is there a particular page number so we can all turn there? Yes. Because what I was hoping to do is, you know, I know they kind of went over everything. I was hoping we'd go through it fund by fund. I figured we could start with revenues. Yeah, that's fine if you want to do it that way. Because I'm fine unpacking non-departmental because it's kind of a catch-all. But I think we should kind of talk about the initial millage and what that could look like. And just full disclosure, guys, my goal is to get the robot rollback. And that means cutting about a half a million dollars out of the budget. I personally do not think we're going to get a hundred percent increase in storm water fees. So we got to be planning for. Capital projects which means plan design engineering of future projects coming down the road So I personally think we got a trim about two million dollars out of the general fund To get to roll back and set some money aside for stormwater projects And I think we could do it The city manager handed us the budget. It is ours. It is now our responsibility so going forward if we kind of keep that in mind of what we want to keep, what we don't want to keep, plus keep in mind the non-funded items as well. And that's why all these beautiful people are here and the department heads so that they can answer our questions and we can try to figure it out. All right, so anybody have any questions on revenue in terms of that? So if we went to rollback rate, what would be our revenue?

$453,069 less than what's in the book.

453 exactly got it so looks like we're budgeting 5.7 million and utility service tax just I'm sorry 51 it's just general fund revenue by source

Can I ask a clarifying question on the PowerPoint before we go? Yeah. Can you just clarify on the PowerPoint, it was saying that solid waste was showing a decrease, I believe. Is that correct? And can you explain how that is when we're looking at potentially raising solid waste rates?

Well, if you look at their 10 months to actuals, they're actually losing money.

Okay, so that's kind of I I would just like clarification on that That it was that one and there was another one The stormwater we had talked about raising it proposed a hundred percent and then it looked like it was proposed Forty percent increase or something on the slide and I was just confused so in both those cases not all revenue and those funds are generated by their rates and

So there are other revenues in those funds, not just their rate structure. So in the case of when the rates are going up 8%, it doesn't yield 8% of total revenue. It yields 8% of three lines of their revenue. Same with stormwater. 100% on one line doesn't equal the remaining investments. Other revenues are generated by the fund.

Okay, so let me go back to the... Okay, so going back to solid waste, so if we increase the rates for citizens 8%, we'll still see a decrease in funds that we're receiving next year compared to this past year.

Yes.

Can you explain why that is?

Sure. If you look at page 124, which is the revenue for that fund, which is the total revenue, you'll see that both intergovernmental went down for our motor vehicle tax shares but the biggest item that dropped is our install purchase proceeds was our debt service on our vehicles is over a million dollars less. So those are the main drivers of less revenue coming through that yield the reduction of 6% total revenue. So you'll see that on charge for service went up by 8%, which is the rate increase, but other areas of the revenue decreased. So transfers in is less miscellaneous goes down due to purchase proceeds and The use of unreserved went down.

OK, and then with that, can you? Explain any other anticipated funds that we should anticipate less aside from user generated fees. So I think the other one was the stormwater. So even though we would be potentially if we did vote on the 100% increase, I think that one still looked like it was going to. Lose some money.

Is the difference the grants for this year? Okay, so less grants. Yeah, anticipating grants is hard. I usually get them throughout the year. So I think last year showed some of the grants, which this year I won't apply for them until after. So I think that's why you're not seeing the 100%. Am I right, Kevin?

Yeah, and then another three-quarters of a million was financing of vehicles. It is then proposed for next year that is being done this year.

Okay. Anything regarding the state that we're concerned about? For stormwater? No, in general, for budget-wise that we should be. I think for our discussion, it's helpful to know, aside from increasing taxes or increasing fees for citizens, what are external factors that we need to keep in mind as we're going through this? Aside from Amendment 3.

I got one for you.

Okay.

So recently the state made a law change about how we can build our bill building inspection fees. So no longer can it be based on the size of the project. So if you're building $100,000 building, you can charge for that scope of work. Now it has to be hard costs associated with doing the inspections and the review work. So the challenge we're going to have is how do we actually calculate how much it cost us to go do that work? And unfortunately, what it's going to do, I think, to John Q. taxpayer is, you know, a permit to have a water heater change out like 80 bucks because the bigger things kind of offset those costs. But if it goes to hard cost, exactly how much it cost us for that inspector, that water permit, you know, water tank permit fee could now go up. Because it's going to be the same for everybody, basically per hour. The issue we're going to have as a city is how do we calculate long-term liabilities, such as a pension or health care, into those costs? And by the way, the same state preemption is also impacting site plan review. So the fact that we can charge developer XYZ for this review is probably going to go down. So it's going to be really interesting to see what those numbers are, and I'm very, very concerned about the revenue driven by those departments because what we don't want to have is our taxpayers subsidizing these reviews for private development. So we're going to have to be very, very critical about how we try to offload these costs onto development because right now I think outside of the building, because the building kind of, makes a little bit of money, and the site plan review process, we're subsidizing that. And it's a lot of staff time.

Yeah. And just to keep in mind, I don't know what the legislative session will look like this time around, but a big trend that consistently comes up is we need to approve things much quicker than we are. We had that one bill where it was like building permits. I can't remember, it was 15 calendar days. It was something really, or three calendar days. It was really tight. So I do know that the state is very big on making sure that government runs more efficient and is quicker for these projects. So that's something to keep in mind. And then my last question was, there's a lot of discussion and a lot of citizens are bringing up, especially when it comes to development, There's a feeling of citizens that have been here, especially for a while, you know, have paid in their taxes, have paid what they feel is their fair share. And now there's a lot of development happening. And it seems as though the impacts of that development now is going on the shoulders of the citizens. So could you talk about impact fees and what we're allowed to do and can't do with impact fees in terms of that?

So currently we levy impact fees on police, fire, city hall, solid waste, and transportation. And then we levy connection fees on the water sewer utility. So those are all meant to expand growth. So you don't, you know, the new police officer gets a new car, the new car can be covered with impact fees. Roadways need to be widened with extra lanes the impact fees can pay for. What they don't pay for is maintenance. They don't pay for resurfacing roadways. They don't pay for general maintenance. The same with the water sewer utility. They can pay for capacity increases in the plants, expansion of the main size, but they can't pay for replacing the two-inch main with the two-inch main.

Okay, so they pay for the initial cost of what's happening, and then as population increases, if we need to add another officer, those types of fees are generated. But that being said, when it comes to maintenance and routine infrastructure, pipes need to be fixed. That will go on all citizens equally? Is that correct?

Yeah, they'll be spread throughout the way the system's levied, so...

Okay.

You know, there's different billing rates for the utilities. There are different tax rates for value. So to say it's even, it's not even. It's based on, you know, in the case of the stormwater utility is even by individual house, except there are deductions for those that are newer because they're in subdivision that have permitted plans. So obviously water sewer is different because it's by usage. So it won't be even. It'll be by how much people are using.

Okay. And then that was my other one. Stormwater I don't think is included in that, but they have different standards that they have to meet than our older utilities. Homes that were built in buildings, correct?

Yeah, anything past 1989 has to fall under the new stormwater actual stormwater regulation pre-1989 didn't have a regulation Okay, it was you know, that's what the older subdivision don't have ponds newer subdivisions do so it's the Among other things that's a major difference in the two.

Okay, and then is there some type of state statute that? We're not allowed to raise our impact fees or they have to meet certain standards. I that we have to abide by? Like, we can't just say, we're gonna raise them 100% for all this new development. Are we allowed to do that?

No, last time we did our impact fees, I think we're capped at 50% initially.

Well, impact fees, as you know, is statutory regulated, so I would have to look into that and get back to you to give you an accurate answer.

Okay, but I do think that we raised them, I think, as much as we could at that time, so, okay.

It happened just recently because I was on council. Our studies came back and I believe police decreased when we did the study. So studies cut both ways, unfortunately. Yeah. But going back on that, I'm really glad you brought up impact fees. One fun fact about our transportation impact fee, we leverage the counties. Transportation impact fee which they're kind of and undergoing the process of redoing I think this would be prudent for us to take an opportunity to do our own transportation impact fee study and collect transportation impact fees as a city and separate that from the county so that we're in control of the funds and we can have more control in addition I think this study should look at the differences between a transportation impact fee and a mobility fee. As you guys all know, I chair the Space Coast Transportation and Planning Organization. I talk about roads quite a bit. And an impact fee, as Mr. Kevin astutely pointed out, the collected transportation impact fee can only be used to widen a road to increase the capacity. However, a mobility fee can be used more flexibly throughout the city in terms of trails, sidewalks, different things that we can do throughout our city to make an impact No pun intended. But the issue is if an impact fee is collected on State Route 405, and let's say they pay a $20,000 impact fee, that goes to the county. The county sits on it. They're making the interest. We're never going to pull down that money to increase the capacity of that state road because it's not our road. And even if we did pull the $20,000 out of there, the cost is $70 million. Yeah. So, you know, at the end of the day, rather than pay a mobility fee that we could use throughout our community in various different creative ways. Member Stoeckel.

All right. And then this is my last comment just for council on the presentation for right now. This slide has always been interesting to me. This property taxes per capita, how we're the lowest aside from the county. And this is why you see hear me say almost at every council meeting that. And we don't have the answer because we'd have to pay for a study for it. What is our percentage of affordable housing compared to the surrounding areas? This is what tells you that we probably have more than our fair share of it. If we had higher valued homes in our area, you would not see this. It would be more evenly dispersed. So what Tom's saying, we really are working on a tight budget because our citizens really don't pay as much as these surrounding communities. And we're still tasked to do these things. So That's why whenever you hear me say that or I'm like, I'm not in favor of this development, I feel like we need to kind of make sure that as a whole we have a good amount of affordable housing but also medium housing, high-end housing to kind of offset that. So I just wanted to point that out to you guys. All right, I'm done for now.

All right, Member Nelson.

We're on revenue, by the way. Thank you. But Tom, can we talk about the COLA, the 3.5 COLA?

Right, the urban CPI is 4.2, and if you recall, I had sent out a comparison of other cities. We're right in the middle as far as 3.5 COLA. Last year, we were at 3%, and we were at the bottom. So I'm trying to maintain competitiveness by the 3.5 COLA.

So basically trying not to lose employees.

It's a placeholder. Basically, we're right in the middle.

And then we lost five employees, six?

Well, we reduced five positions. We have not in the last 20 years ever involuntarily laid off a person. But we've done it through attrition, through combining positions, through reducing vacancies, et cetera. But we haven't done any involuntary layoffs. And we do have additional positions. FTE savings that will be bringing to council but I'm not ready yet to Present them because they involve positions that are currently filled that I have to find put places for those people But we're actively looking constantly to reduce the staffing because you know in through attrition And where are those what department are those people from?

but What departments were impacted?

Two public works, two building, one neighborhood services.

Okay. And the other thing that I wanted to ask, and I think this is a sandy question, flooding. So one of the things I understand is our water table is rising and that part of the problem we have Is that we need to find areas to put water?

Yeah, if you think about our city, I've got a river on one side, a river on the other side. I've got 95. I've got the railroad. There's not a lot you can do with those structures. And a lot of the areas we see some of this flooding are in older areas that they designed to pipe out to a wetland that we don't own. We can't maintain. I don't have easements over it and those wetlands are fuller so they so areas are flooding quicker because for some in some areas the wetlands are above where these pipes go into. So their solution is what solution is to find a place to store water within the city. Yes, we need to start purchasing properties or looking at looking at ways to store water within the city to hold it and let it percolate into the ground. The low impact development type of solution.

Okay. Thank you. Member Moscoso.

If I can just piggyback off of what you said with the COLA, I would really like to look into a tiered COLA, meaning, and we could look at the numbers, but what that would look like if you're making, say, over $200,000, which I think is only two people in our city. You might not get the 3.5. You might get 1%. But we've got officers making, I know that doesn't make me popular, but we've got officers making $50,000. Their purchasing power is the same amount annually. As I'm making over 200,000. And so I would love to see just what those numbers would look like if we were able and how much that could possibly save. But I know we've got some of our employees are barely surviving.

And so that would be subject to collective bargaining. But we can do a analysis and present it to you. But any change?

Well, I guess with police and fire, they wouldn't be part of it. They would stick to the 3.5, but maybe just general, would that work or no? Is it part of the collective bargaining?

You're treading on new ground. We've never done it, but it doesn't mean we can't look into it.

Do other cities do?

No, not that I'm aware of. Okay.

I would just be curious to look into it, if that would be okay. I don't know how the rest of the council feels, but for me, I would just like to see numbers on that.

Well, I think you brought up a very good point, Member Moscoso, and I think as we go through the budget, again, department by department, we can allocate different funds to different departments at different amounts. That make sense? All right. So back to income, so impact fees, do you guys think that's a good idea about doing our own transportation impact slash mobility fee? First we gotta do a study. The other item that Mr. Kevin brought up to me today is we've actually never been challenged on our transportation impact fee and the only thing we're going off of is a 25-year-old study from the county. So it kind of puts us a little bit in hot water. City attorney?

Yes, have we ever done a study before on impact or mobility?

Our own?

Okay, but impact? Yes.

Way back, like 30 years.

I just, as I do the research, I want to know if we have.

Yeah, I think it would be good because, you know, I was talking with Mr. Cook today and, you know, impact fee study is not a huge lift. I think it would probably increase the price just a little bit to add in the mobility, but I think that gives us a lot more flexibility as we have these discussions at the TPO of moving more to a mobility fee as impact kind of hamstrings us a lot. Member Moscoso? Could you just clarify with the mobility because I know impact fees can only be within that certain area mobility is that available for the entire city or only from that Developer that paid into that mobility fee, so I believe they can be used across the entire geographical area again I'm not an attorney, but you know I think that's what the study is gonna outline Again it gives us a lot more flexibility All right, so any other discussion on revenue I? Seeing none. All right, let's move into city council operations. Fund 001, I'm on page 57. Anybody have any changes, suggestions? Fun fact about our budget. Hold on, I lost my page. No, not that page. think we're actually operating pretty well guys compared to what was budgeted versus what was spent in terms of City Council's budget obviously the big thing that we're dealing with is travel as three of us now travel up to Tallahassee to advocate for our city Ah, there it is. Sorry, it was on the first page. Year-to-date actuals, $87,898 on a budget of 137. So, I'm sorry, I'm looking at the thing that was sent out. So I'm just, again, I don't like the revised budget because I don't know exactly where we are. That was just kind of what was adopted. I like to look at where we are 10 months out of the year to see what changes can be made. I think we got some wiggle room to cut a little bit out of the city council budget if we needed to to get back down to roll back.

We typically, I feel like, never hit our whatever's budgeted for council.

Yeah, and it looks like the budget went from 137 to 141, and right now we're at 87. So if needed, we can definitely trim some fat there.

Yeah, I mean, one suggestion, I love serving on League of Cities, but Sarah does a great job representing us, and I don't know if we need to have two members because you are, I think, are you the vice president or?

I'm past president, and so if we don't have somebody else, we'll be losing a board position for voting, right? So I'd rather not lose somebody because that's an additional vote that we get.

Okay, perfect. Never mind. Okay. Can we trim the travel?

Travel and per diem is at $25,000. I don't know where we're at year-to-date because this doesn't drill down into that. But, yeah, I mean, I think that's fine.

I don't think we ever hit the travel. I know my travels, the three main Florida League of Cities conferences. So I don't think we come close to what's budgeted. And then I know you guys come to Tallahassee. And then as I will say, as we do get new people on council, I would like them to be able to go to the emo trainings because I think they're very helpful, especially as a new council member. So I just would keep those things in mind.

All right. So what do you think? $10,000 out of the travel budget, make it $15,000? All right. All right. We'll make that $15,000. Look, we just saved $10,000.

And could we have quarterly updates on where we are on that?

If I didn't see the manager report, I just did in the last budget actuals.

Is it in there?

Okay. Thank you. The city manager report had three months worth.

All right. City attorney. Talk about your department now.

Okay, sure.

Great job.

Thank you.

So did you guys see her itemized breakdown? Yes. So the revised budget for 2026 was 766, and now it's 686. So savings of roughly $80,000. Am I math solid? So again, I want to commend all the work that her and David are doing. You want to give a brief overview of all the things that were being outsourced that are now in-house?

Oh, absolutely. I think, again, I've only been here 10 months and David, what, eight? So we're still new and fresh in looking as to what has been done in the past. However, I will say this. Since we've taken office, we have not outsourced anything other than the normal risk management.

Thank you. I want to hear the applause.

So we have taken in all the litigation that's been served on the city. We have handled all intent for lawsuits within the city, I think. And Joe is here. We have taken over a bulk of the employment legal stuff that usually has been outsourced. And so I'm very proud of our office, not just David and I, but also our staff. I believe when we come before you in October for a review, we'll have a more itemized list of all the things that we have done and have accomplished. But so far, I think we have saved the city, I would say, so far, probably close to $200,000 just to date, roughly, for sure. And we've also initiated lawsuits and small claims that we have brought in some revenue for the city as well. We have initiated foreclosures. We have handled, we have taken in, and TPD is here, we have taken in TPD's foreclosure, forfeitures rather, in addition to the RPOs that was also outsourced by private council.

So what was your COLA?

I KNOW, I WAS LIKE, HEY!

ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CITY ATTORNEY'S BUDGET?

Not necessarily the city attorney, but have we gotten any updates on the HERA group that we hired regarding and if we have been able to collect additional revenue from hiring them?

$33,000 so far. It is considered to be a success. As a matter of fact, I had extensive conversations with the city of Melbourne, city manager, and they are now proceeding to do an RFP. I sent them our document, so they're going to go to a registry. So it was a success story for outsourcing.

Great. Thank you. Yeah, because they collected the $33,000 and didn't have to spend any time doing it. So in the past, they were collecting about $20,000 and probably spending about $50,000 in staff time trying to get it done. All right. So no questions about the city attorney's budget? All right, city manager's budget. Questions? City attorney, do you have something? Yeah, sorry. All right. I do have a question. It looks like we give the city manager a car allowance of $525 a month times 12 months at $6,300 a year. So where does the travel and per diem come in?

I think the car allowance is per the contract that we negotiated, and then travel is if you are to attend a conference.

There are several different conferences that I'm authorized to attend, ICMA, et cetera.

Yeah. So I think, yeah, so some city managers do go to Florida League of Cities, but I don't think ours goes to those. But then there's the International City and County Managers Association, which, Tom, I don't know if you do attend those, but those are good, I've been to those before.

What I'm saying is the traveling to a League of Cities meeting would be covered under the vehicle allowance, and then traveling to a conference and staying in a hotel in the per diem for food, that would be that $53.56. They're two different funds. Correct. The question I have is, have you gone? Are you planning on going?

I did not go last year because I was new to the job. I haven't found the details yet. I think it's in... September, so we'll be at September of 27. But if it helps, I have no issues with reducing that. I'm not a big traveler, except within the city.

All right. You know just mileage driving around that's covered in this contract, but the conference in and again We've had an opportunity to work with him for last year. I don't remember him going to any conferences That's why I was it kind of flagged me in the budget to go. What is this for? Any other questions about the city manager's budget I'm moving on to say clerks budget All righty the budget went from 859 to 908 and Not a whole lot you can do there. Wanda runs a lean, mean ship. Congratulations, Wanda. The one thing I do want to point out is the promotional activity. The legal advertising that we're basically paying is roughly $42,000 a year. And I believe we can, per the state statute, do that online. And I would like to do that and reduce a bunch of costs.

You can. However, there are some ads you cannot legally do. If you're talking about the county website, is that the one you're speaking about?

Yes.

Also, you have to compare cost. So if their cost is more than Florida Today, you have to advertise in Florida Today. We did this research about three years ago, two and a half, three years ago. There was a lot of things that came into play. A lot of the confusion we thought could be coming to play with the citizens, not knowing where to look for the ads because some was going to be on the county website, some would be in Florida Today. Advertising with Florida Today, they're currently putting them on the website and in the newspaper. Currently, only two cities that I'm aware of are doing the county websites. in Brevard County, which is Melbourne and Satellite Beach. So we can look into that further if you would like to see if anything's changed.

Well, I think of the three years there's been that state law that's enabled it to be more like us put it on our website or whatever we need to do to get the information out there without, you know, paying a newspaper that, let's be honest, not everybody gets.

Oh, I agree. And then we also have to have a registry that if citizens want to sign up, they can receive notifications as well, which could be an additional cost depending on how we do that.

By the way, I do have a solution for that when we get to community relations. Member Stoeckel?

Yeah, is that increased cost because of more projects coming down the line or...

Unfortunately, most of our budget, several line items are kind of, you know, depends on what other departments are doing, especially planning. If they're processing a lot of land use applications, some of those large display ads are very costly. Not only that, but if they're changing permitted uses, conditional uses, things like that, it's going to affect our code, which then affects our line item for codification. Okay.

Yeah, because I do see how it's gone up for that promotional activities line. And I do remember when that legislation was passed. And I think it has good intent, and I do like it. My big thing is obviously transparency and more we can inform the public. And I think we do do that with signs around the proposed property. We still do the mailers. And is that part of this fee as well, the mailers? Yeah, that's what I thought. And I like the online component. I think we just need to stay, I think, on top of it as newspapers read, in my opinion, less and less, especially with the younger generation, to see what we can do to make sure that people are hearing it, but cost savings where we can.

My issue is not with the mailers or with the posters or the stakes in the yard. My issue is just put it in the floor today that most people don't even look at.

Yeah, do we pay a third party to put those signs out on the property?

That might be a Mandy question because we provide those upstairs and I believe they go and put them out Yeah, our city staff your city inspectors.

Thank you All right, well, I think there's a little bit they could be tripped there from the floor today bill Hopefully they'll get back to us. Let us know what we can trim off that law enforcement Any questions about law enforcement? Looks like the law enforcement budget stayed pretty close to the same, looking at about a 6% increase. I'm assuming a lot of that is pension reform. Yeah, Mayor Moscoso.

I see how we can save $145,000, but I don't think anybody would agree. It's the flock cameras.

Yeah, I don't see that. I don't see it happening. I'm just saying. It's actually less, but. I have to say. Yep. Any changes to law enforcement? I do have a question about law enforcement, though. It's mostly just bugs me when I see all these different cell phone vendors. You know, we have AT&T, we have Verizon, we have T-Mobile. Wouldn't it be more cost effective to have it all under, like, one main contract?

I might defer that to IT, but...

So currently, we're using the state contract that sets all of those rates. They're basically the same. And really, all we're doing by moving to the different groups is doing coverage values for the different items we're using. So for instance, for the police department specifically, we're using Verizon on the laptops themselves. And then we use T-Mobile for the phones. That way, if there is an interruption in any service, we have an alternate means to make sure that the communication is maintained for all the officers that are out at that time.

Well, it's hard to argue with that explanation. I appreciate it. But again, you just kind of look at it on a budget line item and you go, okay, this doesn't make any sense. I very much appreciate the explanation. All right. On to code enforcement. Now, I do have questions about the code enforcement cell phone bill because they have Verizon AT&T and T-Mobile and that charges $15,500 a year. and there's like four people in that department, right? Five? It seems like a lot to me. So I'm on, hold on. 62, right after, oh, 15, yes. So help me figure out why it costs $15,500 for cell phones for a small department. unless it's just their portion of the aggregate, which still seems disproportionate.

Does that have anything to do, I know they have a feature where you can text in your concerns, but I don't think that should cost an additional amount.

I'm sorry, I don't see that on my budget, so that doesn't come through my side of the PO system, so I don't know where that cost is coming from. I can look into it and find out what it is.

Okay, so Kevin, I'm on page 15 of that, okay. Because like I said, that seems like a lot. And then I do have another question about their budget regarding operating supplies, operating supplement of $93,000 for demolition, uniforms, tools, safety equipment. What are we demoing? Because I'm excited. I mean, if it's some of our dilapidated buildings, I'm all for spending the money, but I'm assuming that's not it. So if it's the uniforms, the tools, safety equipment, any $3,000 seems like a lot of money.

I believe they've been moving into looking into demolitions of certain properties, but they've never reached that threshold yet. And I know we haven't had a demolition of a property in many years, so I don't know if that's something they just keep budgeted in right now in case those properties do come up. But I can get that answer to that here in just a minute.

All right. City Attorney, have we reached a point where we can start demoing foreclosed buildings, or is that never going to happen?

It would be a case-by-case basis, and based on what our ordinance says, usually you have to go through the process to get anything. Building is involved in certifying that a building can be demoed.

The process includes having it designated as a public nuisance.

WELL, SOMETIMES IT VARIES. AGAIN, I WOULD HAVE TO LOOK AT OUR SPECIFIC ORDINANCE AS TO WHAT WOULD CONSTITUTE THE PROCESS IN GETTING A BUILDING DEMO, BUT USUALLY THERE ARE DIFFERENT WAYS. BUT YOU CAN'T JUST, YOU KNOW, WALK ON SOMEONE'S PROPERTY. YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH THE DUE PROCESS USUALLY.

I DON'T BELIEVE WE DEMOED ANY LAST YEAR, BUT HISTORICALLY FOR THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS PROCEEDING THAT, WE WERE AVERAGING TWO TO THREE A YEAR. SO WE HAVE DONE THEM

When's the last time we've done one?

Years.

I mean, I've been in council 20 months. I mean, I would have been there with a birthday cake. Member Nelson?

So I'm curious about the repair and maintenance, 19,000. What is that for?

Oh, that's probably fleet, right, Sandy? Correct.

Yeah, fleet rolls up into their, they have their vehicles, their gas, their parts rolls up into 4601 for every division, every department.

We'll get into that in a little bit. Okay. If you watch every single department, there's a fee paid to fleet. So we'll have fun with that one. But in reality, I'm assuming a demolition does cost a good amount of money. But uniforms, tools, safety equipment, I'm assuming they have all the safety equipment they probably need. It's just a few vests unless I'm missing something. what do you think is an actual appropriate line item for that budget? Unless Glenn's going to tell me he needs it for something. Do we know what they spent last year? Yeah, that's a good question. So code enforcement. Quick question. Yeah, Vice Mayor, go ahead.

Yeah, you know, I honestly don't know, unless they're tearing down a doghouse, why it would cost, and it seems like not a good use of their time, to do demolition. And you asked about the last building that I think the city did, and this may have been about five or six years ago, on the corner of Park and Barner. There was an apartment building there that had been left in complete disarray for a very long time. I think the city went in and demoed that, but I think for buildings that size, you've got to have a contractor to do it. I'm not sure what I agree with everybody else that I'm not sure what demo that code enforcement would be doing.

All right. Well, that, and I think that could come out of the fire budget. Sorry, that's just me being creative with how we take a building down. We chalk that up to train, but all right. So hopefully we can maybe shave a little bit off there. I don't know. Let's call it $90,000. and unless they tell us another reason why they need it. I don't know, TJ, that's kind of in your department, but if you can't give me answers, I'm just saying. Vice Mayor?

Yeah, but my question is, if we had to do it, would it come out of the general fund? I mean, if we had a building that we went through all the legal stuff to do it, I mean...

It would be general fund.

It would be general fund, okay.

All right, any other questions about code enforcement? No? Seeing none? All right. Let's move on to fire. Anybody have any questions, concerns? Again, I did have the same kind of question as I did with police. Verizon, T-Mobile, $61,000 for new equipment. Trying to figure that out. Did you have a question for me? I mean, I'm asking you a question, but you're looking at me weird.

No, go ahead. Nope, nope.

Okay, so on the fire budget, Verizon T-Mobile services and new equipment change total $61,000. I mean, I see there's a radio in there, but what's the Verizon and T-Mobile for? On page 16 of the budget report, general fund ledger with comments. especially because just below that, we already pay for five employees' cell phones, an allowance of $360 for 12 months. So again, no issue for people having a cell phone allowance, but I'm trying to figure out what that Verizon and T-Mobile charge is there.

We have a lot of our equipment has cellular service, so our MDTs are tablets for running medical calls and stuff. And then also our LIPACs have cellular service as well to transmit that data to the hospital. Perfect. Thank you.

I mean, I just wanted to know what it was for because, like I said, I'm looking at cell phone providers on a different line item than cell phone. I think it's a fair question. But that makes a lot of sense to me. Anybody else have any questions about FHIR?

Not a question, but I just want to say that I did appreciate our union negotiations and the solutions that were coming up with, as well as Lucas's presentation, I think it was at our last council meeting, about how they are trying to save costs through different things that they're noticing. So I just wanted to acknowledge that.

Yes, the solution was more breaks. Just giving you a hard time. But I did also have one more question about the fire. By the way, look at the fleet maintenance cost schedule as well. I think that's something to note in this budget. But the business and working meals, $5,000. So what is that for?

I'm not sure about that. I have to look at or get back to you on that answer.

Okay.

And then SCBA bottle replacement. What's an SCBA? So those are the self-contained breathing apparatus that we use to breathe air within the fire. So they have a 10-year lifespan, and we will have to replace them. So is $30,000 appropriate, too much, too little? We have a cycle. We're going to buy 20 of them every two years so that when they hit that life expectancy and we take them out of service, we're not buying 100 of them at a time.

Gotcha.

So is this us budgeting for next year to do it, or are we doing it this year? Every two years. That's this year. And then FY29, there will be another set to purchase.

Okay.

Thank you for that.

Any other questions? All right, now we're on public works, which I'm on public works admin. This is a very confusing budget. I had many questions for Sandy and I was like, who's in public works admin? Literally who I wrote very, very big. It's not just Sandy, but it's not not Sandy.

It's partially Sandy. It's partially Ashley. And it's all of the senior admin. So we distribute mine and Ashley's salaries amongst other funds since we manage a lot of funds.

All right. I don't see many questions on that one. That one's kind of a lackadaisical fund. But I do appreciate the amount that you are charging to fleet maintenance in your admin fund, which is not much. facilities maintenance oh I apologize we're on traffic signals and lights is there a way that we can save money in this department I believe that where there was a discussion about outsourcing certain things yes so we we get paid from the state

to maintain their traffic signals, similar to how we get paid to maintain the right-of-ways. I know for sure in the right-of-ways we pay for more than they give us because we increase our level of service. I'd have to dig into traffic signals to look at the numbers, but this is definitely a recommendation if the tax reform does go through to give these back to the state if we're losing money on maintenance.

That's a strategy that's being exercised by all the cities that I'm aware of, that if Amendment 3 is passed, there's going to be a transfer of duties that we currently do for the state, do not get full cost recovery, and transferring it back to the state, which probably will... RESULT IN A REDUCTION IN THE LEVEL OF SERVICE, BUT AT LEAST IT WILL HELP US IN MEETING OUR BUDGET REQUIREMENTS.

Yeah, my question on that one was the repair maintenance, how in 25 we were at $113,000 and now we're at $255,000.

So we amended it mid-year and added more. I don't have that number right in front of me. And then this is also we're looking at replacing two intersections with new span wires because they're past their useful life and need to be done.

Okay, thank you. Member Moscoso?

Um, if we do give it back to the state, what when you say level of service, what would that look like for our.

Our citizens at the level of service is, um, Kevin has a better idea, but my understanding is, let's say, right away maintenance. We currently do it weekly. Um, it'll probably be quarterly by the state.

at that level of just like me, like mowing and things like that.

Right now we contracted out to JB.

Well, I think we're, we're getting two things here. So right now we're on streets.

Yeah. So that's kind of what I'm talking about. What would the level, if we give that back to the state, what would the, with the lights and stuff with, what would that look like? Just lights not being changed as frequently or.

Well, Yeah, you wouldn't have the own call service that you have now where a staff member comes out from the city to work on just the 50 signals we're responsible for. It would fall to the district, which would probably be all of our county operations. So it would be particularly in a hurricane. You would have a slower response time because they will have prioritization at a county level, not at a city level. And then preventative maintenance would be still done, but it would be at a different timing cycle. Their schedule would be 50, maybe 500 signals they're maintaining. DOT outsources their signals to a vendor, so we would be behooved by that vendor's responsibility, not by the city staff coming out to, say, reset a signal in the middle of the night that's on flash. That would go to the PD would call that out to a contract vendor to come out to do, and we would rely on them to come in at that time to handle it.

Okay. Thank you.

You know, I'd be very much concerned about that because that's a safety thing. Because if, you know, the state's going to have to ramp up if every city decides to do that. I can't imagine how many additional people they would have to ramp up to do something like that. Very much concerned about traffic lights because when they go out. You know, we call and somebody from the city comes and fix it. But if it's a state responsibility, there's no telling how long it would take for them to come in. I mean, it's something to think about. I just don't feel comfortable with it. So just because I don't doesn't mean it's wrong.

Just put it in context. It is a state responsibility. It is their road. We've been doing too much to help them and they're going to outsource it to the county and the county is going to call their third party contractor and they're going to fix it. Yes. And in a time of a hurricane, you could have some slower response time. However, same things to be said if we have a major outage at one of our intersections We're still calling that same contractor to fix it if we can't so the same issues are still gonna apply in an event of a natural disaster Member Muscoso, but does that mean if there's like a major issue and we can't get that third party out there We can't just go out and fix it ourselves.

I Think if we're not in a contract with the state, we would not touch the state infrastructure.

Okay, I PD could still, you know, this would probably hit PD hard too, because they'd have to direct traffic, and rather than us running out and being able to put a generator on it, that would take them, take some of their staff time, or us putting up MOT, which I don't know if they'd allow us to do without the contract. We'd have to look through that stuff.

Any questions about traffic signals and lights? All right, facilities maintenance. Any questions? No questions about $450,000 in professional services? I mean, HVAC systems are expensive.

And our buildings are old.

And our buildings are old. Well, I think the big thing that gets charged to facilities maintenance, unfairly, is all the utilities run through there for all of our city buildings. So I think just overall a decrease in some of our utility costs would make an impact on that $554,000 budget line item. Now, in terms of repairs and maintenance of $1.2 million, how much bang for buck are we getting there? Do we need to do more? Do we need to do less?

Oh, so this includes this includes 400,000 to look at fire station 12 because that that is no longer really functioning for them to look at changing the layout. We can always use more repair and maintenance. I think we're maintaining. Pretty decent. I don't have any big issues looking at next year, so I think it's doable. But City Hall, the police department, the fire departments, they need a lot of repair and maintenance. Now, there's capital things that have not been funded, but that wouldn't go in this line item. That's on the unfunded list.

And I guess where I'm at, guys, is I feel like we've been putting a Band-Aid on a gushing wound for too long. And every year of paying, you know, I don't know, $2 million in maintenance is just not attendable anymore. And I think it will be a behoove of council to pay attention during the public-private partnership presentation that is scheduled for Wednesday. WHEN? AUGUST 25th. AUGUST 25th. I'D MUCH RATHER SEE US GET SOME NEW THINGS AND FIND A GOOD RENT DEAL THAT MAKES MORE SENSE.

AND THAT PRESENTATION WILL INCLUDE SOME CURRENT SUCCESS STORIES OF OTHER CITIES THAT HAVE USED THAT SAME PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP TO AVOID HIGH CAPITAL INITIAL COSTS. SO I THINK IT WILL BE A VERY INFORMATIVE PRESENTATION.

I DID GET INFORMED AFTER THIS WAS PUT IN THAT PD'S ROOF NEEDS TO BE TOTALLY REPLACED. Oh, you'll have to get back to you on that.

So you're telling me I need to put the $90,000 back in the code enforcement's budget for demolition?

No, put it in mine. Okay.

I mean, I don't think $90,000 is going to buy any roof for the PD. All right, roads and streets. I think the confusing thing that I had as an issue is last year they moved road resurfacing from repairs and maintenance to capital. Now it's back in repairs and maintenance. So it's kind of hard to track where we are in that regards. And I've had many conversations with Sandy and with Kevin about road resurfacing and whether we're getting our best bang for buck. And like I said, The county has a contract that we can piggyback off of, which they just pay per square yard and the amount of asphalt. Now, I think some staff have some concerns about that because I guess we ask for more things. But in their contract, they can't bill us for things such as mobilization and some other fluff that they currently do. And we're currently scheduled to repave 6.6 miles of roads at a cost of about $1.7 million. Did I nail that? Kevin, am I right? Close? Sorry, 1.3 million. Yeah, 1.3.

1.3, because 100,000 is for sidewalks.

Yeah. So where's the other 300,000 going?

That's fleet and then 39,900 FEC for crossing maintenance.

Gotcha. So what do you guys think?

We can always turn around and do less road.

No.

I know. I mean, it's not. I need more roads.

Yeah. I mean, we definitely need more roads paved. But I think it would be important for us to explore the county's contract because the mobilization fee of $15,000 here or $20,000 there, I think, will get us a little bit more bang for buck.

Yeah, I don't need a vote on that. When we go out to bid, we can review the contracts and see if that would save us some money.

Because at the end of the day, if we can get seven miles instead of 6.4 for the same amount of money, I think we should explore that. because there's a lot of roads that don't connect to anything, and like Sandy's told me before, Dray Road ain't near anything, so mobilization costs to just do that small strip, but if we're not paying mobilization, we're just paying for the amount of asphalt and square yard, I think makes a lot of sense.

And looking at that recently, we might get under 6.6 miles because some of the roads that need to be done are going to need some extra asphalt. So I just want to caution, we're going to spend everything we can, but it might come in under 6.6 because I was out there looking at some of these roads, and we'll probably need to add some extra thick asphalt due to some base issues.

Member Stockel? With that, how often does a road need to get repaved, typically?

I think we have it set at what, every 30 years, but it's not definitely every 30 years. Some roads, depending on if they're in a high groundwater table, might need to be paved earlier. We do a condition index every few years to kind of look at the worst areas. We don't go and pick piecemeal the worst ones. We try to group them together because that reduces the cost to us. And then, trust me, if you go pave one road in a subdivision and not the rest, it doesn't go well.

Oh, yes. And I feel like since I've been on council, we've aimed at around six miles, but then sometimes we've done eight, sometimes it's been seven. I think one time we did nine.

One year we did 17. That's because we got grant money. Was that during the COVID? American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Yeah. If we can pick it up at mid-year, we've gotten some extra money at mid-years before. Okay.

And I guess, are we doing planning with all the development that we are having? Obviously, that's adding more roads to our pool. I feel like this average of six will need to kind of eventually grow. We'll need to do more.

Very good point.

Okay. Thank you.

It just depends on some of these newer subdivisions that were approved. If they have an HOA or CDD, we just make sure we don't ever accept them. Well, we'll just put it in a time capsule for future councils in 20 years. Don't accept these roads. Make the developer pay for it. All right, any questions about roads and streets? Seeing none, let's move on to support services admin. Do you guys know who's in support services admin? I do, because I asked. It's very confusing. I thought Kevin was in the city manager's budget. He's not. No, so in the city manager's budget, it's city manager, internal auditor, and the executive assistant. Support services admin is Mr. Kevin here, the new asset manager, and Heather Kenny, support services special projects. So in case you were wondering who rolls up where, it's confusing. So I did have a question about, well I highlighted, it's not really a question, just in the budget he has $108,000 earmarked for professional services. One of those is for the city hall security at 63,000 and then the neighborhood services security, right? That's what it was?

No, we moved that out of this division into neighborhood services. So just city hall plus the welcome center.

Gotcha. Any questions on this one? Other than fleet, I don't know what kind of fleet impact you're making, but apparently $12,000 worth of fleet. Oh, sorry, I'm on the back page. Customer service. Yeah, customer service. Yeah, they have a $12,000 fleet budget, which is confusing to me.

City Manager? Well, Kevin can answer that, but that's their vehicle for their field service.

So the customer service does have a field representative that does, like, water theft investigations, checks, bad meters, those types that are separate from field ops in the water department. So that is, they operate one vehicle in person.

I will say, I think the customer service divisions operate under budget year to date. I think they're doing a good job keeping costs well. I don't know if you guys have seen that, but it all looks pretty good. Yeah, down 10%. I mean, it isn't very often they go down 10%. I don't know if anybody's here from customer service, but kudos. I'm not seeing anybody from customer service. They fall under your department, don't they?

No, they're separate into, they're their own division within support services. The big reason, they are direct calls to the water utility and solid waste fund. So all these calls, although they show up in the general fund, they are directly paid by the two utilities, dollar for dollar.

Any questions on customer service? All right, seeing none. Moving on to finance. I know, Jenna's just holding her breath right now. I did have a question about the legal stuff we have to do in the newspaper. Like, what does finance have to do for legal ads? It says, Florida Today, Trim.

Yes, that would all be term related that are required to be published in the newspaper.

Apparently the letters don't suffice. No. Another example of the state making us spend money. I just thought it was interesting. All right, on to human resources. All right, any questions about human resources? Seeing none. Guys, I think you need to update the comments. It says HR consulting, Robinson Bush. They were two brokers ago, but nonetheless. I thought it was interesting how we're splitting the consultant fee between HR and general fund. I think that should all be in HR personally. And then labor-related legal assistance. And Andrean just told me how great of a job they're doing doing the things in-house. My question is,

Mayor, council members, labor relations are the outsourcing of professional services to our attorney and collective bargaining representation. As you recall, some of our executive sessions, we rely on professional labor. If we go to impasse, any grievance, arbitration matters, we use, hopefully, we're... We're not gonna go in that path, but in the event we do. So there is a, there's an entry there for labor related legal assistance.

How many employees does the city of Titusville have? I'm sorry. How many employees does the city of Titusville have? employees 600 600 600 and how many people in human resources department there are Including our there are seven of us seven City of Melbourne has a thousand employees and they approximately have like four and HR So my question is are we appropriately staffed?

I think so. I think the ratio mayor of human resources staff to the number of employees. We usually use a ratio of one to 100. So for 600 employees, I feel we're appropriately staffed. I don't know to what extent all of their services that they provide, but we're a full service HR department, including risk management, payroll, labor relations, benefits, so. Search, applicant tracking, we pretty much run the spectrum of human resources.

Thank you. I apologize, I did have a question about the wellness employee incentive program at $40,000. What does that $40,000 get us? And then the city of Titusville annual health fair at $11,000.

Mayor, the wellness, so you heard from our consultant that Aetna provides incentive of about $75,000. That is to help us with our wellness program that we talked about earlier where each employee is offered a wellness program and meets certain benchmarks such as their annual physical, their health risk assessments, We have a number of wellness activities that they participate. They're all self-administered, and that is through our Aetna $75,000 that we spend. That program has elevated to over 200 or so employees who participate in that, and we are supplementing that in our HR budget. There's also the annual health fair that we implement that is an ongoing activity each year where employees benefit from a number of sponsors in the community. And that is very well attended. That's also part of this budget.

I'm just confused as to why it costs $11,000, because I was there. We're using this room, you know, so there's no facility fee. All the people that come in are vendors that shouldn't be charging us any money. So other than food, which we're not spending $11,000 on food, where does those costs come from?

Well, in the past, we have used, bought food, snacks, Gatorade, for all those that, for example, come in and have their health risk assessment at the health fair. And we supplement their nutrition with those health snacks. And we've now outsourced that to some of the – the trucks that come in and food trucks that come in. And we think that's a great benefit that encourages our employees to participate. So if they've had some fasting that when they come in for their health risk assessment, they can go out and have breakfast at one of the food trucks. So that's where that $11,000 is part of that amount.

I don't remember us drawing blood last year.

I'm sorry?

I don't remember us drawing blood last year. Do we draw blood?

Yeah. Well, we had the fingerprint. We've moved to the fingerprint this year, which is kind of interesting that we did that mid-year. And I understand by giving a fingerprint serves the same purpose as a blood draw. Member Stoeckel?

Yeah, I think he's asking, because like the city picnic on here, and I've been to that, and I've seen, I think I've done the health fair one time, but the picnic makes sense because there's prizes. It's where everybody comes together. That one, I think, is at $15,000. I don't know how, do you know what the $11,000 is going to? Because I do feel like it's typically vendors, and unless it's a... Is that prizes too in food? Because I do feel like that what employees are getting for that is primarily from the vendors, not from the citizen. I'm curious about where that is coming from.

Yes. There are some prizes that the employees participate in. We do a little wheel. When they actively participate, they have to go around to each one of the vendors and then have a card that's stamped, and then we draw for prizes at the end. And that's, you know, it's voluntary. but it's also paid to the employees should they receive that award. It's a fringe benefit. It has to be complied with through IRS standards. It's a great program. I think our employees look at it each year. As the mayor was pointing out, we fill the room with vendors and outside sponsors. We look to that as a favorable benefit for our employees. City Attorney.

Yes, I just wanted to go back real quick. Joe, did you decrease your legal services, professional services budget?

Over time?

For this year.

I can't find it for some reason.

I would imagine you are. Given that we're, I know previously the city attorney's office, you relied on a lot of outsourcing of employment stuff, I know that. Correct. But I would imagine that you would probably.

This may be the same, but as we look forward, I think our relationship and what we've been doing internally with employment actions, I think we can reduce that over time.

I think we'll initially reduce it, and then it's event-driven. For example, we had several complex personnel issues which required us to... consult with Jeff Mandel, our labor attorney. We just didn't feel comfortable.

This was previous?

That was previous, but that was event-driven. That's why the revised is higher, because we had to put more money into it. But again, we can set it at a lower level.

So name one, we do have an arbitration that's coming up in the fall, which is... That arbitration had been previously assigned to law firm beforehand.

But I think as we discussed, I can do some internal prep with our staff prior to outside counsel, but that had been previously retained by outside counsel.

And there are matters of public the perk and public employees relations committee commission. We've had a new bargaining unit representing our service employees. That's required initially some representation by the city with perk. And then as we're in negotiations now, should we need some outsourcing, it's available to us. But we've been using our city attorney and we've been working out real well and keeping those costs at a minimum.

Yeah, I think it's a lot of it to the city attorney's office because your budget for professional services was 162 revised last year. Now it's 88, which is, again, why I believe the HR consulting should all be in that because it falls under HR, you know, not necessarily, you know, 30% to HR and, you know, 70% to the general fund. I think that just makes it too confusing or 40, 60, however it works. Member Moscoso?

I'm sure it's a great program. I think what we're trying to do is save the taxpayers, so I'm in favor of cutting it.

Can you be more specific?

Sorry, the $11,000 health fair.

I mean, I think we can give them a budget of $1,000 for food and whatever, but I think $11,000 is excessive.

Yeah, like I said, it's hard because I just see that, but I don't know what that's going to. So it's hard for me to say, yes, let's keep doing it because I have a health fair that we have and it's primarily vendors, so we don't spend a lot of money on it. But I'd like to have something for food and some prizes, but I don't know if we need $11,000. So probably looking, unless you feel like you need $11,000.

So I think we're all up here about, let's cut 10,000 out of that? Cool. And I think the employee wellness incentive program, I don't understand why that's costing us 40,000. Like I said, if they get to, you do your biometric screening, it shouldn't cost us money in reduced premium, should be an incentive for reduced deductible, but that should all come out of the health trust fund, right? So I think that needs to be looked at as well to make sure we're getting ROI. I'm not saying it's a bad program, but I think we need to figure out if that's the most bang for buck. And then I will be the first one to say it. If I've got to be the bad guy, I've got to be a bad guy. I think we're overstaffed in HR. I think seven people in HR for 600 employees. Mark, he's an outlier because he's risk management. But with the broker coming in and now doing enrollments, as we move towards more technology for payroll, these items should be automated. The paperwork should go away.

And that's one of the scope of services that we're working on. It's going to take some time to develop that technology. Our benefits consultant is offering that to us. It's part of the agreement. So we will move towards automation beginning this year and into next year. Yes, sir.

I mean, it should be for open enrollment this year. I mean, it's not hard to upload data files. I mean, they've done it. Member Nelson?

I'm thinking maybe we need to compare Melbourne and us, see who's doing what down there, how they're managing it, and then look at us and see where we can cut.

Thank you, Member Nelson. All right, Mr. Joe, thank you.

All right, thank you.

I believe we're on to purchasing. Anybody have any questions here? No. Purchasing is a department that I do not understand. And when I say that, I mean I feel like there's a lot of people. I don't really know what the workflow is or what that looks like. I do believe there are some services that can help cut down on the staffing needs as well as maybe make us more efficient. Wanted to hear your guys' thoughts. Member Stoeckel?

I was just going to say, can staff explain what the purchasing department does?

Sure, the Purchasing Administrator oversees all purchasing solicitation of RFPs, contracts, construction, development of scope of work, so forth within as we advertise and bring back to the council. They also oversee our use of existing contracts when we use source well, we use state contracts for purchasing vehicles. The other side of that group handles the processing of requisitions to turn into POs for the city to do business. especially in October. That's very heavy when there's thousands of POs issued throughout the departments. There's two staff members that monitored that and turn it right to a purchase order by reviewing the department entries.

Okay. And that was my other question. Do you know how many people are within the purchasing department? Five. Five total. And they work alongside finance but are not considered part of finance, I'm assuming?

Correct. In the past, they were part of finance back 15 years ago.

Okay. That's it. Okay. Okay.

So I guess the question is, what would be the difference in cost versus having that internal, including the pension, health care, long-term liabilities of that department, versus having an outside vendor complete this task of purchasing?

We'd have to review that because I don't know the cost of time ahead.

Any other questions?

Not a question, but just a comment to circle back to our retreat that we did keep in mind We do still have a consultant that will be coming and looking at all of these departments and hopefully seeing not only the culture Organizational health but also could maybe hopefully come up and see would it better like you just said to outsource some of that? Would it be better to combine it with finance? Those are some things that we can kind of explore When is that consultant coming? It should be. I know Mr. Cook's working on it, and I have been working on it. It's within this budget year because that's what we stated as one of our short-term goals. So I think it should be happening before October.

Is that in the budget? I didn't see that.

Yeah.

Professional service.

Yeah.

Which department? Probably mine. Okay. I didn't see that in there. We just covered it. I didn't see that. Thank you for bringing that up, Member Stokehold. community relations. Any questions?

Yeah, I noticed that the personnel services, it went down almost by 100,000. Is that including the new PIO?

Mr. Kevin. Yeah.

Don't worry. So the personnel services went down $100,000. I know we lost our PIO. Is this $251,000, including the new hire?

No, I believe the PIO is allocated to 1701, so this is the three remaining community relations manager plus the digital compliance and immediate services tax.

So where does the PIO fit?

1701. Okay.

All right. Thank you.

Well, just right off the top, there's a budget mark for $20,000 for flash vote. I think that could go away, but that's my opinion. I don't think we got the results we were hoping for in terms of participation. So it seems like unnecessary, and it didn't work, and we tried it, and let's pull it up. Community relations. There's professional services, $20,000 for flash vote. And then $19,000 for planning and promotional activities, newspaper ads, promotional ads. I mean, we can't be spending $19,000 on Facebook, are we? I mean, I hope we're not advertising the newspaper.

No, no, that money actually was a lot higher until we went through this budget and I actually allocated a lot of that money over to printing. I believe in the past years promotions was in the 40 plus range. From my predecessor and I felt that was probably a little exorbitant. So I reallocated a lot of that money some of it has moved over to The different software things which are now being handled through IT But as far as the 19,000 for promotionals a lot of that helps with some of the printing when we have to do big items like banners and stuff for different events if we have to get Uh, extra copies. We have a finite amount for the printing budget for talking points. For instance, right recently, up until this budget year that we're putting for now. Uh, printing was set at, like, 200 bucks and that doesn't even cover 1 cycle of talking points talking points is on average about 8 or 900 dollars for the prints every quarter. So that's why that money has gone up. But as far as the $19,000 for promotions, that's kind of been a catch-all in the past to cover things that weren't exactly specified in the previous budgets that I've now inherited.

So in this past fiscal year, how much of this budget did you use?

I will have to get back to you on that one. I'm not exactly sure.

I mean, just from what I'm seeing, it's hard to drill down into the year-to-date actuals, but if we're not advertising the newspaper, because Wanda's budget is advertising the newspaper, and that's a lot, right? And I don't think you guys are doing that.

We pay for Hometown News every month, and that's $200. We pay for, there are Facebook ads, which sometimes are a couple hundred bucks here and there, and that's usually about three or four times a year. And then the, I believe, well, we don't do the Florida Today anymore. They up their price a lot, so we canceled that about a year or so ago. So it's just a matter of putting out, you know, printing different objects, different things like that, that go beyond Talking Points.

So we pay $200 a month to Hometown News? Yes. Is that just for a subscription?

That's to put an ad in. We have a page in there in the first issue of every month, and it's about $200 each.

What are we advertising?

It's just a local news thing. We put out there press releases. We put out there advertisements for events that are going on. For instance, in the July issue that came out just before, I think it was either the June issue or the July issue just before 4th of July, we put a big thing in there about the red, white, and boom and about the parade. Big events like that is what we put in there usually.

Can we do that case by case or do we have to have the $200 a month?

Like, for example, I think I would have to talk to Rodney down at Hometown News about that. I think it's just a it's it is month by month. So if we don't do it one month, we don't do it. I don't pay in advance. I don't pay.

You're not paying like a subscription, not a fee for the whole year.

It's month by month. If I just say, hey, I'm not doing one this month, they won't charge.

OK, great. Thank you.

To your point, quarterly talking points is $800, $900, right? And then we have $5,000 earmarked for that, I believe. I believe so. So that gets your talking points plus a little extra. And so the $19,000 for promotional... You know, Facebook ads are very, very inexpensive. You know, again, to your point, we're not doing them very often. So I don't know about you guys, but I would probably be in favor of reducing that by about $15,000 on promotional and then going case by case with the hometown news, Reverend Nelson. I was thinking 10. Sorry. Going down 10 or 15? Going down to 10. Going down to 10. All right. Remember what Scott said.

IF WE WENT DOWN TO 10, WHAT WOULD THAT LOOK LIKE FOR YOU?

I THINK I'D BE FINE.

OKAY. THANK YOU.

I'M FINE WITH THAT.

Do you have to pay anything for Spectrum for broadcasting our meetings or anything like that?

No, we don't pay anything for Spectrum for broadcasting. That was all part of the charter agreement way back in the day in the 90s when the channel was first birthed here at the city. All we pay is occasional maintenance when something breaks and I've got to get it fixed. But we don't pay any kind of fees on that other than, well, there is a Spectrum internet, but that's handled through IT that helps with the live streaming side. But as far as Spectrum TV broadcast, we don't pay for that.

Okay, and then knowing our council dynamics and how much that we want to increase transparency, we want the public to be aware, I just want to make sure that we're giving you all proper direction on that. Do you feel that if we are to cut this, unfortunately it's not one of those core essential services, but we all can agree that transparency in education is a priority. Can you utilize and kind of maximize some of the free resources that we have, utilizing the social media, kind of expanding on what you guys are doing? Okay, within those budgets, if we do make that cut?

From the promotional? Yeah.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, because I mean, it doesn't affect us specifically as people. And there's three of us, a manager and two workers. And I'm not just a sit behind the desk manager. I'm out there doing stuff, too. So we make things happen. And I mean, we've been operating. This has been a three person department since the 90s.

uh and it's remained a three-person department it swelled to uh four people um when jim thomas was still here and then then went to five and now it's back to three so do you guys still do that component of the community advocate within your department yes i've been handling a lot of that lately okay and i think that's too that just i want to make clear of what this department and how it's kind of evolved is you guys do do a lot of different things for how many people you have um Complaints if somebody comes and somebody that can talk press oftentimes, which I don't know how that will work with the new PIO All this technology outside of IT for running our meetings and setting up when we meet off and then also Making sure that you put out accurate correct information of what we're doing So it's a lot and then trying to educate the public So I just want to be clear that I think that is important to us. So I just want to make sure that That we can do that but as was discussed the lowest cost possible because unfortunately when we do look at budget cuts This is one of the more areas we have to pave roads We have to have police officers, but this is one where we can cut But I just want to make sure that that still remains a priority I think for us and that you guys feel comfortable and confident that you're supported by council to do those things and

Yes. Yeah, I don't think there's going to be any problem with those cuts that you mentioned right now. As far as us working, we flex our schedules. So, in fact, I've reduced the overtime amount a lot from what it was in the past. Thank you. We don't use it. We flex. My guys would rather have home time than overtime. And now we're only down to one person that can get overtime anyways because Shane has bumped up.

Okay.

So we don't need that overtime as much as it used to be in the past. That's why I reduced it. Perfect.

Thank you.

Now we've got to talk about office supplies. Sure. I'm fine with a desk and a chair. I think a couch is a little extreme.

So that is actually a TV set that we're going to use for video productions. For instance, if you wanted to do a podcast or some other kind of... I do not. I have no interest. I'm trying to help myself here.

I have no interest in a podcast, and I think a couch is a little much because I know I'll be pretty upset if I see people in there sleeping on the couch.

There were there were talks in the past of doing a sit down meet and greet with different employees, different even having council members come out and speak about things, different things like that. A sit down with the city manager, city manager monthly thing at one point was discussed a long time ago. way long time ago i think back when i was first here so it's one of those things that's kind of carried over for the year so we're looking at doing a secondary set because not everything looks good on a green screen and plus green screen adds time to process and then when you have a police officer in there with green on their patches oh great i've got to rotoscope that out and make sure it doesn't look weird so the set was just a secondary thing and i mean the couch you know i'd get one at goodwill if i could you know i believe in cheap

Well, I mean, I think, you know, there's something to be said with, you know, making sure you have appropriate equipment to work at, office desks, chairs, if they need replaced. But I think it's a couch, you know, you can put up a bar table with, you know, a couple high stools.

It's one of those, you know, options we have open, so. Member Moscoso?

Yeah, I just have to brag on you for a second. I had a resident reach out to me and I went out to his property and I was walking it and he said, yeah, I spoke to Curtis and Curtis is actually, I don't know if it was on your time off or when you did it, but you had gone out there and you saw the property. And for me, sometimes we think, you know, community relations is just this digital thing, but it's also being part of the community. And so that was really neat. And he liked you better than he liked me. So I'm a little jealous about that. So great job with that. Thank you.

Thank you, ma'am. How much do you guys want to allocate for office supplies? Member Nelson.

First, can you live with 9,000? Can we get rid of the couch?

Can you give me six? We would love six. It doesn't come with a couch. It won't come with a couch. Unless I bring one from home, if that's okay. Oh, yeah.

Wait, wait, wait. Don't take that. No, six.

I don't care. I misunderstood you then. I'm trying to see what's on my phone here because I got my thing here.

But that was just to clarify for the office supplies. That was the main thing. Curtis was the set.

Yeah, I mean, it's really a few chairs that we're going to do. The option of a small couch so you have two people sitting there, but I mean, it's not really that big of a deal. It's something we've been talking about for three years, so I'm not in any rush for it right now anyway.

Okay, and if it does become a thing, and especially, again, getting the PIO, maybe we can look at a budget amendment if needed, but... I guess it looks like we're going to six.

And to what member, I thought she said take it down to five. That's why I asked for six. So that's why I misunderstood you.

I knew you misunderstood her.

I understood that we're giving you $6,000 for office supplies. Is that what everybody just said up here?

Yeah. All right.

Okay. All right, so either taking it down by six or giving you six, it's still the same number.

Yeah, I just saw that.

All right, thank you, Curtis. Anybody else for community relations? Anything else jump out at you? Seeing none. On developmental services, thank you, Mandy, for entertaining me yesterday with all the questions I had about this department because this is confusing. Developmental services and who's in that department, there's nine of them, and that's different from the planners. That's 1905. 1902 is different. So this department runs about $873,000 a year. Anybody have any questions? Was that new employee that was earmarked in the 2024 budget in this department or Brad's department of 1905? 1902. 1902.

Member Stoeckel?

So can we, since you brought that up, can we just clarify the positions of the development services versus the planning and how they work together?

Sure. So in 1902, my salary comes out of 1902. The city engineer's salary, the business tax receipt, special events. There's a permit technician who reviews site permits, building permits. THANK YOU. SANDY'S HAVING TO REMIND ME WHO THE EMPLOYEES ARE. WE HAVE OUR DEPARTMENT'S ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT. AND THEN WE HAVE OUR SENIOR ENGINEERING SITE INSPECTOR, SITE INSPECTOR, AND A DEVELOPMENT SERVICES MANAGER. AND WHO'S OUT OF PLANNING? The community development director's salary comes out of 1905. Okay. The planning manager, the senior planner, the planner, there's a plan reviewer, and then an administrative assistant. Okay. The administrative assistant out of 1902, she really serves 1902, 1905 building. Her salary comes out of 1902, but she's our senior administrative assistant.

I would have put you in the planning department, like just knowing. So yeah, I could see how that is confusing. And then what about sustainability?

Sustainability comes out of, sorry, I missed 1905. 1905, okay.

Plus three public works employees.

Yeah, and then the CRA and then the public works CRA. Thank you. Okay.

I just think it's fascinating. I'm kind of nerdy when it comes to numbers.

Well, I get it, too, from an accounting perspective when you have to reconcile everything.

To help confuse a little bit more, the CRA planner and the pilot works technicians are paid out of the CRA fund, other than listed in that division.

Yes. So when we sign timesheets, we have to sign those timesheets, but the money comes out of a different fund, so.

And I guess the challenge we have, and hopefully you guys can help me reconcile this in my brain, but roughly between 1902 and 1905, we're spending about $1.8 million on the departments together. And with the new state law change, with how we can charge developers basically for your time, how do we make up the difference?

Right, so in 1902, I actually pulled the site plan, which are the site plan review and the site permit fees, YEAR-TO-DATE FOR OUR REVENUE, AND WE'RE AT 1.164. WE HAD SEVERAL REALLY LARGE PROJECTS COME IN IN THE LAST COUPLE MONTHS. THREE MONTHS AGO, WE WERE OUT ABOUT 500,000, AND SO THAT 1.1, I'D HAVE TO PULL IT AGAIN, SURPRISED ME, BUT I KNEW IN MY HEAD WE HAD SEVERAL VERY LARGE PROJECTS COME IN. SITE PERMIT FEES OVER 100,000

So to your point, we're at 1.2 million. So we're still negative 500,000. And with future, again, state law impacts, that number of 1.2 million or 1.1 is going to probably decrease unless we can find a way to come up with a hard cost that makes sense. So I'm trying to figure out how we get the revenue. Do you have any suggestions?

Do I have suggestions? I mean, obviously, we're going to have to start looking into, you know, this is a newer bill, a new state law. We are constantly talking to cities in the county, other cities statewide to see what they're doing. There's the building fees that I know they're going to look into a possible consultant. That's something that we had talked about to see what that consultant might have to say about the site plan fees. So, I mean, it's so new. We're just not talking about it.

Again, sorry to put you on the spot. It's just these are the things I think about as, you know, the common question that we hear is make developers pay their fair share and, you know, get it off the backs of our taxpayers. And, you know, this department is basically funded by taxpayers to walk developers through the process. And so how do we get to that more cost-neutral standpoint is going to be really important. Member Stoeckel.

Yeah, that was my thing is to see how can we get to that break-even point as well. The other thing, which may or may not be popular, is we often hear applicants willing to pay extra money to expedite. And I don't want to... hurt the integrity or quality of an application or its thoroughness. But at the same time, I feel like if there's a way that we can have some tax relief for our citizens and we have people willing to pay, I would like us to explore that. And then also just understanding what type of applications we're getting between 1902 and 1905, would it be advantageous to restructure the department? Like if we need... somebody focused more on the planning side than the permit side. I don't know, but just maybe trying to see if we can be creative in that regard, depending on the applications. But anything we can do to try to keep the taxes down, which is, I know, tough.

I do have a question. What is $50,000 for hardening the front? And I do see the note that said the city manager deferred that, but I don't know what that means.

So right now, the front office upstairs, we paid, well, really public works years ago to put in a door. I mean, you can go to the door and just push it with your elbow and it, you know. Yeah. But there's plexiglass up there because of COVID. As you can imagine, we would like to have more hardening as far as security. Glass, PD recently did some bulletproof to their glass area in the front. We thought we would try it and see if we could get it this year because we've talked about it for many, many, many, many years.

Do you feel that safety is a concern for you guys?

Always good to be safe.

I hear constantly that they are concerned about the safety given the numerous instances of violence that occur throughout the country. And we've had some – knock on wood, we haven't had any real serious – but we've had trespassing, we've had some threats, we've had to have the police come out. That's why we have armed security, which we didn't have years ago. We've just seen an escalation in threats against workers. And they are concerned. They bring it up to me every year.

Justin. This is a question about their budget, but more for you. Under the understanding that our customer service calls are recorded in our customer service division, you know, for disgruntled complainants or, you know, if there's any discrepancy in the audio of issues, how much would it cost for us to implement the same audio recording on phone calls for the customer service division and planning such as permits or things like that?

I will have to do an investigation on that and get with Mandy's team for how many phone calls that's going to affect. So it'll depend on how many lines are affected and how that's opted into. We do already have some local security that is based on all the cameras and things that we've used in the past that do maintain audio. So some of them do not, like down in the finance area. Those don't maintain audio, but the ones in the common areas do. So there's some that we can add in those areas as well. So I can definitely look into what that cost would look like.

appreciate it and I guess my concern is you know I've talked with Tom about this is you know somebody could call up that department and say I want to you know put a sky zone in and you know staff says no we're not interested or no council would not make that determination and you know I'm very careful with what I say I would never speak on behalf of council even as the mayor unless we've already voted on it and because I've had those concerns over several times, I think it's important that we put some safeguards in place so that hopefully staff are not speaking on behalf of council. So that's where my concern comes from and I figured I'd share that with you. Any other questions about 1902 or 1905 since we talked about them together? Tina, moving on to economic development. Any concerns there? No, I guess not. All right. Neighborhood services. Anybody have any questions. Thank you Justin. All right. Um, I've said this for a while since I got on council. We should not be operating this building. We don't do social services. We need to have a nonprofit come in and run that building and provide social services. I think the cost that we're paying to operate it far out exceeds what we get from the federal government. I think we would have much more bang for buck if we implemented the process used in Cocoa, where Family Promise came in and rented the building from the city of Cocoa for a dollar a year for 20 years, and they did all the rehab, they paid for all the maintenance, electricity. Sandy was trying to calculate the utilities cost of that building. I think we're at about 100 grand a year, roughly, in terms of just utilities. So I think that's something to be said, plus the $60,000 that we spend on security for that building. So there's $160,000 right there. And then we would give that building back to the community. Member Moscoso, where are you going to push your button?

I'm just curious if we did that. Terry, how would that affect you? How are you guys, in what ways are you guys using it that it would affect how you guys do your job?

So with neighborhood services, we have two divisions of that department. We have the social services side, which is a non-core function of the city. And then we have our, what we call our housing side. That's where we manage the city's CDBG home and ship grants. So both of those divisions are in that building.

But other than that, I mean, we could use, you could still continue to, could they still use that building just as an office space?

Potentially.

For me, that kind of appears that's what it's being used for.

Yeah, I mean, when they're writing their grants or applying for grants, I mean, that could theoretically be done anywhere. You know, it doesn't necessarily have to be there unless they're meeting with the client, which, you know, depending on which nonprofit decides to operate it. Before, it used to be Northborough Charities. I've sat down with the CEO of Brevard Health Alliance and he said, if you give me enough office space, I'll put a doctor's office here. So what do social services look like to that community? In addition, I'm pretty sure our ad hoc committee is going to come give us the same pitch here in the next couple weeks.

Mayor, I'd still elaborate on that. The ad hoc committee is reporting out on August 11th. And one of the recommendations is to outsource and return the building to the community. If you recall, several years ago, North Brevard Charities ran the building and we still were actually tenants of our own building. They ran the whole program. We did an RFP and potentially that's something Council may wish us to consider.

Yeah, so just to clarify further, I think I probably didn't answer all of your questions, is the way that the center of the building is divided is there's a front reception area, and then there are the city offices, and then there is what we call the tenant wing, and there's about six offices that the city leases out to nonprofits.

And how much do you make per month from those six offices that you rent out?

Well, currently only two are rented. Okay. and that's $2,400 a year.

Thank you. Member Stoeckle.

Yes, if we were to do that, do we have an estimated of how much we would save in our budget?

About 100 grand utilities alone.

Yeah, besides, that's the one thing I did hear, but is there anything else, or is that what we're talking about, just the 100?

It depends on if you want to look at staffing as well.

Okay, that's, yeah, okay. How many staff do we have in Neighborhood Services?

Sorry, sorry. Because we just lost her. One, two, three, four, six. Six. Okay.

The question is do we feel that we're getting six FTE worth of community service or social services?

Right.

I mean, currently it's costing us roughly $737,000 a year.

Yeah, that's what I was looking at to see. And I don't think this price includes the $100,000 of utilities. Is that coming from somewhere else?

Facilities.

Facilities budget. Okay. Okay.

So this roughly costs us $837,000 a year.

And I guess that might be a question, Terry, too, if we are, if the federal government's starting to roll back some of their grants and funding, do you feel that we could potentially go down to five FTE? Would that be, I know that's a hard question to say, or to answer, but.

Yeah, although revenues, you know, if grant revenues go down, there's a lot more I'm sure you've kept an eye on all the changes in the legislative and new rules and things. It would be challenging if we decreased staff to manage the same, you know, high level of compliance. That's what I was going to say.

Compliance is the key word, and that's very time consuming when it comes to making sure you do everything correctly for that. So, okay.

In the city manager's proposed budget, it's already proposed to eliminate one staff position from there from seven FTE to six FTE.