Finance Committee - Regular Meeting

All right, it is six o'clock. We'll call the Tuesday, August 25th, 2026 meeting of the Finance Committee to order. We have a full committee this evening. Next item on our agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance. Please go ahead.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the flag of the United States of America and to the flag of the United States of America.

Next item on the agenda is public comment. Is there any members of the public wish to address the finance committee this evening? Thanks. We'll move on to item number 4A, which is approval of minutes for the 14th of July. Any changes to those minutes from the committee? All right, seeing none, those minutes are approved through unanimous consent. That'll move us into our business items. First of all, I want to welcome everyone to the kickoff of the 2027 budget season. I see a lot of members of the council here this evening. Thank you for coming. And a lot of members of the management team and staff that pulled our show and tell together tonight. So the run of show for the committee is I want to remind everybody that we're always on. So we do have kind of a hot mic situation up here at the front table. And as you do speak, if you just enunciate a little bit so Anthony and Patricia can pick us up on the camera. We've got a couple of regular business items, and then we're going to wrap up with a review of the fleet that's in the city garage, and we will adjourn the meeting from the city garage. So we will not be reconvening back in this room once we move on to 5D, which is the show and tell. So with that, we'll move to item number 5A, which is a matter of report, and it's a presentation by our friends at Baird of the 2026 proposed borrowing to support the City Capital Improvement Program. Brad, good evening.

Good evening, Joe. Thank you. So I'll walk through the presentation packet, answer any questions. So this presentation is... It's all behind you.

Sorry, that's where the screen is here.

So this presentation, this agenda item, is really in relation to your 2026 CIP, not the 27 that you'll be talking about a little later tonight. Just by way of a timeline with your authorization tonight, this would be forwarded to the council for action on September 1st. Baird and city staff would then take steps to bring this issue to market, including preparing the official statement, the offering document, securing a bond rating, and marketing the notes to investors nationwide. We plan to finalize interest rates on or about September 22nd, and then the funds would close and be wired to the city on October 13th. The following page, by way of summary, this issue size is $20,735,000, general obligation promissory notes. That means that the city is pledging its tax authority to support or secure the repayment of the notes. That's a very strong pledge, and that, along with AA2 rating of the city, It's going to really drive interest rates down. It's going to really lead to a low interest rate financing. In terms of purpose, there's really two primary purposes. First, there's the funding of your CIP, which is levy supported, and that's $18,395,000. And then there's road improvements in a TID, TID 17, $2,734,000. $2,340,000, excuse me, the debt service on the TID repayment supported from TID revenues, not a separate tax levy. So we're combining those two purposes together to generate the overall issue size of $20,735,000. We have a maturity schedule beginning October 1st of 27. Annual maturity is then with final payment in 2035. And the final two maturities are callable that's eligible to be prepaid at the city's option beginning in 2033. So more than $5 million principal has that call feature attached. Estimated interest rate based on current market is 3.78%. Now the resolution that you're... Identify certain parameters once those parameters are met and the other... material is in place the official statement the bond rating then we're ready to take this to the marketplace summary of the parameters are on the bottom of this page so there's a not to exceed borrowing amount not to exceed interest rate which is about one percent higher than market rates of course you'll get the best market available market rates but we in any case we can't go over the 475 if the market moves above that we would need to come back before we finalize in mid to late September. Other parameters includes the maturity structure that I talked about, and then there's the authority to increase or decrease annual principal payments by up to $2 million, and that's to meet the debt service targets that the city would like, which is really a level repayment. So we can make those adjustments right up to the, at the time of pricing, the time that we're finalizing terms and rates. For anyone who wants to dig into the numbers, the last page of this presentation is all of the city's existing debt that's supported by tax levy. That's the left-hand side of the page. All of that is fixed rate, so fixed payments, none of that would change unless the city takes steps to call or repay that debt. towards the center of the page in the boxed-in area is the new issue for 2026, $20,735,000. And you can see the allocation of the debt service that is the principal and interest payments supported by tax levy or general fund and supported by TID. So the far right-hand column then shows the budget for 26 debt service was just over $27,374,000. That would increase to $28,210,000 in 2027. in with financing in 2027 based on any action that you take on your capital program during the budget cycle. So the market rates are up a little bit from where they were last year at this time, but with the city's credit, name recognition, I expect these notes to be really well received in the market. I'd be glad to answer questions and additional detail.

Brad, we Could you just dive a little bit deeper on that allocation by purpose? Sure. That column to the right of the box.

Yeah. So the total payment, if you're in the box denier that says preliminary, it says total. That's the principal plus interest minus a bid premium. So it's just the accumulation of those three columns to the left. Then I take that total column and I'm allocating it based on the purposes I talked about, the 18 plus million for CIP and the two-ish million for the TID. This is an actual allocation of what is going to be supporting the payments. So where it says general fund, that's tax levy supported. So from this issue, approximately $2,460,000 annually will be supported directly by a tax levy. And then from the TID revenues, about $315,000 annually supported from TID.

when it comes to debt payback, that's really our debt service fund. We separately levy for that. It's part of our overall levy, but we separate that amount, and that's really in our debt service fund that pays for that.

Just out of curiosity, what was the interest rate last year?

3.52%. Okay. And for planning purposes, I'm being a little conservative on this rate. This rate is higher than market rate. We were locking in today and probably be closer to 360.

Thank you.

Other questions for Brett?

So I'm interested for the public to know why and myself, why we're bonding for 26 is CIP, which is we're almost out of 26. And why wouldn't we be bonding for 27 so that we have the money when we need it?

So for the most part, this is all related to cash flow that's sitting in our capital projects month. Basically, each year when we get into the early first half of the year, we kind of have like two things going on. Early parts of the new year's capital projects and wrapping up the previous year's capital projects. So basically what we've been doing for the last six months is really spending down existing bond proceeds, which we're required to do. to make sure we do that in 18 to 24 months. So that's what we really didn't do in the first part of this year, which is why I kind of delayed issuing this. We have historically in the past issued in spring. But because we wanted to make sure we use the existing bond proceeds first, that's why there was a little bit more of a delay this year only for issuing this.

And is that also why when the taxes come in, they come in in January, March, and May, we can pay bills even though we didn't bond for... this part of the year, is that correct?

I mean, for the most part, whenever we issue debt, we're acknowledging whether either we're paying for interest through the bond premium, like you see here, or if we have enough time and know what our debt service is, we use Mark is usually how we're dealing with that. But yes, whenever we do our levy, we have to be able to define what our debt service is. Thank you. No matter what.

Other questions? So that's a matter of report, which moves us to item number 5B, which is an action item. Is review and possible action on a resolution authorizing the issuance and establishing parameters for the sale of not to exceed $20,735,000 of general obligation promissory note series 2026A. Is there a motion?

Alderman Levke? I'll make a motion for ID 2604220 review and take action on authorizing and issuing establishing parameters for sale to exceed $20,735,000. General obligation promissory note series 2026A with the parameters discussed.

Very good. Is there a second? All in favor?

Second.

We have a motion and a second to bring a resolution to council to authorize the $20,735,000 in debt. All those in favor sign aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? That item passes unanimously. Brad, thank you. Okay. Thank you. brings us to another business item, item number 5C, which is review and possible action on the crossing guard contract renewal. Joe? I'm on down. The floor is yours, sir.

Ty Hoffman, Assistant Chief at the Police Department. This is the annual renewal of the contract to provide crossing guard services throughout the city for school children to safely cross the road on their way to school. Interestingly, this year they had a change in leadership at the company that provides the services and normally they get this contract to us closer to the end of the school year. This year it was delayed as they were sending it to the address of somebody who was recently retired from our agency. So it wasn't going anywhere. So once we recognize that mistake, we got on it. Thus, the reason why we're here tonight to consider this matter. Normally, we'd be doing it a little bit earlier in the year. So we're a little behind the eight ball when it comes to the timing on that. Pretty much the same as years prior. I believe 17 total guards throughout the city. They do a study. and recommend a certain number, and that's working with our parking agent supervisor to recommend the optimal number for that.

The amount of the contract for the 17 sites is $195,901.20. Which I believe is a less than 5% increase from the previous year. It says in the cover sheet, 4% increase.

Okay.

Questions for the chief on this side? Mike?

How does the closure as we had in the past?

That's a great question. I would have thought that we would have needed less. Turns out that was not accurate. Still the same number of kids going to less physical locations, even though I believe it's Horning is no longer a middle school. It's still being used as a STEM school. So now it's bringing in, instead of just middle school kids, it's bringing in first through eighth, I believe.

There was one at Whittier because I drive by it every day. Whittier is closed now. So where did that guy go?

That's a great question. I don't have the answer to that.

So the number is dependent on what the company says they need?

They recommend a number and work with our parking agent supervisor who actually monitors and supervisors the guys. So if there was any discrepancy in what she believed was necessary, we would... Got it. Okay.

Thank you.

You bet.

Other questions for Tom on this side?

I'll, you know, I've got it in front of me. I'll make a motion to approve the 2027 contract to all city management services for crossing guards in the amount of $195,901.20. Is there a second? Second by all the person. I second that motion.

We have a motion and a second. I wanted to make a comment. Go ahead, Rick. I'm going to be voting for it because some of the public say, why don't you just have the police officers do it? And this is substantially less expensive than having the police officers do it. So I just wanted to know in the public why we're voting for something. Thank you.

Good. Any other discussion? All right. We have a motion and a second. All those in favor, sign aye.

Aye.

Anyone opposed? That item passes unanimously. Sir, thank you. All right, so that brings us to item number 5B, which is a review of the 2027 and 2031 Community Investment Program. That's going to be led by Joe. And then we'll adjourn here and then reconvene in the garage. And we'll have John Weinkopf and some other department representatives walk us through the different items that are in the fleet book. So what we'll do tonight is Joe's going to walk us through an overview of CIP. We'll have a follow-up meeting to take any amendments or any proposed amendments to the capital budget. So tonight is more of an informational meeting, and I'd ask the committee to hold any amendments until our next meeting when we take action on the capital budget. But you certainly can ask whatever questions you'd like as we go through the presentation, so.

and then we get to kind of see the fleet pieces that we're planning to replace in 2027 that are being proposed to you. At the next meeting, like Mr. Piper had mentioned, obviously we'll be taking any revisions that you want to recommend, but also we'll probably go into more detail on what's in kind of each piece of the CIP for 2027 too at that point in time. So I will say this at the end again, but if you had, after this presentation, Before the next meeting, if you have any questions or would like to request any information that you feel would be helpful for that next meeting, please feel free to reach out to me, and we'll make sure we get that information to you.

And I know, as we all know, the full council received the book. So everyone, all of us, all of us have that in our email, and I'm just pulling up the book right now to give the total page number. The Wi-Fi must be slow here. 370. 370 something. 370. 377. Who was closest? 337 pages. So that is not only this year, but it's also, as we all know, the five-year plan. So as Joe said, if you, as the committee, have questions, please reach out to Joe, Tony, the respective department head, and certainly members of the council as well. If you have questions as you go through the book, you certainly are welcome to do the same.

Joe? Thank you. All right, so just kind of kicking it off, and we're covering 2027 through 2031. We will be focusing primarily on 27 items, but we'll give you kind of some kind of brief overview. So generally speaking, what are we doing with CIP? We're looking at our capital needs. We're looking really at the next five years. We try to put together a book that we legitimately feel is something that we expect to kind of follow. Can changes happen in future years? No doubt. But in this place, in this snapshot, This is our plan to make sure that we maintain things in a safe working order. So that's kind of what our overview of our CIP really is, the definition. It's a long-range plan for capital. These are our options on the screen of how we really traditionally fund all these capital purchases. The biggest piece that we generally have especially on the governmental side, is our 10-year general obligation to just approve one for the current year. That is definitely something. That is the thing that we pay the most attention to when we're doing the five-year plan because we know that there were years when it was a really good interest rate environment that we put additional projects. pool we had a lot of things that happened because the interest rates were so good we knew that if we were going to do something for those types of projects that was a time well we're not in that environment anymore and also because we did borrow for that we had a kind of a pretty large spike in that service levy right to pay for to pay off that debt and i'll show you a graph at the end that kind of shows that um but we're really trying to do is the reason why i say we're paying the most attention as we're trying to level that to year going forward. So just to kind of give you the highlights of this CIP book, total major capital projects, this is, like I said, the major infrastructure items. We have $135 million in major capital projects. Equipment replacements, a little over $17 million in total. And then in the book, we have fleet replacements. for this book. Kind of jumping into our capital for governmental, this is our major projects. Now, each category could go up and down. But like I said, in total, when we look at this book, we are trying to, like I said, smooth out or have modest growth in our general obligation debt. But from a major project standpoint, you can kind of see we have, it's pretty flat. We have a little bit of a dip in 2028. And I will just kind of mention it here, probably won't mention it again, because it is a future project. The reason why you might see a dip here in major projects is because we do anticipate a large citywide radio project So with that in mind, here are some of the major 27 projects in the governmental side. We have some major streets for a little over $2 million. The one good thing about this is we do plan on this being TID funded. I believe it's TID 17 and potentially 25. I'll confirm that at our next meeting, exactly the pieces for each TID, but that is an entirely TID funded project. We have resurfacing projects for 4.4 million. There's quite a few streets. If you look at the particular project sheet on that, there's quite a few sections of streets that are listed. I didn't think it would be plausible to necessarily list them here, or at least not efficient. The next item there is our flood mitigation projects. We have an Area 8 section on Grand Avenue that's a primary driver for this of 2.1 million. The next item noted there is kind of like the second phase of the two-way conversion for North Street and St. Paul. Right now projected to be above $3.8 million. The second to last thing there, kind of our biggest building project for the year, is related to our training and recycling center, kind of the old incinerator building that we have. We plan for a roof replacement of $1.1 million. And then there's athletic field improvement. On this side, we're really talking about our enterprise funds. So for the most part, the biggest generator, the biggest spender in this area, as you can imagine, are clean water plants. A lot of their spend on major projects is infrastructure. So anything that they would potentially be proposing is pretty significant. pretty sensitive when it comes to spending. But I would say that a lot of this stuff has been in past CIP books. It just happens to be the year that we're trying to wrap some of these things up. But we have some pump station projects at the aviation in Northview for $2 million. We have sanitary sewer rehab, which could be sanitary sewer replacements, as well as repaid lining projects associated essentially with all of our road projects. projects for the minor street reconstruction the st paul and north street project that's really related to that but also even in our resurfacing project kind of makes up the basically we're ripping up the road if there's something we have to do with our pipes in the ground we try to address those so that's kind of what that's really kind of following those projects and then lastly we are actually uh planning to finish up our phase three facility upgrades at the for 4.7 million. So major projects, major driver for our spend and our geo debt. The only other area in the book that is driving some larger purchases are our fleet. In the governmental side of the fleet, you can see here, we plan on $4 million over the next couple of years, and then it dips in future years. Still, we do have an extensive sleep replacement schedule that we try to stay on top of. We don't want to see large peaks in any given year, but there are definitely circumstances where that does happen. So just kind of give you the large items that we have in 27. We have dump trucks. I believe there's four complete trucks and then there's some chassis that are being purchased for 1.4 million in total. And then we have our general annual like squad cars and trucks And then just lastly, when it comes to enterprise funds, when it comes to fleet, we do sometimes have some larger purchases in our regular business type funds, but the ones in this particular year are actually related to the transit utility. We have three fixed route buses that are planned to be replaced for 1.4 million. The thing of note, no general obligation debt is being requested. is all based off of their poverty revenues and their federal and state. So being completely purchased through that. So those are, like I said, the really big items that are running through the book for this year. But usually what happens, and it leads you to me, is one of the more important discussions when it comes to what we're spending on capital is how does it affect the tax bill? Now, I'm not We don't quite have a good example of what exactly like our mill rate is yet at this point, but this is kind of, and I'll make it a little bit easier to see. You can kind of see this total levy line that we have for capital funding. This has been like the first is 2022 and we have this through a projected year of 2031. And then below that line, you can kind of see from the previous year how much the levy has gone up from that previous year. This in 2022 and 2023, that was us getting on based in line with paying off, finally paying off those building projects that I noted earlier. That's why it jumped quite a bit in 2022, about 23% then, 10% the next year for that final big piece of debt. And now we've been trying to level off. And what we project for the Basically, the next five years is trying to stay underneath 3% of an increase for that levy. This is, again, just the debt service capital piece. This is not the overall tax levy. This is the smaller piece of our levy, the debt service and capital piece. So when we come and talk to you about the operating budget, so we're going to be talking about that this next month and in October quite a bit, we will be talking about how each one of them are really impacting the tax bill, but then also in total, because really, the resident really cares about the total. Like I always said, when I was at the water utility, we always wanted to talk about what the difference was between water rates and sewer rates, but for the most part, every utility bill, the resident wants to know what the total bill increase is. So the same thing goes for this. But I just kind of wanted to let you know, our five-year plan is trying to make sure we maintain kind of a more nominal increase from year to year because we know we were more aggressive when the interest rate environment was advantageous. So we'll get into this a little bit more in the future meeting. We can talk about it more now and definitely in the next meeting, but I wanted to make sure you kind of understand what our plan projects for our levy. Any questions?

Just one quick question. So I'm glad you mentioned that operating budget and at one point we will see both of those simultaneously, right? Because CIP is, I don't want to say more flexible operating. We don't anticipate much of a

it's going to remain constant and actually grow and say ip but so i could what i could do just kind of for and it will be a i think i might even put that on this this is this is early estimates subject to change if i could make that like have a like fireworks come out of it so that you do a subject change but i i could do something related to kind of what a projected

understand it to be very preliminary yeah just at some point it's like we see both of them sometimes absolutely other questions for joe from the committee that is the overview i guess it's showing as we dig into the book can we meet uh as our next meeting is on the 8th of september to talk even more about capital and make that recommendation

So please think of anything, any other information that's not in the book or you have questions on the book, please let us know between now and the next meeting.

Any questions for Joe before we go to the garage? All right, we'll take a little bit of a break and we'll reconvene out that way in about five minutes or so.

We're going to do police, then we're going to do the bus, and then we'll go this way.

Police, bus, and then go up that way? All right. All right, you guys. So, Anthony, we're going to start with the squad car. Okay. All right, everybody. We have our crack camera crew here. Good. All right. So we're going to start with police department, go to transit, and then we're going to come over here and then work our way up the rest of the garage. So this is the mic, of course. Just hold it like a normal mic. The one thing I'd ask for department directors is that if somebody asks you a question, could you please repeat the question and then answer it? So Sergeant Wanner, I'll kick it to you for the police department.

Hi, good evening. I'm Dave Wanner. I'm a Sergeant in our Special Services Division at the Police Department. I work with managing our fleet as one of my roles. So this here is just a typical MARC patrol fleet, one of the fleets that we're requesting to be replaced this upcoming year. Every year when we roll over fleet, there's, I would say, the majority of the equipment with the car, absent if there's a major redesign by Ford, the majority of the equipment in the squads is able to be reused. We do occasionally run into situations where new technology with a light bar, for instance, would come out. Computers needing upgrades. But absent of those types of things, we're usually able to repurpose nearly all the equipment in the squads. Any questions about the fleet or... So the question was how many squad cars are we replacing this year? Our request includes seven marked patrol fleets like this, two of our unmarked detective CID fleets, and then one fleet or allocation of money, I guess it would be to replace or refresh the cars that our narcotics advice unit use.

for replacing on a yearly basis?

Sure, so the question was what percentage of marked squads does the city have? We have 32 fleets dedicated to our patrol division. Not all of them are marked. We have, for instance, two cars that are dedicated to our crisis response unit. Those are just plain white Explorers, not in the same replacement cycle as these are. We have a supervisor fleet, again, not in the same replacement cycle. It's not driven the way these cars are. So the necessity of replacing it as frequently isn't there. We have a specialty van that's used for transporting prisoners. It's only used when needed. A few other cars that are for our commercial motor vehicle enforcement unit. Those are only driven really during the daytime hours. So the type of use those cars get, the mileage they rack up is not accustomed to that. Knock on wood, we've had a very fortunate year with really very minor issues with crashes or damage to fleets. Yeah, so the question was, what was the criteria for replacement of the squad cars? Basically everything you said. We did years ago, prior to my time in this position, they did a study kind of analyzing all of those things. And that's where we kind of landed on a three year mark, trying to cycle the fleets out before the factory warranty is expired. I think a huge thing to understand is that, you know, 80,000 miles on a car like this is not even comparable to 80,000 miles in a car that you or I might drive. The type of driving that these cars, the, the, the type of driving they're put through is not typical of a personally owned vehicle. These cars are driven 24-7, 365. When they're not driving, a lot of times they're idling. So there is a lot of hours on the engine, other factors that start to break them down. And we're just trying to get to a point where we're not having cars out of service for a long period of time and not basically being able to respond to emergencies. The question is, what does the city of Wauwatosa and the city of Milwaukee recycle their cars at? I'm not sure of that answer. Anyone else?

You bet. And just for those of you that are wondering, the estimated cost on a squad car like this to replace it is about $75,000. That's in the book.

Brian, if you'd introduce yourself for the folks at home and take it away. Brian Engelking, transit manager for the city. As Mr. Chiro said, we do have three buses, full-size fixed route buses that are on order. They were actually approved last year because there's about an 18-month lead time. What we have here is one of our Metrolift buses. We don't... This isn't a replacement. This is actually to add an additional unit. The reason being is... For you, the council, I've said it a million times, but our Metrolift ridership has rebounded. We're at levels that we haven't seen since 2012. In 2012, our total Metrolift bus fleet was a total of seven vehicles, and we were using five on a daily basis. We only have four of these. So it's a little bit lighter during the summertime, but next week school's gonna start. We're gonna get hammered again. And like last May, we had days where we had five vehicles out. So we had all four of these out plus our supervisor van. We're getting to the point and we keep on getting more and more applications of more and more riders because our citizens are growing older. They're living longer, so we need more of these vehicles to transport the disabled. And I should back up. Metrolift is used for folks that have significant disabilities that do not allow them to ride the regular bus. So we've seen a drastic increase. We just need to do this for customer service because we can't tell somebody who's going to dialysis three times a week, oh, you're going to have to arrive an hour early because we can't fit you into the schedule, or we're going to have you come late, or you're going to be late to school or late to your job. It's just that's very poor customer service, and we're probably going to be violating the ADA. we could open ourselves up to federal lawsuits, which we obviously don't want to do that. The other thing is the existing four units that we do have are getting really heavily used, and they're really starting to show their age. These actually, the existing four could be replaced all next year, a seven-year cycle, but we're gonna try and keep these going. The existing ones, In the plan, 2 in 28 and 2 in 29, we're just adding an additional one to basically meet our current demand. Unfortunately, there's about a year-long lead time, so we probably won't see an additional one if this is approved until next fall. So with that, I can take any questions. Yes, sir.

Just for the public metro, is it working for you?

Yep. Correct, yes. Yes, and they have to be pre-approved. They have to have a doctor, some kind of medical professional sign off on their disability is so significant that they can't qualify for or that they can't ride a regular bus. But you're absolutely right, Alderman Lemke. Yes. for Metrolift, we're back up to about 60 rides a day, which might not sound a lot, but when we're only doing two and a quarter riders per hour, we're getting up to almost 30 hours of service, so we need to have multiple vehicles out at one time, so. And one other thing, this would be 100% funded. We've got 80% federal funding available. And then as Mr. Truro said, we will reimburse our operating budget with federal funds. So in effect, it's 100% paid with federal dollars.

All right, thank you. All right, so we're gonna swing down and start with the plow trucks. I'll turn it over to Mr. Weinkauf. John, if you could introduce yourself for the folks at home.

Good evening, everybody. John Weinkauf, the fleet manager for City Garage, overseeing the vehicles that we work on down in the garage here. Right in front of you here, obviously we have four of them here. We have a little bit of a different project this year compared to what we've done in years past. The biggest problem we're facing right now is in 2028, there's an emission standard that's changing from the federal government. It's changing the NOx standards on the vehicles and changing the after-treatment devices. On these vehicles you see right now, they do have after-treatment on them. This is the current standard right now in 2028 it goes to a much much stricter standard with that stricter standard what it's doing is it is increasing decreasing the emissions out of the vehicles but it is increasing the emissions space that these vehicles take up for the emission components on them so what we've put together working with the freightliner dealership that we work with right now anticipation of these changes they were made us aware of this that's what got us to this point Originally, we were talking about pre-purchasing the chassis for essentially the vehicles to get us to 2030. With some budget issues that we're trying to work through, we're able to move two vehicles forward. So essentially what we're doing is actually pre-purchasing two chassis for those vehicles that we put in storage. The warranty on those vehicles doesn't start until we physically put the vehicles in service. So that's an advantage to us. Cost savings, about $15,000 per vehicle by doing it. And then it allows us to maintain the current configuration that we have on our vehicles. What I'm saying about the emissions devices, the filter that is on the truck currently right now, if you look at the back of the cab, from the back of the cab to the end of the frame rails is called a clean CA, cab-to-axle. On the new trucks that are coming, you are no longer going to be able to get that. The emissions device that's on them is going to stick out in excess of a foot from the back of the cab, and then the new engine that they're going to be coming out with will be wider, which will inhibit the current PTO provision that we put in these vehicles. We're going to have to change the location of the PTO, and then our wing brace is also going to change because of that. The secondary market right now is not in tune with this. Compared to the OEMs, the OEMs have gotten this engine for the last three years from Cummins. The upfitters that do the salters and the plows and wings and everything, they don't get it until the first one rolls on the door. We're anticipating it being a huge learning curve. So by us purchasing these chassis ahead of time, it allows us to maintain that configuration, not deal with the problems that are gonna be coming with the unknowns of this and maintain our replacement schedule of these trucks. That's the first project that's in there. Obviously the replacement of the vehicles themselves are the four trucks. Obviously I can speak to four, essentially there's two here and there's two down there. Essentially where we're at right now, we've been very good about standardizing our outfit that we do with the chassis we've obviously done this stainless steel as much as possible or aluminum where it prohibits obviously we can't do everything in it the sub frames that are underneath the trucks are still steel the frames are still steel and items like that um we've actually had some issues where the emission components have come apart because of the corrosion issues and it's something that it's an ongoing issue that we deal with every day We're also changing our standards with our salt or the chloride reduction with the clean water plant. So all the trucks that we replaced, we've been replacing since 2018, have been adding pre-wet to the trucks. With the pre-wet, we obviously, the anticipation is reduce our salt usage, which is a benefit to the salt cost, but then also less salt chlorides that are going to the clean water plant next door. As far as configuration from these, the plows and wings are the same on all of our vehicles. We have 43 plow trucks altogether on our entire fleet. The plows and the wings are the same on every one of them. Obviously interchangeability is big, especially if we get an issue where one breaks down, the ability to put one from the next and keep the operators going on their jobs, keep the routes clean and keep the streets opened up. Biggest change we've done to is add the pre-wet and then we've also gone to a bigger box. Holds a little more salt, which obviously keeps them on the routes a little longer, plus the ease of loading and less pollution because the salt, stays in the box more instead of spilling over the side. What that has to do with the bucket that's on the loader is now narrower than what the box opening is, so a lot cleaner when we're coming into operations. I don't know. Obviously, we've seen these every year. This is really nothing new, but if you have any questions regarding the plow trucks, we'd be happy to answer any questions. Okay. Take that as a no. We can go down to the wheel loader. So this is a 2016 John Deere 624 wheel loader. This loader is used extensively, obviously for snow plowing. It's used heavily in downtown areas, as well as all the cul-de-sacs in the city. We also, obviously it's a critical piece of equipment when it comes to leaf pickup and then brush pickup, as well as obviously construction projects that we have around the city, load and salt, you name it. They're kind of a jack-of-all-trades for us. This loader does get equipped with a snow plow that goes on the front of it. We used to put wings on the side of them. We've gone to a different plow now that scrapes cleaner, and our cleanup time is much less than what it was when we had plows and wings on the loaders. We've gained great efficiency by doing that. And also this allows us to put the snow where we need to put it in cul-de-sacs, which is where a wing, it's a straight edge that you kind of go where it goes type of deal. So we've noticed that we've switched to that in 2019 is when we switched to those kind of as a pilot. And it has gone over extremely well to the point that the operators actually fight over the metal plus plow versus using the wing plow that we currently use. are kind of phasing out. So we are standardizing to Caterpillar equipment across the board, across all of our construction equipment. So this would be a Caterpillar replacement when it gets replaced. We have seven wheel loaders in the fleet down here. There's two loaders that are up at Park Rec, and there's one loader that's next door at the clean water plant. So all seven of these during a snow event are out on their plow routes or downtown doing cleanups when we have our snow operations. Any questions on wheel loader?

Go ahead.

that our clientele was saying that they, cul-de-sacs weren't plowed is because we need more of them or we got the right number and that's why we use loaders and not plows.

So the question was regarding cleanups of cul-de-sacs and if we need more loaders or if we have the right amount of loaders. As far as the amount of loaders we have, you have to keep one thing in mind. When we take an operator out of a plow truck and put them into a loader, it no longer puts a plow truck on the road. So Joe and Brian work heavily on creating the routes for it. Obviously, we have a snowplow manual that dictates where and when we clean cul-de-sacs. We adhere to that manual as well. And some of that is the nature of we need to get certain things cleaned up before we can get the cul-de-sacs. Obviously, we want to get them open, so our first priority is to get them open so you can at least make them through, and then we'll come back later in the storm, and then we'll finally do a cleanup on them to get them actually cleaned up. And the reason is because cul-de-sacs are very labor-intensive. For a straight street that we can just take this truck with a plow and a wing and go up and down the street, obviously, it's a lot quicker than for these trucks to do a cul-de-sac compared to that loader, it's about a tenth of the time for that loader to do it. But obviously, driving this across the city at 35, 30 miles an hour versus that driving around at 20 miles an hour. It takes a little longer to get across the city. Plus then they'll strategically send the loaders downtown to get downtown cleaned up first, why there's less parked cars and less activity downtown. Once that's done, then they'll move outwards around the city the way the routes are designed so that we can get cul-de-sacs cleaned up.

Thank you. Major reason, I refreshed my memory, major reason for replacement for that?

The major reason, obviously, as we get to that 7,000, 8,000 hour mark on these loaders, which we push up against, that's when we start to see major transmission and engine problems occur with these, obviously pushing the snow. Yes, it's a loader that's designed to be in a quarry and work heavily. The level of salt that's on these, it chews the heck out of them. It really does detriment to them. We had numerous issues in the past where we had a lot of loaders breaking down in cul-de-sacs, having problems. So by moving up the replacement schedule of those loaders and moving them through, our breakdowns are much less on these pieces of equipment and then able to keep the durability up. Because obviously... One thing is the repairs themselves obviously incur costs, but the downtime in the middle of a snowstorm, there's seven loaders and those seven loaders are assigned to routes. We don't have seven more loaders if they go down in order to keep things going. So in order to get one back out there, just the drive time to get from here to wherever that is, typically in the outwards parts of the city, it can be 20 minutes to a half hour one way. Well, in that time, That probably would have been about five or six cul-de-sacs that would have got cleaned up in that time frame. So trying to limit the downtime, increase the uptime, and then also decrease the amount of money that we're sticking into them and repair costs is the objective of this.

Thank you. My cul-de-sac is always awesome. So you can spend a little time on the less time on northeast side. Going to the cats versus the deer, are we going to get some more longevity out of it? Is that one of the reasons we're switching? Maybe keep it for more hours or more years, less breakdowns? Is that the hope?

So the main benefit that we went to when we switched the caterpillars back in 2018 was the operator usability. With the John Deere loaders at the time, at that point, they have two joysticks that control the plow and the wing functions. So essentially when you're running the wing operations, you need to take your hands off the steering wheel because you need to run the joystick to raise and lower it, and then there's a secondary joystick to run the wing. With the cat equipment, everything is on one joystick with all the controls on one. So you have one hand on the steering wheel, one hand on the joystick. Obviously it's a safety issue at that point. At this point, John Deere is now redesigned from when we started doing that point. But for the operators that we have, when we have everything that's the same across the board, they can jump from one to the next and the operation from one to all the other seven over one is the same. So that's the objective. There is some, yeah, we haven't had a lot of issues with them. I'll admit that. As Rick can attest, you can have two pieces of equipment that come from the same manufacturer, and if one was made on a bad day that it wasn't your lucky day, you can have problems with it. The name on the door doesn't necessarily signify everything. Anything else? Any other questions? All right. We can go to the back. Hold on. This is a 2016 case, 590, it's a loader backhoe. Initially when I would say Public Works started, that's probably where the heart and soul of these machines were. They were the heart and soul of nearly every Public Works department in every state in the United States. They're a great piece of equipment, they do a phenomenal job. There's a few downsides to them, we've realized that over the years. We've now changed to having dedicated excavators There is certain jobs that these machines, we still need. We have two of these machines in our fleet. We will maintain one of them in our fleet because there's certain jobs that they fit that niche for. They work very well. The downfall to them is when we are opening up a street and we're replacing concrete panels, we're doing storm sewer repairs, whatever it may be, in order for this machine to load into the truck, you need to have closed down two lanes of traffic in order to get there because your range of motion with this machine is restricted to... basically 180 degrees. That's all you get. When we go to an excavator, you have 360 degrees of rotation, so you can park the truck in front of you, you can dig behind you, and then you can spin around, and then you can put it in the truck in front of you. Work zones, obviously, are smaller. The other difference is these machines with extend-a-hole, when the extend-a-hole came out, which extend-a-hole means is the bucket, you see that bucket that's on there right now, it extends to twice that length. It was a game-changer when that came out, but your limitation is how much you can dig with it when you get to that point. As you extend that out, you can load less because it's moving it farther out on the pendulum. We've recognized that. We've had the conversations about looking at different options that we can try to do. Obviously, Brian's crew, this machine is used extensively by them. Joe's crew works on it, working storm sewer, sanitary sewer replacements. There's a limitation to how far we can dig, and we're getting to the point that we're pushing up against the limitation of what this machine can dig. And it's resulted in a few times that we've actually had to have contractors do the work that we were capable of doing, just didn't have the right equipment to do the job. So by going to a different type of machine, which is an excavator that's on wheels, allows us to get to the job site without having to trailer the piece of equipment, plus gives us about three times the amount of digging depth is what we can get out of this machine and keeping it a smaller footprint of the work zone that they're working in. The capacity of the machine is about three times what this machine is as well. So as we start to lay concrete pipe in, as Brian pulls out heavy concrete panels as he's replacing streets, we no longer have to break the panels up as small because we can take them in bigger chunks to put them in the trucks to get them out of there. Obviously, we're trying to keep their efficiencies. Plus then, the reality is if we're not using a piece of equipment, it sounds great because we're not getting hours on it. But as a piece of machinery just sits there and doesn't get used, it degrades. And then it costs us more money and repairs to keep it going for the once in a lifetime opportunity when we do use it. So that is the reason why we're changing the layout of this machine and going to a wheel excavator instead of doing a loader backhoe. Like I said, we have two of these. The second machine will still remain a loader backhoe because there is certain jobs that they work very well at. When we do that piece of equipment, Aaron is getting a different loader backhoe that was budgeted for last year and approved. The attachments between the two machines were specifically targeting a specific machine so that if it gets to a point where he has a major tree issue or storm damage going on, we can go over with our equipment and help him do cleanup work. with the same attachments that interchange between the two machines. So trying to get to the point of commonality across machines where possible. There are certain machines you just can't do it with, but in this case, there's a specific machine that we're able to get the same attachments from one to the next. It's going to be a benefit to the entire city so that we can work together to get items cleaned up when there's problems that exist. Any questions on a loader backhoe? Correct. Yep. The question was, we have two of the machines. Are we going to get rid of this one and then keep one?

Anything else?

You're making it too easy on me tonight.

Sure.

The second machine, the question was, when we get rid of this machine, what do we do with it? So what we do with the machine, with all of our equipment here, Our first objective is if there's a use within another city department, we'll try to utilize it at another department. In this case, probably won't exist. So at that point, we would sell it at auction. It goes to a public auction that anybody has the ability to bid on. And the last one we had when the second machine was replaced in 2017, that machine actually ended up going to Florida. So it's a national auction company that we use. It's called GovDeals. And we sell... 99% of our equipment on that website. So opens it up to a large audience, which there's some other companies out there that auction equipment off. They get to a smaller audience. This gets it out to a worldwide audience in some cases. We've actually had some people, a vac truck we had for the clean water plant that actually went overseas when we sold it. So we try to get to the, in certain, you know, like when we get rid of ambulances or fire trucks, we'll try to do whatever we can to see if we can market it. There are certain things that just have a limited market that you're not, it's a niche thing that public works or fire police, whatever use, you're just not going to get a lot of people that want it. But then there's other things that as we try to standardize things and make it more attractive for the general public, when we buy things, instead of buying unique pieces and drive buying things that are more run of the mill, it makes it more attractive. And then it helps us on the resale value to offset the cost of new equipment. Thank you. Okay. Then we'll go to the red truck. So this is a 2017 F-350. It's a crew truck. It is used by the heavy crew leader. He oversees anything that's asphalt, concrete, construction, grading that they do around the city. Obviously, there's tools and components that are in the truck to take to the job site for what the crews need. This truck has 108,000 miles on it. It's been a great truck. It's to the point that the box of it is, we actually received some damage at the point of what it was going to cost to replace it. It wasn't feasible to replace it, so we just put it up for normal replacement instead. The replacement that we're going to be purchasing would be basically the same thing, just a new version of it. So nothing really exciting here. It's pretty key to when the guy's out, the crew leader's out managing salt plowing operations, any construction projects that the heavy crew's working on, leaf pickup, brush pickup, you name it, he's running around taking supplies, taking tools, brooms, brushes, you name it. That's what he's taking with this truck running out there. There's a fuel tank on it because this truck here fuels up the horizontal grinder. If you remember, a couple years ago, we replaced the big horizontal grinder that grinds up all the brush. This is the truck that fuels that grinder up, the construction equipment that's on job sites for different grading projects. Brian has his crew working on. That's the truck that's running the fuel. We use it for many things. The fire department has used it when we've had either our fires or mutual aid fires, so we can take fuel to different fire apparatus that are on different jobs. So it's kind of a Swiss Army knife for our crews. Any questions? Okay. All right, I don't know if you have any questions. We kind of talked about the plow trucks. I don't know if we have any other questions on the plow trucks. They're kind of one in the same. Yeah, yeah, we'd replace the body and the truck. If you look at the other side of it, you will see why we're replacing the body of it. There was a... Part of the clean water plan and the return flow water project, there was a pipe that was sticking on the ground and it was very tight to get out of the driveway and it kind of went down the side of the truck. So at that point, they basically said we were going to have to replace the body and it was trucks within a couple of years of replacement. Let's just hold off and just replace the truck instead. So.

Thank you.

Yeah. That actually wasn't why I parked it like that either, to be honest with you. We'll go all of us. The truck has 378,000 miles on it. The biggest downfall to this truck, to be honest with you, is the nearly 13,000 hours that the engine has on it. At this point, this motor that's in this truck, it has excessive blow-by. It is to the point of needing a major overhaul. A major overhaul on this truck is close to the $50,000 mark. Obviously, that's exceeding the value of the truck at this point. So what this truck does is Brian's crew has a paver. We have our own paver, obviously. We have an asphalt mill that we've rented. From time to time, we haul it on a semi-trailer. If you look out in the parking lot out front, that's where the trailer is that this hauls around. This also hauls the grinder, the horizontal grinder that we replaced a few years ago. And then there's a dirt shredder that's up at Park Rec that we move with it as well. It is the only one we have in the city. We purposely set up the trailer so that this does not have a wet kit on the truck. That way, if something would occur, in worst case, we had to rent a truck, we'd be able to because we didn't need the hydraulics on the truck. Instead, the trailer itself is self-contained with the hydraulics on it. Not a bad truck by any means. We've spent quite a bit of money on this truck, about $70,000 we put in this truck since we purchased it in 2012. At this point, we would just go to a new truck. At the point, at the time... The main driving purchasing the used truck was obviously new ones were expensive. At that point, the main purpose behind that truck was to haul the horizontal grinder around. Now that we've changed the way operations are, now having the trailer to pull the paver around because the paver got to be heavier and the rollers and different equipment, the truck is used a lot more now than it actually has ever been before. Hence the reason for time to do upgrade on the truck. Is there any questions on the semi? The question was if this truck could be, this is the only truck that could be utilized for the purpose. Yeah. It is the only fleet within the city that has a fifth wheel on it that can haul a fifth wheel trailer. Obviously these trucks all have pintle hitches on them to tow like a tag trailer. This has a fifth wheel just like a semi trailer you see going on the road. This is the only one in the city that we have to do that. Yeah, we would buy a new one. Correct. Any other questions? At least 20 years I would anticipate, yeah. The main driving force, obviously the budget of 28 was kind of what kicked some of this up, but then the incentive right now is we're able to purchase this truck pre-28 emissions and still get 27 emissions on it, so it'll have one less on it that we have to deal with. So, yeah, this was kind of a trial thing of here's a cheap way for us to get rid of the truck that we had did not have the capacity to haul the grinder. This obviously did. It was a very, it was a cost effective way for us to get the grinder moved around. Then once we started, when we got the bigger paver, they got the bigger trailer, it was, all right, we'll use the truck. Let's see how things go. And it's getting to the point of, okay, we're kind of on bought time with a motor. Usually about 10,000 hours is the point at which you do a major overall on them. So we've exceeded that point. To the best of my knowledge, everything that I've looked up, I can't find that anything's been ever done to that motor. Obviously, we've done repairs to the motor since it's been here, hence the money we stuck in it, but it's kind of a ticking time that I don't really feel like dealing with when it goes down. It's not going to be cheap. No, they don't. Any other questions?

All right.

I will hand over the microphone to Tim. Tim wants to talk about ambulance and...

All set. Good evening. Tim Fleming, assistant chief for the fire department. A couple items here tonight, the ambulance and then utility five. So this is a replacement ambulance here. This is the second part of a two-year process. This is the purchased, I'm sorry, the chassis we purchased this year, working with John and first priority group. We're able to see about $10,000 in savings by purchasing that ambulance chassis this year and then spreading this project over two years. So the second part of this process then is sending this off to get the rest of the build completed. In working with our committee, we were able to realize some new features that are available with the new build. A lot of that has to do with the interior configuration, the safety of both the customers that we're transporting as well as our members when we're going there. So widening the interior seat, what we call the CPR seat, allows a little bit more flexibility when we're treating that patient based on the size and age of that patient. The five-point harnesses that are for our members as we're transporting on the bench seat, the addition of a bench and cabinet. That cabinet centralizes those life-saving items and equipment that are inside the box of this and sort of an area that both members of our department during transport can access those much easier. Other than that, some of the other things we did, we looked at reducing some of the exterior lightings, sort of that decontenting project, and putting together a product that I think will suit our community very well. Any questions with the ambulance process? If not, we can move over to the utility. 10 years, so they're in our frontline for seven and then they go to reserve for three and then come off. Good, okay, we'll slide down. All right, so this is utility five, currently housed out at station five. So a little bit different vehicle than perhaps everybody's used to seeing as far as the fire department response. But this piece of equipment is vital to sort of that support role and function for the fire department. And when we look at that true 24 seven response capabilities and some of those extra responsibilities and projects that we have to take care of. So things like response to emergency scenes and some of those larger scale things from hauling air bottles, bringing back damaged or used hose after an incident, bringing out those rehab Gatorade snack pieces that we need for our folks when we have those longer work cycles. On top of that, you'll see it pulling the new fire safety house as this fall comes around and we get out into the schools and we started looking at bringing our safety house out to the kids and other community events. This becomes that tow vehicle to haul that trailer around. When we look at the use of our burn building and our tech rescue building, the fire... Mr. Shearer talked about the fire trading facility down there and some of those expendable items, I'll say, that take to facilitate that pallet, the excelsior bales, other components that support the use and training of those facilities. This just becomes that sort of safety, if you will, that allows us to do all those other pieces so we're not taking engine companies out of service and using equipment we don't need to haul those additional items. Questions on Utility 5? Fantastic. Who's next? I can. I don't know if I'm going to do you much value. Thank you.

So the van behind me is Van 61. It's used by the Buildings Department for Park Rec. They've used it, basically they use it for the maintenance of the different facilities that they have around the city, whether it's cleaning or repairs or whatnot. It's used during the day shift, and then also they have a second shift staff that uses it as well. As you can see, it's kind of getting to the point that it's starting to show its age. This vehicle has 116,000 miles on it, has served a great purpose, but is to the point that it's ready to see somebody else use it for the rest of its usable life. We have about six different vans, different configurations that Tony's team uses for different operations that they use for different things, whether it's building maintenance, actual repair, plumbing, electrical, you name it. So they kind of have their distinct purpose. They have all their tools and equipment in them to do whatever job is designated for them. This is typically, you know, opening, closing, cleaning buildings for his staff. The replacement for this vehicle would be a Ford Transit, similar configuration, but obviously would have shells inside of it. We've kind of gone with Tony working on his replacement of his vehicles to get the transits. They're able to get a little more headroom out of them instead of having to crawl in and out of their knees all the time and in the back of them not really the greatest of environments so it's worked out quite well for him and we would just continue that standardization is what we've done with the rest of his vehicles any questions on the van all right then we'll go to truck five which is behind it this is a 2000 gmc uh one of the last that were made in janesville um it's It's been a great truck. They utilize it between parades and a lot of watering that they do. I'll be 100% honest with you, the truck has 31,000 miles on it. Though the mileage seems great, I will say that it has been a challenge to get a lot of parts for this truck. It's getting to the point that 26 years, There's things that we've had to make and parts that we've tried to find boneyards for, and it's kind of a morphidite truck, not exactly front and center for a lot of things. So there's components on it that are similar to a pickup truck, but there's enough things that are different about it. To be honest, Chevy's kind of experimented in this medium-duty truck market now a few times. The last, they just tried it again, and actually... It would be beginning of this year, end of last year, they actually quit production of that vehicle and have given up on that. We would be standardizing this. It would be a Ford F600. What we would be doing different on this truck is right now this has a dumping system. tips, but it is fixed to it. We'd be going to a roll-off setup similar to what you see with a roll-off dumpster. So it can have different attachments. So this tank would be mounted to a flatbed. When they're not using it to water trees, then they can take that off. They could put another flatbed on it that they could have for just hauling different pumps and different whether it's a parade float or materials, whatever it would be. There's a dumpster attachment to go with it so that when they go and have volunteer programs, that volunteer will come mulch a park. They can fill it up with mulch, drop it off at the project. They can take the mulch out of it, and when they're done with it, whatever's left over, they pick it up, take it away, and don't have to clean up the mess. So it's kind of going to be a Swiss Army knife of sort for them with different abilities to have different attachments for it so they can move it around and get better utilization of it. Obviously, the miles are low on it because it's one of those deals where it has a single purpose. I think we come up with a really good plan to come up with something that we can use a lot more and get better utilization out of. So is there any questions on this? The question was if you have to have special equipment to change the attachments. So essentially what it is, is if you've ever seen, I don't know if you've ever seen like a dumpster get dropped off. So it comes off, there's a hook that's on it and that it's hydraulically done that it will angle and then it'll slide down and then release whatever attachment is on it. And then you can move to another one. And with that same hook, you grab a hold of it, pull it up and put it on the truck body itself. It will, When the truck's driving on the road, it's going to look the same as what this looks right now. It's just going to have a mechanism underneath it and in front of it that allows it to change the bodies itself and change different items off of it. No, the money that we put in for the budget is the vehicle. The hook lift is what they call the mechanism that lifts the bodies and the different bodies that we project right now that we would be using to replace what this truck currently does. There would be attachments. Yeah, there's, I believe, four different attachments for it. And then it would be something in the future that just for a conversation's sake, on average, the attachments that go on it are right around $10,000. So it's kind of a low cost compared to the overall purchase of the entire vehicle. That's the initial, the onslaught of it is actually buying the vehicle, putting the attachment on it, and then afterwards is then buying the different attachments as you see fit. and then obviously what works best. There's a multitude. There's, I believe, about 10 or 12 different items that you can put on the back of them based upon what each job is.

Go ahead.

So is the use case shared amongst the different departments that are carrying within the city here, and is that part of, like, your budget and the other departments' budgets as well? We'll share that since this, I believe, would be part of assessing other jobs within

So the question was if the dollars to purchase the vehicle and the operating dollars are spread across the different departments. So Park Rec essentially owns the vehicle. As we share different items around different departments, and we do that very often, We don't say, okay, you use this truck for a day, you owe me $1,000. We don't rent that out. It's kind of the gentleman's agreement of you take it in the condition like this tractor, you get it in this condition, you return it in that condition. If you damage it, then you take it out of your operating budget to repair that vehicle. They're not paying for the damage. They're paying for the normal wear and tear, daily operation. And like the fuel thing, we don't really get crazy about the fuel unless it's a really long project that you're going to have it for a month. Well, then we would charge the fuel to that department. But most of the time, we just let it be because it's not that big of a deal, to be honest with you.

Thank you.

Any other questions? All right. Then we'll go to the tractor dealership in the corner here. So I'll somewhat generalize the conversation across the three tractors, kind of like what I do with plow trucks, because I don't think you want to listen to the same spiel on all three of them. The layman's terms of these tractors, the two John Deere tractors on the end are used to maintain the ball diamonds at the various parks around the city that have baseball. It grooms all the dirt and obviously preps it for the field, whether it be the field or the actual diamond itself. They're in very good shape. I won't deny that part. What the struggle we have with them right now is because they were, when they were purchased, they were purchased with one idea in mind of this is only going to take care of the ball diamond. When there's other projects that are out of baseball season, we don't have the ability to do those things with them because they don't have loaders on them. They don't have cabs on them. They don't have tires with configurations that we can do construction work because they're designed to be on a, you know, be turf friendly, so to say. What we've worked with on... Two of the tractors is we're gonna standardize these two tractors to the same tractor, same configuration. They'll have a loader on them. There'll be four-wheel drive. They'll have tires that can do projects accordingly and with lift capacities that they can do their project with besides also taking care of all of the turf and ball diamond issues. The other tractor, what we're going to do with it is there is, it's called a Ventrac. What that machine is is you buy the machine And with that machine, you have different attachments that you can put onto that machine to do different tasks. One of them, obviously, is so they can take care of the ball diamond. They need to do that. But then there's also some hillside mowing that have extreme slopes to them that you need a machine that has a very low center of gravity and has weight distribution very wide so you can be stable on that ground. That's what we're proposing to replace one of these tractors with. That way they can get some other tasks done. Right now they have to have very specialized pieces of equipment to come in or, in some cases, have a contractor do it. be able to do that in-house Travis's crew has demoed that vehicle extensively and kind of figured out what actually does work and found out that there's a lot of benefits to doing that and getting something that we have somewhat low utilization on some of these pieces of equipment because they were purposely built for one on job we want to start now looking at things and saying okay is we're gonna spend this money how can we spend this money wisely so we can use it for more things than just the one task of taking care of all diamonds so Travis was very great to work with on that. I think we came up with a very good conclusion in the end of something that's going to work very well to go across the board for that.

I have a question that specifically for this piece of equipment, the county owns some of these, it's actually a remote control. So no matter what the angle is, it's the operators not in any danger because it can just go. And because it's so low to the ground, it's very efficient and it's fast as they want. Did you guys ever check into that for any extreme angles?

Yeah, there was a few years ago that we did a few things, trying out different like remote control things. They had done that, I actually believe before Travis actually got the position and it had some value to it, but they're extremely expensive, very specialized piece of equipment. And again, when you can justify the cost of that piece of equipment, doing that task, that's great. But when it can't do 90% of the other things, but can excel at 10% of it, it's not really a good use of our dollars. So we try to make it so that we can do something that can do more than one thing. So you're welcome.

You had mentioned that with this new piece of equipment, the Ventrac, right, that right now there are some tasks you're hiring contractors to do. Is the intent that buying that you'd replace that with instead of having to hire a contractor, we do it internally then?

Yes, that would be the idea behind it. Obviously, there are certain tasks that are very specialized that it's not right for, but in most cases what he found is that he was able to do those jobs in-house with the staff that he had instead of having to have others do that work. It won't completely eliminate it, but it will significantly reduce it.

Thank you.

Welcome.

Did you say that one of the intentions is to be able to do snow removal in parks and things like that? Is that one of the goals for it to go out on the bike paths and parks and things like that?

So the question was if we could do snow removal with it. By going to the tractors that have the cabs on them, we could go to being able to use them for snow removal. Currently, there's a lot of reconfiguration of the plow routes that's been going on to try to optimize between contractor work and then staff that they have to try to minimize that amount of work. We do have some pieces of equipment that are very specialized for sidewalks. They have tried a few different approaches to doing sidewalks. They've come to the same conclusion nearly every time they've tried something that the tracklesses, though very expensive, are very effective at doing sidewalks very well. And then minimizing also the turf damage. You know, obviously a sidewalk's only so wide. You get a piece of equipment that's wider than the sidewalk, It's great in winter, but nobody wants to see it in springtime. So they've kind of reverted back to that. But they're as different, like they can clean parking lots, clean wider areas with some of these pieces of equipment. And by going to the cabs that you can use year-round, it gives us that ability to do that. They have a few pusher plows that they can put on these now. In the past, they were very limited to using them only in a skid loader. Now they can use them on the two tractors that would replace these as well because they'll accept both the loaders that we put on these would accept skid loader attachments. Any attachment that would go to a universal quick attach can go on those tractors. Anybody else? Okay. I'll move on to the vehicles. So the maroon vehicle behind me is a 2009 Chevy Colorado. It's used, I would say, it's kind of Melissa's vehicle for doing a lot of running around that she has to do. Other staff uses it as well. It's been used by numerous people to do different tasks around the city. Essentially, it's getting materials and people around different job sites to visit different parks that have projects going on to it. Really nothing exciting. It's just a vehicle to move people, move equipment with it. Hasn't been a terrible vehicle. I haven't stuck a ton of dollars into it. We're trying to get to the point of not keeping things till they look like that. So we're trying to get rid of why they have some residual purpose to them to get out of that. It would be replaced with a Ford Ranger, similar configuration, nothing really exciting for any means. This is not used for any snow removal or anything of any sort. It's merely for moving people and materials to different sites around the city. 59, say 59, 500 miles. So just shy of 60,000 miles on it. It actually might be over now from when we put the numbers in here. It might be a little higher, but that's what that was. The Colorado that's next to it, that is a 2018. This truck here was extensively used for doing the wider sidewalks and plow pathways. If anybody remembers back when we used to have all the Jeeps that used to do a lot of the trails. Those tasks. So we don't really have a lot of use, a lot of choices that are out there. The downfall to it is, though you can buy a plows on them, the obviously boss engineers plows for them. The vehicles aren't designed to really be doing a lot of what we're doing with them. So what we start to see is transmissions that are starting to slip causing issues. We're trying to get ahead of that to not have to have those breakdowns and have those expensive. The tractors, there's been conversations, there's different things going on with different plow routes. The replacement truck for this will not have a plow on it. So that'll actually be able to extend the life of the vehicles now because we don't have that. on those vehicles, hopping curves, doing stuff with them. It isn't the greatest on them. Is there any questions on that? So in the summertime, Travis typically is the user of it. He has a trailer that it pulls around in the summertime with the more, sometimes four individuals that are in it. Sites around the city doing lawn mowing and trimming and maintenance of flower beds, you name it. You can fit five, but realistically four. Yeah.

How many days of the year are they in the shop?

To be honest with you, this actually just came out of the shop. We actually had it by us for the last three days doing repairs to electrical repairs to the truck. So the utilization year-round, the replacement of the vehicle would be the same vehicle. It'll be a Ford Ranger, small vehicle. We don't need, for what his crews are doing, we don't need a large vehicle. And in many cases, they don't want a large vehicle because they're going into tight parks, small areas. You think of Frame Park, if you think of the pathway around Frame Park, Do you want to be driving a big pickup truck around there? Do you want to drive this smaller vehicle? So it is somewhat purposeful. We lay out vehicles based on what their intended use is, not necessarily just saying, hey, we want every truck to be a one-ton truck. There's many cases where it doesn't work for it. No, it's... Okay.

has major problems that's just my thoughts and the same thing with this if you go another five years without major problems and resale value isn't going to make that much difference so i'm just telling the council what my opinion is you're all free to make your own and i'm not picking on parks but i'm just telling you

And like I said, as we have changed the purpose of the vehicles, the life cycle of the vehicle will change as well. As we take away from the snow plowing and doing all the salting with it, the wear and tear goes down significantly and we can get to the point that we can keep them a lot longer. But the nature of the snow plowing, hopping curbs with them, Let's face it, when this truck was designed, yeah, it was designed for a hairy homeowner to go plow his little driveway that's, you know, 1,000 feet long, not to go plow miles of sidewalk and go jump curbs all day long. It gets into a lot of that. Yeah, but you also got to recognize one thing. What you're also missing the point of is we can't afford downtime with some of this stuff. When they're plowing, and they have three of these vehicles that are set up to do that, if two of them go down because the front end goes out of them, whether the four-wheel drive blows out of them or the front end blows out, ball joints, half shafts, well, we don't have other pieces that can do the job that these do. We're very limited. It's not like a plow truck where we have 45 different plow trucks. Well, okay, we get one that goes down. We'll put another truck in its place. We can deal with that. With these unique pieces of equipment we have, we don't have that surge capacity. So maintaining them so we don't break down because of the downtime, that's what our objective is to get to that point. Well, that's fine.

Yep, that's fine.

Any other questions on this? All right, we'll move on to the last pickup truck. So kind of where Rick started with the last truck, I want to hit on a few things. This truck actually is in very good condition, no doubt about it. Has a lot of life left. Some of the reason of what we're doing with these vehicles, this vehicle, when we replace it, will actually go to the cemetery and be utilized at the cemetery. We actually pulled a $50,000 pickup truck out of the cemetery Because this truck here, when we replace it, can take that place of that truck. We no longer have to spend that money. So some of when we replace vehicles is not just because we want all brand new stuff and I want everything brand new walking into the shop and it looks great. Some of it is also just managing the vehicle's life so we can utilize some of the secondary life of that vehicle and utilize it to offset expenses in other departments. We've done that with multiple vehicles. Right now, the cemetery is going to be getting a truck this year that we replaced with last year's budget. They'll get that truck for a year. It's got some rust, got a few things going on with it. We're going to use it. When the replacement for this truck comes in, then this truck will go replace that one, and that one gets sent to auction to replace that. So we try to do that. where it fits it doesn't fit in every single circumstance but there's certain circumstances that it works very well for and it's a good cost savings for other departments we did it with community development last year we took a vehicle from jennifer that was a ford fusion was a great vehicle still had many much life left in it we gave it to the cemetery to replace a 2001 mercury sable there was zero cost to the city by doing that because we repurposed the vehicle that would with the purpose of this is it's not a bad vehicle no doubt about it The struggle that Travis has with it is that actually is supposed to seat five people in it. You look in the back seat of it and you put four adults in that vehicle, not really conducive to being comfortable, even if you're not driving very far. So we're able to take something that does the job, get them to something that can do their job more effectively, get people there, get equipment there, and then take this vehicle and repurpose it to somebody else that will fit exactly what the cemetery needs. They saw the truck and went, this will work great for us. So that's some of what we do. It's not just I want to spend everybody's money. Some of it is looking at the big picture and looking how we move things around. We've done it with vans at Park Rec. We've got a van that was going to go to auction, replace another van that had very low utilization, couldn't really justify replacing the vehicle. So we take one that's in good condition, give it to them and get rid of the one that's in higher miles, worse condition. And you don't even see that because it's just something we do behind the scenes. And that's where the, having the global view of what we're doing with the fleet, we have that ability to look around and we kind of know what everybody has because we see a lot of it and we kind of see conditions and we can figure out, hey, you think maybe this would work for you? would this be a way that you can get your job done? So we look at that, and this is a prime example of that. So I'm not going to argue about the condition of it because, yes, it's a great vehicle. It has a lot of life left in it, hasn't had a lot of problems with it. We're just trying to capitalize on the residual of it to repurpose that. Any questions? Maybe I talk too much. The last thing for Park Rec is going to be a chipper. Pretty near and dear to Aaron. That's why Aaron wanted to stand near the chipper. Obviously, in light of all the storms we've had lately, they've been getting a pretty good workout. I would say probably the biggest thing we fight with chippers is foreign debris and wood. When you've got a tree that's got a wire that's wrapped in it, and it was wrapped in there 30 years ago, and you put the log in the chipper and it eats it up, There's damage that occurs. That's been a lot of the issues that we've had at chippers. There's really no true way to stop that. I mean, his crew is very good about looking it over, but if it's in the middle of a tree and you can't see it, there's nothing you can do. We have two sizes of chippers in the city. Aaron has two larger chippers, and then this is the smallest chipper he has. Some common sense would be, hey, let's just get all big chippers. Why do we got to have small ones? Reason behind it, if they're going to go into a park, if they're going to a small area, the weight of the chipper is very significant, a difference between the larger ones and the smaller ones, in excess of probably about 5,000 to 6,000 pounds. So with the smaller chippers, they're able to get into some smaller areas that deal with some issues and do a lot less turf damage and restoration work after they get the tree out of there. So that's the logic behind the different sizes of chippers. It's not been a bad chipper. We have standardized our manufacturers of chippers. Aaron's worked great with the vendor on that to get things manufactured across all. We have bandit chippers across the board of all the chippers that we have. They've been very good. Like I said, we've had foreign debris go through every single one of them. So it's not at all that something that we can get away from, but it's something that we try to avoid as much as possible. So any questions on a chipper?

mowers and the chippers. When we replace them, does that go out for an RFP or how does that work? How does the purchasing process work? Do you walk into a dealership or does it go out for bid?

Sure. So in most cases, there's a lot of pre-bid contracts that are out there that we can take advantage of the government. There's national, there's state, and local. There's contracts that the county will bid out, and then we're able to piggyback off of those contracts that are out there that are already competitively bid. There's national contracts, NJPA, Sourcewell. There are contracts that are very advantageous for us to take advantage of. The plus side of the contracts is the prices are very well laid out for what we are. They're competitive. We bid already. It's accepted by council, the programs that we use. But then that's how we're able to get to the standardization of some of this equipment. The bidding process is a great process, but low bid is not always the right answer. Just because it's cheap doesn't mean it's the best piece of equipment. Like I said, when we have chippers, we have spare knives for all the chippers. Well, if we're bidding a chipper and we get whatever's low bid that year, now you've got three times the parts that are out there. You've got operators that are getting trained in different pieces of equipment. So it gets to be a real trick. So the contracts allow us to get to the point of, okay, this piece of equipment works very good for us. We don't have breakdowns with it. We can get parts. We can get support. Therefore, we can get to that point. Does that answer? Yes.

Okay.

Anything else? Any other questions? All right. Well, we're on the downside now. We'll go to an exciting golf cart. So this is a 2002 easy go golf cart. Obviously, it's nothing too exciting. The back of it, we were able to make a contraption because the old contraption that was on there rotted out. It's used for watering of flowers and anything around the cemetery. Kind of go-to for a lot of their summer help for doing maintenance around the golf or the cemetery this is one of five golf carts that they have we're able this last year to capitalize on upgrading some of their other golf carts this here is an electric golf cart sounds great the batteries are really expensive and they don't really get to the point of lasting all day so they've gotten to the point now where we've gone to gas carts they can get through the day they can do what they need to do they can climb the hills a lot better obviously carrying the water around on them Yeah, it's meant to carry your golf clubs, but the water tank's probably pushing it a little bit. So with the gas engine, we get to that point. These golf carts, to be honest with you, there's not a lot of repair costs that we know of them because a lot of the maintenance is done over at the cemetery. Obviously, there's no engine on it, so it's just a matter of the batteries they've replaced over the years. The batteries are getting to the point that they're obviously, we all know the batteries aren't cheap. So the plan would be to go to a golf cart that's got a cargo box on it that has heavier springs in it, heavier load carrying capacity that's designed to haul the water tank. This machine here was solely a golf cart that was repurposed to put a water tank on the back of it. They've looked at going to different size vehicles. We did a demo last year with it. It's hard to find narrow enough vehicles to get into some of the areas they need to get to to do some of the watering they have to do. And then obviously when you get some of the summer staff that's on it, you get a wider vehicle, then they're hitting headstones, hitting different things in the cemetery. Nobody wants to be dealing with repairing that stuff. So it's worked out quite well that we've had the golf carts and this would just be a continuation of the other golf carts that are in the fleet for them. Any questions on the golf cart? I'm sure everybody wants to go golfing instead of watering. All right, so the next piece of equipment, we are not replacing this piece of equipment. I'll give that. What this is is we actually switched to these machines last year for doing leaf pickup and brush pickup for getting the leaves off the terrace. In that process, others have seen them and said, hey, that would work pretty cool to be cleaning up the cemetery so we can clean up between headstones instead of having to be out there with backpack blowers endlessly for days. The struggle we have with it is we have three of these that we are using at the same time that the cemetery needs them, naturally. Leaves all fall at the same time. Everybody wants their leaves cleaned up for leaf pickup. So though it would be great to share them, we can share them during the summer, and that's not a problem. But the nature of how we're doing our leaf pickup, we had the conversation about adding one to their fleet for the cemetery. They've worked out very well. We did a demo of multiple different manufacturers, and these have worked out extremely well. A lot less terrace damage when we're... taking leaves off the terraces you don't have people carrying backpack blowers around all day burn gas it's a lot more operator friendly and obviously the amount of air that this machine moves is way more than you can get out of five backpack blowers so that's kind of how this came i just brought this one down obviously we have the picture in here but that way you could physically see what we're talking about just as a representation but this is not getting replaced it actually has 1.1 hours on it right now so it's brand new so any questions on the right on blower Okay. All right, down to the last two. So this is a gravely zero turn moor. We have since 2021 standardized to all John Deere zero turns across the fleet over at the cemetery. The cemetery has a little different use for their mowers than what Park Rec does. Obviously, Park Rec is trying to mow a lot of wider areas, in some case smaller areas. They're very limited that the deck can only be 48 inches wide on them because of the spacing of the gravestones throughout the cemetery. Back when this machine was purchased in 2022, there was very limited availability of units. There was very long lead times to get them. They had multiple machines that were basically dying at the same time. At the time, this was the machine that they could get a hold of. They tried it. It has very low hours on the machine. It does not mulch nearly as good as what the John Deere's do. It doesn't operate nearly as well and doesn't... but is good. So what we've had the discussion about similar to the pickup truck down there is fire station four has a hand-me-down old zero turn from the cemetery that now has pretty much gotten to the point that Tim's going to have to go push mow it and he doesn't want to do that. So what we're going to do is the machine is not a bad unit. It still has some life left in it, has the ability to keep going. This machine will be given to the fire station four to be mowing the grounds around station four. Then the machine that station four has will then go to auction with the proceeds going to offset this machine here. I've worked with Karen extensively. We've done a nice job of kind of working through her. Obviously, for them, their bread and butter are the golf carts and their mowers. That's the majority of what they have. Obviously, they have one dump truck and they have one pickup truck. That's their livelihood of what they need to do over there, keep things going. So there's a long-term plan that we were basically replacing a zero-turn-a-year just to keep the blood moving in and out. We've got This one here has 850 hours on it. She has a mower that is two years old that has nearly 2,000 hours on it because those machines mulch and mow so much better than what these are doing. It doesn't make sense to keep them around if they're not working. So we're able to put them somewhere else that they can be used, get some life out of them, and then get her something that standardizes with what she has in the remaining five altogether mowers that she has at the cemetery. Any questions on the zero-turn? OK. Last one, then you don't have to listen to me for a while. This truck here, I don't have the year in it. I believe it's a 2016 F-150. It is used by the clean water plant next door. Clean water plant is a little different than most. Obviously, when it comes to what they're doing, they don't have a lot of miles on their vehicle. This vehicle here has 40,000 miles on it. But what it has is this truck here is well over 10,000 hours of idle time on it. Obviously, when it comes to freezing temperatures and cold temperatures, they're working with water at the Clean Water Plant on the multitude of different repairs they're doing. These trucks have to idle in order to keep those tools warm and unfroze. So that's the killer to the vehicles that are over there. We've changed the vehicles that we purchased for them over there. We've gone to all-gas vehicles instead of diesel. The diesel vehicles, though they're towing heavy generators and such, it's not worth the headache that they create. So we've gone to that point. The truck is actually, right now, it's... Has an issue with high oil use, obviously due to the high hours that are on it. And if you sit in a seat, you'll break your back practically. It's getting pretty uncomfortable. So they're not a terrible vehicle. It's in decent shape. It's just got a ton of hours on it from idling from the nature of what they're doing, going around different lift stations at the clean water plant. We have done a few changes within their fleet trying to get the vehicles. They've got more utility vehicles that they use around the clean water plant. Obviously, we have a lower cost with the utility vehicles. Plus, when it comes to replacement time, we can replace them sooner, and it's at less cost what is a pickup truck. But there is certain things, whether it be a heavy material, every pump they're pulling, whatever it is, they do need to pick up truck in order to do those tasks. So we're... Due to the nature of the oil usage on this thing and what's going on with this probably will go to the auction. I don't know that we have a right purpose for this truck to get repurposed based on where it's at right now. Any questions? Okay.

Given that, I'll turn it over to Joe. John, phenomenal job. On behalf of the Finance Committee, I want to thank everybody that pulls this together. I mean, there's a lot of work that goes into this, and it's a great opportunity for all of us on the Council and the Finance Committee and the public to really get a sense on what goes into making the city go and how much all this stuff costs and really the plans, the extensive plans that the city has around the way we take a very thoughtful approach to equipment. So I want to thank everybody for coming tonight. For the council and the committee, our next meeting is the 8th of September, where we'll take a deeper dive into the capital budget. So please be prepared with any questions that you have for directors at the September 8th meeting. We'll also make a recommendation to council on the capital budget, and then we'll dig into operating budget probably starting in mid-September into October. Is there any referrals from the committee? Joe, any communications? All right. Next meeting's on the 8th. Seeing no objection, we are adjourned. Thanks again, everybody, and have a great evening. Thanks, folks.