City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everybody. Thank you for being here for the Plymouth City Council meeting of August 13th, 2026. I'd like to start with a roll call.

Council Member Bottomley? Here. Council Member Cranford? Here. Council Member Dill? Here. Vice Mayor Hornish?

Aye. Here.

Mayor Nunn?

Here.

Thank you. We have a quorum.

All right. We all stand for Pledge of Allegiance.

are affiliated with the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

All right.

So, looking for approval of City Council regular meeting agenda of August 13th.

Why is it so loud today?

You just talked about that. Oh, really? Yeah, you could actually step back a little bit. So I don't have to like eat the microphone anymore? You don't have to have it in your mouth anymore. Thank you.

Second. Council Member Bottomley? Aye. Council Member Cranford? Aye. Council Member Dill? Aye. Vice Mayor Hornish?

Aye.

Mayor Nunn? Thank you. Motion passes.

So just before we move on from that, I wanted to note that the county assessor's presentation, we're going to have to hold off until that presenter makes it here, but I think we can just jump back to that item, continue with other business until then.

All right. So at this time, we're going to go to regular meeting public comment. At this time, anyone who wishes to speak has three minutes to speak to things that are not on the agenda, and I ask if They're agenda items. You wait until that item is brought up, and you'll get three minutes then, too. So I have one from Darlene Esti-Travado. Can you come up? And make sure you push the button, ma'am. Do you get the red light on?

I got the red light. Darlene Esti-Travado. I live at 9221 Landrum Street. And I'm here this evening because I have a concern about Gunter Way, which is right off of the main street there. You go up Gunter, it's a real short street. It's got two houses on it. And Gutierrez Landscaping, he has trucks and trailers. And they're parking the trucks and the trailers on the side of the road in front of his house. And so your car can go through just about. but no ambulance, no fire trucks, no emergency vehicles could go through there. And that's a problem. That's a health and safety issue. And I'm asking if the city would look and make that a no parking on either side of that road. I don't think there should be parking on that street, period, just because it's not wide enough. But again, if you have to come back to Landrum Street and you can't get up that street with an emergency vehicle, you're going to have to either go up to the post office and go around or go down to the end of the street past the school to come on to Landrum to get to people who, you know, if they have emergencies back there. So I'm just asking the city to take a look at that and make it a no parking on either side so that nobody parks on the street itself. He's got a driveway there and he's got parking to the side and I realize he's got a business and I know that park is a premium here, but also I think about people who might have an emergency and need the help.

So if you're concerned, Gunter or Landrum? Because I actually, so I can see his house from my house. And I drive up there, and he's usually, as far as on Gunter, they're usually pulled into the yard. But I have noticed that on Landrum, they're sitting on the side sometimes. You kind of got to pull and go around them.

The Landrum, you know, there's places on Landrum that shouldn't have parking either.

Oh, I agree.

But this is, he's been parking consistently in front of his house. So right in the front on Gunter. So it's on Gunter that I don't think there should be any parking on either side of that road. I think you should, you know, we can drive. And two cars, if nobody's parked there, can get by there. And a fire truck or an ambulance can get up there. But when there's vehicles parked there, and they all park in front of his house. So I just, you know, I wanted to bring it to the attention of the council before we have an issue.

Thank you. I have noticed he gets a little busy right there. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, anyone else? Public comment?

Thank you.

Rosemary, Marino, Moody, Plymouth. First off, I want to thank Ricky and Nadia for the community picnic on Sunday. They're organizing it. We were out of town the first one, but we went to the second one. They do a great job and it's a great community thing. And thank you so much for doing that. It's wonderful. So I'm hoping more people will come in the future because it sounds like they want to continue it. So thank you. The school signs, they're up, excited, but I do have a question. It says on there 15 miles an hour when flashing, but I have never seen them flash. So is there a certain time that they should be flashing? But it's nice to see the speed, but I notice it's not very bright, and is it just going to take some time for that to get to the point so it's brighter? And then the last thing is, because I'm usually out walking when kids, they're going to school. Yesterday it was working. Today it wasn't working at all, the one up by Empire.

To answer those questions, I don't know if they're supposed to be flashing at a certain time, but I will definitely get with Public Works and express those concerns and get some answers for you and get them fixed.

Yeah, I appreciate it because it does say 15 miles an hour when flashing. but I haven't experienced that. So thank you.

Thank you, ma'am. Robert.

Yes. You just forgot to mention when they come by the school, they assume that the speed picks up now because the speed, that speed sign is way up there by the Montessori. So now they're flying out of town fast again. So maybe another one. Not that, just a speed sign down by where the crosswalk is. I was watching them this morning, and they don't even stop for the kids to go across the crosswalk.

Do we have an in-school zone sign like most schools?

Well, the two new ones that we pointed out says flashing when in.

I understand that, but usually there's one that says in-school zone. So you're saying that they're going by your house still doing that? I'm not sure.

50% it's helped but they're still but it seems like they come around that corner and then they're away from the school they just speed out of town okay I'll look into that as well and I'll also let the sheriff's office know yeah I was going to say could we let the sheriff's office know again maybe they can hang out there anyone else for public comment Stephanie

I apologize. I'm not feeling very well today, so I'm going to stay away from all of you. I just want to remind the council that at the last meeting I brought up about having a post-action report for the fire that we had in town, a public forum to allow people to talk about their concerns about what happened and maybe make suggestions about how to improve the conditions around town, to to do things differently or applaud what went well. I just really think it's important to give everybody an opportunity. That was a real close call. And, I mean, the firefighters may think it wasn't a close call, but for the people living in town, it felt like a close call. So I just want to remind you that I asked for that, and I'm hoping to hear that you want to do that. Thank you.

Thank you.

Let's do it.

Anyone else for public comment?

Good evening, everyone. Tom Tomlinson, Fire Prevention Officer for Amador Fire. Just want to give you an update on the total run call for the month of July. It was a total of 51. That included the land and fire that was already reported on at the previous meeting and one traffic collision. Aside from that, everything at the fair went fairly well besides being a little bit warmer than last year to what I recall. We had our UTV staffed with two EMTs every day throughout the fair, four to five volunteers at our booth. It also helped with the running medical aids as needed. So overall, I feel like it was a very good event. In regards to the Landrum Fire, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me. I'll give you one of my cards before I leave. And then we're always open to whatever questions you may have or concerns you have about it. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else for public comment? No. No, it's all right. Come up.

Mike O'Meara.

I live over across in the fairgrounds over there. This will be CHP. I have been passed so many times on a double yellow. I was turning on the Pacific yesterday, making my right turn. A guy jumped out, passed me on a double yellow with cars coming toward him. Okay. And I'm just going to say, and then the day before I get passed again, And I'm not a slow driver. Everybody knows me. I'm not a real slow driver. I got passed another time, and it was just on Old Sacramento, where, again, we might pass on WL down, and then it's clear. These are all dangerous passes, and these people are hauling ass. I don't know. Comment to the CHP. I was going to comment to them. And then I hadn't done it. Oh, down in Jackson. It seems like people are just going, I don't know. I'm just making a comment that may contact CHP and let them know. It just seems like, again, I heard speed and whatever. Again, I'm not necessarily a slow driver. In fact, I can't believe I'm up here saying some of this stuff, but it's just unsafe, just flat out unsafe.

Thank you. We understand. We have actually, I think it's improved a little bit on Main Street in some places because we have really pressed with the Sheriff's Office to do more. And it seems like it's working a little bit on some of the streets, but we're doing what we can.

Yeah, I understand. I mean, it's like the other day, a guy did the same thing to me. And two minutes later, here comes a CHP driving up through it. Just missed it. But I mean, it's just, again, turning on, what blew me away was when I was turning to Pacific. across from the fairgrounds, guys come behind me and I'm watching. He jumped across, jumped across WLs with cars coming toward him. Okay. I mean, I don't know. I don't know what they can do. Be aware, I guess. Whatever. Okay. Thank you.

Can I chime in really quick, Mayor? Yeah. So I know we're going to put a call in to the Sheriff's Department about some of this, but I can say honestly, if each individual citizen will call the Sheriff's Department, multiple people, it will help even more if they hear from multiple people.

They'll carry more weight.

And I can give you guys the number if you need it. But it definitely helps like the quantity in hearing from us. Yeah, either CHP or Sheriff's Department. Sheriff Redman has started a traffic unit because of these issues. So they are actually doing traffic stops now where they used to not do that. And that's just happened in the last, I think, six months or so.

And Mike, thanks for wearing a SEMA shirt here tonight. Wearing a SEMA shirt in here tonight. Yeah. All right. Keep it up.

Anyone else for public comment? Yeah.

I ran through.

That's pretty impressive in those shoes.

Yeah, this was a bad birthday present here. So, hi guys, thank you. I just wanted to say, actually, I think I might need to borrow your phone. You have the description of the girls. I ran so fast I forgot my phone in my car. The young women who helped paint the Little Free Library, I hired them all summer to work at Operation Care and a few other places around the county. They've been doing so good. One of the girls just got a job from a neighbor in Plymouth even, and she made a few 100 bucks on that because she saw her working in the park. So it's worked out really good for these girls and they had a great time painting here and. They'll probably come back and do something else in the near future. We're working on a project at the fairgrounds that we're gonna do at the pond there, at the Koi Pond. And it'll be permanent metal sculptures all around that area. So it's gonna be really cool. You'll see these kids in the future. One of them is moving into her room for college right now. I'm just gonna introduce their names and who they are. Isabella Gower is a first-year student at the University of the Pacific. She said that math has helped to form her understanding of the world around her, art has helped her portray that understanding, and now she is studying environmental science and combining her passions in the active pursuit of bettering this world of hers. And then Emily Dayton is also 18. Both of these are graduates from Amador. And she's currently enrolled at Columbia Community College. Art is her one true passion in life, and she couldn't be the person she is today without it. She's participated in numerous art shows around the county and sold many commissions and personal works. She hopes one day to become an art therapist or a child psychologist to teach kids and adults the power of art and creation in mental health spaces. So, two really good kids. And both of them won about $2,500 in scholarships. And Isabella was my top stagecraft officer last year. I learned so much from her, how to work better with other people on art projects. She didn't put up with me or my stuff at all. She made me work hard. And Emily is just so incredibly creative. And So they're going to have art projects in every city in this county, and you'll see them up for the next few decades. So watch what happens at Amador High School. We're going to do a few more there. So I just wanted to thank you for letting us use this as a cooling down space and have snacks here and stuff for us. So it's just really cool. So thank you.

I did see them out there working, and it looked great what they did. Yeah. Would it help them with their scholarship stuff if they had a letter of appreciation from the city?

That would really help them because definitely they're pursuing this.

Maybe the city manager could write a letter just of thanks to them for what they did in the city. That would be great, guys. Thank you so much.

Isabella is quite an accomplished young lady. She cleaned up at scholarship night.

She did?

I mean, she, yeah. And I don't know Emily, but Isabella, that name works. Because I heard it over and over and over at scholarship night.

So she received some really amazing scholarship. Very talented young lady. About 3,000 hours of community service hours. And Emily, you know, she wants to care for other people. They're so community-minded. Great kids. So, yep. Thank you.

Anyone else for public comment?

I forgot that I have pictures. Of the cars. Who can I give them to or send them to?

Email the city manager.

Okay, perfect. Thank you.

You're welcome. Anyone else for public comment? Do we have anybody on Zoom?

I don't see any.

John, you have public comment? Are you good? Because I'm going to close it. Okay. All right. Hearing and seeing no one, I am going to close public comment at this time. Our presentation from the Amador County Assessor, we're going to hold that until a little bit later in the meeting. And we will go on to 4.2 is presentation of audit status. We're ready for that.

Hello, testing, testing. All right, that works. So I'm up here today giving a brief presentation on the audit update, how the audit's gone so far. Doing it today, August 13th. Okay. There we go. So this is the little graphic that I see every time I log on to the portal for the audit. They use a website called Suralink to keep track of everything that is outstanding and that they've asked of us. And this is the little pie graph that I see whenever I log in. The green is stuff that I have submitted and they have accepted. That's relatively small. The yellow has been submitted and not accepted yet, but yet to be reviewed. Those two numbers total up to 64%. 66%. So from my perspective, what I've submitted to them, we're about 66% through the audit. But those first two chunks, the first two thirds are the easier chunks. And the second, the last third is a little bit more difficult. So that's that gray outstanding there, about 34% outstanding. Our audit kickoff meeting was on January 13th, 2026. As soon as that meeting stopped, we hit the ground running and got a ton of stuff over to them all the way through May. At the end of May, we hit 60% completion. So as you can see from this tracker on their little site, they haven't done much updating or approving on here. But what they did was they moved to an open items list where they were sending me an email. That was a Word document. It was about 12 pages long, not of like tight bullets of everything to be done, but pictures and questions and that kind of stuff in there. We've got that open items list down from 12 pages to about seven pages. So there is still stuff to be done, but we have made significant progress. Progress starts to slow down in June as the easier items have all been resolved. We gave them all the bank statements. We gave them all the payroll reports. We gave them everything that we have available. And now it's more of the intricate, interwoven issues that have accumulated over the years. So the finalization, we finalized the bulk of transactional testing in July and the remainder was sent early August. So at this point in time, we're complete with transactional testing. That's where they asked to see invoices and our check stubs and all that kind of stuff. They have discovered a couple issues with what we provided. So they might come back with more selections and I'll go over those issues that they found here in a minute. As of August, we've largely, yeah, we've gotten most of the easy stuff done and we're left with more intricate issues, like I mentioned. So these are some of the areas that we have completed with the audit. General items like our policies and our organizational documents, contracts, the budget documents and supporting documents for that, that stuff's all been taken care of. Staff interviews were completed months ago, as well as walkthroughs through specific areas like how payroll is processed, that kind of stuff. records and statements. They've got all the bank statements. They've got investment statements as well for LAFE. They have all of our payroll information. They have a ton of checks that we cut and received. So they have a lot of those documents taken care of. We had to put together detailed ledgers because when I got here, there were not detailed ledgers for each fund's revenue expenditures and beginning balances for most accounts. The beginning balances were particularly difficult because this is the audit year where we transitioned accounting systems. So we went from one system to a new system. We're currently using that system. But our folks here might have missed some training or something, and there have been issues with that conversion. So putting together beginning balances for some of those accounts meant digging through an old system and then reconciling the differences of what they changed between that conversion. Pretty difficult. Testing selections, like I mentioned, have been largely completed. They asked for 108 selections for expenses and accruals. We have 660 invoices in 21, 22. They asked for 108 of them, which is a really, really big coverage because, again, they're not so sure that we can trust our numbers with these conversion issues and some issues that were found on the previous audit statement. Uh, revenue, they asked for 42 items and then payroll and other journal entries. They asked for 25. Uh, we've given them all that information. Those have all been knocked out, but again, they might come back with some more. We've completed the confirmations, which is basically where we send a letter to like PG&E or the sheriff office and say, Hey, The city of Plymouth is saying that we spent X amount on you guys. Can you confirm that? We passed all of those, so there's no issue there. We're not paying the sheriff's office $100,000 and then booking $120,000. There's none of that stuff happening. Confirmations have confirmed that. Long-term debt was an easy one to knock out. We got that done at inter-fund transactions. This is where do-tos and froms between funds show up. So some of the issues we have now are we have funds with negative balances in cash that we're reporting on. That shouldn't be a thing. That isn't a thing. You can't have negative cash. It should be a due to or due from another fund. So we've been able to book those transactions and run them through the balance sheet, and that's had an effect on our current reporting, but we're correct 21-22 right now. Uh-oh. So these are the areas, some of the areas that are incomplete or work in process. Like I mentioned, there's a ton of system conversion errors. We've been able to clean up some of them, but others are very intricately woven between multiple accounts. And it's kind of like untangling Christmas lights. You got to kind of go from this angle and you go from this angle and try to figure it out as one big puzzle. For some reason, we broke out a conversion accounts payable that does not seem to be properly recorded in our current accounting system. We still show this accounts payable balance today, five years later, and it's never properly cleared the way that it should. I think that's part of how it was booked in the system and part of the system having some limitations that we need to work around. So that's an easy one to clean up. I just need to get on the phone with Black Mountain, our software provider, and hammer it out with them. Our developer deposit accounts, some of those are pretty tricky. The auditors did identify one issue with one of those, with one of our good buddies, Amoruso, Peter Amoruso. We got that resolved and sent over to the auditors. I'm awaiting their response on it because that was one of the ones that was a selection. And then we provided support for it. And I corrected everything and said, hey, I found an error. Well, you guys found an error. I corrected it. And here's where our accounts sit currently. So that whole chain of events might trigger more testing selections. We want to see more invoices. We want to see more revenue items. See, accrued payroll and compensated absences. That's an easy one to resolve. Sorry, that's my baby. We have to book an accrual for payroll and compensated absences. Basically like if everybody left today and we had to pay out all the vacation time in 21, 22, what is that number? I booked that accrual based on current standards and the auditors let me know that actually 21, 22 was a different standard. So I got to adjust that accrual a little bit, but it's nothing too major. Capital asset activity, this is a little bit of a tougher one because there aren't great records for the capital assets that we have. I'm not sure if that was deleted or if it just was never maintained. Luckily, we don't have a ton of capital assets, but this is an area that I've yet to crack into because it is a little bit more intricate. Yeah, so receivables, loans, and general AR. For these guys, we have a few funds that are holding Loans that are uncollectible at this point in time, these loans total $132,000 and they spread across three funds. The Home Grants Fund has 33 grand in loans that we're saying are receivable and we haven't seen that money come in. So at this point in time, it's pretty safe to say that money's not coming in. Similar thing with Housing Rehab Welfare for Work. That fund has $39,000 in loans that probably aren't receivable. And Community Development Block Grant, that fund has $60,000 in loans that are likely unreceivable.

Does this include the money you had identified like nine separate outstanding people had to us? Yes.

Is that included in that? That is included in that $60,000 one. We had a discussion talking about loans that we wrote for people to basically have like a second mortgage, it seems like, on their house. And we did that in 07, 08. And we all know what happened in 07 and 08. So most of those loans... We didn't even receive a payment back on them. There was maybe one of them that tried very hard to make payments and then that went kaput too. So we're still holding these balances as loans that are receivable.

But beyond that, wasn't there other money owed to the city by...

I thought that you'd said there was some different stuff, you know, different things. These are the three ones that I've identified and they cross those three funds, like I mentioned. So we're saying on our books that they're receivable in all likeliness. I mean, maybe the lawyers might have some different say, but in all likeliness, it seems like these are not receivable loans. So we need to write these off in this year. But that determination hasn't been finalized yet. Yeah. So there's that one. Budget to actual variances. Those are pretty minor things. We said the budget should be this and we overspent or underspent. And I had to explain why. Pretty easy. I tried to make a mix of tougher things and things that will probably be knocked out by the next time I give you an audit update on here. This is not a comprehensive list. This is the bigger chunks of things that need to be resolved still. Okay, so here's some of the audit findings that we have so far. So far they've documented that we have a lack of formally documented internal control policies and procedures. People here are doing the work, stuff is getting done, but it's not always getting done the exact same way every time. And the auditors want to see that. So that means we need to write up a document of what our procedure should be and make sure people are sticking to it. With all the turnover and stuff we've had in the last five years since this audit, you know, since this financial year has happened, that happened. So we need to get those documents formalized. A lack of documentation procedures and support for capital assets. Like I mentioned, I found one spreadsheet from like 2008 that has a couple of trucks on it. And like, that's kind of really all we got right now. So I need to create that documentation. That part of what I'm doing here is creating that documentation so that the next audit we do, is way easier because we don't have to create all this stuff from scratch. So capital assets is one of those areas. Bank reconciliations are not being done in a timely manner and are not complete. Most of our bank reconciliations have been marked as complete, but they have a $20,000 variance where it's like, a note that says, hey, I need to look into this. I need to go find out what this variance is. And that's not a complete bank reconciliation. We've nipped this in the bud for current years. When I'm doing the bank reconciliation, I'm booking journal entries to make sure that it is as complete as possible. But I'm not able to mark those reconciliations as complete because these other ones are still outstanding and it's like a checkbook. You got to balance it each month before you can close your current month. Bank accounts, Eldorado Savings. We have an Eldorado Savings account and the last statements I can find from it are from 2016. So it's got like $9,000 in it is the former Lodge Hill Capital Improvement Club fund or something like that. So yeah, that's sitting out there and we need to go and try to regain access to that. It is $9,000, but it's relatively small potatoes. We got a lot of stuff going on. We haven't had a chance to get that done yet. Developer billing account issues, like I mentioned, there's a lot of these. Some of them are negative, which they shouldn't be. We should be holding a deposit for these folks and developers, you know, incur charges with us and we reduce the deposit. But those issues are still outstanding and they're very time consuming to unwind. Funds carrying negative cash for years with insufficient revenue. Andy discussed this in his previous update. We've worked on a resolution to get that taken care of in 2022. So, you know, we're looking better there. Then the financials are not sufficiently reviewed and approved by management. Ideally, there's someone here who puts the financials together. They get sent to Andy for his review and they get sent to the city manager for his review. And that hasn't happened historically. But we would like to get to that point soon. So those are the findings that they have for us so far. And then I just wanted to briefly go over what audit opinions are and what they mean. An unqualified opinion means that we pass the audit. Clean, good, highly unlikely there's fraud or material misstatements. A qualified opinion is, I got one red flag there, it's material misstatements, but the errors are not pervasive. We made one mistake, but that same mistake doesn't happen every single month. This is the opinion that we're kind of shooting for. I would love to get an unqualified opinion, but they've found some errors. So a qualified opinion is likely what I see happening here. If we get an unqualified opinion, we're popping the champagne. We win. Good stuff. Adverse opinion. I don't see us getting this. This is material and pervasive misstatements. There's a big mistake. It's material and it happens every single month and no one's fixed it. I don't think we're there. A lot of these issues that I've identified have happened in the past, like pre-21-22 and just been carried forward. They're not active mistakes in 21-22. And that disclaimer of opinion just means that The information was so lacking and so bad the auditors couldn't even put an opinion out there and we won't get that one for sure. So that's just a quick run through of audit opinions. And that's what I've got for you guys. That's our audit update for now.

Ricky, thank you so much for this information. You got handed a hornet's nest and I know audits are not fun. A lot of work. They're a little... sometimes people can be kind of scary with what they tell you, but you're doing a great job and really appreciate you taking this on. Cause I know it's a huge task and doing your regular work.

Yeah.

That's, that's, that's,

You're doing great work.

Yeah.

Thank you very much. Appreciate you. One of the tough things for me, because I would like this to be done. I'd like to do the fun stuff. I don't want to be doing this forever. But one of the tough things here is that I'm not doing the audit. Right. I'm supporting the people who are doing the audits. Right. And we're kind of on their timeline right now. They're out of busy season and it's summer. People are taking vacations. They're doing whatever because they got those 80 hour work weeks coming again in winter. So I'm trying to push them as much as I can while still being friendly and But we're going to get to a point soon here where I have to be less friendly. So, yeah. Any other questions for me while I'm up here?

No, I don't think so right now. Thank you. We need to offer public comment on that now. Okay. So we're going to have you hang around in case you have to answer this question. So at this time, open to public comment for Rosemary.

Rosemary, Marino, Moody, Plymouth. Ricky, great presentation. I want to say this is a really positive thing that the residents get because the transparency, you know, so that is really good. And I like that you are forthright with the issues you have, what's going on, what you're doing to correct it. And this is something the city needs to do better at. And I'm glad that you're doing it. So thank you.

Stephanie.

Thank you. First of all, I want to compliment Ricky on the work he's doing. He obviously knows what he's talking about. I use Surrelink, too, and it's not easy sometimes. And just when you think you get all the way through the spreadsheets and samples that they ask for, they load a bunch more in there that you have to all at once do. So he's doing a really great job at that. And I'm hoping that you're doing whatever you can to make sure he stays with the city. Um, I do want to ask why he's doing all this work in addition to his regular job when you have a contract with Andy Heath that is supposed to be doing this. So I'm wondering why that workload has shifted onto Ricky. Um, and maybe that's a way that the city can save some money if he's doing it anyway, maybe compensate him more for what he's doing and get rid of that contract if it's not working out. Um, I also wanted to, um, I have a couple of questions if you don't mind. Sorry. I want to know if you're going to transition to a new accounting system because it sounds like the one you have is pretty antiquated and that might be a worthwhile investment. I'd like to know, it seemed like a lot of the incomplete and work in progress that were there are in significant areas. And I'm wondering if there's any sense that there will be additional hits to the general fund balance. by the time you get through this that may impact this year's budget. I'm wondering what's happening with the Zinfandel Bridge. Um, community facilities district, I think you're supposed to do an audit at that, or at least an annual report meeting.

I don't want to interrupt. Can I just say 1 thing? You're asking a lot of questions and I don't want to confuse them and he won't be able to remember. Yes. Maybe let him answer a couple and then you could ask some more.

Sure. I was just trying to get through my 3 minutes.

No. If it takes some longer presentation a little bit, do you want me to?

So, 1 was the system a new system.

So for the system, I wouldn't say that it's the most antiquated system. The fund balance is what we were using previously, and that was a very, very antiquated system. This system is better. It's got limitations. It's not as flexible. I can't do things as fast as I would like to. I can't have multiple windows open, that kind of stuff. But at this point in time, when we're five years behind on audits, we need to get through all this stuff before we even cross that road.

Okay, thank you. Yeah. Um, the, the ZR, um, the, the CFD is supposed to have at least an annual report. I see it's missing from the county's website for last year. Um, I thought that they're supposed to have regular audits. I didn't know if one's scheduled, not positive about that, but I know they're supposed to have at least an annual meeting and review their budget separately because you're supposed to determine if the amount you're charging them is still legitimate. It's just not an automatic every year. It's the same and you get to increase it. You have to justify those expenses. So they're not overpaying. And so I just wondered if that's going to happen anytime soon. That might be a council question or.

We are working on that, so that should be forthcoming.

Okay, thank you. I just want to correct. I have a difference of opinion in what you said about if it hasn't come in yet, it means it's not going to probably come in and we should write it off. I did submit public comments for the budget showing that sometimes the money's come in, it got posted to the wrong accounts. So if you just write it off, then you're actually doing a fund transfer that's not on the books. So I encourage you to do the research on those to see where those accounts are. And I did provide an invoice for the Caltrans one because the city did receive $900,000 for that account. It's showing that you didn't receive it. So that means the money went somewhere else or the checks are uncashed. If the checks are uncashed, you could ask for them to be replaced. If it went somewhere else, it needs to be moved. So I just want to say that.

I'm not familiar with the Caltrans issue, but if that's in my email inbox, I'll definitely get that out.

No, it's one of my comments tonight for the budget. It's in the back room.

City manager has it as well, it sounds like. But I will say for some of the home loans and whatnot, a lot of these folks were, they declared bankruptcy. um we received like a very small payout from bankruptcy court specifically for the home loans um but you're right we shouldn't jump to writing them off we should do everything we can to make sure that if the money was received it is properly reported which it might not be you know right the cdbg mortgage loans are a little bit different you're right and i used to to manage those too so so i understand that i was more concerned about the grant payments that haven't shown for sure for sure completely fair comments okay and then

Can I still ask more questions? So I don't know if you all remember that the city lost $50,000 back in 2020 that was supposed to be in the CDBG reuse fund and disappeared. And I kept asking about it. Nobody knew what happened to it. And the last I heard was finance director at the time said some things are better not to know. And I don't think that's a good answer. So there is a $50,000 CDBG reuse money that a transaction that disappeared out of that fund and the CDB is reuse money. That would be the mortgage payments that came in plus any leftover from your CDBG, like your fire station account. And that's discretionary money that you can use for certain things. So it's important to get that money back in. So I just wanted to point that out. And then, um, really quickly, um, I think it was the fiscal 2021 year audit. It was presented to the council and it was lacking the management letter. And I said, how come the management letter isn't in here? And the response from the city manager at the time was, well, we don't know what happened last year. And now you can understand why, probably. But I said, well, you were here last year. Why don't you know what happened? And so the council said, go do the management letter and bring the audit back. I never saw the audit come back. And you're working on the 21-22. So I'm wondering if the 20-21 is still... need to be approved or accepted by the council. So I just, that was my last thing.

Thank you. Accepted by the council. I'm not sure, but I do know that the printed out copy of the audit that I've been looking at referencing back to does have a management report. Okay.

So, so maybe it was that year and they, they did it. They just didn't come back or maybe it was a prior year, but it was when it was back in 2019 or 20 sometime in there. So. Thank you for your indulgence in my questions.

Thank you. Anyone else for comment on this? All right. Hearing and seeing no one, we will move on. Mr. Mayor, Mr. Rooney's present. I did see him walk in. Mr. Rooney, are you ready right now? All right.

Yeah, there you go. Hello, everybody. Jim Rooney, Amador County Assessor. Sorry I'm a little late. I wasn't going to give you an excuse, but I got a good one. I had surgery yesterday, cataract surgery, and I didn't feel like doing anything today. And then all of a sudden, I thought, uh-oh, I'm going to be a few minutes late. But anyway...

I think that hasn't happened to some of us up here, so no.

You know, I could really see good out of my right eye right now. So anyway, by the way, it went very well. I come once a year before all city councils, school board, water agency to give you an update on what's going on in your jurisdiction and the county with property taxes. And I have some other information too, which is kind of interesting this year. And should I point this in that direction? All right there, okay. All right, let's see. Oh, there we go. Okay, the information I'm about to give you, these are assessment changes that will be reflected in the property tax bills that are coming out later this year. And every year, Prop 13, as guided by the state and mandated by the state, requires that we adjust all assessments in the county that haven't sold or that there was no new construction, to a certain percentage, they cannot be higher than 2%. So if nothing changes in the county in terms of new construction or change of ownership, the maximum the assessments can go up is 2%. And this year, let's see. Shoot, I swear I pressed it. Did I do something wrong there? There we go. The tax increase for the county this year, countywide, was just 3.01%. And, you know, that's not a whole lot. Everything that didn't have new construction or change of ownership went up 2%. So... if there were any sales or new construction, that generally is much more than 2%. And that's probably what accounted for the 3%. Now, this one is going to be hard to see. Oh, no, this actually isn't so bad.

Yeah.

Okay. Good one. It's funny. I took this to the county. I couldn't see it at all. Now I understand why. Plymouth is right there in the middle, and if you go down to almost the bottom line, Plymouth went up 2.65% the assessments last year. The highest in the county was Ione at 4.19%, and then Jackson at 3.59%. I want to let you know that Assessment-wise, Plymouth is, in the very bottom line, is 2.92% of the county. The largest part of the county by far is in the unincorporated area, which is nearly 69% of the county. So it's by far the largest. Ione right now is the largest of all the cities, but it's only at 11.3%. So that just gives you an idea of the assessment distribution throughout the county. Let's see. All right, I'm gonna go to the next slide. This is the information I thought you might find the most interesting. This is the number of residences in each jurisdiction. I'll go straight to Plymouth. Plymouth has a total, does this have a pointer on it too? Okay, Plymouth has a total of 418 residences. And the interesting thing about that is, let me show you, Ione has a little more than 2,000 residences. Jackson has about 1,500. Sutter Creek, 900. Plymouth, the very far to the left row, it shows that In Plymouth, the primary residences, there's 234 out of 418. Now, I want to tell you, the reason that's an interesting number is primary residences, we keep track of those, and those are residences that people, they live in them, that's their main home. That's what they call their main home, where they're based out of. They might have three houses, but that's the one that they call home. And In Plymouth, last year, it went up four. There's four more primary residences than the year before, and there's eight more than two years before. And from 2021, there's about 22 additional primary residences. Now, Plymouth is different than other towns in the county. If you look at Ione, I own, while it has 2000 residences, for the last three years, the number of primary residences is going down. They have more homes, but less primary residences. Shoot. Okay, there we go. Now this is countywide. In Amador County, over the last five years, You can see in 2022, there were 153 new homes. 2023, there were 306 new homes throughout the county. In 24, 49 new homes. In 2025, 141 homes. And in 2026, 55 new homes. I'm going to tell you, Sacramento County has advised adjacent counties and this area that between Excelsior Boulevard and Sunrise Boulevard, they have plans for 100,000 new homes. Amador County is showing 150 homes, 300 homes, 55 homes, 49 homes. we're really not growing. There are a few new homes. There's less primary residences. We're very static. And I've told every jurisdiction that, including Plymouth tonight, and I'm not saying this as a good thing or a bad thing. I'm saying that this is our observation from the data we keep, that the county residence-wise really isn't growing. And again, not particularly consistent a good thing or a bad thing. It's just an observation that we've made. And you probably aren't seeing that too. I have information that IOWN says they have, I've heard, up to 1,500 new homes planned. And I asked someone there, I said, can we talk about that? He said, we have 1500 new homes planned. I said, can we talk about it? We have 1500 new homes planned. I'm gonna tell you about Castle Oaks. Castle Oaks started in about 1992. It is now 2026. It's about 34 years. They have 900 and about 90 new homes forecast looks over a 34-year period. When people tell me there's going to be growth, I have to have a timeline. Otherwise, it doesn't mean anything. So anyway, I hear things and I see things. We don't do pre-assessments, so we don't make too many forecasts. So anyway, that's what's going on about that. And I want to tell you, I've been receiving a little bit of FLAC, online, people are complaining a little bit about property taxes, which goes with the job. I get it. But they're describing these property tax situations that aren't in this state. I just want to tell you, it's California. In every county of the state, it's uniform. We have Prop 13. Prop 13 means that everyone is given an assessed value when they either purchase or build their property. that assessed value can go up a maximum of 2% a year unless there's new construction or change of ownership. And some people talk about it as being very limiting in the revenues it's going to bring into California or into our governments. Since 1980, there's three very important numbers since 1980, the population in California has gone up about 56%. the inflation rate has gone up about 300% since 1980. Revenues from property taxes have gone up over 1,100%. Prop 13 keeps things very stable. I heard earlier, Chris, he was talking about how it was so terrible in 2008 and 2009, things weren't paid back. things were really bad then. I was assessor at that point. Values in the county went down about 40%. Because of Prop 13, assessed values went down a maximum of 10%. And what it does is it's very stabilizing. It doesn't let things go up too fast. But also when things get bad, it doesn't have them go down too fast. So in a sense, it's It's a kind of a safeguard that's very stabilizing and it's very helpful too. So anyway, that's what I have for your jurisdiction and the county. And if there's any questions or concerns, give them to me now because I didn't run again. It's going to be a new assessor next year. I was going to say, if you have any questions or concerns, call the office, ask for Jim. If you have any problems, ask for a guy named Jeff. He'll help you.

Anyway, any questions? One question. You hear a lot of talk and see things online about them trying to certain entities or whatever, trying to get rid of Proposition 13. And then I've heard that, well, no, it's just on commercial properties they're trying to get rid of it. What do you know about that? Is there a movement afoot to try and get rid of it? Because I like Prop 13. I think it's great and should stay forever.

There's always a movement to change Prop 13. And recently there was this thing. It was a Prop 8. They called it Prop 8. And that was to only assess... keep Prop 13 on residential properties, but have commercial properties reassessed on an annual basis. And it would have been extremely hard for assessor's offices to do that because there would be more challenges and just the workload of assessing commercial properties on an annual basis would have been hard. And personally, the state has done a lot of things to hurt businesses in the county. This would hurt, I'm sorry, the state. This would affect businesses negatively. And I'm going to tell you, the oil companies, the mining companies, the stores, do they pay property taxes? In a sense, they really don't. They put that on their product that goes to the consumer, and that consumer is essentially paying the additional property taxes. especially with gasoline. So they are trying to change it. There's a Prop 43 this year, which does affect Prop 13, generally not with property taxes, but with the voting of having additional taxes, it would have to stay at two-thirds. But you can look at Prop 43. That's an interesting proposition. Proposition 43? Prop 43, yeah.

I think I heard about that a little bit.

Yeah.

Thank you. Anything else? Anyone else like to ask anything? Well, this is about the, I'm going to tell you, this is about the 23rd or 24th time I've come before this council and I've always appreciated the hospitality. We appreciate you coming. Well, thank you too.

Thank you for your many years of service to our county.

Oh, I got to tell you, it's been a pleasure because it's been a real good job and I've liked it.

It was to my benefit. I think you've been our assessor as long as I can remember back to the assessor. So it's going to be a strange change. Yeah. Congratulations on it. Well, thank you. Enjoy your retirement. Is there any members of the public have any questions for Mr. Rooney before we let him go? Stephanie, do you mind hanging out for just a minute in case there's questions?

I have one question for Jim and, and then two questions for the council. First of all, I want to thank you for your service. First time I called the assessor's office, I asked if I could leave a message for him and they said, just a minute. And he answered the phone and I was like, so amazed, you know, and that's his policy is that he's available to constituents. And I love that. And I've worked with Jeff as well a few times and, and he's just as great. So I'm really pleased and I'm happy that you've, been with the county for so long and wish you the best in your retirement. So my question is, how do you determine it's a primary? Is it by the homeowner's exemption? Is that how you track it? So if someone hasn't filed for the homeowner's exemption, they go in the non-primary category, right? So there could be more primary houses if people have failed to file that. Okay, thank you. And then the question for the, thank you for answering that. I had noted 1.83 increase for Plymouth and you said 2 point something. So I must've read it wrong. But I just wanted you to recognize that that figure is how much the revenues went up from last year. And that's how you estimate what your property tax revenues will be for the next year. And so when we get to the budget, I'd like to know what percentage they use to estimate property taxes for next year so that it relates to that figure. And then the other thing is Jim said it's neither good or bad about not having housing I think it's bad that we don't have more housing because I want my kids and grandkids to live in the county and if there's no more housing stock They're gonna have to be forced to move so I would like to encourage the council to take a look at the housing process We've had projects in the pipe for a while. It's possible that there could be streamlining in the permits or or the fees or whatever that we could do to encourage more housing development in the city. It could be infills. You know, somebody has an extra room for a house on their property. It could be a major development. But I think it's important we look at those. They need to be properly mitigated. They need to go through CEQA. But I just feel that we desperately need that housing. Thank you. Thank you.

You know, I want to say one other thing. I was talking with somebody yesterday, a businessman in the county, and he said something to me that I thought was very insightful. He says, be ready to, he was talking to me personally, be ready to invest your money in housing. He says, there's a huge baby boom generation who's not going to be here forever. And there's going to be a lot of houses come on the market. And I thought, that's interesting. We've seen increases in Plymouth over the years and the county the past 10, 12 years, 4%, 5%, 4%, 5%. And it's been very steady. And that's good. What kills you is when it drops to 5% or 6% when you're expecting 3%. It happens, and it's probably going to happen again. You just never know at the real estate market, and be vigilant. I think that's all I have. So thank you, Cameron.

Anyone else like to make, John?

No, no, no, no, not John Colburn.

Sorry, John.

I want to know why you have my house appraised for double what it's worth. Well, actually, this gentleman here, I just wanted to get up and say thank you. Thank you for your service. He's been an outstanding employee for the county for so many years. Yes. All right. We will dearly miss you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, John. Hey, I do want to say, in all seriousness, if somebody thinks their house is assessed too high, please call the office. Under Prop 13, we will lower it or we will leave it alone. We don't raise it unless you did some illegal building without permits. If you did that, don't call and ask for a review. It happens, but it's very important because as property owners, you know better than anybody what your property is worth. Look at your property assessment. If you don't think you could sell it for that much, ask for a review. You really have nothing to lose, and it's extra work for the office, but what do I care, right?

That's right. You're retiring.

Hey, thanks again, and I'll see you all around downtown. Thanks.

Anyone else for public comment?

No.

All right. So at this time, we're going to close the public comment on item 4.1. And if there's no big objection, I think we'd like to take a quick five-minute break before we move on. Everyone? Is that good? All right. We're going to adjourn for five minutes. Thank you all. This time we are going to get rolling here again. And we at 746. Thank you. And we're going to move on to item five, consent calendar items. So on the consent calendar, does anyone have any questions or anything at all?

So I want to make a quick note. We had a comment from Stephanie Moreno about item 5.5 and pulling that from consent. I looked at it again this afternoon. I think there are some additional positions we should add to it. That'll also require adding some additional disclosure categories. So my recommendation is going to be that we pull this for 5.5 and bring it back next time with some modifications.

Sounds good. Um, Anyone else? And we'll open it to public comment in a second. Anything else, Andreas? It's just that one.

That was it for me on that. Otherwise, we should take public comment on consent and go forward according to that.

So we're going to pull 5.5 and go to public comment. Stephanie?

No, no. No finding between children. I mean, siblings.

Oh, you don't even know. I just thank you for taking that off. I appreciate that. I just want to, again, compliment Ricky because the warrant register is so much easier to read and understand. We've been asking for that for a long time, and I'm just really impressed. So I just want to put that into the record. Thank you.

Thank you. Rosemary.

Rosemary Marina Moody Plymouth. Kudos to Ricky again. So made a good choice there. I just have two questions on the warrants. There was another boot allowance on there. And I know the last time it was in the warrant, I asked about it and asked if there was a policy for it. And I was told that it was just something they've been doing and that you hadn't found a policy. So have they found that policy?

No, ma'am. No.

Okay, and then there was also a warrant for signs, and I'm wondering what were those signs?

I have to see the warrant. We did buy signs that we put up to help direct traffic for the casino, and then we did, Shenandoah Excavating did help us with putting in the TAPCO signs, but other than that, there hasn't been any sign work done.

Okay, so the signs that went up, I was told in January that those were completely funded out of a... I'm going to interrupt really quick, RJ.

Vicki can answer the question. The signs I think you're asking about, they were rattlesnake caution signs that we purchased. Oh, okay.

So I just wanted to be clear that the signs that went up, they were totally funded by either a grant or some special funding? Is that correct?

It's through a risk management company. The purchase of the signs were, the installation was not.

Okay.

And so that was something that was put into play before I got here. And so Shenandoah Excavating helped us at a very reasonable cost to help put them in. So we're grateful for that.

Okay. Thank you. You're welcome.

Anyone else? Okay. Council members don't have anything. I guess we'll look for a motion.

I motion to approve the amended consent calendar. I'm sorry. I can't get used to this micro. I keep, I'm so used to putting my mouth closed so everyone can hear.

I'm used to going way up here like this. And now it's like, I got to lean backwards.

Council member Bottomley. Aye. Council member Cranford. Aye. Aye. Council Member Dill? Aye. Vice Mayor Hornish?

Aye.

Mayor Nunn?

Aye.

Thank you. Motion passes.

Okay. Public hearings, we have none, so we're going to move on to regular agenda items. 7.1, adopt Resolution 2026-16, adopting the revised annual proposed budget and fund balance for Projections for fiscal year 2026-27. Does any manager report on that?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm going to go ahead. Unfortunately, Andy was unable to be here tonight. It was a last-minute thing, so I'm going to present his PowerPoint and try and do it justice for him. So we'll just get to it. Maybe. Okay. All right, this will provide an overview of the revised proposed budget development process, our citywide budget overview, the fiscal year 26-27 proposed budget, forecast of the general fund, the enterprise funds, and other fund groups, and next steps. Our process was general fund contains most fiscal activity citywide, the administration, public works, community development, public safety, parks, recreation, engineering, And the 2627 proposed budget developed essentially enables continuation of core services. This is a very basic budget. There's no thrills, no frills in it. The only asked things we're asking for changing is to reclassify our account. So we can. help him get what he deserves for all the hard work he's been doing. But other than that, there's really not much to it. There's updates to the budget that include known cost drivers, such as staffing, contractual, and insurance, and then the preliminary budget assumed to deliver existing levels of service. So no service expansion, but we do have conversion of our lead maintenance worker to a maintenance worker one and an increased hourly rate for our accountant position. So this is our proposed budget update. Right now, if all goes well, our total appropriations will be 3.928160 funds. So our ending fund balance is also the $5,333,025. we do have one capital project that we're looking at doing and we've set aside um it's a new project for the old sacramento road rehab um we will touch on later actually after this budget we did put an rfp out for it um just to kind of get feelers to see what it would take to get that road serviceable again on our portion um i believe council member bottomley has some further updates from the actc that she'll share later on um so as right now this is in um in our budget and what we were doing is also, we had money that was supposed to be for the Mill Street curbs and all that stuff that was completely underfunded and we weren't able to do that. So we're gonna use that as well as our gas tax and RMR to pay fund. Our proposed budget update and general fund budget, our estimated revenues for the 25-26 was $1,321,425, and our expenditures, as you can see, was $1,665,000. one million six hundred sixty five thousand two hundred three dollars um our budget for the preliminary budget for the 2627 is balanced um the anticipated use of revenues during the 2425 was 343 thousand and 778 dollars and that came from transit occupancy tax revenues down 40 percent from average of four prior years uh 195 000 versus 325 000 we cannot use gas tax funding to pay for any general fund street costs without compromising receipt of SB1 money. and a one-time cost of staff transition, so from the city manager and staff reorganization. High legal costs, we had a little over 260,000 last year, and we're typically around 75 to 85,000 average, and so we need to bring our legal costs way down. And our higher fire protection costs went up about $30,000. The originally anticipated use of the $203,078 in reserves, with the fiscal year 25-26 in your budget, as we talked about. The budget presented is a balanced budget. Budget assumes static service levels, so no increase, no decrease. Nominal revenue growth for certain categories of approximately 1.5 to 2.5%. We fully loaded our salary for all positions, but it does not include a CPI salary increase for any staff. Andy put in here that a 1% increase in salary adds about $6,000 to the general fund budget. And if we were to go up 3% to the CPI, it would be about $18,000. It does include $49,503 towards the Amador County Public Safety Contract, also covered by this lease fund. So that was money we reallocated or reidentified our public works superintendent, who 100% of his salary was coming from our general fund which he lives and breathes out at the wastewater plant so we moved a lot of some of his uh time around which allowed us to move that 49 000 over to this lease fund um and we need to reduce legal costs to base of about 85 000. can i have a question yes ma'am

The 25, 26, those are estimated. Are those estimated or actuals?

I believe they're actuals now. Okay.

That's what I thought. It just says estimated.

Some key items in our general fund revenues, we have 2.5% increase in property taxes, 5% increase in sales tax. We are one of the only jurisdictions in the state that are increasing our sales tax, which is cool. 10,000 increase in transient occupancy taxes due to current collection levels. The static levels of development-related fees, charges to the building, planning permits, a removal of a one-time revenue related to grants and donations, an $11,000 reimbursement from the Zinfandel Ridge CFD related to the administrative oversight, potential public work reimbursements. So any work that our public works does out there now, we're asking them to document their time out there so we can get reimbursed for them. So that number could be, as long as they're documenting their time out there, will be about 11,000 based on the time they've spent out there in the past. Some key items for the general fund expenditures, full funding for all positions in the general fund for the entirety of the year. We reclassified lead maintenance worker to the maintenance worker one. And so we were able to save a little bit of money there. We had a $247,000 decrease in administrative related to lower city manager salary, removal of a one-time payout in the previous year. And if we reduce in our budget, $175,000 in legal costs. 58,000 reduction in public works related to lower salary and benefit costs, lower equipment maintenance and repair, 9,000 reduction in building regulation planning related to lower anticipated staff and contractual costs. We're doing a lot of, we did a lot of streamlining this year and figuring out what we need, what we don't need, what the city can function with. And so that's helped lower our expenditures. Our anticipated reserves on June 30th, 2026 is 1,730, or excuse me, 1,730,771. Our balance, our budget for this year will be balanced. And so our anticipated ending reserves will be that. So as long as we stay on track, we should be okay. Okay. These are some of our funds with negative balances that we've been talking about. $481,000, almost $482,000 for the safer house of schools. We just did some digging, and when you look at the 2019 audit and 2020 audit, you'll see that the city put out a little over 1.1 million for the safer out of the schools and as and in those same models you'll see payments coming in from from the grant from reimbursements and so looking at that going through what caltrans or what the state actually reimbursed us the city overspent this money So the reason why we haven't been able to get it back is we overspent it and it wasn't in the, we can't figure out how to get it back. And so it's something that we're going to have to get rid of. The general plan fund update, the negative $269,000 and the San Antonio-Philiptown project is negative $87,000. So our total negative balance is $838,524. And the estimated general fund, if we take this money, which right now it is in our budget to zero out these accounts, would leave us with $892,247 in our reserves. For our proposed budget update general fund multiyear forecasts, purpose of the forecast development provides a forward-looking conservative baseline budgetary outlook for the city's general fund and related fund balance. Under a given set of revenue and expenditure growth assumptions using a base case approach, The forecast development process, a full update of the 2627 based staffing funded by cities general fund includes all recommended re classifications. It's an update. There's an updated fiscal information from updates to fiscal activity since fiscal year 2122. All positions assumed filled for entirety of each fiscal year. So there's no vacancy savings as of right now. and the forecast built conservatively for revenue expenditure growth. The city is showing that we are bringing in slowly revenue and we're always looking for more ways to bring in revenue and lower expenditures. As you can see right now, right there in the middle, the fiscal year 26-27, we're balanced. If you go all the way to the left, the 21-22, this is at the height of the Zinfandel Ridge building. And then as that development started tapering off, we found ourselves $313,000 in the hole, and it only got worse with last year's. And then now we're balanced again. And as long as we maintain our expenditures and our anticipated revenue, we'll slowly start to kind of level out to where we won't have these negative funds. The proposed budget update general fund multi-year forecast is a lot of these were done without the increase in or without the Prop 218. My information, we won't have those numbers on what it's done, but I'm sorry, let me back up. I apologize. Okay, gosh. Ricky, you understand this slide a little bit better than I do.

So we're looking at our general fund multi-year forecast. This is the general fund balance where we stand currently at the beginning of the 26, 27 proposed budget is 1.73 million. And this is just saying that if we stick to the budget, then we should be finalizing this year, um, I didn't make this either. So we're trying to discern Andy's stuff. But this is where the budget stands each fiscal year. So fiscal year 27-8 is a forecast of $1.697 million. And then we're staying nice and flat because we're controlling our expenditures and not bringing in too much additional revenue. But we're looking...

right here 1.73 for the proposed budget and then three years in the future it's just showing that we're not going to overspend if we stick to our budget we'll maintain 1.6 million in the bank thank you sir yeah all right our city-wide staffing levels uh staffing costs are 69 funded by the general fund um unfilled vacant positions result in vacancy savings but we don't have any um Right now, budget also includes amounts for contracted positions, which is finance, planning, which should be on here also as our wastewater plant operator. But that's still a salary savings since we don't have one on staff. Base amount of as needed and appropriate levels of administrative public works costs. Transfer to Zinfandel Ridge included the forecast of revenues around $11,000 if we get reimbursed and document that correctly. And amounts noted do not include salary increases for the fiscal year 26-27. We tried like heck to get the staff the much-needed increase, but it just wasn't there for us to budget. But as even noted here, 1% increase would add $6,000 to the general fund. The fiscal year 26-27 proposed budget update, Water Enterprise Fund. So you see the estimated actuals for the 25-26 revenues in our expenditures. The prelim budget will be for the 26-27. We are showing a deficit, and a lot of that is because of Water Fund use of working capital to balance preliminary budget of $139,000. The operating expenditures, including annual debt service payment of the $149,613 that we currently owe the county. and a repayment of, oh, sorry, the Royal Ditch Loan from the county, excuse me, and the need to review how penalties are posted to the general ledger. This goes back to our previous fund balance and our Blackwater Mountain. A lot of our penalties are assessed to the Water Enterprise Fund, and that was taken into account during the 2018 hearing and stuff, but because of their process, and I'm not a fan of this Black Mountain either, but It shows more negative in our water fund than it does our sewer fund. The water fund rate study was expected to be implemented, and it was. And it went into effect July 1st. Well, July 15th was when the new bill started. And the water fund has operated in a deficit position for the last four years. Our wastewater sewer plant, our wastewater plant.

Cameron, I have a question. I don't know if you guys can answer this, but the community benefit fund is a result of the money we get from ZR, right?

No, that's a... In the development? No, that was...

That'd be community facilities district, right?

No, that's the district, but I thought that the community benefit fund was created out of the development of ZR.

I think it was, and we do have a significant amount of money in there that we're looking at how and what we can use that for.

Right. So on this, it says that we can pay, that we could do a one-time transfer of $149,000 from the Community Benefit Fund to pay off the Amador County Arroyo Ditch Loan.

Correct.

While I would love to pay that loan off with that money, is that legal? Because that ditch loan was taken out, as far as I know, well before ZR came.

When we look through the records and the purpose of that fund, it was pretty broad on what we could use it for. And so we feel that we can.

Can you weigh in at all?

I've not been asked to look at it yet, so I don't have an opinion on that.

Just want to make a distinction that we do have the CFD, the community facilities. Yeah, I know. Two funds associated with that, 80 and 81. Right. So this is a separate fund. I know. Not the Zinfandel Ridge funds that were set up.

I know. But these funds, I understood, still were generated out of developer fees that came from ZR. Am I wrong in that?

Um, I'd have to ask Andy.

Yeah. We, we need our finance guy here for the accountant. That's retrospective, not prospective, but the CFD funds were not touching. That's.

Yeah, I know.

I get that. Yeah. All that good stuff. Um, this is a separate thing. Yeah. Is meant for community development, um, We did do a deep dive in the review of what we can use these funds for. Andy was involved in that, and it was determined based on documents that our city clerk provided to us and everything that we are able to use these funds to pay off the loan. It might be funded from developer impact fees, but it's not Zinfandel's SOA money. So does that make sense? When we build a new house, we collect an impact fee for the streets, and it goes into a streets fund, and then we can repave the road with that fund.

Yeah, I understand all of that. All I was asking was, can we use those retro? Meaning like those funds didn't exist at the time that loan was taken out. So then we're pulling from something that didn't exist at the time of the loan. So I'm just asking from a legal point of view, like, are we allowed to do that? I can confidently say yes, we can for that one.

Yes.

I agree.

Yeah.

All right, so our notes for the wastewater fund. Wastewater fund operating at a net positive of about $189,000. It's been helped with our wholesale septic sales. As we discussed, penalties and revenues included. Wastewater fund rate study expected to be implemented, which we have. The wastewater fund deficit spent in fiscal year 23-24, 24-25, it recovered to a slight surplus expected for the following two years due to addition of wholesale septic sales and reduction of AWA contract services. Our estimated fund balance next June will be $1.989 million. Our proposed budget update overview of other city funds, the transient occupancy tax and street promotions funds. We designated for 50% streets, 50% promotion expenditures, such as summer festivals, rodeo, Christmas market, everything we do here. And some capital projects, such as the McGee Park residual costs. Um, typically funded by 40% of all top revenue collections transfer from the general fund. So we've been covering a lot of that stuff with our general fund and has not been funded for the last 3 completed fiscal years and no transfer budget for 2425. The transfer would amount to approximately 80,000 dollars each year, resulting in steeper forecasted general fund deficits. If we continue down that road. The 26-27 budget is likely to include typical recurring funding towards noted events, $40,000 to $60,000. And we've been pretty prudent about what we're providing for top requests.

Cam, today when I was talking to Andy, the designated 50% for streets and 50% for promotions, that's just a given number. Correct. We're not siloed into anything. We can do all 100% streets if we wanted to. Okay. Just so everybody knows.

Thank you, ma'am. So the Community Benefit Contribution Fund, it's funds collected pursuant to development agreement in place with Zinfandel Ridge and it requires payment of fees into the fund for new development lots for homes. Funds can be used for providing loans to advance planning or construction projects, providing loans for reimbursing costs advanced for past projects, i.e. reimbursing the water fund debt service on the Plymouth Pipeline project, constructing enhancement projects and purchasing capital equipment to improve service to city residents. Determine potential of including in the fiscal year 26-27 budget the repayment of the Royal Ditch. So that's what we're asking as well with this budget to pay that off. We're asking only for the $150,000 right now. I've been in contact with the county and kept them up to date on why our budget hasn't been passed yet. Just before we go and ask for any forgiveness on the interest that's accrued, which is about $26,000-$27,000 right now. Symphony Ridge Community Facility District Funds, the Facility Maintenance Fund, Fund 80, is used for ongoing maintenance and operation of public roads and streets, bike lanes, parking bays, bridges, culverts, traffic signs, landscaping, striping, and legends, street lights, frontage improvements, drainage facilities, public trails, boundary fencing, and neighborhood parks and open space. We're likely to begin the 26-27 with $285,520 in the fund balance. And assessments for the 26, 27 expected to generate at least 132,000 for this. Fiscal year 26-27, and that was filed with the county, I believe, last week. Fiscal year 26-27 expenditure plan will recommend with the budget landscaping maintenance for the continued contract, recurring maintenance and operating costs, and administrative costs as required, and that also included the public works. Fund 81 was used for law enforcement and fire services. They're likely to begin with a $236,535 in that fund. The assessments will generate at least $69,288, and that coincided with the plan we just provided the county. This year, 26-27 expenditure plan will be recommended with budget, portion of Amador County public safety contract for the sheriff's contract, portion of it will go to the fire district costs, and a portion of this year's public safety costs. The district started paying for costs just last year in 25-26, so they're now contributing. Okay. Some of our impact fees for general administrative, streets impacts, fire impact, public impact, and AB 1600 impact fees. You can see the estimated fund balances for those. And so we're looking at right now what we can use for those to benefit the city. Okay. But the impact fees may only be used for specific purposes. In the AB 1600 study, fund balances and certain funds, significant, currently no planned budget, but general administration fee, impact fee is $519,000. Streets impact fee, almost $540,000. Fire impact fee, $286,000. And police impact fees, right at $30,000, a little over. So the next steps will be consider adopting this proposed budget, receive feedback and direction from the council, and continue to reconcile and update fiscal activity. I will say that the finances were quite a mess when we got in here, and Ricky has done a great job identifying and correcting these. And as our audits get done, we'll get a little bit more pinpoint on where we're at. But thank you. So I'm not quite Andy, but thank you for your patience.

So one quick follow-up on the, Jesus, that is loud, on the community benefit fund. Yes, who we're dealing with? I just looked it up while Cameron was finishing up his report, and it did get created through the Zinfandel Ridge Development Agreement, and it is separate from the CFD monies. And it was a fund specifically designed to reimburse the city for certain categories of things laid out in the development agreement. And the one that's relevant here is providing loans for reimbursement costs advanced for past projects.

Okay.

So it essentially was designed to help and allow the project to buy into those past improvements that might've already been made. Okay. Thank you.

Okay. So at this time we'll go to public comment.

I got several things. Um, But I am concerned about the salary allocation that's in there. It's still showing that 50% of the city managers is going towards the water and wastewater fund. And that just is so unrealistic. He shouldn't be, 50% of his time shouldn't be spent on that. We have other staff. And if you look, we've got equivalent, They were talking of 1.95 people to the wastewater. And I was told after the budget workshop, because there was a vacant in the wastewater operator position. And I asked about that. And the city manager told me at that time that they felt that they didn't need a full-time person out at the sewer plant. So we've got 1.95% of people, so almost two people worth of salaries allocated to wastewater, plus we have $5,000 a month for this contractor. That seems like a hefty amount that the citizens of Plymouth are having to pay, reflecting on their rates for this. I don't think it's right. And if the city manager is doing that much, then he obviously is not doing his job because he has other staff that should be taking care of the water and the sewer. Then I want to head to the salary schedule, the monthly health and CFF plan, the headings on that. I had talked to Ricky, but I really think that those need to be So people understand what they are because it's showing 457, a health, which we understand health, and then a residual pay. There's no explanation what the 457 is or the residual pay and how those are calculated. That's not in the budget. So that is something that needs to be looked at. And then on the capital project funds, I really think that for each of those grants that the city needs to provide all the invoices, all the reimbursements, research it out, give a good basically revenue expense report for each one of those before they write them off. Because I think they're just trying to write them off and not not worry what has happened with it. And the thing is, is some of that money may have been misappropriated and used elsewhere. So if that's the case, then there are certain journal entries need to be done to reflect it correctly. But one, Stephanie said that from Caltrans, it showed that they paid all of theirs, yet the city's saying they owed it. So that's a big discrepancy. And I really think it should be done And the last thing is the $85,000 in legal fees. Is that really realistic based on what you guys have had in the last five years?

Anyone else? Stephanie.

So how do you want me to do this? Ask a question, get an answer, or just go through everything or?

Well, that was basically for presentations. You could ask the person presenting. Okay. This is just basically you tell us.

Could you all grab this? I sent it to you, and I think it's on. The item 7.1? Yes.

So are you going to go over that? Yes. I thought we're not supposed to do verbal public comment on something that's written in public comment.

Well, that would be illegal if you're going to do that. That's just what we've always done. That's the old counsel's policy that they did to keep me from talking after I submitted comments. It's not legal. And you can ask counsel about that, your attorney. You can't prevent someone from speaking at a meeting just because they submitted.

If she wants to spend her three minutes talking about what she's submitted in writing.

Okay. I did. I was just asking. I'm just amazed that it's building up right now. I'm just asking. I'm not mad at you, Wendy. It means somebody said that to you. So one of your staff members told you that, and that's what I'm upset about.

The past council said that, that I sat up here with. Okay.

Well, you can't keep us from doing that. So I thought we were past this with this council. I thought you guys wanted to hear from us.

I was just asking the question, Stephanie. I know you were asking if you could tell me not to talk. That's what you're asking. No, it's not. What we do for one, we have to do for everybody. So I was just inquiring.

Okay, so tell me who else have you told they can't talk?

I didn't tell you you couldn't talk. I was asking a question.

I think she meant that. Let's start your three minutes. You can talk. Okay.

I want to, there's a lot of issues with the budget, and I'm hoping you decide to continue it until Andy can answer some legitimate questions, okay? You're not in a hurry now, obviously, because you're past the June 30th, you adopted preliminary. I think it's important, given the financial situation that we're in, that you absolutely know what you're proving. This payment history does not match what Cameron said into the record tonight. Yes, the city did overspend on the Caltrans. You can see in here, they spent 1.167403.57. And they got reimbursed 918,981.33. So they used an additional 248,422.24. But 140 of that was matched that they were supposed to spend. So that only leaves a difference of 108,000. And they're claiming they're going to write off 500,000. So that doesn't match. And the reason there were cost overruns that they probably couldn't charge Caltrans is because the engineering plants that were drawn and provided by the city engineering firm that did this were wrong. And as soon as the contractors started work, they realized the grade was wrong on the engineering plans, and they had to pause and go redraw them. And that cost extra money. I think it was around $30,000 or something. And then after they poured all the sidewalks in front of the fair, they realized that the plans were wrong again, and they hadn't left driveways in for all the fair people to get out of the fairgrounds where the school district is. So they had to jackhammer all that out. So there were costs that were over and above that they couldn't charge the state. So writing off $500,000 because you don't want to bother and go look at where the money went, I think is unconscionable. The second thing is you borrowed $150,000 or so from the county for the Arroyo Ditch match. You got $1 million. You had to pay $150,000 match, right? you didn't do the grant, so the match money is still sitting there. It's still in your accounts. You can pay it back out of the water fund because the money you borrowed is still in your water fund. When you're trying to hit the community benefit fund and saying that you legitimately can use that for a project, you didn't have a project. You borrowed money for a purpose that you didn't spend it for. It would be illegal for you to hit that community benefit fund and transfer that money out to pay back money that you already have sitting in an account. And then the third thing is that you could not answer me, Cameron usually says we'll get back to you or we're working on it or whatever he says, but he did not answer my question if the 150,000 that you borrowed was put into the Prop 218 rate. So if you have $150,000 sitting in your account, you want to keep it there to spend for other things, you're charging the ratepayers that $150,000 to pay back the county, and you're hitting the community benefit fund, you're doing some double dipping big time. And if you want to create an audit finding, that's the way to do it. So I'm asking that you continue this until staff can provide those questions. I also would like you to have them put in writing how much the deferred comp rate is for every employee, how much the health benefit cost is for every employee, how much their cap is that the city pays, and how much the in lieu of payment is for health benefits. Because I've asked the city for that information. They said there's nothing in writing. So obviously they have something because they're putting it in the budget, but they're not telling us what it is. Thank you. And Wendy? Sorry, I got upset, but you just triggered me with some stuff that happened before. So I apologize. Thank you.

I have one question really quick. You said that we received a million dollars for the Royal Edition. That was a match money. Do you know, none of us were on the council up here in 2019 or 2018, I think is when this happened. Do you know for a fact that that million dollars came into the city?

I don't know for a fact because I haven't looked at the books, but what I was told is that the city had gotten the loan from FEMA. They had received an advance. In my mind, it was like $300,000. I'm not even sure. It sat there. Rex came on board. He was told it was priority to get that project done. It didn't happen. Margaret came on board. She was told it was a priority to get that project done. It didn't happen. And the money had to be... either returned if there was an advance or the project suspended if it was just a grant. At any rate, the match wasn't needed. The money sat in your water fund all this time. If you look at your water fund, you'll see that it's in there. I think it even says it has a special category for that money.

Does the audits from 2019 or 2020 show that, Ricky? Do you know or have you looked at those audits? Yeah. Okay, I'm just curious. Anyways, I just had that question. I didn't want to forget to ask it. So thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, I'm sure they could go back and look at the records on the FEMA stuff. And there's lots of records. It was talked about frequently at the city council meetings.

Anyone else for public comment? Hearing and seeing no one. I guess we'll move to council member discussion and close public comment at this time. Move to council member discussion.

I'd like to start that. So on that 150K, so that was part of why I was asking that earlier is because I wonder where that 150K went. If it was pegged for a certain project, why wouldn't we still have that money to pay back if we didn't do the project? So I'm, you know, I agree with Stephanie, and I don't understand the accounting of that. Like, there has to be some clarity on what happened with that.

Yes. Do you have any idea? We tried to find out where that money went and what it was used for, and we can't. I don't know what else to say. It's just this was done years ago, and...

I don't know that... I don't know that anybody can confirm or deny this. And I don't even know that we should, but I do know that there was kind of two, I think it was RJ that brought it up earlier, this missing $50,000, or maybe it was Stephanie. I know that there was somebody who sat in Ricky's seat, essentially that had questionable, what they were doing was questionable with money. So yeah, I mean, is there any way for us to forensically find out what happened to that money and where it went? Would that come out in the audit process? Do you know, Ricky?

So, I don't believe this would come out in the current audit process with 21-22.

No, because it's older.

Yes, it is older. And the auditors are taking the 2021 audit statements as truth as far as they can trust them.

Does anyone know who did our audits in 2019, 2020?

I believe it would be the Marcello and Company auditors. They're out of business now. They're out of business. Of course they are. I actually just recently found out they were acquired by the Poon Group. That's currently doing... We really still have the same auditors. So wouldn't they have those records? um it's tough to say i can ask them for sure you're asking about forensically trying to figure it out i can definitely spend time trying to do that however our 2019 2018 records are all paper and they're all in a storage that is not very organized. Is that the storage that got... No, ma'am. Okay. No, we still have them. I haven't gone and looked at them myself, but they should still be in that storage container. The issue is time and hands to do that. But this is very important, and we should... Yeah, I mean, that's...

If we're talking even just about those two things, that's $200,000 that we just don't know what happened to it or... So I hesitate to pull money from a fund to pay the county. I mean, can we reimburse ourselves if we figure out where it came from? Can we then, yeah, legally, could we then go, oh, hey, we figured this out and it turns out that money is still sitting in the water fund. So now can we transfer that money back to the community benefit fund to refund that?

Fund transfer? Yeah.

Show us in the budget. In this budget. So why can't we use that to pay it back if it's the money still sitting there? You're saying that that's not what that money is. No, I know that, but I'm being told by city staff that that's not what that fund is.

$174,000.

And cash. This is some of the sins of our fathers type stuff that we're dealing with here with very messy financial records.

So is there a way for us to exclude certain things and pass a budget or do we need to move this on down the road? Because I don't want to spend the next two hours going over finite details of stuff if it looks like we're not going to pass this tonight.

I think this is sort of an all or nothing proposition. I don't think we can hold certain pieces of it back. Because that puts into question where those things stand in the end.

So I want to pay the county back. Like, I don't want that hanging over our heads, but I don't want to use funds that should not be used for that. That's where I stand.

I had almost, I was going to ask almost the same question. I'm just curious if, because I have several questions on this budget. That's why I kind of wanted Andy to, you know, to talk about it when he's here. But is it legal or can we justify? What I was going to ask is just go ahead and pay the county out of the general fund, do our budget, figure out where to pay ourselves back from. It's kind of basically the same thing Wendy's saying. Can we just go and vote to make, or would that have to have been agendized? Can we vote to say we're going to pay the county back right now, no matter what, out of the general fund?

One, I think that would have had to be on the agenda as an action. And two, whether we can do that, I think that's more of an Andy question. I would agree. I would agree.

Is there any, sorry.

I was just going to say, worst case scenario is that we're looking at what, maybe two more weeks to straighten all this out. And we tell the county we're sorry, we'll pay you two more weeks interest or what? I don't know.

Say what you have to say about it. I mean, this is your decision, sir. The county's been pretty forgiving for us pushing it out. I can always ask.

They can't get blood from a turnip. They've been waiting this long.

I'm sorry.

It's not that we're trying to not pay it. We're trying to do our due diligence to make sure we don't end up in some sort of legal situation where we've expended money that we shouldn't be spending. So I think that they, I don't think that they would hold that against us. Um,

Do we know when we can get Andy here or on Zoom?

I don't. His opinion was this is as good as the budget is going to get.

Well, that answer sucks.

I know. It does.

So, I mean, when you've got specific questions and you're paying somebody what we're paying Andy, and I like Andy, but this is obviously like you can see there's a specific line item in the budget to pay that money out of and we're trying to pull from a community benefit fund. we could use money from that community benefit fund for something else that Plymouth desperately needs. So, I mean, the laundry list of things we need is a mile long. So I just, I don't know.

We could also, we don't necessarily have to push up two weeks depending on how you guys feel about it. I mean, if Andy's available one night before that, we can maybe deal with this Monday or Tuesday night or whenever, you know, whichever day we could deal with it. But I don't know. Um, I'm not supposed to, but if you do it really fast, it might help us.

Ms. Marino, will you please go to the mic? Thank you.

If you look at that page, you'll see the 174 in the Arroyo, but you'll see that they have a deficit in the other account. So they don't want to pay the money out of there because it's going to increase the deficit. They're using it for cash flow, which is specifically prohibited by the county agreement. Can't be used for anything other than the match. But what you could do, potentially subject to city attorney saying that it's okay, is you could make a loan from the community benefit fund to the water fund to offset the money you're taking out the Arroyo so you don't have any more of a deficit in there. and then make arrangements to pay back the community benefit fund when you figure out where all the rest of the money is.

It's just a suggestion. Thank you. Thank you. Deborah, you have any, or Wendy?

Yeah, I'm... On this $150,000, is it in here that we have to pay it? Is it just part of, are we coming up with this idea that we have to pay the $150,000? No, we owe it.

I mean, obviously we have to pay it off, but do we have to pay it off

This month, next month. I mean, is this something that's just in our budget? We could have time. So when I wanted to push it out another six months, we could, because it's in the budget.

They sent us our third and final invoice back in September. I went in front of the board of supervisors in October and asked for forgiveness more time. I told them in the agreement, I don't want to say it was agreement. It was, uh, if you guys can make a substantial payment by the end of the fiscal year, we will consider extending the loan. We haven't done that. They were also going to say, they also said if we could pay off the loan, they'll also look at reducing our interest or wiping them, you know, clean as it is. And so I haven't gone in front of the board of supervisors yet. They were trying to put it on this week's meeting, but we are obviously our meeting wasn't until tonight. So I asked them to postpone it till their next board of supervisors meeting for me to present.

Have we been making payments on this at all?

None, ma'am. Never have. I believe we borrowed the money. The city never responded to the county when they were seeking payment.

I believe we borrowed this money back in like 2018, and none of the council members ever knew anything about this, to my knowledge, until, to his credit, Cameron found out that we owed this money to him when he came on. And so we've been trying to deal with it just since he came on, like in September, I think.

OK. On the other funds that we show these negative balances in, obviously we overspent on some items that we had to pay for way back when. What is the statute of limitations on these? I just, I don't feel like showing these negative balances is fiscally responsible of the city. I just, I don't, it's a lot of money. I don't agree with it. And I, again, I don't agree with just throwing it out, you know, just let's just fix it. But this, we need to take care of these. And if we have to pull them out of the general fund, That looks like where it's going to have to go. But we can't keep carrying these forward. It's like having bad AR on your receivables. If you're never going to get paid, you can't show that. You're not going to ever collect on this. It's something that needs to be handled. I mean, how long has this been going on? 15 years, 10 years? That's way past the bad debt limitation.

It's been approved by councils, you know, showing a lot of these negative balances. And so we're just trying to correct past mistakes.

I agree with Wendy that they, you know, in the presentation, it showed if we zero those out and clean those up, then it leaves us 800 and something thousand in the general fund, which is a true and accurate number, correct?

Yeah.

Correct.

Correct.

than where we're at because right now it's this is my very layman non-finance person terms it's like fake money is sitting there it's not real so we don't have two million dollars in general in reserves and we started talking about that last summer right before cameron came on right that so we found out we really don't have any of this money no and at that time i remember

We'd all had a private meeting with Andy and Margaret, and I talked to them about, well, if we don't really have it, exactly what you're saying, it needs to come off the books. And we left it on because we thought, well, maybe it's recoverable. We were going to sit there. We didn't want to, as Ms. Marino had brought up, just write it off. But it's a year later, and we haven't figured this out. And it's basically...

Well, my understanding is those amounts have sat there for years.

And if we recover money, we can reverse that back out. I mean, it's just like a typical bad debt. Yeah. Yeah.

So can I bring it all back, if I may, and ask the question to the council members that where are we at with this? What do you propose we do tonight? Just not to be a stalemate here, but forward progress. What does that look like for you guys?

I have significant questions about some stuff. There are certain things that I've wondered about, asked about, that I feel... I want an answer to you before I would vote. Like one of the questions I have, and maybe Andreas can answer this, I've talked with Cameron a little bit about it in the past, but I'm not exactly sure how the whole ZRCFD thing worked, but I remember when it came in place, we all know it's portion of it is for fire and police or emergency services, it's called. For some reason, the way we do it here with Amador Fire is we pay them a parcel fee that's equivalent to what people in the county pay. And that's gone up. It was reassessed. And so it's like $70. Well, we don't charge that to the residents. We're apparently paying it for the residents out of their property tax. Whereas in the county, it's an actual separate charge, I believe, on your property tax bill. So I believe that when Zinfandel Ridge was set up, part of that reason for a fire and police thing was that it would pay for those impacts and it wouldn't, so it wouldn't be an impact to the city. So if you have a hundred houses out there, is the city paying that? Or is it coming out of their fire and police emergency services fund? Because it seems like on those houses, that money should be taken out of that fund, but I don't know if that's accurate or not or right. And that's how come I said in the past that I wanted to have a meeting on what we're allocating to what out of that. And it's, we still haven't got there.

So your question, make sure I'm understanding correctly, is CFD money being routed to pay for fire protection?

Is it not being when it should be? Is this what I'm asking? Is part of that agreement, that CFD that was set up, was that emergency services fund supposed to be for, say, the 100 houses out there? Should that $70 a year be coming out of that fund instead of the city paying it out of their property taxes? Like they do on the other residences that were already here that was already in place.

When you say their property taxes, you mean this, the Zinfandel Ridge.

Properties, everyone's property taxes, but I believe that before they came, it was already in place that the city was just paying them to fire and back that at that time was only like 30. As I recall back in 07, 08, it was around $38 a year. Now it's gone up to 69 or 70. And our agreement is that we pay the equivalent. Okay. So what I'm saying is I believe that that whole thing behind having a CFD and collecting those funds was to offset the impacts to the city. Correct. So the residents have already paid that money. We know this it's sitting in a bank account. They paid the money for that. And, uh, I had a conversation with Andy when the Sheriff's Office contract was coming up and he was like, oh, well, we have this money to pay it with. And I was like, no, we can't. We have to we could spend like so say we could take out and I could be wrong. That's what I'm asking you is we can only take out, say, $70 a year, the equivalent of what it is for everybody else out of their fund. So say everybody in town, we're paying $70 a year for a fire impact fee. We're using their property tax money. And Zinfandel Ridge came along later, and we put this impact fee in place. Have we taken the money out and paid those impact fees, or are we paying it out of their property taxes like we are with everyone else?

So the have we actually taken it out piece, again, that's an Andy question. I don't know. Yeah. Should we have? I believe so.

I think that's what the CFD was partially set up for. That's what I thought. And I don't believe it's been happening. And I've been asking about this for about a year now, and I haven't really got the question answered. I think I probably won't until we actually have a meeting to decide how we're splitting up. those funds because i had the the conversation with andy last summer not this last december but summer before about you know when the sheriff's office contract thing was coming up it's like we can't just go and use whatever we want out of those funds to pay it we have to sit down and plan for it and it has to be equivalent of what i think it would be from the other houses in the city can

Can I say something? I think, I don't know about Debbie, but we've heard from four people up here out of five that have questions for Andy and Andy's not here. So can we just table it at the first possible time that we can meet with Andy? I don't care if it's on zoom or not, but like we.

Yeah. Is there any reason he can't zoom in for something versus having to fly out here?

I could definitely check with him.

Legally? Andreas, is there any reason?

No, he could participate by Zoom. That'd be fine.

Okay. I would prefer not to spend the money on a special meeting, but that's just me.

We could put it out to the 27th and see if Andy's available on the 27th. If not, we'd have to call a special meeting. I'm going to tell you, I have so many questions that I would like to table it. If we take it to a vote, I'm going to be no, just because I have too many questions. So.

I don't have any additional questions, but I agree with. What you guys have been saying, and the questions for Andy.

mayor do you want yeah all right so move to table this until the meeting of the 27th or possibly special meeting if it's necessary before okay so we're going to move on to item 7.2 review bids discuss and possible take action to approve the purchase and installation of an inline static mixer online chlorine analyzer and automated chlorine dosing controls for the city's wastewater treatment plant Do we have a city manager report on that please?

Thank you Mr. Mayor. The staff reports the same as last time. There is a correction. IFAP fingered the Telstar instruments on my staff report. So instead of the $54,937, it's $54,397. But other than that, there are three bids for your review. And we recommend that we review those, choose one, and direct staff.

Okay, thank you. Give me just a second here. Get my mess in order. Okay, it's time to open for public comment. Anyone? Stephanie?

I did submit written comments on that. But my question, I'm grateful that you asked for bids. But when you compare bids, you compare apples and apples. And there's no indication in these bids if there's any licensing costs involved. A lot of software systems have annual fees. They have required maintenance inspections, calibration stuff, all that stuff. And so that's not in the staff report. So I'm just hoping you'll ask the city manager what those costs might be and if they've been budgeted in the budget that he has. Thank you.

There are no licensing fees, ongoing license fees that we have to worry about. There was also discussion in there regarding what it would cost per hour for them to come out and fix it. We don't have to use Telstar to work on the project if it needs servicing. That was just for our review, so it wasn't part of their proposed bid. But there are no ongoing licensing fees at this time.

Thank you. Anyone else for public comment?

Rosemary?

Rosemary Marino, Moody Plymouth. So there's no licensing fees, but is there a maintenance fee, an annual fee to have this software? And to maintain it for upgrades, anything like that? Because when I talked to the super, I mean, the contractor at the last meeting, he said, no, there's no cost after that. But I find that hard to believe with a software system because it's going to need upgrades. It's going to need all of that. Is there going to be ongoing charges to have this system? Yeah.

At this time, there is not. In a couple years, if there's new software and stuff, we'll have to address it then, but as of right now, there's no anticipated further costs.

Anyone else for public comment? Hearing and seeing no one, we'll close public comment at this time and move to council discussion. Wendy, anything?

Not a thing. Let's do it.

Debra, do you have anything you'd like to say?

One thing that when I was looking at the quotes, I agree with Stephanie's comments about comparing apples to apples. And not one of the quotes says specifically like make and model. One of them calls it a chlorine analyzer. And two of them call it something else, an inline mixer. So they're not broken down by how much is parts, how much is labor. So I just want to make sure that there's such a variance in the three quotes that just making sure that they're all the same product.

Well, Telstar is the maker of said product. Is that correct?

No, they're the installer. They don't manufacture the equipment. They're the ones doing the installation.

And is it Telstar that we've used before?

We use Telstar for a lot of our plant operations.

Okay. And Telstar is the only one where I see an itemized invoice, correct?

Yeah.

Anything else, Tamara?

No, that's it.

Wendy?

No comments for me.

Ogre? No, but the two are going to make a motion. Yeah, I'm just kidding.

Yeah, I thought you said you wanted to make a question. Yeah.

I'll make a motion to approve the purchase and installation of an inline static mixer. online chlorine analyzer and automated chlorine dosing controls for the city water waste treatment pipe.

Do we have to call out who we're awarding it to? Which of the bids?

Telstar.

Second.

Council Member Bottomley? Aye. Council Member Cranford? Aye. Council Member Dell? No. Vice Mayor Hornish?

Aye.

Mayor Nunn?

No.

Thank you. Motion passes.

Okay, moving on. Item 7.3. Review, discussion, and possible action to approve amendment to a professional services agreement for wastewater treatment plant operation services with AMS Heating Incorporated. City Manager report.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Since April 29th, 2026, Justin Granados is a grade four wastewater treatment plant operator with advanced mechanical system has been responsible for operations at the city of Plymouth wastewater treatment plant. Mr. Granados has assumed these responsibilities following the vacancy created by the departure of the city's previous plant operator. He's an experienced operator who oversees multiple wastewater treatment plants in the area, including the city of Ione's facility. Since assuming responsibility for the plant, this has advanced the process of certifying the city public works, superintendent as a wastewater treatment plan operator. He's also identified and corrected a history of inaccurate regulatory reporting, implemented minor operational adjustments that reduce costs, address a backlog of preventive maintenance and coordinated vegetation clearing at the facility. Mr. Granados has provided the license oversight and operational continuity necessary for the city to maintain safe, reliable, and compliant wastewater treatment plant operations. A one-year agreement with AMS will allow him to continue serving as the city's chief wastewater treatment plant operator while supporting development of qualified in-house staff. The fiscal impact of the proposed agreement is $5,000 per month for a one-year term for a total not to exceed the $80,000. And contracting for these services provides cost savings due to the City by avoiding the overtime and employee benefit costs that would be associated with filling the chief operator role with the City employee. Our recommendation is that the City Council review and discuss the proposed agreement and authorize the City Manager to execute a one-year provisional services agreement. with advanced mechanical systems for Justin Granados to continue serving as the chief wastewater treatment plan operator for the city's wastewater treatment plan at a cost of $5,000 per month in an amount not to exceed $80,000 in a form substantially similar to the draft agreement attached here too. Thank you.

Thank you, Ian. At this time, we'll open for public comment.

Rosemary Marino-Moody-Plymouth. My question is, it says not to exceed 80,000. However, five times 12 is 60,000. Why is there a $20,000 discrepancy there?

So I can address that. It's an amendment to the existing contract that Cameron has already entered into. So for the past four months, it's been $20,000. An additional year from here forward would be the 60 additional for a grant total on that contract of 80,000. Oh, okay.

I also submitted written comments. I keep hearing the city manager say in council meetings and privately that he has contracting authority up to 20,000. But there's conditions on that in the Plymouth Municipal Code. and it has to be a budgeted amount, something that's budgeted in a budget. He can't just create a contract for something that's not in the budget, which this was not in the budget. And he can't split a contract into different pieces in order to get under the 20,000, which he also did. He approved a contract for four months, then approved an amendment. I don't know what the First Amendment is, because it's not even in your packet. And now he's coming back and asking for approval of the Second Amendment, but he's including all of that in there apparently to compensate for doing it in the first place. So I'm asking you in your motion tonight, because this is a good, this is a good thing for the city. I think I just, the process wasn't followed that you ratify the original agreement and amendment after you see what the amendment is along with the second amendment that you ratify the budget transfer that he essentially did by using the money from the personnel costs to offset an independent contractor, that you include that in your motion so you clean up the record. And then I'm also asking that you hold his feet to the fire and following the code in future approvals of contracts. In all fairness, this hasn't been exclusive to the city manager. This has been an ongoing problem for the city. But with the financial considerations that you have, I think that you really need to know what's happening on contracts and budgets. Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, if I may, my approval is for 25,000, the municipal code, which we want to thank Ms. Moreno for pointing out is out of date. And so it's not consistent with the procurement policy that we did pass back in March. So we do need to clean that up or bring that back to the council for cleanup.

Yep. And I'll say to be totally transparent city manager, it talked to me about it. And at the time we were in a bit of a situation and we needed to get somebody in there. We need to have wastewater treatment plan where we were planning to bring this forward faster than it happened. And honestly, I told him. Yeah, go ahead and do it. We have to have somebody running the treatment plant and we'll get it from the council. And it just took too long. So. be transparent. That's kind of how that played out. He didn't totally just do that on his own. So anyone else for public comment? All right. Hearing and seeing no one, close public comment, and we will go to council discussion. Woody?

Nothing for me.

I don't have anything on this one. Yeah, Winnie?

No, but I was caught on the same calculation, Rosemary. I was like, 12 times 5 is 60,000. No, I think it's great that he's going to be taking care of this for us. Go. Mark?

I only have one other question that hasn't been addressed. When I looked at this, I thought, this is one of the shortest contracts I've ever seen. There's nothing written in here about what if something does happen, he has to spend extra time, say a whole week extra, one month or something like that. He's just going to eat that cost? Because we don't have anything built into this if it goes over a certain amount of hours or anything like that.

Yeah, the contract's capped at $5,000 a month.

Okay.

I just wanted to make sure there wasn't some way he came back to this or anything more.

No, our staff handles the heavy lifting over there. He's out here a couple days a week directing them and making sure everything's done correctly, and it's his license that we're using. But our public works superintendent and their staff are out there doing all the clearing and maintenance of the everyday plant.

All right. That's all I have. So if we get a motion, if anybody doesn't have anything else. We have a motion.

A motion to approve amendment to a professional services agreement for wastewater treatment plant operation services with AMS Heating Inc.

I'll second. Council Member Bottomley. Aye. Council Member Cranford. Aye. Council Member Dell. Aye. Vice Mayor Hornish.

Aye.

Mayor Nunn.

Aye.

Thank you. Motion passes.

All right. So this time we're going to go to city manager's report.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As you can hear, we did get some speakers and clean up our audio in here. We also added the speakers back there for the next time we have a fuller room. I do have stats from the sheriff's office. There's a total of 157 incidents. They made 20 different car stops. Corners case was one. Disturbing the peace calls were five. They responded to multiple alarms throughout the city and violation of domestic violence restraining orders. They made two misdemeanor warrant arrests, a public intoxication arrest for 64647FPC, and another arrest for methamphetamine and possession of paraphernalia. They're also filing charges separately for 67PC, which is bribery, and commission of a felony while on OR, which is Jimmy Christmas. Why is it blinking on me? Thank you. And they also made an arrest for a felony bench warrant. Good gosh, I only did that for so many years.

Just to clarify, that 157 is all in Plymouth? Yes. What was it this time last year? Do you have any idea? Could you find out? I do not. I didn't look into that. But it was way less.

We did fill the maintenance one worker position. We had some great candidates that came in. I mean, I was actually really impressed with the level of candidates we got. We chose a gentleman named Ken Jeffrey, who is a Plymouth resident, our worker, great family. And he has just been a great asset in the last week or so to to the city. we supported and worked through the county fair. That went off without a hitch, without too much impact to the city. And also the Plymouth Farmers Market, as you saw in our second week, we had some road closure issues that we addressed, and it looked like that they corrected those tonight. But I can't wait to hear how their night tonight went and how that's improved. I do have an update on the wastewater treatment plant dike survey that Council Member Cranford asked about. We had a geotech engineer out to look at the dikes. He took multiple photos, walked around. The dikes look on service to be the way they should. There's no seepage, there's no leakage, there's no vegetation that's growing where it shouldn't grow. um however we we searched high and low for plans that uh would show the compaction rate of of the ground um all the other plans around that time uh were 95 and the geo the engineer thought that This should also be 95%, but they're not documented on the plans from 58 years ago. Additionally, 58 years was a little out of his comfort level to write a memo on it. So we are proceeding with doing some testing and drilling. Right now, we've excluded WGA just because they put a fee on it as well, where they were comfortable with us dealing directly with the geotech engineer, so it'll save us a little bit of money. The bid right now is around $20,000 to $23,000, but that's on the high end. And right now, he's looking for somebody that can come out and drill. And do that if we had it done within for 4 weeks, which I asked him to do, then that. Constitute an expedited survey, which ups the cost. So I told him, we'll get as close to the 4 weeks as we can to save a little bit of money, but they will be coming out drilling and actually doing a study on it, which I should have for you shortly. Hopefully in the near future.

I appreciate you following up on that. Thank you.

Yeah, 100%. And he also wanted us to point out that they're dikes and not levees. I don't know. He's really hung up on that. So I will oblige. But he said they do look good on the service. It's just his risk assessment wouldn't allow him to sign off on them at this point. So we decided to go for it. It was more beneficial to the city. We looked at the risk and reward. And The septic loads have been beneficial, so our option was not to do the study, and we stopped all septic loads. Or we do this study, we use some of the septic money that we've used, and we take the risk of it coming back and saying that it's not feasible. I talked to the engineer about it without him committing, and he said that it's definitely worth looking into because even if there is compaction issues, they're fairly easy to rectify. So we decided to go forward with it. So we'll have that update for you. I was going to recognize Mike Spinetta and the gals that helped him paint, but he took care of that. The fire hydrant at near Deadfly, which has been out of service when a car did a little hit and run about a year ago, we are looking into replacing that, and we got a bid. Around 8,000, we're kind of looking to see if we can get any help from AWA, which doesn't look like we're going to see if we can get any help from AFPD before we go forward with that. But we are looking into correcting that and fixing that. Our Purple Heart event on August 7th was phenomenal. It was awesome. Thank you to Council Member Dill and Council Member Bottomley for coming. The staff really did a great job in putting that on, and the veterans that did show up were ecstatic. I received multiple Facebook messages from it going like, how do we get on the list? How do we know about this next year? So it was a great way to honor our veterans. So I want to thank everybody that participated. We do have some public records requests that came through. Um, we had purchasing records requested from 725, 2019 to current building permits issued from January 1st, 2020 through the date that the request came in, which was beginning of July building permits issued from 6, 126 to 6, 3026. A request for electronic copies of the most recent recent purchase agreements or lease agreements for any mail equipment. a list of parcel IDs or addresses for legally-ran short-term rentals. We have approved or denied building permit applications and decision records from the past year where the project required reference or included air quality permits, air quality review, emissions, control requirements, air district approval, or similar air pollution permitting conditions for each responsive project, building permit application approval, denial, and laundry list of things. We had one for the complete purchasing card, procurement card, and employee credit card transaction register from the city of Plymouth from January 1st, 2025 through December 31st of 2025. One for building permits issued from 7-1-2026 to 7-31-2026. Outstanding uncashed, stale, dated, voided, canceled, or otherwise unclaimed payments. And then one from the FPPC Form 700s and information regarding former city planner from 2010 to 2013, Jeff Beiswinger. And so those have all been addressed. And also our pool season came to a close on Sunday. it was a school started and got open on the, is it still open on the weekends? It's not. No, no. Last Sunday was our last day. Um, a lot of our staff were leave for college and in school. Um, It was a phenomenal season. I don't think we had really any complaints. We had to shut down for a couple hours one day because we had some issues with our chlorine distribution. Staff jumped on it, fixed it. We were able to open it for the last few hours of the day. We've already gotten responses. from the the lifeguard staff asking to come back next year and all the positive things that happened this year and how smooth it went so that's a credit to our city clerk miss vicky and so it was a very successful pool season so we'll do it again next year so that's all i have so thank you thank you okay the council member reports thanks

requests for future agenda items?

Wendy? Reports. Fair was awesome. Fair went great. Lots and lots and lots and lots of people in town. If you happen to walk, my husband decided we needed to buy a picker-upper thing so that when we go on walks, one of us can have a trash bag and the other one can walk the dogs so that we can pick up the litter from the fair. Because it's on all the surface streets. Because we lost so much parking due to the Caltrans installment of their genius idea. And so now people are parking way further in on the streets. Yeah, in neighborhoods. Thank you. That's a word. And so there's a lot of trash on the streets. you know, sides of streets and stuff like that. So if you're out walking and you feel like you want to be neighborly, pick up a little bit of trash. Let's see, what else?

I don't really think I have anything else.

Honestly, I know. Don't be, oh.

Almost got away with it.

The 49er, I keep asking about that. So if we could get that on an agenda or an update, I know there's some legal stuff involved with that. So that has to be a conversation on closed session. I just would like to be able to have a conversation about it.

Yes. We closed session. We have met with the 49er. So I can give you an update. We did discuss with them some, some possible solutions. I spoke to the mayor about it. And right now we are, we're getting ready to send, we'll bring a letter to you guys for review at the next meeting, but we're looking at, turning some of their spots into low-income housing. We're looking at some spots being, no matter what, top funds are paid for it. So those are some of the things that we've talked about. We have a letter generated. We're just going to get it on this agenda so we can bring it to your next agenda for review.

Fantastic. I would really like to see that. I think that's it for now. Thank you.

As Cameron mentioned, last week we had the Purple Heart City. Wendy Bottomley and I were there. I've got two of the awards, one from the Assembly, State Assembly, and then the State Senate that they presented to the city, which was nice. The only other thing, since I'm now back up to Dawn with the Amador Fire Board, I met with Fire Protection Authority. Thank you, Fire Protection Authority. I met with Kayla and Rob Withrow a couple weeks ago and just kind of got up to speed on that. So if I needed to step in, then I'm ready to go.

The fair was great. It was my first Derby event. It was very fun. Didn't know what I was missing. And the Purple Heart event was great. It was very patriotic. Had some wonderful violin music from one of the veterans and some great singing and It was just a really heartfelt event, and I hope we do it every year. I will be there every year. And on August 6th, I went to my ACTC meeting, and the commissioners voted and approved that the five-mile stretch of Old Sack Road from the city to La Trobe has been approved as part of their pilot program. We will be the next project they do to the pilot program. Let me back up a little bit. The pilot program is to train a group from the county to go throughout the county and the cities to overlay, do overlay, do grinding, do repair work to our highways and roadways. So they started off quite slow with some smaller projects, like Buena Vista Road was one of them, basically like a one-inch overlay. And all four of those did very well. So then they wanted to do something a little bit more robust to give the workers some better training on some different types of road. So... I pushed. I didn't say I didn't. And they approved it. So we will be the fifth project. We do have a few legal hurdles to go through. The legal counsel for the ACTC is drawing up a cooperative agreement between the county and the city. I'm sure Cameron will be talking to you. And we're going to be able to get that road paved. It will be ground down where it needs to be ground down. It will be overlaid where it needs to be overlaid. But I'm hoping that they will move quick enough that we won't run out of paving season. So they're going to talk next week to the legal, get that drawn up. I don't know how quickly that will go after it's been drawn up, but once that's done and everything's decided, they're ready to go. So that's a big win for Plymouth. That road is a mess. Huge win. Brian was there, and I gave a few examples of, I drive that road every day, you guys. People swerve outside of the curves just to miss the potholes, and I've almost crashed into a few people, or head-ons. I said, if we can do this, you know, and of course we were all talking amongst ourselves and it's been on the docket for a while. It's a, it's something that everybody knows it needs to be fixed along with all the other roads in the County because everybody's road is horrible. Right. So anyway, big, big, big win for us. I'm super, super happy that we were able to get that done for the city.

Thank you for your advocacy on that board.

Excellent. That would be huge to everybody in the north end of the county here.

Holder? All right. So I don't really have anything to report since I was gone on vacation. I did find something curious today about the rotaries in the farmer's market vendor parking only lot. Right? There's only one car parked in there in the entire lot. So maybe we can remind. Rotary and vendors to park in the designated areas. Or remove the signs, let us park in there right across the street. Yeah, it's the newborn property. Yeah. Either way. it's wasted parking spaces at this point. And let us park in there, remove the signs, or make sure and enforce that the vendors are parked in there. We'll bring up spots for everybody else that wants to come to the farmer's market and support them. So thank you, that is all.

Thank you. So I did attend the first AFPA meeting I've been to. And out of that, basically, they met to vote on the distribution of the funds. And for everybody who doesn't know how that actually works with them, it's just basically the Measure M funds that are brought in for the county. They're split amongst the fire departments based on population and call volume. And all the chiefs have to... you know, how many calls they had and so forth. So we did that and voted on it and they were all in agreement and that went pretty well. They made some big changes to measure them that could down the road affect, you know, um, affect us probably positively. One of those changes is that they're no longer, departments are still going to respond to every call just as they always have, but not every call will still qualify now for Measure M funds. So, A lot of these public assist calls now, lift assist will still qualify to be paid Measure M and medical aids, of course. But a lot of calls like a vehicle lockout or assist with removing a rattlesnake, stuff like that, the department still comes and does it, but they don't get Measure M funds. And the difference it makes is just that... For the amount of calls, there's so much money in the pot. And so the way it splits it up, the calls will just be worth more money now. Every call that is a payable call is worth a lot more money. And some calls, departments are running for free. So that largely, you know, Amador Fire gets all of our measure and funding. So that'd be a help for them possibly because we don't have a lot of those calls that don't qualify here in the city. And so... That's what came out of that meeting. And on top of that, not so much for a request for future genitals, but I would like to know where we're at or if we've ordered Christmas decorations yet and what we're doing. Because it's getting to be middle of August and these places can be out of the stuff. I'd like to know if it's been ordered and if we've figured out where the tree is going and so forth.

Ace Hardware had a big old sale on all their Christmas lights, by the way.

I saw those and I almost called down here and said, let's pick them up. Those would have worked like in the windows and stuff, but I don't think they were the big external lights that we need. Like the commercial grade lights that we're going to need for outdoors. Okay. Let's go. Let's hear it.

We have identified one or two spots that we could put a tree. We just needed to know how much money we could spend.

Oh, I thought we had talked about it one night in here that we could use. Weren't we going to maybe use top funds or something like that? I thought we said a few. What did we say that night? Like $2,000? Well, we said the first year would be a lot because we had to buy the stuff. It's been so long now, I don't remember, but I thought we said we'd spend like $5,000 or something.

That's how long it's been. We don't even remember what we discussed. Come on. We can put this on the next agenda. I'll bring you guys some pricing.

Yeah, just because we thought the first year we'd buy the stuff, but then you guys package it up good and everything, and we can keep using it year after year. So I think that we were getting… My recollection, it could be wrong, we'll talk about it, but I was thinking we were going to put out like maybe 5,000 to set it all up for the first year. Maybe have some stuff you string across the buildings that the building owners let us, like the other town. So you definitely have to have fake snow.

You guys are all smirking and think this is real funny, but we're going to turn this into a Hallmark movie.

Yep.

We want a really big, just you White House type.

I want everybody to be really gay and happy and drink eggnog and, you know, what? Mold wine? Yeah. Roasted chestnuts? No. Yeah, definitely. We want it to start happening every year, but it's just I'm afraid that... What if you had a giant snow globe that you can walk into, and then you zip it up and... You guys are unhinged right now.

Okay, sorry. The thing is, in all seriousness, though, it's middle of August, and on the industrial side or commercial-grade light stuff, they probably start getting bought up by cities and entities about getting close this time of year, so we need to get on it. When I say we... I really mean who? That's right.

Maybe could you maybe call Disneyland and find out like their snow blowing machines?

That'd be great.

Yeah.

Are we going to close session?

Yes, we are. No one else has anything else at this time. We're going to be going to closed session, but I'm going to open the floor for public comment. Anybody has anything to say about items on the closed session? Anyone? Okay, at this time, we're in a closed meeting and we'll adjourn for closed session at 922 p.m. The council met on item 10.1, proper negotiations. No reportable action was taken. And the meeting is adjourned at 9.31 p.m.