City Council - Regular Meeting

As I'm sitting here, I'm thinking, too, you got almost 30 years and close to 30 years and over 20 years. We got a lot of time here. And the stormwater initiative has been.

I was part of the stormwater task force at the time.

That one followed the citizen strategic plan LS 21st century back in the late 90s. Yep. I remember right. In the 2000s. This has been a long time coming. It's been 21st century strategic plan and the LS 360 strategic plan and then the more recent Ignite. Citizens Strategic Plan have all mentioned and made strategic recommendations for a stormwater utility.

So just in general terms, what is stormwater management and why does it matter?

Well, I look at stormwater management as when it rains, the water's got to go somewhere. And so managing stormwater is trying to collect and carry it. It's going to go to a stream or a lake, but try to get it there without flooding homes and businesses. So that's one component is the flood control piece of it. And the other is when it gets to the streams and lake that it's not polluted. So it's trying to limit the pollution that gets to streams and lakes and then in such a way not to flood homes and businesses. So that's really what the management part of it is. And there's a lot of implied tasks in that. Like when it is collected on a street to get to a stream, it's got to go through pipes and it's usually going through somebody's backyard or between homes. And so we have to maintain those pipes and that's One of the big challenges is, you know, people don't see it, but it's probably in their backyard or, you know, underground. I promise it's there.

We have hundreds of miles of pipe. In fact, last looked, I think we're close to one and a half million linear feet of pipe and close to 20,000 stormwater structures in our community.

And that is the pipes is just one piece of the infrastructure, correct?

Yeah. We're a community of several lakes, too, and lakes are part of stormwater management, whether it be Raintree, Lakewood, Prairie Lee. We've got a lot of lakes, but there's ditches. There's all kinds of infrastructure. Curbs.

Everybody's yard is part of that stormwater conveyance system. We all play a part in it.

We look at stormwater management kind of like a three-legged stool. There's the public infrastructure side of things. then there's the site grading so that's on people's homes and yards and things like that so it drains away from the house and then the proper building construction so that we're not putting a walkout basement or a window well in the middle of a swale that's carrying water and again it all ends up in streams so the streams and lakes are part of that stormwater system as well okay and so you want to talk just about what it currently looks like in the city and you were kicking us off talking about just how this has been a decades-long initiative so

It has. In fact, a lot of our infrastructure, and Mr. Banger can talk a little bit more about the material that was used and when that material change happened. But we have a lot of metal pipe called corrugated metal pipe throughout the community. And probably the overwhelming majority of our infrastructure is corrugated metal pipe. And it's fine so long as it, you know, the galvanized coatings aren't eroded by rocks tumbling down or that we're maintaining it. But when it's not maintained and it begins to rust because it loses those protections, that's when we begin to see failure of the pipe. Pipes collapse, sinkholes are created. And it becomes extremely expensive as opposed to doing more preventative maintenance inspections and cleanings to tear that pipe out. And it's also very disruptive. So we have a lot of that pipe throughout the community as it was put in really everything pre mid 2000s when our standards changed to more concrete. as a minimum standard or plastic pipes that don't have that same type of condition. So we have a lot of that that needs to be addressed. We need to start with really an inventory and an asset management plan. Right now, everything we do is pretty reactive. When we see flooding, we shut down the road with barricades. When we see a sinkhole, we throw up orange fence and it could be two years before we get to it. We just have very limited resources for us to address all of our stormwater repairs, maintenance needs. Um, and that's just been a decision by, um, the city on priorities and being that a lot of our stormwater is unseen underground. Um, the, the priority has been to address things more like pavement or water sewer and some of the other infrastructure, um, ahead of our stormwater system.

And Mr. Park, it's safe to say the resources that we do have is not enough to maintain what we have. We are, we, we've kind of, um, I'll say kick the can down the road based on other priorities that this community desires, but it is time that we start to get a handle on our stormwater management and being more mindful rather than reactive. And that's going to take years and resources to get on top of it. But the longer we wait, the worse and more expensive it gets.

Absolutely. It's not fixing itself. You know, as time goes by these metal pipes and our inlet structures and outlet structures, the street, everything without being addressed gets worse. I think that's why it had shown up decades ago in the first citizen strategic plan, you know, us 21st century. And it showed up in the second and the most current strategic plan because the community realizes that this is an issue that we need to address. Like, like many communities across the state and the Midwest and really across the entire country have found a solution to address that on a more proactive basis with adequate resources to address the stormwater, you know, stormwater is a resource, not something that we have to manage or just take care of as a problem. But, um, Yeah, I think that is something that we're very aware of. And in fact, it became a little more attentive, a little more aware as we began to bring forward projects to address pipe failure or collapse. And they're like, well, why are we spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this? And it's kind of like a pavement failure, right? If we haven't maintained that road, we've got to replace the road. They're like, well, wouldn't it be cheaper to... do preventative maintenance, to have this in a maintenance program, some operational maintenance, to avoid that half-million-dollar repair, yes, it would. And they're like, how do we do that? That goes back to the strategic plan recommendations. You need to have a utility. We have similar programs for pavement, for water, for sewer. We lack that for stormwater.

So that really ties nicely into the next piece of that, which is what are voters being asked on the ballot measure on the fourth? So, um, any one of you, if you could just break down that language and what that means.

Yeah. So the question before the voters is whether to, um, put in place a one quarter cent sales tax that would fund this, this utility, uh, that would better manage and maintain our storm sewer systems, all public systems, uh, And so that's the question, and I can let Mr. Binger and Mr. Park talk a little more about the process that was put in place to come to that ballot question, because there are other options to fund a stormwater utility, but working with the Public Works Committee and stakeholders, this is what was arrived at. It was a one-quarter cent sales tax measure.

About four years ago, we started working on a project a study to develop a stormwater funding proposal. And at that time, we were looking at a stormwater utility, which is a user fee. So that basically means if you have so many square feet of impervious area, you would pay a certain rate, kind of like a sewer rate or something like that. Um, so it would basically be a fee for, for the service provided. Now that has a big impact on schools and churches and the community. And we went through this process. We formed a stormwater advisory committee and we met several times to come up with a proposal on that. And we looked at the options of that user fee. We also looked at a property tax and then we looked at the sales tax. So when we came out of the stormwater advisory committee with, with their, uh, their recommendations and comments, we, we worked that through a public works committee and, and, and the full council as well. And council recommended going forward with the sales tax. And part of that is in the state of Missouri, sales taxes are very common. I mean, we know there's at least 80 other communities that have a stormwater sales tax. State law, state statute allows communities to have a parks and stormwater sales tax. Currently, Lee Summit has a park sales tax for a quarter cent. And we're asking... to add another quarter cent to that to max out that parks and stormwater allowed by the state. So going forward, there's advantage on the sales taxes. The administrative cost is very low. There's almost none. So what would happen is if this is passed, the sales tax revenue would be collected in January of 27. And within about six to 12 months, we can start ramping up like, you know, staffing crews, getting equipment. Because one of the things we would do with this is The goal is to add two stormwater crews. We currently have one crew. It's about five people. It's a supervisor, four laborers that do our stormwater. As Mr. Park had mentioned, a typical work order may take 18 months to complete. With three crews, we can shorten that to about a 60-day window. So that will take time to ramp up because we can't hire people immediately. So we're probably looking at the first year, 27, we get the first crew on board. 28, we get that third crew on board. The other thing that comes with this is the planning. One of the things that we haven't been able to do is that long-range planning. How do we plan growth of the stormwater system? How do we plan future development like with some of the – the large tracts of undeveloped land. We know if we can do more of a regional system and look at, manage it by watershed instead of like each little parcel, that would be very beneficial. So that allows us to bring on another engineer, public educator, to help with some of that long-range planning, identify projects, identify needs, so we can better manage it. One of the elements in our current permit we have for stormwater through the state is a requirement for a public educator. And public educators help a lot on the water quality side. We know that every year we'll see reports of like an E. coli outbreak. Well, why does that happen? Well, E. coli is related directly to fecal waste. You know, usually it's animal waste that flows into lakes and streams. And that causes that E. coli outbreak. And the fun fact that the educators like to throw out is like the average dog will eliminate its body weight and fecal waste every month. So if you think about a 60-pound dog, that's 60 pounds of waste. So you throw in all the wildlife and other animals in the area. That's quite a bit. So that water quality is a big component of the public education side. So those are just some of the things we'd be looking at with this. So there's the improved operation side of it. There's the reduced response time. And then we actually get into the planning side, the public education side, to where we can take a more proactive approach.

Yeah, there's a lot of different services that were identified and our service level gaps that the Public Works Committee and City Council and also stakeholders had said, what could we accomplish with a sustainable revenue source like sales tax? So as Mr. Bing said, it's not operations that maintenance. It's also small capital projects. It could be new programs. Right now we have no program for like street trees, landscape maintenance, the public programs. uh landscape and and this would certainly fall in a stormwater management um area of funding that could be done the public educator the planning asset management uh it what it wouldn't do though is like your very large multi-million dollar capital projects that that's still how we address through you know voter initiated bond approvals or cip sales tax where they're very project specific where we go to the voters we get money for a very large project the project's done the vote or the the the tax or the bond issue is done when that project is done. So that's how we do our major projects right now. That would continue to be the source of funds for major projects because right now the current annual projection of a quarter cent sales tax is just over $6 million a year. So you can imagine we can't do a $5 million capital project and leave no money left over for stormwater management, the operation, the maintenance. It also explains a little bit why it doesn't have a sunset. You don't hire people, you don't buy equipment to take care of a system like stormwater with a sunset to its revenue source of support. And that's why it doesn't have a sunset like some of our other project-related revenue streams. And so, yeah, there's a lot of really good opportunity that the stakeholders, the mayor and public works committee and city council identified in putting this on the ballot. One of the other, I'm not sure, that we talked about was property tax was another alternative. That was dismissed pretty early on by our stakeholders and elected officials. It's just not really a viable revenue source for this utility. Some of the other reasons why the sales tax I think was preferred is because we can avoid some of the overhead cost of administration, the account, the billing, the system management of calculating how much impervious area being rooftops, driveways, parking lots. Every year you have to go through that assessment to determine what is the right fee for each individual property owner. we can avoid all that what I consider overhead cost or management cost of the utility by going with the sales tax. Another advantage is the sales tax is one that is paid by everybody who purchases, buys goods in the city, people who don't live in the city, whereas a property tax or user fee is exclusively just our residents. And so there are a number of reasons why I believe our elected officials chose sales tax as the preferred option.

And so when you look at that approximately $6.1 million revenue that could be generated, I think one of the questions you guys were getting often was, does that do away with what happens to the current money that's allocated to cover stormwater management? And I know we have all of this on our page, but if you could just break down kind of high level how that funding would be allocated.

So I'll start with it does not supplant or replace what the general fund is currently funding in our operation of maintenance. The crew, the rented equipment, we estimate we're spending about $800,000 on that operation of maintenance. that would continue to be spent as kind of a baseline out of our general fund for stormwater operational maintenance. So this is truly an enhancement or an expansion of level of service for stormwater. Maybe, Mr. Boehner, you can break down a little bit of kind of the proportionate shares. I know we were looking at roughly 4% to 5% being on more of that support, customer service,

With the sales tax expansion, adding the operations, crews, and maintenance, that's about 50% of the sales tax revenue. So that's where the bulk of it goes. Then there's another category we're calling small capital projects. That's going to be about like $1.5 to $2 million per year. So that's another 25%. So when you look at it in total, 75% of it is going to be going directly to the system. And so that remaining 25%, there's like a small percentage for overhead, like maybe I think it's less than 5% going to that. But then you get to that engineering, that planning stage, that's about 15% of the cost. So when you look at it from that, and then that includes the public education. Because within stormwater, there's also a regulatory component we have to comply with. The city is part of the National Flood Insurance Program, which is run through FEMA. By being part of that program, that allows residents to buy flood insurance within the community. With that comes a lot of regulatory requirements. We have to do that to maintain that service. I mentioned the state permit for water quality. That's another regulatory requirement. That regulatory piece falls into that 15% that we're talking about for the planning, the engineering, and that type of work. Again, 75% of it is going to go into the system for system improvements. When we talk about capital improvements too, we've In the past, we had the 2007 bond issue, which was about close to $15 million in stormwater improvement. In 2017 sales tax, it was close to $25 million. So over that time, we've spent close to $35 million just to mitigate flooding of homes and businesses. That's the large capital that Mr. Park was talking about earlier. These smaller capital projects would be things like we have short stretches of stream where we have a public line comes in, dumps into a private stream. Because almost all the streams in our community are owned by the residents and back up to them. So they're responsible to maintain those streams. If there's erosion along the fence line or anything like that, the residents are responsible for that. We have some situations where we have a public line drains into a stream and it's private for 200 feet, then it goes back into a public system. We've gotten a lot of phone calls about that, and we have no means to address it right now. So that would be like that small capital project would be something to where we could do something with that short stretch of stream. We could take it from private to public. So those are some of the small projects we'd look at. The other would be working with HOAs. One of the requirements is with the local communities or neighborhoods will have a detention basin on site. Well, that detention basin is designed to hold water during a rain event for 24 hours. Those have to be maintained. Our neighborhood services require that, and local codes require those HOAs submit an annual inspection report every year. Well, with that inspection report will come recommended repairs. Now, as of now, we have no means to enforce those repairs at this point in time. We have no way to offer assistance to those neighborhoods. So, you know, assistance could be like, you know, our engineer goes out in sight and says, well, this is the type of contractor you need. They should be looking at this. This would be the approximate cost or something like that. And so that's some of that public-private partnership we talk about is that on-site, you know, consultation or assistance to help people navigate some of these stormwater issues they have on these basins or property issues they may have.

Sure. And go ahead.

As you say, just like we were saying, the system is getting worse. The system is growing. Our community is growing. One of the advantages of the sales tax is that it will grow with community, but it applies to the point of sale as well as use tax. And so, you know, what is 6 million today, we've seen very steady and reliable growth in sales tax. And so as our community grows, that sales tax and use tax would grow with the community. And so we feel like it is a good source of revenue to pay for these things on an ongoing basis. And to the point of regulatory requirements, those also increase as our community grows. So, you know, a larger community has more regulations imposed on it by the state and the Fed that we would need to comply with.

Which I think is why it's perfectly fitting to reiterate that this fund would be dedicated, if this is approved and passed, dedicated solely to stormwater management. And so...

That's correct. No different than, you know, we did the half-cent public safety sales tax. And all these dedicated funding sources, we do not co-mingle those with other general fund or other funds within the city. That's why our city budget's pretty complicated when we put that together.

And so I was just going to ask you to kind of go into that a little bit because I know some of the feedback we've gotten through this information process as we've started to have these presentations and meet with people is questions about the budget and some of the recent budget committee meetings we've had and then what we've presented to council. So can you please clarify for the residents the difference between what we've spoken about for fiscal year 27 budget and what we're talking about here today?

Sure, so every year we put together a balanced budget. There's a requirement that we put together a balanced budget. And in doing that, a number of funds compile, come together, and put together the city's budget. The two most flexible funds that the city has, I'll say, is the general fund. And in some sense, our public safety sales tax, the public safety sales tax is for public safety, so between police and fire, and we can adjust that public safety sales tax in those areas, but not the whole city. The general fund funds numerous services here in the city, and then we have all these other funds that that are dedicated and go to those specific purposes. So we're very, very mindful of that. And if this quarter cent sales tax were put in place, that would be that dedicated funding source that, again, creates another fund within the city's overall funds for that specific purpose. And so I guess I would say Part of the challenge is within the general fund. That's where those revenue sources predominantly property tax due to the tax assessments that has been the most challenging to put together and that's that's what was Creating a lot of the concern. We're still going to deliver services We still have other funds that provide a number of services throughout this city So we needed we needed to be very mindful of specifically that general fund and where those resources were allocated. I

Yeah, and when it comes to the general fund allocations we said earlier, the proposed sales tax is not to replace that. And in the FY27 budget, there were no cuts to the operational maintenance of stormwater. Where there were operational level service reductions in public works, it was really to the weeding and mowing areas of service. It had nothing to do with. the stormwater system. And as Mr. Dunning said, the fund that would be approved or not by the voters for sales tax on stormwater is exclusively limited to stormwater. In a way, it's kind of like the capital funds that are in the budget. You know, there's hundreds of millions of dollars spent in the budget on capital projects, but it can only be spent on those capital projects because the voters approve those through bonds or through sales taxes and or it's part of another dedicated funding source. So it's not monies that we could use on public safety or for any other general use of the city. And that would be the case with the sales tax. And another point, and this goes back to the very beginning of our conversation, stormwater utility, stormwater management has been an issue for decades. It is not a reaction to our current fiscal environment.

And Mr. Park, it'd be safe to say we already know, based on our data that we have, areas that this funding source would be invested in. So from a priority level, we already have a pretty good knowledge of where those resources would be needed right now. And so there'd be a plan put together, very transparent, as to what those priorities are and what are we working on with those resources and making those investments in the stormwater system.

It would. And there's not a place in our community that isn't touched by stormwater. And when we look just over the last 10 years of service requests, which are really... requests for investigation, inquiries, problems that are reported to the city, and then the volume of work orders that we've done, we are not keeping up. So we have a backlog of work that would immediately begin work on addressing. And in that average, we've had about 500 of these service requests and work orders per year come in, and it's just beyond our resource or capability to address. It's why some of them sit out there with orange fence for, unfortunately, a very, very long time. Longer than anybody would want, right? And, you know, there is an element to this, and I talked a little bit about the cost of doing a major repair versus preventative maintenance. Over the long term, and you manage stormwater system as an asset, we actually should reduce our cost, our long-term lifecycle cost of stormwater infrastructure if we're properly funded up front. Because we can take that half-million-dollar repair and instead do maybe it's a $20,000 lining that prevents that repair from ever being needed.

As I mentioned before, we spent close to $40 million over 15 years on the reactive repair to capital maintenance. That's removing and replacing pipe. That's putting in pipe and inlets, stream bank stabilization, where the system had failed or didn't exist. That corrective maintenance costs about 10 times the amount of proactive maintenance. So the inspections, the lining, like if we can line the metal pipe, it will stop the corrosion. So that type of preventive maintenance is about one-tenth the cost of this reactive maintenance that we're currently in. It's very forward thinking.

It's what we've done with, like I said, pavement, what we've done with water, sewer. It's not unlike what people do with their house, right? You don't wait for your siding to fall off and your house falls down. You inspect it. You caulk the seams. You repaint. You take care of your home so that you can avoid a loss like that. And that's what we're proposing here.

Okay. And so let's just talk timeline and next step. So election day, Tuesday, August 4th, if it passes, let's talk about when I, the consumer will start to see this tax, like when I'll see it on my receipt and receive that, the cost of this. And then when will the city begin? It sounds like, when will the city begin to see the revenue? It sounds like the planning piece is already in place and you've got at least the first few steps to kick off.

Well, if passed, the collection would begin January 1st. So that's just a statutory requirement on the timing and schedule of the ballot measure to when implementation begins. So those taxes are then collected by the state. I think the first remittance of payments from the state to the city would probably be sometime in March, is what I would estimate.

At least a couple months past the beginning of the collection.

And then we would begin putting those dollars to use. As Mr. Binger said, we don't hire everybody in a minute, but we certainly have the work ready to go. And over the course of the next couple years, we would be procuring that equipment, hiring those people, getting contracts, doing some of the more investigative work in the planning and really executing what we said we would do.

So if passed in that period from January of 2027 through June 30th of 2027, we'll be preparing our FY 28 budget effective July 1st. So in that process, if we know that this revenue is coming, we'll start making plans for that. We'll start working on the expansion positions and operations. With an engineering, we'll look at that master planning piece so that we can start looking at that proactive planning stage. And then we'll also be looking at small projects because then there's a lot of value if we can show work going into the ground, that we don't want to spend the first however much time just doing nothing but planning. We want to show progress, and we've done that on our stormwater project. If you look at our 2017 sales tax, we started with a list of 24 projects. We've, like, one dropped off, two added. So since that time in 2017 to now, we have completed or have in design 26 projects. Our last project is in design. It will be constructed next year. So you can show over that period of eight years, yeah, of about eight years, we've completed 24 projects. And that's our intent is to get that, you know, stuff in the ground.

And then the other side of that, if the measure does not pass, it sounds like we will continue to operate within this space

It really is kind of a referendum, right? The public would say, we are okay with your current level of service. And it would be up to our mayor and council to decide, do we pursue this and how long do we pursue, whether it be the same ballot measure or an alternative or a revised level of service, because this problem isn't going to fix itself and it's not going to go away. So some solution may be out there, just might not be the right time to do it if it doesn't pass.

And I would say, too, in October of 2024, we had a council retreat with the mayor and the council at that time, and it was at that point that we said, we really need to do something about this, right? You've heard Mr. Park reference, how many times has this been in a community strategic plan, and it initiative that we really needed to get our arms around and so through this work with the stakeholders with the Public Works Committee they made that a priority and that's what's brought it here today right and so we're thankful for that from from you know we as city staff we want to deliver we want to continuously improve our systems and this would be that opportunity with these resources to do what we know needs to be done within this community in many of the The citizens expect a service level provided, and this would provide those resources for us to match those expectations.

Okay. Well, I think there's a ton of value in just sitting down and having this type of dialogue conversation about things like this around the city. So if there's anything else you want to add?

No, I just, you know, we're happy to talk here, but we're also out in the community doing presentations, and there's a lot of resource available on the city's website for the upcoming ballot measure where hopefully people can find information, kind of that single source of fact and truth. Great.

All right. Well, thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, thanks.