Town Council - Regular Meeting

It's time. Somebody want to or do you want me to enter into a closed session under NCGS 143-318-1183 attorney client privilege.

Motion to enter into closed session.

All in favor? Unanimous. If we'll all stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Sergeant Leonard, lead us off tonight.

I pledge allegiance to the flag

and justice for all.

If you'll remain standing for a moment of silence. You may be seated. I thank everybody for coming tonight. And let's see what we got on tab. Do we have anything in between now and the next meeting? Yes, we do. Comedy under the stars Friday night. That's a new one. So, uh, you got some funny people coming. Absolutely. What's the weather supposed to be like beautiful. Good deal. Well, I'll be there at, uh, I'm looking forward to it. Get ready to laugh until your cheeks hurt. We are bringing two national recognized comedians, Cyrus steel and cam Bertrand. for one unforgettable night of comedy under the stars. Bring your blanket, grab a drink, and settle in for a hilarious stand-up, great food, and even better company from dry bar specials to America's Got Talent. These comics know how to keep the laughs coming. Don't miss the funniest night of the year because laughter really is at its best park amenity. Well, I look forward to it and something different, something new and it's good. Also coming up this week, I think, Abby, don't we have coffee with the mayor's next next Thursday? And we're doing coffee with the mayor here downstairs along with the Rotary Club. so uh for you know we usually don't know how we're gonna fit that in i hope i don't know if we're gonna get anybody to get up that early uh but generally we do it at nine o'clock but this is 7 30 but you get breakfast out of it so that's a good thing um generally we don't have a full breakfast but we'll have a full breakfast for this for this one and uh i look forward to that also well uh oh yeah and uh We're gonna do, we're gonna do, I don't even see it on here. Oh, there we go. Mayor and council introductions. Clarence, start with you.

Clarence Alsabrooks, Jr. Tom Ambrege. Crystal Puholik.

Mayor David Cohn. Melanie Cox, town attorney.

Todd Barber.

Marcus McIntyre.

Adam McLam, town manager.

Thank you, everybody. And one thing I started last meeting was to kind of tell you what the mayor has done in the last two weeks and kind of give you a rundown, let you know that I've been out working. I had a meeting with the Stallings town manager and mayor. Now Stallings is joining Indian Trail at Truist Field Takeover. for June 26th, and it's not only gonna be an Indian Trail night, it'll be an Indian Trail and Stallings night. So it's gonna be hopefully even bigger and better than it was last year. Met with the Sheriff Kathy, Captain Mullis, Chief Deputy Underwood, and our town manager, Adam. We meet about every other month, met with them for breakfast. Met with Betty Pruden, who's a resident here in a large meeting room downstairs. with a group of people called Friends of Charlotte. They had a guest speaker, a novelist, Mark Perez. And Mark was very interesting, and he wrote a book on AI. And I don't know a whole lot about AI, but I know more about it now, and it scares the heck out of me, man. It's some crazy stuff coming around in this world. And this guy is a professor, novelist, very smart man. one thing that I think it scared me the most is we've all seen the movies where the the the computers or the robots take over the well, those movies might come true someday because what you know, these well, you shake your head no. But what he's saying is they're really programing these computers and robots to not want to be want to be turned off. They they all want to stay. But anyway, Not I thought it was very, very interesting. We had a poplin back to school bike that not back to school, but bike to school day where our kids got free helmets that didn't have helmets. Sergeant Leonard, you were there and so was Kat Mandy. Lots of the sheriff's department were on bikes directing the children in there had the fire department. Safer kids were there, the parents, the teachers, the staff. It was a really nice day as normal. It was wonderful. It's probably the only school that we could do that at is Poplin, but we have all those neighborhoods, and it's just great to see hundreds of kids riding their bicycles to school. It's a nice thing. Had Common Heart breakfast and fundraiser. Had a nice visit with Keith Adams. Met with a Southwick neighborhood rep. over some things going over there in their neighborhood, checked out both ABC stores, talked to the general manager, had my normal phone calls that i get every week and and uh and emails that i answer and uh spoke with the residents who uh play on the new pickleball courts and boy they're getting like double two thumbs up and one of the things i noticed too is living in bonterra we used theirs courts used to be full they're not full anymore they've gone and now they're at the park uh i've talked to uh several of them and they just prefer to play there. It's a nicer court. So just some of the things that the mayor did last week and I think you should know what he does. All right, that brings us to agenda additions and deletions. Can I get a motion for the agenda?

Motion to approve the agenda.

All in favor? Unanimous. All right. Presentations, new business, Dutch Brothers. Is someone here from Dutch Brothers? Nobody's here. It doesn't surprise me because I passed it on the way coming here today, and they were still lying down 74 to get in there. So I bet they're still doing that. Does that mean I get to keep this dollar? Put that, keep this dollar. Well, I'm sorry. I was hoping he'd give out some free. We'll have him next time. We're giving out some free coffees. My understanding of this is, well, I shouldn't say that. I understand that they got great coffee.

And just a little hint, if you download their app, you will get a free medium coffee.

Oh, really? Maybe that's why there's a line around the bill. Probably OK. No, it's pretty, pretty world famous. So I wish Charles could have been here tonight. OK, this brings us up to FY 27 manager recommended budget presentation. Mr. McLan.

first good evening mayor and council we made it we made it through all of the budget workshops we made it through all the emails and all the conversations and back and forth till we got to this point that we do have a manager's recommended budget to present to you tonight what i would i'll start out with saying is thank you thank you for being my first council to present one of these budgets to Hope it's not the last and I hope there are many, many more to come after this. Couple other thank yous that I'll mention. Thank you to all of town team members, everything that all the directors and everybody did putting their budgets together. And then I'll give a special thanks to finance sitting over there against the wall for the multiple, multiple ROUNDS OF CONVERSATIONS AND E-MAILS AND REDOS OF THE BUDGET AND CHANGE THIS, TWEAK THAT, MOVE THIS THAT THEY DID WITHOUT A COMPLAINT OR WITHOUT ANYTHING. THEY WERE VERY GREAT TO WORK WITH, SO I APPRECIATE YOU ALL. THANK YOU VERY MUCH. ALL RIGHT, LET'S GET INTO IT. So we're gonna do a couple of things tonight. We're just gonna give an overall context of the budget. We're gonna actually give that recommended budget and then we're gonna talk for a split second at the end about capital projects, because that is part of this budget. Hopefully all of y'all have your budget books, draft budget books, managers recommended budget books that brought to y'all last week. Just for the general public to know that after this evening, that budget that you have there along with This presentation will be posted on the web, so anybody can go on and look at that. Also, a copy of the budget book will be both at the library and in Trina's office, so if anybody wants to come look at it, they can look at it either one of those locations as well. Alright, so given a little bit of context, keeping with our theme of using this graphic, we again remember we're in that approval phase. Now we have moved down one more step where that managers recommended budget portion of this and then the next Council meeting will be the public hearing and then hopefully after that will do budget adoption. Council during this process, y'all adopted, uh, kind of tweaked your, um, priorities, right? You know, we, we talked about these, we went back and forth for a while and we created those, uh, priorities of public safety, town infrastructure, employee and civic engagement, economic development and transportation in no particular order. Those are just how they fit up there on the screen. We also this time work to add to each one of those clearly defined goals and measurable actions to be able to show that we are making progress and we are moving through those. That'll help to be able to show, yes, we've done something related to transportation. Yes, we did it by doing adding X linear feet of sidewalk or approving blank economic development, or it'll allow us to have clearly defined measurable outcomes. Lastly, so look in here. Y'all saw this very early on in the budget process. We talked about this. You can see what the budgets have done from 22 through in the like light bluish color. There is the manager's recommended budget this year. So you can see, yes, we did have an increase in budgets as we had ARPA funds and state funds being infused into our budgets, 22 through 24, right? There was a lot of that going on. And then as we came out of that, 25, 26, budget starts to taper back down. And then 27, again, we stayed kind of level a little bit below what the amended FY26 budget was. All right. So now we'll get into the great story and the good story all in one slide. So as we look here, we're just going to give us a high level of all of the budget kind of big ticket items, and then we'll dig down into a few of these. so the overall budget all operating funds for next year is recommended that i'm going to just give 31.9 million i'm not going to give all the the other numbers after that which is a decrease of 1.76 over the fy 26 budget we're holding the tax rate or showing tax rate held steady at 17 cent also holding the debt service cap reserve fund at the five and a half cents We did include additional funds in this budget for economic development. We are requesting one new team member. We're going to talk about those capital projects and what's going on with those. And there is some new equipment requests that are related in this budget as well. All of that is done with a decreased budget of 1.76%. That's why I say it's a good and a great new story. When we talk about our operating funds, so you have your general fund, Powell bill and stormwater, those three, the general fund at 27.5, Powell bill at 2 million, and stormwater at 2.4 million, add up to that 31.9 million. out of that general fund if you remember we just talked about that five and a half cent right so that is that 5.1 million that is transferred out of the general fund leaving 11.5 cent is the 22.4 and five and a half is the 5.1 one thing i want to draw your attention to right so the general fund budget by itself is up 3.5%. Overall, all the operating budgets are down 1.7, but general fund is up three and a half. Anybody look at what inflation rates came out of today? Did anybody hear what they were? 3.8% was inflation year over year. So we held a general fund budget of 27.5 million below what inflation was. That should be a good, I mean, that's a great thing that the budget held below inflation. So now as we look at some, going more granular now, looking at specific revenues, ad valorem taxes are up off of just natural growth, 4.9%. I'm not going to go every single one of them is up 4.9%. Uh, restricted intergovernmental is down slightly. That's our solid waste distribution from the state. investment income i know that was one that got talked about a lot in budget workshops remember as we spend out some of those capital dollars to do some of the capital projects there's less idle funds available to earn interest off of and as interest rates are starting to go down slightly we are seeing less earned income coming off of those so that's the reason for that decrease And then the last one there of other financing sources, that's our transfers in and out of general fund for different funds. That's in the budget book that you were given last week. Just another way to look at that same information, but I think graphically sometimes can tell a different story. The one there in orange, the ad valorem taxes, that makes up 57% of our revenue. And then also if you look at the dark blue one, it's actually kind of a, I don't know what color to call that on that screen. The bluish green colored one, the 7.1 million, that makes up another 26%. So when you add those two sources of where our revenue comes from, that's 83% of our total revenue comes from two sources. Just kind of painting that picture of how we get to a final balanced budget. So as we talk about expenses, general government, that's all the, you know, made most of your main departments here in this building. Public safety is up 4.5%, keeping steady at the sheriff's office with 38 full-time employees for FY27. Transportation listed up there is engineering, because these are by functions. Environmental protection is solid waste. economic and physical development. So this one does have a decrease. And most of that decrease that you see there is related to equipment. So the last couple of years, we've been pretty heavy on purchasing equipment, we've ramped up providing our team members the equipment that they need to do their jobs. We're kind of at a point now that we've kind of gotten some of that caught back up from where years we didn't do that. So now this year we did have a, we pulled back a little bit on the amount of equipment that we're purchasing. That's where most of that decrease is coming across that line. Not all of it, but most of it. And then the last one down there, culture and recreation, obviously is Parks and Rec. Again, graphically can tell a different story. Call your attention to, to the orange and the teal blue total. Those two together add up for 33% of all of our total, uh, expenditures in those two areas. Um, just kinda, those are two of our larger areas that we're, we have expenditures going. Every year with the budget, y'all adopt a fee schedule. The only change this year in the fee schedule is to the EV charging rate. We're going to go up by 5 cent. I'll know what that rate is. Uh, we had a conversation earlier this year or late last year with council that we would make sure that this break broke, even that we weren't subsidizing the charging. Um, we're doing this to make sure that we hold true to that promise and that we make sure that that is what's happening. We talked about equipment. So as we look at what some of this equipment is in next year's budget broken out into general fund and stormwater, and then under general fund broken out to public works, IT and code enforcement. So under public works, a couple of pieces of equipment that are at a 60% share of that equipment, and then it has a cost share with stormwater down at the bottom for 40%. That's because those crews use that equipment on both stormwater projects and on just general fund type projects that we do along the roadways. Under IT, we have had a lot of conversations about bringing some of our IT services in-house, continuing down that path that we have talked about for years now. This is us taking that first-time investment in actual equipment to do that. So we're looking at purchasing some servers, some networking equipment, and some software. That will allow for us in-house to be able to control our daily operations here in the building. It will be ours. We'll own the data, the equipment, everything that's there. We'll also have a backup here, and then we'll have a backup externally in the cloud. Part of this is also we're going to move to where our backup data that's ours would actually be housed here in the U.S., not sitting somewhere overseas, not knowing where it's at. So we want to control that and make sure it's here. I'm breezing through this. I do have questions at the end, but if y'all want to stop me, I can slow down. Yes, sir.

Can you go back?

Yep.

On the Senate agenda, you've got surplus. One of those things listed was a dump truck. So is there a new dump truck in the budget that replaced that?

No, there was a dump truck in FY26's budget. We just haven't surplus the actual, we've already bought the new one. We just haven't surplus the old one yet. All right, as we look at personnel and our team members, again, as I stated when I put the manager's recommended budget out to you all in the message, our team members are how we do everything every day. If we don't have them, we don't do the things that we do. We don't provide the services that we provide. We don't do code enforcement. We don't patch potholes. process payments, none of that gets done without having our team members. So next year's budget has 58 team members in it. That is one new position for a communication specialist. We've had some conversations about what this position can do or will do. Our hope is that this will consolidate communications into one department. Right now we do communications in multiple departments. This will help us to consolidate that. It'll also free up those departments that we're taking that communication out of. One of the big ones for that is park and rec, to free up some of their functions to do more park and rec things, to be able to reach out to the community more and do the things that they are very highly qualified and skilled to be able to do. Position will also help with our new ADA initiative that's coming down from the federal government. It'll also help with economic development and creating brochures, pamphlets, videos, things like that to help facilitate that bringing more economic development into the town. We do have one reclassification within planning, so that's for an assistant planning director, from a senior planner to assistant planning director. Both of these positions are recommended to start in January. We also have 15 part-time staff, and something new that we're gonna try this year is two interns, one of which will be paid, one will be unpaid. Um, the paid one will obviously be a college intern. That's an MPA program. Usually it is a requirement of almost every MP pro MPA program that I know of, um, that they have an internship somewhere in local government. And then a partnership with union County public schools, uh, is an unpaid internship for our high schoolers. It's a class that they have in high school for, um, local government. And this is one of those, uh, Ways that we can give back and partner with, uh, the school system. We've talked about this before, but I just want to bring it back up. I want to make sure that we give our team members the credit that we're credit to do. So if you look, in the manager's recommended budget for FY27, 21% of our personnel, or 21% of our total overall operating is what personnel makes up of that 100%, only 21% is personnel. if you add in all of the capital projects that we manage. So think of Chestnut Parkway, think of Indian Trail Road, all of those projects, which we'll talk about in a second. That number actually decreases down to 6% due to all of the work that they're managing and doing across all of those different projects. And again, I think that can further be seen when you do show the comparison again that we talked about related to number of employees per thousand uh residents and we're at about um 1.27 and if you do the average of those 10 it's actually 1.79 is what the average of those 10 is so we're well below even the average of what those you know other municipalities are and remember we pulled out departments that the town doesn't have and even reduced in departments that the town has to make the numbers as close to apples to apples as we could for that comparison Keeping on the personnel theme, if you remember back to adjourn your budget workshops, we talked about a healthcare increase. And we, at that time we had said 24, I think 24.6 or 8%. Um, we have worked very hard to renegotiate that rate and get it down to a 16% increase. The town is still looking at paying 50% of medical dependent care. I'm recommending a 2.5% COLA and a $1,500 minimum on that. We did have an increase in our contribution to the state mandated retirement pension plan. of 75% or point 75% to 15.13. Yes, I think we've gone back and forth in a couple of emails, the death benefit was reduced by point oh 1%, which equates to about a $500 savings to the town across all 58 employees. KEEPING WITH THE MERIT POOL OF ZERO TO THREE PERCENT, FIVE PERCENT CONTRIBUTION TO TEAM MEMBERS 401 . AND THEN THE UPDATE TO THE PAY CLASSIFICATION PLAN. I CAN TALK, Y'ALL. IN YOUR PACKETS, YOU SAW THAT THERE'S A NEW PAY CLASSIFICATION SCALE PLAN IN THERE. WHAT THAT HAS IN THERE IS THE TWO NEW POSITIONS WHICH WE JUST TALKED ABOUT. IT ALSO HAS TWO ADDITIONAL POSITIONS. And those are because of the last item on there that we're going to go out has been the town practice every three years to go out for a pay classification study. Let's use an external consultant to look and see that we, all of our pay classification scales are correct.

Um, but what those other two positions that are in there is a senior code enforcement officer.

and a business development manager we went ahead and put those in because we know those are positions that have been talked about and we want to make sure that if council chooses to move forward that we know the right band the right location the right salary for those positions so now moving out of general fund and into pow bill Pavel, if you remember is mainly where we do all of our resurfacing funds come out of, and it's where our traffic calming as well comes out of. So straight balanced budget at a little over 2 million. In stormwater, this is a little reduced diagram than what you have in your packet. But again, the biggest change here that you see is in FY26, we had quite a few large projects. Actually, Todd doing the stormwater update here right after I get done with this, we'll go into some of those. There are no scheduled large projects in FY27. We're in a kind of a planning phase to move forward with a couple of more larger projects as we move forward. Capital improvement projects. It's interesting when you break it down like this. Every time I do this, when I look at it, I'm like, wow, that's a lot of projects. Right now on your CIP, there are 24 total projects. 18 of those are active in some way or another. So that could mean that construction is actively taking place. It could be design is going on, right away is being constructed. It could be any number of things. But 18 of those 24 are actively moving forward in some way or another. Yes, sir.

And these capital improvement projects, how many of them does the budget fund? I mean, like...

you know we've been budgeting a million dollars for them on the road every year that's paid so we're not doing that anymore but like i.t road phase two i mean it's does the budget have any money for work or is this stuff we're going to decide later we would have to decide those later so the 10 projects that have capital project ordinances they have dollars attached to them whether it's from fund balance capital reserve fund general fund dollars anything they're already attached to those projects Yes, make sure, check over in the corner.

I think we still owe a million dollars, we're just not paid, so we're not paid up on that.

on old Monroe Road. No, we did not pay the million dollars this fiscal year due to the delay in the project. Again, that money will it's in next year's budget to pay for FY 27 budget to pay next year. If the project moves forward, I hope that it does. But again, we'll monitor that. And if it doesn't, then we'll hold the funds again.

QUESTION HERE. THE OLD MONROE ROAD MILLION DOLLARS CAME FROM A BOND, NOT A GENERAL FUND. I WANT TO MAKE THAT CLEAR. THAT MONEY CAME FROM A BOND THAT WE ISSUED A FEW YEARS AGO. SO THAT MONEY IS SPOKEN FOR. IT'S PART OF OUR DEBT SERVICE RIGHT NOW. YES. THANK YOU.

YES, SIR.

WE TALKED ABOUT THE 500,000 FOR THE I.P. ROAD. IS THAT IN THE BUDGET? IS IT A CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT?

Yep. So due to there not being an actual agreement today with the between the developer and the town, that money is not within the budget. If council chooses in the future to put that in the budget, we can definitely do that. We just need that agreement, that mechanism to to put those funds within the budget.

I have a question down here. Sorry. I'm putting up my hand, Mayor. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Melody's head. I'm putting up my hand. Get some water. Easy question. Softballs I'm giving you tonight. You did mention that particular item. I think we had spoken as a council and asked the attorney to drop the agreement. Can you just tell us where that is? Because I know it's not in the budget and therefore we can't really appropriate it. It doesn't really make sense unless we get the agreement. WHERE IS THAT RIGHT NOW?

I'VE HAD A CONVERSATION WITH THE DEVELOPER. THE DEVELOPER IS SUPPOSED TO BE DRAFTING THAT FIRST DRAFT OF THAT AGREEMENT TO BRING TO US.

OKAY. SO THE ONUS IS ON HIM. THANK YOU.

Uh, we have two new, I'm going to S I just did the 10 capital project ordinances that are within your budget. Um, we have two new projects that are kind of being discussed a little bit. Uh, they were discussed at last meeting. One of them is coming back tonight. Uh, that's the intersection project on old Monroe road at Hayes road and the partnership with stallings for the pedestrian improvements. Those are not included in the CIP because council has not said, yes, we want to do those projects yet. I WOULD LIKE TO, AS WE WORK THROUGH FINALIZING THE BUDGET, I WOULD LIKE TO UPDATE YOUR FIVE-YEAR CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT PLAN. THIS IS ACTUALLY THE LAST YEAR OF THIS PLAN, SO I'D LIKE TO JUST TAKE THIS AND PUT IT IN HERE, AND WE'LL UPDATE THE PAGES IN THIS AS WELL TO FULLY SHOW WHAT OUR CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT NEEDS AND IMPROVEMENT PLAN IS FOR THE NEXT FIVE YEARS. Lastly, I'll talk about, we've mentioned a couple of times that we've been working with our financial advisor on a finance model and what we would be able to show and model and let council see which of these projects would be able to be funded, at what level, at what scale, and what year we would actually be able to do all of these. The model, we can show different rates for the tax rate. We can show different rates for ad valorem growth we can i mean we can up and down a bunch of different things to help us to be able to show which projects we can fully fund and in what years we can actually do that it's pretty incredible alicia alicia and i have had time to sit down and meet with the advisor and go through it and i'm we're excited to show it to you it's probably going to be in july probably or august after we get done and get through the budget then we'll bring that back to talk more about that After that, I'm here to answer any questions. Okay.

Anybody got who wants to start?

Okay. Yeah. Thank you, sir. Um, one great job on the presentation. Uh, I think we got more information this year than any year I've been here. So great job to everybody that put all this together. Investment income is, couple of years ago was 1.6 million, and now I see it's 900,000. Is there any level of money we need to keep in the general fund and different things that we can maintain that to not to where it doesn't continue to go down?

I'm trying to think in a couple of different ways to answer that. Because I know we've got money sitting there. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yeah.

If council wanted to set a policy to say we want to always be able to have a half a million dollars of investment income every year, we would have to figure out what that number would be. As we continue to spend funds to do projects, that investment income is going to continue to go down. That capital plan that we just talked about and all of those projects, as we fund those, we'll see less and less idle funds. We will not go below Council's set minimum in the general... Yeah, it's 30%, general... Yeah, sorry. In the fund balance, we won't go below Council's policy of 30%, but we we can show model again all the way down to that 30% to how we can fund all of those projects.

Thank you. Sure. I just, you know, and I know part of the decrease is we spend our money on different things that we're sitting there. Yeah.

Federal funds.

Yes, sir.

And that's why we were making so much is because there was those ARPA funds and those state dollars in there as well.

FY 27 here, you've got 5.1 million for the debt service and capital reserve. In your expense, we spend out 1.8 million of the debt service. So that leaves us just to clarify, well, it leaves us 3.1 million available to spend, correct?

That is correct.

And that money is not allocated.

That is not allocated. Okay.

All right. Uh, I noticed in the power bill expenses here and revenues, you got 2 million. Part of that 2 million is we get 1.3 million from the state and you've got 700,000 transferred from the capital fund to do that. Does that $2 million allow us to complete the five-year rotary paving plan?

So the 700 and some odd thousand is actually coming from the Powell Bill savings account, correct? Okay, so it's not coming from...

fund balance it's coming from a powell fund balance it's not coming from um general fund general fund balance okay does that make sense yeah i had a fun but just had fun by one okay appropriation um but i just wonder if that's enough for us to complete the five-year road repayment plant program that we that we set up yes if you're saying that the five years was to achieve above 80 overall average

He's saying that if it's to achieve the 8080 80 average for the streets, then yes. Okay. If it's 100, then no.

Okay.

Yeah.

So the plan was to get to 80 with the 2 million. Yes, we would hit that 80.

Okay. I just want to make sure we got enough money there to do that. The but you know, personnel cost is you had estimated an 8% increase and with health insurance going down is are you is that lower? Is that number lower now?

Yeah, it would be down. I don't know how much it would be down, but yes, it would be down some. Oh, I do remember. Yes, you're talking about in that graph that we showed that we had an 8% increase. Yes, it would be less with health insurance going down by,

Yeah, because, you know, it's not not 1.1 million in your budget. And that's one of our I can get you that number. I don't need it. I just it's just good to see it going down. So the you did a call of 2.5% with a $1,500 minimum. That's correct. Okay. Oh, 60,000. Someone gets 1500 at 100,000. Someone gets 2500. That's correct. Do you think that's fair?

Do I think that's right?

Yes, because I think we're trying to, that's what the floor is trying to do is to make sure everybody is getting a decent increase, yes.

I just wonder because, you know, the cost of living, Harris Teeter doesn't charge me more money because I make more money than someone else. So I just was thinking from a, like you said, you know, with an inflationary figure, I was just seeing if it was trying, maybe we give everybody the same amount.

If that's council's direction, yes, we can look at that.

Yes. You know, that's just my thought and they can bounce it around. But other than that, no, I just had a few questions and, um, I think, I think it's a good budget and that was my questions for now. I might have more later, but appreciate all the, you know, you've been allowing me to ask a lot of questions cause I wasn't here and I apologize for not being here at the last budget workshop. So thank you for the good presentation.

You're welcome. Thank you.

clearance.

So there's a. a statement that says put your cookies on the shelf where everyone can get them meaning explain it where everybody can understand it and you did a good job with that i appreciate it for your first one so thank you um i do have a question though and sorry that i don't know i probably should know this but the fund balance at 30 i always know it's 30 but do we set that year over year or the state

So it's in our financial policy that's been adopted by council is the 30%. The state has a, well, they don't have a- There's no minimum. There's no state minimum. Right, there's no state minimum. I knew that.

We said that year after year. Okay, all right, thank you.

Marcus?

All right, I have two questions. Let's talk about ad valorem for a second. Can we go back to that slide? Not the circle. So I'm looking at my book, right? And I see revenues. And I see taxes ad valorem. And I have a 14.5 number. But then I see, is that all? all all of them added okay you just broke it out here correct all right thank you and then the other thing that i had um so good i i appreciate that um the debt service if we can go to that for a second just a quick question i know it's not much For debt service, we see 1.88 in 26, but then in 27, we have 1.89. I mean, it's not a lot of money in the scheme of things, a $27 million budget, but what's the $1,000 increase all?

One of our instruments balloons at the end, so one goes up.

Okay, that's it. All right. So a couple points I want to make. So I appreciate those two questions, answers to that. I know this is your first budget, right? And you kind of got working on it, I don't know, first meeting in December is kind of when you kind of took over, or second meeting, something like that? Somewhere along those lines.

January.

Right, or January, yeah. So I want to say to you, I appreciate the time. I like the aspect of when we were doing the budget, we were talking, everybody was kind of down there. I think from just a perception standpoint, that really does mean a lot to the public, right? Because it makes it accessible to the people, because this is really the people's budget. But in terms of providing the explanation and giving the council the opportunity to ask questions, I think that's very good. I also like the fact that you set up time with everybody to come in and ask questions, to be able to sit down. You personally drove around town delivering the budget books to everybody's house, which I find is very admirable of you. So I sort of like the direction that we're going. I think it's what, 3.5% increase you said? Yes, sir. So we always want to try and keep things within reason, right? But I want to say that the way that the budget is presented, I don't have any more questions. I think that a lot of information has been presented to the public and to the council, and hopefully people will be able to ask questions here in the public, but also lend support to the budget. So I think that's a good first start for you.

All right. Thank you. Anybody else? You did a great job. I will say this. It's I love the fact that everybody's saying, hey, I like this and we're agreeing on this. What I would like to see is if anybody has anything that they don't like about it. Speak your mind. Yeah. You know, don't come up at the last minute and say, well, because, you know, through the emails I see through council, you know, I've seen, you know, where we want to cut this or we want to cut that or we want to cut uh some employees and and all that everybody's entitled to their own opinion but now's the time to say it not not at the very end or not or not say it at all um because i i want to know too like you guys do um is if you think this budget is too much show us how how you would do it differently, or where we can learn how to do it differently. Show us your ideas. And, you know, so what won't happen again is, you know, it talk about a tremendous raise in taxes, but nothing's done to show how you would have saved that money on taxes. So in other words, is what I'm saying. I'm pleased with with what you're saying. What was is what's going on. But if you got something that that you don't like, please let us know. I mean, you know, the 3.5 and that's less than inflation. You know, law enforcement went up. You know, something that you detect, The taxable value increased by four point nine percent. Explain that just a little bit.

So just our natural growth. So new people move into town, new businesses come into town, new investment in the town. That's how you have that four and a half percent or four point nine percent increase. That does not mean that your tax bill will go up because your assessed value is still assessed on what it was last year.

Right, right. Also, and the last thing I want to say is, you know, our personnel is 21% of our operational budget, which is by far one of the lowest anywhere. And actually, what that says is we all know and we all brag about what what a good job are and what everybody does here. And we do it with one of the lowest operating budgets with with what we've got. I mean, how much? It's unheard of. So thank you. Thank all of you that are here. Staff, you're the best. That's all I can say. You work very hard at what you do, and you probably get tired of me saying it, but the numbers speak for themselves. The numbers speak for themselves. So thank you. Thank you. And thank you, Adam. You did a great job.

Thank you.

um one thing to what you just said so in doing some research couple other municipalities that i've reached out to locally like literally that touch our borders on sides they're in between the 30 and 40 percent a municipality a little bit further away but still in the charlotte region you use as a metric as one of their goals one of their council goals is to stay below 50 percent of their operating budget as salary That is a goal that their council has. So to be at 21, you are far below that. Um, council member Barbara, you had brought up about the potential water line. We have had some internal conversations. If we do move forward, hope I hope we will, but it is going to take the developer getting us back the agreement. We have had some internal conversations about how we would look to propose to fund that project. So we are already internally having those conversations.

Well, the next conversation is, I mean, if you can get maybe research a little bit is I like to know what kind of happened because I thought when you were here back then, it was, you know, and I don't want to speak for you, but I thought we, we had an agreement with the County and now you say the contract was never signed by the County. So I don't know what happened, but you know, it's, I don't know if, If it's something we could reach out to try and bring the county back to the table or they're not interested. I mean, none of the county commissioners were on the board back when this happened. So I don't even know if any of them are aware of it. So anyway, I'll talk to you about that at a later date. But, you know, I thought we had gone to the town attorney back then and had it drafted and everything. So I don't know what happened. Yes.

Okay, Adam, thank you. I'll end with another thank you. Appreciate y'all. Appreciate all of y'all. Couldn't do this without you. Thank you. Yeah.

On your presentation, it says the manger report or something. Look at the right up top there. I'm just spell checking for you.

I expected more from this guy.

Very good, okay. All right, Todd, I think is, no, Abby. Come on up.

Good job, man. Website update, Abby. Yeah, I like the green in the back, yeah.

all right got to adjust to my height okay good evening mayor and council I'm excited to share with you some highlights of our recently launched website redesign but before we get into the design itself I'd kind of like to start with the why just as a little bit of a refresher first and foremost we needed to update the design to correct some a lot of back end issues with accessibility on the website. These were all issues that had to be addressed by Civic Plus, our website provider, because they were all back end coding areas we don't have access to on our side. So they had to fix a lot of that as part of this process. Most of those updates aren't really visible, but they are incredibly important so that all of our residents are able to access our information and resources. Second, The redesign, it gave our site a fresh, kind of modernized, up-to-date look with features that make it more user-friendly in addition to accessible. We'll go through some of those here in a minute, but I just kind of want to walk quickly through the process. um so kind of the project scope first of all this redesign was free it's included as part of our civic plus contract so there was no additional cost for us to do this which was great it included a main home page redesign including layout graphic elements all those sorts of things updates to our interior pages that match the overall design And then Parks and Rec, their homepage redesign that kind of complements ours, but with their colors and branding. We kicked everything off in September of last year. Our initial meeting with Civic Plus was in September. We did a layout and color palette review in November. The homepage design concept review and approval was at the beginning of this year. Approved the Parks and Rec homepage in March, prepped for launch in early April, and then we launched at the end of April. So it was about an eight month process from start to finish, which is right in line with their six to nine month timeline for this. So we were kind of a little bit ahead of schedule. And before we get into the website itself, I would be remiss not to highlight our internal website design team. I might be the one standing up here sharing it with you, but this was a team effort. Every department was represented so that we were able to ensure the site meets the needs of every department and those who access. So we had Alicia, our assistant finance director, Sam, our recreation program coordinator in parks. Adam, who started out the project as the director of public works and then turned into the town manager about halfway through. Bobby in IT, Maggie in engineering, and Josue in planning. All right. But I am incredibly grateful to them. They took time out of their already busy schedules to research, meet, provide input. Couldn't have done it without them. So now we can get into the fun stuff. All right, so here's the updated design. As I mentioned before, it's kind of got a fresh, more modern look that still aligns with our colors and our branding. You can see the town seal, the familiar colors that we've been using for the last several years. One thing about this you can't see here, but if you were to look at it on your tablet versus the website versus a phone, it would respond so that it still looks good no matter what device you are looking at it on. This main photo here, it can be static or rotate so that every time you click through or refresh, there's a new picture, which is what we have. So there's a new picture every time. And then we can also even change this to a video if we have something we really want to highlight. We can change this to a video that will play. The header is also a little bit thinner. And the social media links are visible here at the top. But when you scroll, they go away so you can see more of the information. We kept but updated the look of these main icons right here along the front. but we updated them to meet what people are looking for most. So we kind of looked at the analytics on the back end and found that these are the areas people are most looking for, people are trying to get to, so we wanted to highlight those right up front. But then we also, and these are meant to be static. They can change as needed, but they're meant to pretty much stay as they are. These popular resources down here, these are more flexible. So we added these as another way to get quickly to important information, but we can change these a lot more often if we need to. Another big thing that we did was we separated the news and calendar sections. So if you remember on the old website, you had news over here, calendar over here. Now you have news by itself, so you can see More articles, you can scroll through to older articles, just a lot more user-friendly. The calendar is also a lot more user-friendly. You can see more dates. It's easier to navigate. And we had it split up so that you can look for town meetings. So if that's all you're interested in, you can look for town meetings. Or you can click on town events, and that will show you everything that Parks is doing. It's not all put in one, a little bit separated out. And then just to show an interior page, there really wasn't much overall change except some of the color. So you can see colors changed a little bit. They changed the color of the links. This is one of those accessibility pieces you actually can see. They updated the color of the link so it met the color contrast criteria for ADA. And then finally, the Parks and Recreation page, as we said, it follows the same basic layout and look, but it matches their branding. So those are kind of the big updates. There's some littler things that was done, but that was kind of the big piece of it. All right. Back to mine. All right, so what's next? So next steps, we are going to continue our focus on accessibility. We are doing a page-by-page review of the website to address any accessibility concerns that we can control. So alt text and images, linking things correctly. We'll have Ablr, our accessibility partner, rescan our website when all of that is done. Then we'll go back and address any remaining issues. We'll continue to create accessible documents, remediate existing PDFs as needed, and just have a continued focus on accessibility moving forward. And then we'll do an annual scan by Ablr every year to make sure we're still compliant. And then we'll also continue on focusing on usability with regular updates, page and document reviews to ensure content is up to date, and maintain website design standards. That's all I got. Any questions? Questions?

no i'm allowed okay so when you go back to that page with the icons the the right there i just i find it funny that you got tax bills and trash right beside each other as far as what people are looking for um but no it's pretty neat that park and rec is right up there and development permits what information that people can find i I already went through this, had fun with it. If you scroll down a little bit.

This is just a picture.

Okay. I like the fact that the annual budget was first. I would ask that people sitting out here, people watching on social media, tell your neighbor about this. I talked to a citizen just the other day, and she was saying, I didn't know this. All this information was available. So if you know about it, please tell other people. and get the word out also is so important to me i actually had my cards uh the business cards my town cars with a qr code on the back so now that if i give my card to someone they scan that qr code and they go right there and they can find out so much information so it looks good i appreciate it and thank you thank you yes sir we email you with recommendations yes okay because i hadn't really looked at it so yeah but i mean could you punch community

So that's a drop down.

Okay. Yeah.

And it can go. It goes to all the fire departments, transportation.

So, yeah, emergency contacts, everything. So, yeah, that's that's great. Thank you.

Thank you, Abby. Thank you. Good job. Good job, Todd. So annual stormwater advisory committee review my list for public comment.

I know it's riveting stuff I'm about to talk about, so I hope y'all get excited.

You're excited to be here, I thought.

I can tell. So as everybody knows, we don't have any really new council members. We do this every year around this time, usually in April, but we're a little late this year, so we're in May.

But again, giving you an update on this committee, which is a very vital part of our Stonewater program.

So a lot of these slides are going to be ones you've seen before, but we just wanted to let the public know how this got established. It was established in June 2007 through our stormwater management ordinance. It basically oversees the implementation of the stormwater management program required by the NPADS Phase 2 permit. Uh, current members, uh, as council member, Todd Barber is the chair, which is part of the bylaws. Uh, we have to have council members chair. Uh, Blair Hinckley is our new co-chair. Uh, as you see at the bottom, Chris row, uh, he was our co-chair, but he, uh, moved out of any new trail. Uh, he'd been here for probably 20 years. Uh, and it was, uh, at our first committee at one of our longstanding members. Um, but unfortunately he had to move. So. Blair took over the co chair this year. And then we have Alan Mosley, which is he's been here as long as Chris. So he's now our longest member. Leo, I'm not gonna say that name because I'm going to butcher it. And he's, he's been with us for a few years now. He's a retired he's a former retired New York is New York Do T bridge.

Inspector

And then we have Phillip Rapp, which is our newest member, and he's part of, his occupation is environmental. And then, of course, I and my, Brian's my stormwater engineer, or at least that's what I call him, our stormwater engineer.

We are staff members.

So in our bylaws, these are the four main duties of the committee. Review and recommend town council stormwater policies. Review and recommend town council for capital improvement projects. Respond to town council staff requests regarding stormwater management program. And again, present to council an annual report, which is what we're doing now. So one of the big things we did last year, obviously, was we did that stormwater fee assessment. And just wanted to refresh everybody's memory that the residential part of that assessment changed. Commercial did not. And so these are the tiers. And this has divvy up. And basically... Once you add up all the folks that pay stormwater fee every year, the annual yearly gross is about the same. It's just broken down differently based on our new impervious inventory, which coincides with this very well. And then again, a commercial didn't change at all. So the way our phase two permit works is we have to achieve six measures during the year. And these are our six measures, public education outreach, which is about basically going to town events and stuff to that nature. Public involvement, which is this committee is basically the primary goal for that is the committee have a citizen committee to talk about these things. So that kind of checks off that box. This detection and elimination program, basically we do get calls every once in a while, not very many, where somebody will see somebody, for example, a pipe coming from somebody's house, dumping right into the creek. So we go out there and do an investigation, figure out what that is. But we hadn't had a lot of those in the past year or two, to be honest with you, which is a good thing. Construction site runoff, which is basically what it states. We try to monitor that as best we can. Post-construction site runoff, again, is your BMP, stuff like that. Make sure that what you have approved on those plans as far as your wet ponds and all that is taken care of and checked off. and then pollution prevention and good housekeeping. That's basically your facilities. Public works is a big part of that. You know, they make sure the, you know, obviously, um, for instance, we do have BMPs in our town facilities. You got one right here on the parking lot. That's basically trying to, they're maintaining that. And that's one aspect of that measure. Uh, I'll give another one is good housekeeping is street sweeping, which we'll talk about here in a minute. So outreach and education, we do try to do newsletters, articles in the newsletters. Abby is good about sending us emails to remind us about that, and we'll show you some examples. And then education brochures, we do that at town events, kind of put a brochure in there, hope folks read it. That's a good way of getting out and about. And then, of course, town events, like I just talked about, those are our major ones. I want a couple of examples. One is illicit. We always do at least one list discharge article every year just so folks understand that there is a program out there that they can call if they see something out that it's not seem to be appropriate. One example, somebody is dumping paint in a storm drain catch basin. Unfortunately, that happens at least once a year. I don't know why, but it does happen. People call people, so don't do that. of the other articles one is a volunteer opportunity storm drain markings we do have that program i won't get into it but it is a voluntary program that citizens can request and we're actually working with one so division right now trying to get that started um installing pools something we've been doing uh new since covid had came through a lot of people put pools in because they don't want to deal with the community pools I guess and so we've really had a lot of those ticked up in the last few years and so we've had to change our way I do our processes and stuff so we we put this in pretty much every year that article to educate people that want to build a pool in the town So stormwater maintenance, we'll go over a little bit of that. Last 12 months, we just wanted to highlight a few projects and then you'll see at the bottom there's got this number from Adam, basically the public works have done over 200 work orders this past 12 months. Is that all stormwater or is that like a little bit of both? All stormwater, okay. So the first one was Allison drive. Um, we had a individual, if he's right there where the pool is in the middle of your screen, he called in basically there's a stormwater pipe where the gray square is long Allison drive and his, uh, the, the drainage ditch that's, uh, downstream from that is basically started filling in over the years and basically just couldn't outlet anymore and was ponding in the back of his lot. So there's a stream, which is on the, obviously the other gentleman's property in the blue. And so we had to go in there and Pullet Works, we as a staff, engineering staff, designed the cross section of the ditch based on the upstream flows drainage area that that pipe was carrying. I think it's a 36 inch pipe. So it's carrying a lot of water. And so gave them that cross section design. They went out and did work. So this kind of kind of concept layout we gave them and basically based on the room we had proves pretty tight. So we had pretty much rip rap the entire and actually had to work with the other gentleman to get an easement. And we're on the process of working to get that easement surveyed and get applied it so we can maintain that. And again, the stream was actually in the other gentleman's property, which is actually in the floodplain. That's all actually floodplain in that area. That's another reason why it's probably filled in over the years. So it was a good project. Everything went well. Property owners I haven't heard anything from, knock on wood. So I'm assuming that everything's fine. The next one was we had a new home built in the aqua boundary property at Kiwi Circle. I'm sure you're all familiar now where Kiwi Circle is. So there was a pipe where the gray square is right there. It was existing. They were putting a driveway in, drainage ditch needed to be graded, didn't really – was compatible with the pipe that was already there and it needed to be upsized. So we did a calculation upsize pipe to 24 inch and public works was in the going in there and put it in and that's some pictures of that work. All right, street sweeping. So I'm gonna give you some questions and feel free to raise your hand and ask them if you want to. So how many times you think a year, the town street sweeps their entire, all their town, all their town roads once, once. All right. Wrong. Next four times is correct. I don't have a price. I've only seen it on my street once. Hey, uh, you, you talked to the gentleman beside you. I have no idea. I don't keep up with this program. All right. So, um, next question. long you think it takes for one just one time to do all their streets three days rome next ten days all right seven to ten days so all right you said that

Who said ten days? All right. Lastly, I've been seeing the I'll know the answers.

Can you clarify that question next one? You said it says parking lots. Is it town on parking lots or. Yes. Yeah.

So so our park, our park, our parking lots included in that town. Yeah. Town on park. Yes. Our facilities.

Yes.

Included in that time. No, that is as an easy as needed basis. We don't do parking lots unless we do it needed.

we actually do parking lots more than four times a year. Cause it happens after like special events or things like that. That's unacceptable.

Any other questions? All right, I'll move on. Well, I was hoping you would say that. Okay. All right. So we did have two contract, uh, services that we've been doing throughout the year. We did talk about stormwater fee assessment, but we'll just wrap that up, and then ARPA stormwater design services. That's what basically designed our ARPA Phase II project, which we'll talk about in a minute. That was a design contract of $723,000, and again, that was a pretty large number because they did several designs. They did the five-pipe replacements, Liberty Lane Channel, and they've actually got stream bank restoration designs that are ready to go. I just haven't pulled the trigger on that and wanted to wait until next FY. And that's why you see that million and a half number in the CIP. That million and a half will cover those stream bank restoration projects. But again, don't have a time of that yet. Stormwater fee contract, that was $129,000. We spent, I think we had about $14,000 we didn't spend of that. That was freezing nickels. Again, fee assessment, then we had a floodplain inventory, which we basically located all our accessory structures, stuff like that, that are located in the floodplain. All right, so the big CIP projects y'all are very aware of. Our main phase two was engineering estimate was 1.5. It came in a little higher, 1.7. If you don't remember, we had to bid that twice. We didn't get bids the first time, and then we only got one bid the second time. And so we negotiated and felt that that was a decent number to go with. I had ARPA funds. We spent all that 1.3 of ARPA. And pretty much spent most of that stormwater. As you can see, the final expenditure is 1.6. So we're pretty close to spending all that money. And that project's complete. And again, three culverts along Clover Bend. That's one of the culverts existing at the time. You've seen these pictures, some of these pictures. I want to see some updated pictures where we have actually got the landscaping in. It's taken a while. Unfortunately, it's been dragging on far too long, but the goal was to put some plantings along the slopes, some trees to stabilize those slopes so our pull works guys wouldn't have to go back and maintain it over the years. So it's coming in pretty well. That's one of the culverts. I think that's Moss Court. And there's another one. Again, those trees on the right, we planted those and everything. So it's coming up well. It looks good. All right, Liberty Lane, the little yellow circle to the far left, that is Liberty Lane, the end of the road. That's where all this water dumps, that and the library. And we are actually contributing some additional flows, not a lot, but some for our Complete Street project. So again, we needed to upgrade this ditch that the corridor side was a string. So now it's a string. So that's the ditch that is now a string. And so you got a plunge pool that's at the end of the library parking lot that dumps right through there. And then where the truck you see that's edge to the left, that's where Liberty Lane is. And that has a drainage going to the downstream of that plunge pool. And then there's your ditch and there's trees on the right. That's what we planted. Basically we have plantings of trees all along that. And of course we tried to get, we hadn't had a lot of success with grass growing in this area for some reason. But it's slowly getting there. Unfortunately, the farm, for some reason, these farm guys got it figured out. They've got grass growing everywhere over there to the right. It's nice and green. Well, it was nice and green. It's got, I guess, because the droughts got brown, but there was a previous picture about a month or so ago. It was actually beautiful, but anyway. So Bowbrook Pioneer, again, two 72-inch CMPs. Both these subdivisions, as you see at the bottom of the screen, were plowed in 1981. So these were 50-year-old pipes that need to be fixed. So again, these impacted homes downstream from them. If they would have, you know, overcapacity, you know, flooded or whatever, we'd lost the pipe with these people have been stuck. Same thing with Morse Park, with the frontier circle, all them, these guys would get stuck. So these were the pipes, Bowbrook on your left, Pioneer on your right. And then this is Pioneer Covert. You see you put a small truck in there if you really wanted to. And this is Beaubrook, which is a little bit smaller, but pretty much the same size. And so got those in, got them completed. We're waiting on Duke Energy to get some lines put in next week, get their underground put back in along Beaubrook, and then we'll pay Beaubrook in case y'all ever get complaints about Beaubrook. It's pretty tore up right now, but we're going to try to get that fixed as soon as possible. And again, that was a 1.8 engineer estimate. We got it for 1.3. I will be coming back to you next council meeting to ask, and I talked about this at the budget workshop, asked for about an additional 15,000 for that project. So we finally got the invoice in. That's what I can you get from the contractor. But we went over due to additional stone for those culvers. And I'll talk a little bit more in detail about that next time.

And that's it.

I'll be happy to answer any questions.

I have any questions. Thank you, Todd. All right. Appreciate it. Thank you. Brings us to public comments. Mr. Jim Drummond, come on up.

Jim Drummond, we live on Pioneer. our off pioneer on Frontier Circle ties right in with Todd's remarks of today one of the crews come by and replaced the drainage pipe in the right of way in front of our place and they did a great job they were Very chatty. We had a good time and, uh, I'd like somebody to get back to them and say, thanks for the job. Well done. Uh, Ryan was heading that job up. So, all right. That's all I have. Thanks.

Thank you, Jim. Lindsay Hudson, Austin.

Hi, good evening. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak. I have been a resident of Indian Trail for almost eight years in the neighborhood Taylor Glen, which houses 492 homes. And I estimate if I just say four people per house, about 2000 residents. Our HOA had the intent of trying to prevent our dues from being raised. And in doing so, they stopped mowing our common areas. We residents at a recent meeting voiced our concerns. We felt we were not heard. And so numerous residents filed complaints to Indian Trail because at the meeting, I also reminded them that our HOA is not exempt from the Indian Trail grass ordinance. It was not well received. However, once we got the violation, um, I don't, I don't know if I can say the code enforcement officer's name, but he has been phenomenal. So I would also like to thank him. We've been talking back and forth and he's the one that actually encouraged me to come to this meeting tonight. So you're aware of what's going on. I'm not sure why our management company has not helped our HOA enforce, make sure they're following the Indian Trail Ordinance. I would like to read to you what I had sent. And we met. Thank you for coming to Taylor Glen. We met at the coffee with the mayor, met some of you. Our biggest concerns as residents is the visibility and physical safety. The lack of maintenance around the retention ponds, especially the ones on the front side of Magna near Wesley Chapel Stouts Road, as well as the backside of Magna, is significantly decreased. I live on the backside of Magna and a lot of balls, toys have fallen into that pond. I saw a dad the other day almost fall in the pond himself. If the visibility continues to decrease, we might not see somebody if they fall in it, including a child. The grass not being cut also poses significant safety concerns because it creates an ecosystem of more arachnids, insects which attract copperheads and mice. And I had a copperhead this time last year greet me at my front door. So this this I've had multiple copperheads around my house and I feel that it's only gonna get worse. Um, the playgrounds are not being cut, so the children cannot enjoy our playgrounds. Uh, let's see, is that my time up? That's your time. Okay.

But we do have a council, uh, comment to come back. So you, you stay, stay there. I, cause I have a question for, for you and I'll, I'll ask Brandy this question too. Brandy, maybe you can help me. Sure. What now? I can help. Okay. Okay. Adam help. First of all, who did you said you contact? Somebody contacted the town. I was one of those. And who did y'all contact?

Um, I filed a complaint with the Indian trail ordinance.

So you can, anybody from the public can submit a request online. That request then gets filtered to the right department. Once it gets filtered to the right department, that's how code enforcement got it and went out and did an investigation.

All right. Well, usually the mayor gets it, so I didn't, I didn't hear about it. So I was just curious of how, yes, how that went, but. Also, I was curious, is what can the town do about, is that town business, is that HOA business? Maybe you can explain that.

It's treated just like any, you know, if I didn't cut the grass at my house, I would get a nuisance violation from the town. HOA property is considered the same way. We would issue a violation, which is what happened. But code enforcement's been trying to work with the HOA and trying to work with the management company to get it resolved.

Okay. Well, my question would be, because I think we all, a lot of us, live in neighborhoods that have HOAs. in my particular neighborhood, I didn't even know the town got involved because if you don't mow your grass or you usually get a letter by the HOA, they're the first ones to that.

Right.

Ironic, right? That's what everybody complains about. You know, you know, I got it. And believe me, they do a good job. They try to do the best they can do. But my question is, so there's more than HOA. So if I've never seen it happen in my neighborhood where, where, because your HOA sends you a letter before we do. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. The town standard is 12 inches. Um, so it has to get pretty tall for us to start getting involved from a town standpoint.

It's past that in numerous areas. Um, neighbor of mine just sent me a picture before I walked in. He's about six foot tall on our soccer field. It's gone up to, sorry, gone up to his waist.

Well, now the next question would be who gets the fine? The HOA gets the fund?

Yes, and potential liens put on the property.

So per the town code, yes, the HOA is the owner of the property, right? So they will get the violation. And you are correct. At some point, if it's not taken care of, if we don't feel like resolution is happening the same way we do with any nuisance violation, the town can go in and abate the property and actually do the, the, in this case mowing. And then yes, if the town, if it didn't get paid, the town could put a lien back on the property, uh, to service.

So we're in process of working on this.

We are, we are working through this process.

Okay. And, and I'm just curious, what are you, what are you asking?

Oh, just the code enforcer that I've been working with encouraged me to come let you all know. because our HOA management company has been very challenging to work with and keeps pushing back and even asks like, well, where are these ordinances? And it's as simple as going to the website. And as a management company, I feel they should know that, but they should also know that our houses are investment properties and we can't. Oh, it was beautiful. If you drive through it right now, it doesn't look so beautiful. We've had neighbors who have had to go out and cut common grass area because their houses are for sale and they're fearful that their houses won't sell solely because the common grass area is so tall.

Well, last question I'm going to ask and say is where do we stand in this is what I want to know. Where do we Is and I don't mean to. When you any other way, but but is this a problem for the homeowners in the H.O.A. or does the town get involved?

It's also a North Carolina law. Yeah. When you say where do we stand, do you mean the council or do you mean the town like as a whole?

Where does the it sounds like to me that that that you have a problem with your H.O.A., the H.O.A. is and the residents are having the problem and the management company, the HOA, that type thing.

Yes, but I just wanted to let you know about 2,000 of your Indian Trail residents are affected by this and also they're not maintaining the, what they're called, the stormwater pipes, which will affect potentially us needing to utilize funds to maybe redo those storm drain pipes because they're letting plants grow in that too.

So to answer your question, the violation letter that was sent, and I think you said at the beginning too, you were coming to let us know, let everybody know about it and then also to compliment the code enforcement officer for the work that he has done during this time. But to answer your question, so where the town stands is the town has an ordinance and a code that has to be abided by whether it's an HOA or whether it's a homeowner or whether it's a town property. We have to make sure our grass is cut as well. The violation letter that was sent has through the 21st of May for the HOA, I'm saying the HOA, but the management company to get the grass cut, or then we would look at going into the next step and whatever that may be to be able to get these areas cut and brought up to a standard for the residents.

Yeah, I'm just trying to figure it out. I've never seen this happen before.

Nor have I. And I hope anybody else that lives in a HOA doesn't experience this either, because it's it's we feel very unheard and again, very unsafe. Our children now have no common space and that's why a lot of us moved into that neighborhood.

I hear you. I hear you.

Did the violation letter plainly state what the town ordinance is? Yes. Okay. So I would just say that your HOA send that to your management company since you're saying that they're not aware of it.

Oh, well, no, the, the violation was sent to our management company. They're the ones saying, Can we have an extension? Where is this ordinance you speak of? Even though it was in the notice of violation.

Just know we are actively working with them to get it resolved.

Again, I don't know who I need to tell or if there's only one code enforcement officer. I don't know. I can drop the name to whoever, so they can get, okay.

We know who it is. We have two, one works one side.

I'll say it. So it's Rodney. That's yeah. So, and just so y'all know, this is the second compliment he's gotten in the last two weeks.

He's been on it and communicating back and forth. Um, and again, he encouraged me to come here just to let you all know what about around 2000, give or take residents are also up against right now.

Thank you for coming, though. I appreciate you bringing that to the council's attention. As you mentioned, most people's greatest investment in LIFO is their house, right? Yes. People trying to sell, and they want to maintain it. I mean, I know HOAs, Lord knows we've all had issues with them, but they're essentially created to try and keep the property values and keep the places nice and neat. Correct. We do understand that. And Don does a very good job of following up on that. And Rodney is, you know, excellent. So I think hopefully they can provide a resolution there.

We'll get it fixed. Thank you. Thank you, Lindsay. All right. That brings us to the consent. No law enforcement. I'm sorry. We got Sergeant Leonard. Come on up tonight. Take Andy. And he's not here.

All right. Well, thank you for having me again. Sergeant Leonard with the Sheriff's Office. I'm the traffic supervisor in Indian Trail. And that's what we're going over tonight is just the traffic stats for the month of April. So month of April, just the main stats to point out driving while license revoked. We had 63 charges, no operators license 68. So just those two, we have 131 total people that were cited for driving without a valid license in the month of April. Forge tag, 69. Speeding, 71. Other traffic citations, this could include stop sign violations, stop light violations, lane violations, a multitude of different things. 481 citations issued. No insurance, 75. And I just want to point out two warning areas. So other traffic warnings, again, that could be stop signs, stop lights, lane violations, 298 warnings there. And then speed warnings, we had 101. So that is the monthly stats. As far as that goes, at least the highlights. And then in the month of April, we also did a traffic saturation. So throughout the year, we do a multitude of those. This one specifically was looking at, typically we look for Seat belt violations, just regular stuff. Total stops, 27. In that event, there was six no operator license, six forged tags, four with driving while license revoked, 18 registration violations, and 13 others. Throughout that was some written warnings, verbal warnings, towed vehicles. We did have a felony flee to elude. We had one chase that we got in during that event. That individual was located and taken into custody. So any questions as far as the April stats go? All right. Well, I appreciate you all. Thank you.

Thank you, Sergeant. You did a good job. Thank you. Tell Andy we didn't miss him a bit tonight. You did. You did great.

If I can, if I can add this real quick. Sure.

In the month of April, there were also 80 wrecks investigated by Indian Trail deputies with 69 of those handled by the Indian Trail Traffic Unit.

Very good. Thank you. Brings us to old business. Mr. Hunsinger. Consent. Oh, I missed the consent agenda. Can I get a motion for the crystal?

Motion to approve the consent agenda.

All in favor. Unanimous. Sorry about that. Now, Mr. Hunsinger, I was just trying to save time and get you to walk up here while we did that.

I'll be happy to start blessing the consent agenda for you if you want me to. Uh, yes. So this is our my follow up presentation to what we discussed, discussed last meeting again, wanted to give you just the results and everything of that public outreach for this project. So again, just really run through similar slides. This is part of the 2025 critical intersection program with the county kicked off in August 2025. Five intersections selected into our terms were selected for this intersection. Public outreach was done month of February to March, 30 days, and that's how they've done it for all these different programs in the past. Our public meeting was March 24th, and it was virtual. We had six attendees at the public meeting and 12 respondents for the public survey. Design options and construction impacts seem to be the big overall topics that were discussed. And again, the survey basically 7% picked alternative two, 11% alternative one. And the reason why they did that is it's less confusing with the safe returns, cuz you're not competing with two different intersections, just one, seems easier to navigate. With vehicles and pedestrians in recent years, for instance, vehicles hitting Jim's house was discussed. or talked about in the survey as well. So these are the options. Option one again was keep it as is and run dual signal signalized intersections. You would have some widening to add additional lanes, but both signals pretty much talk to each other. So it would act like a big intersection itself. And that's where your mast arms would be located. Other one is to relocate Hays Road towards the Duke Power plant right there. And again, you would be doing some adjusting to the Faircroft entrance. There would be some impacts to that as well, but again, overall, similar intersection you would see anywhere. And there's where the mast arms would be located. So break down the cost again. This is again, this spreadsheet is based off the CRTPO's future costs. And we discussed this a little bit during the Stalin's discussion last week. But option one was about 1.2. If you went out there and built it today, number two would be 2.1. And then you've got your engineering CEI you have to have because basically you're going to have federal dollars involved, so you have to have the CEI out there. And so that's an assumed 25, 20%. Then you have right-of-way utilities, and this is, again, RK&K, the consultant, came up with the cost for the utility relocations. um contingency allowance is 40 percent and then you have a 2026 cost and a 2031 cost with the inflation so again this is about a million and a half difference uh in the future and a little less than that about 900 000 the difference right now if you build it on the base cost at least um so i'm here tonight for y'all to select the alternative and what you're doing right now is you're basically selecting the alternative. You're not saying you're going to build this project or anything like that. It's just to get it, uh, stated into the programs report, which is exactly what you did with Rogers road. Remember we, we did select one Rogers road because you know, uh, we just didn't want to go with it. So basically what, what that, what that report stated was what was stated in the council meeting was basically the council decided we was not going to pick an alternative, uh, because, uh, just, it wasn't, um, Conducent to the property owner issues that were out there. So this is the same thing. You're just picking it, and basically that report would say that you did pick this alternative, and then that would allow us, if you wanted to in the future, to go after funding for this project if you so choose to. So you're not, again, you're not approving this project to be built at this point.

Yes, sir?

Sorry. I can go ahead? Yeah, go ahead. Can you go back to the previous slide for a second? Yes. So the 2.1 is just the base cost, and I'm looking just option number two. The $947,000 engineering, 635 right-of-way utility relocation contingency. So if we wanted to build this now today with our own funds, it would be 5.6. If we say, let's wait, let's go to CRTP or the government and so on, we're looking at 6.5.

correct but right now what you're asking us is which one of these two we want to basically say yes and take it back to the county and go from there correct uh now i will say that the property owners are around that area that actually showed up to the public meeting uh you know all of them wanted number two, and they're going to think that this project is an approved project, but we'll take care of that if we get phone calls about that. But I just want to be clear, again, this is not moving forward the project, this is just selecting alternatives.

So, last question. If you go back one more slide, sorry, right, that one there, that's option two. The Faircroft way, the way that you envision this, we would have to do some right-of-way acquisition. There are some people who own houses there. Is that going to be a problem if that selection is, if option two is selected?

Again, the folks that attended that lived in that area didn't bring up any issue with that. All they brought up was the fact that there is a drop off right here. Along Omer Road, that house is lower than, you know, halfway low in the road. And so by the time you build a more to use path, which is what we're continuing based on the other Omer Road widening, there's going to have to be a wall built and everything else. And they were just concerned. You just wonder, well, how much is that going to affect? But if you look at the right of way right now, I don't know if that's future or existing. Now that's future. So I don't know where the existing right away is. But yeah, I mean, you would be impacting their property a little bit. But again, I think they would be inclined to be okay with that if you're building a safer intersection. So I don't think we'd have that big of an issue. The only other thing is that the like I've talked about before, the subdivision sign is basically going to be the taken out I mean and I don't think there's no way to put that back because you just don't have room anywhere to put it and it's a pretty big sign so we would have to probably negotiate with the whoever I don't even think they have HOA so that's going to be hard to do anyway how do you even go around negotiating that but but you have you have to put a smaller sign or something they just wouldn't get the existing sign they have out there right now go ahead Adam

What I would say is that that house, the one that we're moving the road closer to, is the one that the car has run through the fence four times. Yeah, correct. um yeah that's number one number two yep the more expensive one yes yeah and um as todd said just so you know you're just approving the alternative then if council said yes later we could look at going to crtpo or another funding alternative to help fund the project and i think

I mean, I think that's what we would plan to do is look this summer at our budgets and everything and come back to y'all maybe in July and say we might get funded this way. If you like to move forward with it, just like we're going to do with the Stalin's partnership, possible partnership question if they did.

number one, would that also alleviate people running through his fence?

Would that, would that help or, or would again, both options decrease the crashes, which is the major reason why this was selected, uh, by 30%.

I mean, the reason I ask is it's so much less expensive for number one, if it's the same, if the same exact thing is going to happen, regardless of which way you go. Cause the way Adam said it, it sounded like, Or first, I thought you were talking about that would be the safer way, but they're about equal. Is that what you're saying?

Equal in the sense of crash reduction? Yes.

Okay.

Yes. So do you think, though, with option one, you think people will be more opt to try to run the light to turn and that would cause problems as well versus.

It's always possible.

Yeah. Okay.

I mean, we could certainly try to look into putting a guardrail up along that backside of that path, which in case somebody did run the light and go straight to it, you know, the guardrail would hit it and possibly not go in that guy's yard anymore.

Well, I mean, and when they run the first light, then they're going to try to run the second light as well. I think they would try to run the second. I think alternative to is better for the, that's my reasoning for.

All right, do you guys, yes?

So if we're buying up the right-of-ways and fixing the intersection, isn't Old Charlotte Highway a state road? So who takes responsibility for the intersection once we pay to fix it?

The state would take over because they own all the streets, all four. We don't own Faircroft. We don't own Hayes Road.

So who buys the right-of-ways?

Well, the right-of-way, that's the, I guess one of the benefits of going with the federal route is you're using the federal money to buy the right-of-way. You're not, it's so. Yes, the DOT could potentially put this as a project in the future, but it would never get built. So that's why these towns are having to go obligate to look at other alternatives because people like Unionville, Fairview, and all them, they get these programs because they know the state's not going to fix those intersections that far out because it's not worth it as far as traffic counts and stuff, but they've got major crashes. So you pretty much have to take on yourself as a town to either fix some DOT intersections or don't fix them and hope they get fixed in the future.

Is the main problem the people running through the guy's fence?

Is that the reason that we're doing this? No, again, the crash data is supported looking at this intersection. And this was... you know we've gone through this program for several years and this is like the third or fourth on the list so we we went through the high priority ones and you know we just we're just pretty much going down the list of what was discussed years ago when it first started in 2016. yeah all right so i'm going to make a motion on which one i'll make a motion yes sir

I'll make a motion to approve alternate number two conceptual design for Union County's 2025 Critical Intersection Program.

All in favor? Clearance? Unanimous. And there you go. Very good.

All right.

All right, you're next. Stay right there. Helmsville Road West. It's Tunsinger.

So we did a presentation for y'all in March about this potential project. So basically we've been waiting for the applicant to come back and to see if they will be willing to pay to do an assessment for this road improvement. And so I'm going to just give you a rundown again of what this is, just to refresh your memory. Location of his private drive is you've got Nissan dealership, the Chrysler dealership, and the Ford dealership along Hemsville, and you've got the driving range. And you've got Hemsville Road, existing State Road on the north side of 74, and then you've got this private drive, which we're calling Hemsville Road West, and there's really not a name for that private drive. But it does say Hemsville on Google Maps. So the section private drive, again, it's between driving range and Chrysler dealership. And so this is what it looks like right now. Again, it's inadequate drive in a sense of you've got a business accessing it, you've got homes in the back accessing it, and then people trying to get off 74. And, again, the conflict points of that with the lack of turning radius is what's unnerving, I guess, if you want to call it that. with the applicant. They would just like to see an improved widening of the roadway. So, the applicant, Shana Evans, assistant driver is basically in a private easement right now. It's basically an easement that the driving range owner owns. Well, I say the driving range property owner owns. The driving range itself is run by somebody else.

They don't actually own the land.

And then the reason for request, again, conflict points and insufficient width. So the way the assessment works, based on general statutes, is basically a citizen has to come with a request. No more than 50% of the approval can be assessed to the citizen by the town or city. And a resolution of intent needs to be, if moved for, a resolution needs to be drafted, outlined terms, and then a public hearing is set, which can't be no earlier than three weeks once the resolution is passed or no later than 10 weeks from the day of the adoption of the resolution. and general statute numbers below. So we came up with a conceptual layout, and our resurfacing contractors already looked at it as well, just to, again, one of the is feedback on the price, because I came up with the estimate and everything. So basically, you would be building up to the first drive of the drive range and widening the road to two 11-foot lanes, which is kind of our minimum as a town. engineering department and so sidewalk up top is not included but needs repair so we're gonna probably do that while we're out there but that is not a part of the number and then you would install it in a maintenance sign at the end the project and then basically this is a right-of-way we would have to ask the driving range property owner for And I've had a verbal conversation with the gentleman. He seems forward. I haven't engaged him since because, again, don't want to really go down the path of this unless y'all want to move forward with it. So we still have to go back and engage him. He might change his mind. I don't know. But, again, right now I'll have his verbal commitments. So we would stripe it just for the sense of people turning right into it would be able to see better that you need to stay in that lane while people are trying to get out. And then you put a stop bar and stop sign, which is not there right now. Again, not very pricey, but it is going to have to need a little bit of work. And we're going to have to close the lane on 74 to get that tied in. So that's why the cost is a little higher than usual. Total price of the project would be $39,427. Again, every service guy has looked at this. I will tell you, I didn't put this in the price because I don't feel like it's a burden that the applicant should take. But as you know, gas prices have went up. When gas prices go up, asphalt goes up. And that jumped during the process of talking to this applicant. So there would be an additional cost the town would have to take on, which again, probably a thousand bucks maybe at most. But again, it's based on 6% of the actual tonnage of the asphalt. So you're not talking about a lot of asphalt because again, it's only a $4,000 cost overall. But again, not going to put that burden back on them. It wouldn't really change the overall assessment that much to be honest with you. So the obligation based on state law is 50% dab can't, which would be 19,007 and then thanks to have seven for us. And again, as Adams talked, told you last time, it's 40 40,000 up front for us regardless. And we've got to wait 10 years to get the money back because she would be assessed, uh, $1,971 every year for 10 years on her tax taxes. Again, had a talk with her, her and her husband, very nice couple. They're in agreement. They tried to get other folks involved that live back there. They didn't want to, so they're going to take on the burden themselves. So tonight, um, you would have to basically approve moving forward with the adoption resolution. That way the attorney can start that process and we would adopt it at a later at next council meeting. Uh, but we, I would need something from y'all tonight to say you are willing to move forward with this project or not. And I'll take any questions.

One more, one question. What, what improvements to the street will, elevate their property value, or would it?

It probably won't because, again, their properties are way several hundred feet down.

The road doesn't go back that far.

It's all gravel from there, so it's not really getting any value to them, to be honest with you.

All right. Somebody make a motion?

I'll make a motion, unless if anybody else has any questions.

Go ahead.

so i'll make a motion to approve moving forward with this special assessment as presented by mr hunsinger all in favor unanimous and there was there's no action for a public hearing i guess you and the town clerk will said that right correct we're putting the resolution to you next and then i'll have the date for the public hearing all right good all right i thought i'm done thanks all right thank you uh thank you that brings us up to our next uh

item of business, new business grant excuse me, Grand Marshal nominees. The Lions Club did not give us any, so we don't have any nominees tonight. We're going to do that next meeting. We're going to hold it for the next episode. Anyway, we'll skip on to a number 11 and get a report on city vision from council members. Also, Brooks and Buhalla, I guess you want to go ahead, start us off.

I'll start. Thank you for allowing us to talk about a little bit about City Vision and bring back some of the things that we learned. First of all, being in Raleigh, it was really wonderful. They have some really nice parks and being something that we pride ourselves on, it was nice to kind of see some of the ideas there and what they have and be able to bring some of that back. And I'll probably be meeting with Hayden and just giving him some of the things that I saw there that people really liked. um the conference overall gave us a variety of sessions that we could choose from that we attended so i chose one on building trust with your government which reinforced how important it is to show up for the people and show up with integrity and transparency we all know that but sometimes it's nice to get that reminder and ideas of ways that we can truly be transparent um i also attended a session on self-care just because truth is if you You can't pour from an empty cup. And that was the name of the seminar. But take care of yourself helps you to be able to take care of your community. And then another session that I found really valuable was on communications. And I've actually already spoken to Adam. I'm sure he's probably given you some of my feedback on communications. We do a great job here. A lot of the things that they were telling us to do, we already do. So I do appreciate that Abby and Adam, I'm sure you have a lot to do with that as well. But just really, making sure that we're out there on different social media outlets and reaching everybody as a whole, not just a certain demographic. So that was something I thought was really important. But it was also not just for our residents, it's communicating amongst our staff and amongst ourselves and how important it is to truly have that open communication and be able to respect and talk to each other. But the most valuable part that I find every year going to City Vision is really just the connections and networking that we get. We meet different elected officials across the state and many of these have the similar problems in their municipalities and we're able to talk and see what solutions they've come up with and discuss just similar challenges that they're facing so that we're not starting our solutions from scratch. So it kind of saves time, it saves money for our municipality And it just makes us stronger as a community. So that's probably my favorite part is just networking, getting those networks. I have a whole Rolodex, I guess, of phones in my contacts now that I can call if there's any issues that I can kind of discuss with them. And then I would like to also say that Clarence, Adam, and I received an AML Certification of Municipal Achievement Award, which they did present at the conference. Basically, we went to enough classes that we earned that certification, so I feel like it's really important. I think education is very important, and continuing that education, you should never stop learning. But I think it shows that we really have put the time and are trying to make sure that we're the best that we can be for our citizens. just the last thing I want to thank the council I want to thank the staff and I want to thank the people for allowing us to attend um you know I don't take that opportunity lightly and everything I learn I do try to bring back and share with everybody so thank y'all Clarence

All right. So just to add what, to what councilman Beholic said, my personal venture up there, I started off with a NC BMO meeting and I, um, am part of a leadership cohort. So, What happens there is people I've met in that class, we get together, we communicate, but also the mayor of Stallings, he went to the same leadership cohort some time back. So he has his group of people and we all get together and we kind of work this thing together. What class I may go to, they may go to a different one so we can all come back and share the information that we received. So that was one of the things and the mayor of stalin's also received the same award that crystal and i received as well so shows how important it is there are i think 588 municipalities in north carolina so to have the opportunity to meet with small municipalities you're talking you know three four thousand people up to your raleigh's your greensboro and to have that ear of those people and ask them the questions or say, this is what we're dealing with in Indian Trail, or how did you all handle this? So I personally went to understanding your town finances. I went to that session was originalizing utility infrastructure, which that one right there actually didn't it didn't relate to Indian Trail. But what it showed me is that a lot of municipalities and counties are because of the cost they're combined in their utilities and you're having one entity run the utilities because it's just too much for a lot of them. So didn't relate to Indian Trail, but the other sessions didn't relate to Indian Trail either. So I chose that one. I went to the downtown economic development session and working with your town manager. So those are the ones I participated in. The other thing is they have vendors there. I was able to talk to a few vendors and send some information back there was one vendor about it so i sent some information to bobby and abby and have another vendor so overall it was very great uh great opportunity and again the as council member buholic said the networking that you get and it continues you know once you leave there so thank you for the opportunity

Well, thank you both for going and trying to learn more and make friends with our people around the state. And you do make friends and you learn from them. And thank you. I know it's time consuming to go up in and appreciate your effort. So that moves us to, I think, council comments. No, no, no. The manager's report. I'm sorry, Adam, I didn't mean to cut you out.

You're trying to get through in a hurry more than five. I do want to bring up one thing. Uh, Todd texted me after he stepped away with the Helmsville road, um, Helmsville road West, the property and would like, as we move forward, uh, to have the ability to help to name the road, um, for whatever the road may be. So just, uh,

And just one other quick thing. Sure. I want to trick quick trivia is that Monroe was named Helmsville before it was named Monroe. If anybody ever wants to know that long time ago. But and you wonder why so many Helms live here. That may be the reason. I don't know. But anyway, go ahead, Adam.

Just a couple of other quick items really quick. Most people know bulk pickup is going on right now and ends this Friday. I am happy to announce our new Public Works Director will be here next week. I'm happy for more reason than just that we have a new Public Works Director. He is starting on what is National Public Works Week, which is a very good time for us to celebrate our team members that are out in the field every day and the things that they do, and Abby has a whole social media campaign that's gonna go on next week for that. MANAGER'S REPORT GOT POSTED ON FRIDAY IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS WITH IT LET ME KNOW HAPPY TO ANSWER THOSE OR GET YOU AN ANSWER IF I DON'T ALREADY KNOW IT FIELD RESERVATIONS SO ANYBODY THAT'S TRYING TO RESERVE FIELDS FOR THE FROM JULY 1ST THROUGH DECEMBER 31ST FIELD RESERVATIONS END TOMORROW SO IF YOU HAVE IN YOUR APPLICATION YOU'LL BE IN THE RUNNING um we are running another park and rec related thing full steam ahead for family fun day everybody knows that's coming up you got some passes tonight actually on your uh seat up here at the dais lastly again i'll say thank you to y'all uh for the budget um now let's if you have any questions let me know i'm happy to answer them and thank you again to staff for all your hard work that you did with that as well thank you adam

All right. I feel like it was a good meeting. So thank you, everyone, who came out. I want to thank our staff. I think that y'all really have worked hard on the budget, and it definitely shows. On my end, it's been pretty busy. I do Leadership Union and City Vision. I attend Women in Business. I attended the Habitat for Humanity Awards today, which two local, one Indian Trail resident was recognized, and another local that most people know, Pat Kell, was recognized. So that was nice. And I also went to the Women in Municipal Government meeting. So definitely a lot of good things. Definitely has kept me busy. I've got a Central Island meeting tomorrow, so hopefully we'll have some information to bring back from that. But other than that, just wanted to say thanks to everyone again, and have a good night. Councilmember McIntyre.

Thank you. Before we close tonight's meeting, just a few things I want to touch on. First, I want to recognize our town manager and the town staff on the budget presentation tonight. This was the manager's first budget presentation, and I thought it was exceptionally well done. It was clear it was thoughtful and reflected a tremendous amount of preparation and effort. as we move through the budget process i hope we continue to stay disciplined keep costs as low as possible and remain focused on responsible growth while still delivering the essential services our residents expect I also want to give kudos to Abby and her team on the website, Redesign. The updated website looks great. I actually went on there, Abby, live while you were doing this, and I was wondering why your pictures were different than mine, but you explained that. It feels modern, it's clean, and it's easier to navigate. I know that's the intent here. In many ways, a town's website is the public's first interaction with local government, and I think the work done here represents the town very well. I want to just mention something that we mentioned a couple meetings ago, but I want to say that Chestnut Parkway is open. This is a very big deal. I honestly cannot remember the last time we opened a new falling road of this significance in the town. What makes it even more meaningful is that this project started as a conversation, just an idea, possibly around the table. And now it is a fully drivable roadway serving our community that matters. To me, tonight reflects something more important. Things are beginning to move. We are beginning to execute and complete projects. Residents are starting to see tangible results from planning, investment, and collaboration. I'm excited to see what we can accomplish over the next few months and years if we continue moving in this direction. We also have to remember that roads and infrastructure remain critical investments for a growing town. Our town continues to grow. We need to continue investing wisely in transportation and connectivity so we can keep pace with the growth happening around us. this doesn't just happen in a vacuum it happens with the staff going out being part of the community coming back to council with recommendations and information so we can you know make decisions so thank you to everyone involved including the council and thank you for all your work tonight everybody have a blessed evening thank you councilmember also brooks

So I hope everyone had a happy Mother's Day. And that's whether you're the mother of a pet or a mother of a person. I am going to try to join Councilmember Buhalik at Central on it tomorrow as well. Also for the citizens, The CRTPO, there's a very important vote that will be coming up soon. If you've been following the media, you see that Charlotte rescinded his support for the I-77 project. So it will be a weighted vote. And I would love for you to tell me, how do you think I should vote as your representative? So please reach out to me. If you don't, I have... some still a little bit more research to do i've talked to some council members in charlotte and but i would love to hear what you have to say make sure i cast a vote that represent the people of indian trail Also, I would like to challenge everyone in this room, everyone on social media, everyone watching this meeting to contact me after you have told someone in your neighborhood or someone that lives in Indian Trail about the new website and all the information that they can find on the website. So everybody in this room, I'm looking at you. I'm waiting for a phone call from you or see you at the next meeting to say, Clarence, I told someone about all the good information on that website that Indian Trail has. So with that said, have a good night. Council Member Ambergy.

everybody stole my thunder on that website you guys but it looks really good honestly i saw the um the cone there i guess that's where you report a pothole so we don't have to have clearance do no more presentations um well god bless you guys 540 this morning came our 520 came early this morning god bless you jesus loves you councilmember barber

I'd like to send out congratulations to all the recent college graduates. I've been seeing a ton of them online. Also, congrats to all the parents and family that helped make it happen. Also, Kimberly's Place Foundation is hosting a local freedom market at the VFW on May 30th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. If you'd like to attend, They're also still taking applications for a booth if you want to set up. Congrats to the town manager and the staff on the budget presentation. Good job on the website. And I'd like to give a shout out to Mr. Huntsinger and the stormwater crew. As you can see is there's there's a lot of work being done that people don't see. And cause matter of fact, I think I'm going on six years being on the stormwater committee. And for the first time we actually had a citizen show up just to see what we're doing, you know, so, uh, a lot of people don't see. So when he shows those pictures of culverts and things and, know cleaning creeks is you know that we've taken that in-house so it's you know just you got to understand that they're out there working and they're always doing projects so shout out to stormwater well other than that everybody have a blessed evening thank you america well i'll say the same thanks to uh adam we're talking about this being your first and

You've got a lot to live up to coming up in the next few years because it's like winning the Super Bowl. Sounds like to me on the first year you're in there. Now you expect to win it every year. But you've done a great job, and you did it with a great staff. And I appreciate everything you do. I just like to say tonight that we're on this earth for only a short time, but it's what we do on this earth that determines our our eternity. Choose to make our world and town a better place. Slow down and enjoy the the small moments that make life beautiful and we'll all be happy. So with that being said, God bless everybody. Can I get a motion to adjourn? motion to adjourn all in favor unanimous