Council - public_hearing

Brian, you ready? Okay.

Budget hearing for the city of Homewood September 15th, 2026. Councilor Simmons. Here. Councilor Sims is out. Councilor Lane.

Here.

Councilor Armstead is absent. And Mayor Andrews.

Here. Okay. All right. So, first of all, That is a great site right there. It's amazing. I think it's the first time we've had everybody in one place, maybe since we've all been together, maybe. So anyway, it's great to see everybody and glad to see you all up here at City Hall. Okay, so I'm going to kick the meeting off. I'm going to start. I want everybody to hear me say this. We will have public comments. Let me go backwards. Okay. So everybody heard that. So let me go backwards and say that we've always called these budget hearings. Um, and we have not ever taken public comment before. So this is my 11th, um, you know, uh, budget cycle and we've never taken public comment before. So this got posted as a public hearing and we are going to honor that. But let me say that we need to first do. what we always do which is to go through the process the meetings that we always have so we are going to hear like we would any other budget hearing today's the day we hear from all of our department heads so it may be a long night but we are going to do the process the way we always do it and then at the end we will have public comment and depending on how many people want to speak we may limit it to two minutes depending on what it is um let me say i'm going to echo councilor lane's comments last night we are only at the beginning of the second meeting of this whole process so we have a long way to go we are not voting tonight we are not making decisions tonight we are here to listen um We are here to hear and learn and work through things, but we are not making any decisions tonight, and we appreciate everyone who's here. And so, like I said, we will have public comment. It will come at the end after we hear from the department heads. That's it. So I'll hand it over at this point to our city manager.

All right, Brian. I gave you a stack, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you got a stack. You should have it.

All right.

I, too, want to thank all the employees and department heads for being here. We don't pay most of these folks overtime, so thank you for being here. I want to We'll talk about what we're going to do. We talked about this last week, kind of the process and format for each of these budget hearing meetings, we're going to talk about revisions that we've learned about in this case over the past week. We're going to talk about on Thursday, what's coming up, which are other funds, court funds, and the narcotics funds and chief, I think, Lieutenant Hampton.

That's right.

And Laura Roberts is going to be here tonight. We're talking about the general fund. And so that's why all the department heads are here. Laura Roberts is not here because she has court, but she will be here on Thursday night. Most of the money that is spent out of courts will be talked about Thursday night. She has very little in the general fund. we're good there again in code sheets you have the stack that in front of you that's not in your book but those are going to be what we talk about tonight because those have been updated from the last time we talked about this those are only expenditures those aren't their revenues because tonight we're only talking about expenditures all right so revisions this is This page is based on what we talked about last time. We had two comments come out of the revenues piece of it. One was about the public investment account. So we want to leave that at zero. We currently show revenues from public investments in two other accounts. It used to be three, which is why this account exists. So we would recommend just leaving it at zero. And then the vehicle sales tax vehicle registration sales tax from Jefferson County. I don't remember who made the comment, but they felt like 400 was a little too high. We went back and looked at it and we felt the same way. So we reduced that amount from 400 to 375. And then to balance that we are using now 3.5 million of fund balance. So we're using 25,000 more. A couple of other changes and Fundo for which we'll talk about at some point next week. We did not have budgeted the streetlights that we just installed along Central Avenue along the multimodal facility. So Randy got a price we were adding 5000 for that and to balance that we're going to borrow 5000 from fund balance and the gas tax fund. Building improvements capital they need a new air conditioning unit at community center So we're going to add 35 there and they're not, they don't need traffic. They don't need a new or they do need a new air conditioner, but we're going to do it right now in this year. So, um, left over a 17,000 that we're going to use from fund balance to balance that everybody good. All right. Just kind of a recap about what we talked about last time. revenues total 76.9 million dollars that's using 3.5 from fund balance so out of out of our savings we're using three three and a half million dollars to balance the general fund and this is where we get it from this number this slide i showed this slide when i originally proposed the budget on august the 10th that number came down a million dollars because of the opeb money that we're going to spend this year and not next year That's just a recap. All right. So the general fund covers all these departments. That's why they're all here. What we're going to do in a minute is to start at Department 10, which is administration, which includes HR, city clerk revenues and city manager's office. that's department 10 and then we're going to walk through all the departments ending at 29 and we're going to go in numerical order so 10 11 12 included in those departments is the general government which is fun which is department 12 uh too many numbers department 11. so we're going to go through that before most of these folks get a chance to talk i wanted to highlight another thing that I mentioned on August the 10th, which is personnel cost is $42.2 million of the general fund budget. That includes a 1% COLA not increasing employees contributions to their health care premiums, but health care premiums are going up between three and 5%. We budgeted 5% and the RSA contribution rate goes up to 22.45% from 20 where it was last year this year. What that means in real numbers is like, we provide tier one benefits, RSA benefits to our employees at a cost of about nine and a half million dollars. So that's important. $42 million worth of personnel covers 346 full time employees, 45 part time employees, 128 seasonal employees, which are lifeguards, camp counselors. All right. I want to talk about this real quick. Um, actually probably won't be real quick. So we've gotten recently a lot of questions, a lot of emails and phone calls around around personnel costs budgeted in FY 27 as it relates to FY 26 budget specifically around the police department. Um, I will say this, the police department's personnel budget was in FY26 was 13.7 million. This year's budgeted at 12.9 million. So it's a decrease in 6.4%. So that comparison needs a little bit of context. I don't know how the FY26 revenues were projected, how the people that worked here at the time assumed that those revenues were going to come in. I also don't know how the decision was made to jump $6 million from FY25 actual to the budget number in FY26. So we jumped $6 million in personnel costs from FY25, which is significant. Um, so the other comparison that's important is that not only the police department was decreased in FY 27, but eight or seven other departments budget numbers in 27 or less than they were in 26.

And the reason for that is because

beginning in the spring we did a really deep dive to figure out and understand who works here how much do we pay them what benefits do they have what is their actual cost to the city and from those numbers and based on 25 numbers we we put together the 27 budget for personnel cost. Now, the increase is still significant from 37 million and 25 to a budgeted number of 42 million and 27. That's an increase in 13.9%. That's a really significant number because every time we go up 1%, the cost is about $420,000. Why that matters is because every time this number goes up a percentage. We compound each year we have to carry that. That financial load into the following year, right? so i think the message here is pretty simple we also heard today that we are proposing to lay people off that's absolutely not true we're not laying anybody off um we just wanted to create a budget that reflected what our city currently looks like and um and make it accurate based on the revenues that we feel like we're going to get in fy27 which we went through last week and we talked about every single one of them So I just wanted to try to clear that. Are there any questions about this? And I gave you the sheet a minute ago that it's just like this.

Are there any questions about any of this? Do we have any actual as of today or say as of September 1 with our

total expenses have been up until now yes sir okay and so the sheets that we're going to go through tonight i think most of them are uh counted like are up to august or july august 31st august 31st two weeks ago which is yeah and which is closer than we've ever been to real-time information so that can actually give us a closer idea of what

our revenue. That's right.

So when we go through the expenses tonight, and you see that Bo has spent $25 on notebooks this year, that that information will be through. Oh, all right so with that we're going to start with department 10 which is administration um there's no easy way to do this so you have a packet what i handed out earlier and we can go through i can call out what if you want me to call or you can just spend some time looking through it and asking questions as they come up for Kim and Bo and myself to answer. So personnel call services in Department 10 is 1.6 million. That includes a $4,800 car allowance. That's a new thing. I'll explain car allowance. So we have three people in the city that get a car allowance. Aspen, Kim, and Judith, who are all department heads. Most department heads have a city vehicle. We're trying to cut that back. Good. So that's what that is. Contractual services are included in your book. So if you go to Department 10, you'll see what the contractual services pay for. So for their $169,000, you get 157 for Paycom, which is our payroll software, P.O. Box, I don't know what doc org is, and Citibot. So all that's included in your book, each contract. For supplies, I mean, you can read it. Bo, do you have anything to add?

No, nothing really to add. If y'all have any questions about anything in the city clerk's office, I'll be happy to answer.

Once again, what I'm looking at on the actual year to date right now is as of August 31.

Yeah. I mean, I would.

That's what I'm looking at, right? On all of it. On the action. Right. Good enough.

What do you have left for professional services for September?

With additional two. Go ahead.

Yeah. What do you have left for?

That's a good question. It has to be paid.

Yeah, and I think that some of the paid contractual services have been charged to finance that we discovered when we were looking, and so that needs to be reclassed. So you'll see when we get to finance that contractual services are over budget, but it's just a reclass country that needs to happen. Okay.

We were talking about on the financial end of it, say, our last previous contractual finance person who went off in July. OK. That was in the budget. Was that in the budget originally? And how was that? now that it's gone, is that in the contractual budget or was that in the financial?

It was in Department 11, which is general government.

Okay, it was in there, okay.

And I think it's still going to show up in here, and we'll get to that in a second, but you'll see it's in the report for now.

Okay. Personnel services on workman's comp. I see actual across the board, of course, workman's comp is one of those things, it's an unknown, but why Should we consider increasing that dollar since? So have we looked at the average cost and then determined, is that what we're doing here?

Yeah. So in the payroll spreadsheet, there's a calculation that we say, this is what Paul Simmons does. This is his job. And we're giving him. Am I explaining this correctly? Because that's about all I know right now.

It's broken down by department. The work is obvious and it's sitting in each department's fines and then it'll be dispensed.

I feel good about the total workers' comp number. The total budgeted number. It might get squirrely across departments, but I think overall we're good. Because And they'll come in and do a fork or something. Like all day. Yeah. Okay.

All right. I'll stay away from the health insurance. Yeah.

Why does the $14,000 on the workman's comp insurance, it's not that big of a deal, but we go from, say, in 2023 at $32,000, then we drop to $3,000, $3,000, and then this year we're up to $14,000, then we're going to project again back down to $2,000. It's not a big deal, but I was just trying to figure out Why is it, how does it jump so much and then go back to this lower number, then back up again this year, and we're budgeting a lot less this coming year? Once again, it's not a big number, but it just, looking at the percentage, I'm just asking how that, what that is.

Right. You're saying that it doesn't make sense that we've spent almost $15,000 this year on working on, and we only had budgeted $3,000.

Right. Yeah. And then we're only budgeting, and we're looking for next year, only $3,000.

Right. 3,000 is the right number. I think the answer to your question is I don't know why it says 15,000. But probably what it is is the way it gets keyed in.

Well, I noticed it's 32,000 back in 23. Same issue when it was then back to 3,000. So OK, there's something involved there. Not a big deal. Like I said, it's not that big on the price point.

And then you talked about after the first of the year, after the first of the fiscal year, looking at all the contacts across the departments and seeing where we can make it more efficient in economies of scale. Yeah, for sure. Yep. So that's next. That's after October 1.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. and that yeah and we're talking about we've been talking about software's that will help us manage contracts because right now we have to go to bow and Amy and pull the contract this convoluted it's bad practice so yeah On the second page of Department 10's budget, you'll find membership subscriptions, travel and conference tuition, which is zero, and credit card fees.

And Municode. That's for our codified, yeah.

What is that for?

Codification of ordinances. Municode is an online platform that people can go and search ordinances. All right. We'll go to general government. This one might take a minute. So I'm just going to let you guys sort of lead this because you can see all of the all of the contracts on page three, we kind of really get into like, who the city gives money to and support, specifically nonprofits such as the exceptional foundation. But you can go through the whole list, I can read them out loud, whatever, whatever you want, however you want to tackle it.

You may want to read some of it out loud for the people here.

So personnel services are budgeted at $48,000. That is really the council salaries is all that one is. Professional services includes legal services, attorney's fees at 480, legal advice and contingencies at 130,000. These are thousands. Legal services for Brookwood are special projects. Other special projects are 200. Accounting and auditing services is zero. So that number that we talked about last night, for Doran Mayhew, the accounting firm comes out of the finance budget. Revenue collection services, $50,000. Sales tax audit for the Board of Education, $10,000. Contractual services, $366. I'm sorry, 376,000. Those include jetty trips at 217, drug testing at 5,000, which is an on-call service from Harold Parker.

He's not retiring, is he?

He's been retired since January. But we might have questions for him every now and then.

But we'll probably be able to take that out pretty soon.

encode is 65,000. We we got rid of placer AI. So we cut that water systems 25,000 Zadien code strategic planning 20,000. And then we get into the fire system for a total of 40,000 janitorial services for a total of 50,000. Personnel Board of Jefferson County, $410,000. Revenue collections from the state, $175,000. Jefferson County Health Department, $180,000. That's for the Stormwater Management Authority.

I'm asking about that. I've been talking to some other mayors, and I think we talked about this, that they are looking at... going on their own, leaving SLIMA. I mean, is that something that's, I'm just throwing this out there for conversation, is that something else?

Yeah, there was a meeting.

Yeah.

the other day and we weren't involved but but I heard about it and you know at some point I mean the other municipalities including ours are beginning to ask the right questions which is what service do they provide because we pay them a lot of money and can we provide the service for cheaper and probably better yeah I think there are other cities that are saying they can do that mm-hmm not just over the mountain communities but even in some of those north yes Gardendale

Who are we communicating with that? Who are you talking about?

Stan is the, I think, the representative for the JCMA for the Mayor's Association, and he's hot about it.

Yeah, he's hot about it, and he had a meeting with Vestavia Hills and Scott, not Jeff, but somebody else over there about it. The Transit Authority, $385,562.

Which, let me say, thank you, because that's $35,000 less than what we thought it was going to be.

I thought it was, I originally had $420,000. Jefferson County, fees, tax collection, mapping. Jefferson County EMA, $40,000. The RPC, $16,000. utilities so we pay all the utilities out of the um i'm sorry all of the electricity most of the electricity for the city out of this so it's 1.4 million yeah i'm moving down The $11.5 million, $11.574 is the BOE one cent sales tax. So that's the penny that we've talked a lot about that comes to the city in sales tax revenue and we send it to the Board of Education. Moving down, general liability insurance. This is where we pay this. So this is under other expenses for the $1.59 million. I'm sorry, 1.539.

So what in retiree, this is where the OPEB went, is that right? The retirees health insurance, that's where OPEB, why is it zeroed out here?

Well, we're going to move a million dollars into it next year. It's OPEB, right? Well, yeah. It's where we used to pay retirees benefits from. From the general fund. From the general fund. But at some point, we're going to have to move whatever we pay out of the OPEB trust, we're going to have to replace it. We're going to replace that core. So we're going to probably come back in eight months and say we need to put money into here. Move money from OPEB probably from carryover funds. moving down to the near the bottom Chamber of Commerce 74,000 holiday lighting 55,000 that includes the 10,000 increase West Homewood on the next page discretionary for city managers discretionary fund 40,000 arts advisory council 15,500 what are some of the examples Well, so if you remember, it was budgeted in FY26 at about $120,000 or $100,000. So we cut that. We paid for the citizen survey out of that. That was the big ticket item. I can't remember what else. That ate most of it. We also paid for, I think, some of the fleet study came out of that cost. The Birmingham Arts Advisory already said that. 15.5, Birmingham Zoo, 10,000. Mature tree planting, 25,000. Environmental Commission.

Go ahead.

You good? I'm good. 14,000. Red Mountain Park, 25,000. City Hall Maintenance and Repairs, 50,000. Probably not enough.

That's not good. Yeah, if we're already spending, who's maintaining that?

We are.

I know. We as in Berkeley? Yep. OK. $70,000 plus right now, right?

I mean, you got stuff that's going to have to be done. A lot of this stuff hasn't been touched. And this bill is almost 24 years old.

What are you suggesting?

I don't really know. I mean, I don't know what the appetite for the council has to. I mean, yeah, there's no way that you know, protected different that you go in to do these things. I mean, it's gonna be a how do you want to do it? What do you want to do? And you want to do the same as what was done? You want to change it? I mean, it's just a lot. I think I would say this. from the mayor and the council standpoint, we're going with it, you guys are going to need to get a tail and begin to work as to how you want to move forward and, and beginning to update some of the interior of the building. I mean, start Rosewood Hall and come up to the main hall and go up to the floor. I mean, some of that stuff, I mean, not being open, but hadn't been touched. I think the building opened in Oh, three or four. So we just get to a point now you're gonna have to start

know we replaced the chiller what two years ago and so all this stuff is beginning to age out for our municipal building so one of the things we'll talk about in capitol is that the is that we need a new roof on city hall but that's going to cost a million dollars so we're going to

We've got to be on the capital end of it, right? That'll be on the capital. But what I'd like to do, though, if we already know we're talking 72,000 as of year to date right now, and we're going to head budget 25% or 40% less, basically. So we get to during the next year and we get to 50,000. Are we just going to write a check out of another fund to handle that? See where I'm trying to what I'd like to see is when we put the budget, that's the budget, we run out of money on that budget, then we wait till the next year to accomplish the next thing. That's the way you know, you've seen going because a lot of times we just moving money around back and forth, right? We need to be as accurate as we can be on this. And this right here is not even close to being accurate. So now, in this case, I would say it needs to be almost $85,000, $90,000 for what he's talking about. And that might not be enough. So in doing that, then we're going to have to find another $40,000 somewhere else basically, correct? That's right.

There's a trade-off somewhere.

OK. So we probably need to make a line item here where we want to move it to $90,000 and then Going forward, if we find a place we can deduct or we add and just start making numbers. I mean, is that a bad idea? I don't know.

It's just a thought. I'm with you. So is there a way to determine... And I understand exactly what you're saying. What's the appetite of the council? But what needs to be done? What can wait? And can we, are we able to determine, you know, priorities on those items?

I would say this. When I tell you it's an appetite for you guys, the main thing you got to look at as we start moving forward is the age of the roof and the HVAC system. that's your that's the biggest calls that you're going to incur from a standpoint of doing that. Now, you know, of course, when you do that, you know, electrical is going to come into play, plumbing is going to come into play things like that. The what I consider is the bones of the building is what we've got to begin to start formulating a long range building plan for. And that was, you know, whoever that is, I don't know, we come and fix stuff when it's broken, but at somewhere in some point with the age of the building, the building needs to begin to have a long range facility plan that packs out the next 15 to 20 years for the bill. I agree, you know, whether it's painting or whatever it might be, but again, your big ticket items are going to be your route, your age, fat system and things like that. And all those being I think, you know, Brandon's working with the maintenance department or on doing that we began to kind of track these things that we've not done before. But eventually it comes to a point that we've got to get a long range plan put in place that you guys can start budgeting for these items as the years begin to move down. When I say many things court

budget so we engage Johnson controls along with a couple other companies that we are working on a total infrastructure inventory that they will present to us as a group this is where you are this is where you should be and this is what you need to do to get in between there I think once we get you that we can really put a hard number and and johnson controls is not the only one that is the only one we have met today we're going to get several companies to come in and help us evaluate where our infrastructure is what we need to do and kind of give you a road map like we do with our fire apparatuses this is what you should have over the next 20 years to make sure your buildings maintain where they are it's just we will not have it for you at this point does that have anything to do downstairs underneath also

it is okay so well kudos to you um there's a we've done a great job in my opinion is it's cleaning up the downstairs when i say downstairs i'm talking about in in the basement um where the parking is and it's made it a lot more inviting to go park okay so i don't know how much you spent extra on that is what i'm saying did we start did all this extra that we've got over now, did that come in the last three months or was that just through the whole year?

That's through the year. Okay. We did it. We have two guys. I've got two guys now that come every day. They come downstairs every day to do trash, use the building to vacuum up and a lot of different items.

Thank you.

I'll say this, too. I mean, I think $50,000, like, I understand and I appreciate what you were suggesting about separating out, like finding something that we feel like we're probably going to spend more on. But I'm confident in the way the finance department is running that you guys are going to see every month at council meetings what we have spent year to date. And so when those numbers start getting close, we're going to be like, Councillor Lane, we're bumping up on this $50,000 number. We need to add $30,000 more, because we want to do painting on the fourth floor.

Well, that's what you're saying.

But what I'm saying is, if we're budgeting that, then let's put it in the budget. And if we don't make it next year to that budget, then you get to adjust. But to keep, if you miss every budget by a little bit, I'm just saying, your house, you budget it at the house. You know, you're not going to budget it under it.

So we can flag, right? I'm just saying, you know, flag this to take a look at and.

Yeah, we just started looking at put a lot, you know, line items.

I'm encouraged by the long term strategy. No question. We have to know where we're going with those dollars.

I'm hoping with what he's going to say, that's going to be the savings and be lovely next year to be able to deduct that. Hey, we didn't accomplish that. That's what it is.

We are now also tracking all maintenance requests through the which we'll see in this budget process as well. So we'll be able to really narrow down where our money's going.

Internally, right? Internally, yeah. One of the yeah one of the many tasks fire chiefs get to do is

take off the firefighters hat and figure out building maintenance Centennial celebration 26,000 we've talked about this this is for fireworks and food and stuff in October

And this was planned before, it's just hitting the budget after October 1, which is this year. So we had a $100,000 budget and this is just hitting after bills will be paid after the fact. So the event's on October 17th.

So everybody knows that $100,000, basically $75,000 is in this year and the extra $26,000 is going to be next year to combine for the $100,000. That's right.

Okay. And they've only spent $2,700? Is that right? Did I say that wrong? Yeah. No, they've only spent $2,700 to date, right? Yeah, that's.

Yeah, somewhere around. It's all coming.

It's coming. It's all planned for. Right.

And whatever's not spent in that, what happens with that, Cale?

It goes back into fund balance.

Thank you. Okay.

Board Preservation Commission, $7,500. Meals on Wheels, $8,000. West Homewood Neighborhood Street Fair, 10,000. One Place Metro, 5,000. Operation School Bell, 5,000. Class Tran Appropriation, 17,000. Sims Garden, 30,000. Exceptional Foundation, 50,000. The Bell Center, 5,000. Homewood Theater, 3,500. And that's it for those.

Is there any reason for cutting the Bell Center, just for my curiosity?

Well, I will tell you, I threw in five last year. It had always been five, and I proposed ten last year.

And it was yes to everything last year.

It was Glenn's budget, so we got another five, so Gail's scaling it back. So it's always been five, except last year it was ten.

I think Bell Center is a good call. Oh, 100%. I'll be honest with you. I would give the extra $5,000 to the Bell Center and cut the zoo to $5,000 from 10. That's just my personal opinion. But I'm not doing it. I'm just saying, if you're asking me personally what I would choose, I would choose what's happening here in Homewood more so than what's happening in Birmingham.

except that i know exactly what you're saying i just use that as an uh as an example for sure can we have a comment right now we're going to wait we're going to go through the whole process thank you okay remember what you're going to say all right transfer to debt service fund

is $2.9 million. So that is to make up the difference between the ad valorem that is required to go to debt service, which is about the $8 million we talked about last week. This is the additional amount that makes up the full amount for us to pay our debt service payment each year. $1.9 million transferring out to capital. So you've seen the slide before where the little penny is cut into a quarter. So a quarter of that penny is about $2.9 million automatically goes to capital. We'll talk about capital next week. But we have about 8.8 budgeted in capital. So we need to find other sources of revenues for capital. So we use some from carryover fund balance out of the capital fund. We're also proposing to use $1.9 million from the general fund.

Are we gonna look at that policy-wise as far as, I know we talked about changing the allotment on that penny?

I'll, uh, yeah, but I mean, if you take another two and a half million dollars, if you give them another quarter penny, then that's another $3 million of fund balance that you have to use to balance the general fund.

So we need to wait a year.

I went through that. I went, I spent about a week on that activity and I couldn't, I couldn't make it work.

Okay. So we'll revisit that in a year.

Yeah. Okay. So the total general government is $23 million.

I've got a question to ask now that we're looking at it. We budgeted for $21 million this past year, right? Or this year. I mean, right now. And as of the date, we're at $32 million. And then we're going to budget back down to $23 million. Am I looking this wrong?

So there are two reclassing entries that need to happen. The debt service fund shows a transfer out right now of $11.4 million. That actually is a due to, due from, and not a transfer out. So that will come off of there. workers comp expense paid. And that actually is insurance that should have been amortized. So we have a liability on our books that will offset that. And so that also will come off of year to date actuals.

I don't see what you just told me. Okay, I'm looking at nine or back on eight or something.

Seven is where the workers comp expenses. It's 1151 1300 is the account number year to date is $978,000. That will come off because that's sitting on our balance sheet. And then on the on the page nine where we look at transfers out there's 11.4 million transfer out to debt service that will also come off.

So I'm to assume that's not gonna happen again. Like that.

Yes, that's a fair assumption.

Because I noticed in 22, they did the same thing about $10 million worth. You know, what are the differences? I mean, then it's all got back down to normal again.

So I'm going to try to explain this. You tell me if I'm doing wrong. When sales tax money comes in, we automatically do a journal entry to send a penny over to debt service. That's an entry that Melanie makes. And so Aspen came in six weeks ago, a month ago, and figured all this, began to untangle the web. And so she's getting rid of all these do-tos and do-froms and transfers in, transfers out. It's an accounting speak.

And is that what the $8 million, when we were in our meeting previously with Carl Riggs and them, when there was an $8 million transfer, remember? Is that basically from the debt services that we did to?

DAVID BURRAGE. You mean $8 million? There's an $8 million. So a penny plus ad valorem is $8 million more than what we need to pay the debt service.

Right, right. So we were putting in, basically, we were building up debt service. That's what I'm saying. So everybody thought when we were losing money, we weren't losing money. But the money was going into debt services. And then finally, we transferred it out to get it right.

The point is, we shouldn't be. So we're moving money over there and then transferring it back.

We shouldn't be collecting money in debt service, basically. Right. That's right. Okay.

Which is why in a few weeks, we're probably going to come to you guys and say, look, we want to fund one year's worth of debt service right now and just move cash in there and not transfer anything else over.

Are we putting that on the budget to be like a budget? I want to say a budget expense, but it's since it is an asset, right? I mean, the pennies coming in. So it's not going to be bad. I mean, we're going to have budgeted like that. We're not to say 8 million. I mean, we're not going to we're going to leave it at 8 million or whatever that we are that year.

Right. And so debt service has its own fund, right?

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So so here what we're doing is debt service shows the ad valorem tax. Mm hmm. And then plus we're transferring out $2.8 million or however much it was. Yeah, $2.8 million to pay the full debt service payment.

Instead, we're going to budget the entire amount to go to debt service rather than take.

Right. I mean, that's kind of what we're doing here. I mean, because.

It is. Yeah. But it's messier. And we're going to clean it up. Right.

We're cleaning it up. Yeah. Good.

Yeah. Okay.

Y'all ready? Yep. Move on. Building Permits and Inspections, Department 12. Mr. Pugh is on the front row.

No, he's not.

Come around here.

Where is he?

Last time I saw him, he woke up. Come on out. Come on. Yeah, can you see? I know we've probably folks watching online, and we've got a microphone right here. Do you mind coming up to the front?

Sure. They want to see you.

I saw him last night on my guitar. He was playing somewhere.

All right. All right. So we just went through the numbers that. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I can click through them.

Personnel services is 1.353. All this is on the screen. Professional services is 81,000. Supplies is 11,250. Contracts 115.

So that's a big cut from, are we, are we okay. First of all, we've implemented some structural changes with Wyatt and how has that impacted the budget? First of all, and then second of all, that's a big cut on contractual services.

You mean from the, from the FY 26 budget? Yep.

And what was that due to? What did we do in 26 that was?

Again, I have no idea what happened in 26. I don't know how we got to $330,000 in demolition costs.

Which we've only spent $120,000. Does that have any of that has any...

Anything to do with removing public nuisance, condemning condemnation, does that have anything to do with the $330,000?

I'm not really sure which number we're talking about. Contractual services.

I think on contractual services on the demolition costs, maintenance contracts. It's going from $330,000 to, it went up to $330,000. It's going to go back down to $115,000. I personally don't want to knock that down.

Okay, all right. Okay, so if you're putting it all in one, so demolition costs, yeah.

That's why I'm, what she's talking, I think, is that what you're talking about? Yeah, there's a big jump of $330,000. But to me, demolition is not that big. I mean, the cost is up there.

This year, we only got 85.

Right. That's right. And I think that's two houses we just guessed.

Well, yeah, that's about anywhere from three to five houses, depending on the size and the situation of the house. But we included some additional funds last year because of the building at the park at Buckingham. was another $100,000. As far as the $330,000, I don't recall demolition. That's the budget. That's not the actual.

$120,000 on the actual. But that's personal. But it is personal to me. I'd like to leave the $330,000. I'd like to take that jailhouse down and use whatever that's going to cost. I'm just telling you. Don't mess with that, 330. I'm just kidding.

You're going to be part of the work class.

I'll get a sledgehammer myself.

And then other expenses total $12,800. So that's membership, subscriptions, travel and conference, and tuition.

If that's contractual service, going back to that contractual services, if that involved anything to do with the Tyler implementation, we did have a sizable amount due for that.

Yeah, no, that's under professional services. You got $70,000 in there for that.

Going back there, Wyatt, though, I know we tore down the house over in Rosedale. Yes. That would be part of that. Am I wrong?

Probably.

Yeah, that would be I mean, so how many how many combinations have we had?

That's what that the only one I know that we've actually had a demo property, right? Sometimes I'll come in. Right, right. Right.

Most everything in that account for this year to date are title searches. There have been two demolition of homes, one for 98,500, one for 16,100. 200 something. That's where it's coming from.

And a lot of the condemnations, after they go through the process or start through the process, are voluntary compliance.

And if we pay for it, we have a lien on it to get it back anyway, correct? Yes, we do. Do you have that? Is that on there also like that? How does that work?

If we get money back, then that's right.

Because I know we put the one in. I know in Rosedale we put a lien on that. There's a lien on that. OK. So we don't have, it's out of our pocket right now, but so how's it on the books as far as recovering that money?

When the house sells and they pay the tax and they pay the.

I know, but where's it on the books as an asset?

Dean Howard and the board. I don't know.

I'll talk to my head. I mean, just because what I'm seeing going on right now, I think there's going to be a lot more of that happening, especially to do the things we need to do to clean up some things. And so we'll need some way to know where that money is going to be set aside. Because if it costs us, we're going to have to recover it. And it needs to be on an asset against the debit somewhere, right?

That's right. OK. DAVID BURRAGE. I think the risk is there's no guarantee that we'll never recoup 100% of that money. DAVID BURRAGE.

Oh, yes, there is. Because if we know the value of the property, you'll know the value of the property. There's an appraisal. I mean, all the condemnations. We're going to be going through abatement board on some of those coming up, right? DAVID BURRAGE. Yes, sir. DAVID BURRAGE. And that's going to be the same situation. DAVID BURRAGE. Right. DAVID BURRAGE. So we will know. I mean, we know the appraisal value of those properties. Basically, we should anyway. Well, the Jefferson County will tell you what the property value is.

Right. So when we lien the property, if we lien Paul's property and then you buy it from him, then you're going to have to pay us back. And you're asking how we account for that.

Yes, because.

No lien on my property.

Well, I'm saying, if we don't have anything on the books for that, so when they go and we get that money, say $120,000, OK, then it comes back into the pool where you're going to put it. How does it get back into the city?

I don't know. That's a good question.

Because it could go out the back door. I'm not saying it does. It's not 100% that we want to get that back. Correct. But we still have to have records on how to collect it.

We do. Oh, yeah. We'll get that answer on Thursday. Perfect. We'll get that answer. All right. Any questions for Wyatt or Wyatt, anything else you want to share on the department?

I don't think so. Any questions for Wyatt? If you have any questions for me, I'm happy to.

Thank you. Also, for the department heads, you don't have to stay for the don't feel like you need to stick around unless you just Wow. Hey,

I was going to say, I know we're not done with him. Put baby in the back.

So while she's walking up, oh, we can wait on Paul. All right. So for personnel services, total is 660, 660,000 professional services, 273,000.

Is that to take the zoning ordinance work is to take our comprehensive plan and.

produce the zoning map from that yeah that that's a good question and a a good point that i want to i think talk about for a second so it's the total cost of zoning ordinance work is not going to be a hundred thousand dollars it's going to be much more than that we anticipate spending a hundred thousand dollars next year on that we don't know exactly what the total cost is going to be so when they provide us after the comprehensive plan whoever does the zoning ordinance work will provide us a proposal and then we'll bring that to you guys so you'll have an idea of what we're budgeting at 28 also what's the time frame on that so we'll be getting the public draft for the comp plan sometime in winter and then

we're estimating a springtime adoption from Council. And so as soon as we adopt the start with whoever our consultant is, the zoning ordinance and sub regs revisions in the compound over the planning commission first, right?

Before we move off the salary before we move off the sub salaries. Where did we OK, I see we went $679. We went up to $800. Now we're going back. What happened with the salary? Where was the adjustment at? Same.

Same what?

Glenn.

Well, no.

Glenn should have been in.

Glenn would have been in. I have a good answer for this one. I have a real answer. So Amy and I both used to work together in engineering. Right. So you're gone and it's all over. Right. So Amy does twice the amount of work that I could do.

I'm just, I'm just, look at now that you said that, I know where to go.

I needed two people, me and Amy. Now Amy just needs Amy.

But I see that in the, I thought maybe some of it was being swapped over from professional services that we hired somebody from there. I mean, we've done something to go up 70,000.

No, sir. What we did there was to combine, um, some of the contracts that we had we like rolled arborist and other things up into engineering services and then so imagine that number is a hundred and seventy three thousand four hundred dollars and then another hundred thousand is for the zoning ordinance work got it okay all right supplies four thousand Other membership and travel is $6,500. Anything to add?

That was it perfectly.

he's been with us for three or so years i think um and we we spend less and less i feel like every year on that service because we

Because Berkeley's guy, Matt, knows how to identify a dead tree. He's gotten really good at that.

What would it cost us to have an expedient, a quick cash register going out the side for small business people? Miss Amy?

That might be a permitting question. I'll catch him at the next time he's playing in the band thank you

Department 14, the police department.

Yes, sir.

Personnel is 12.879. and then professional services and you'll see on your on your handout on your sheets that there are a lot of contracts this is where we really start where some of the departments have a significant amount of contracts um and so i can i can hand the sheet over to chief or and he can talk about what questions you have about some of these contracts

the total is 570 most of these contracts have to do with software technology that the police department over the last many years has kind of developed or implemented to help solve cases criminal cases it's most of that software that you see in the contractual services line item is is to aid our detectives and investigators in investigating crimes But there are some other services in there too that we contract out that you can see, some of which are self-explanatory, but I'll be glad to answer any questions about that.

I'll point out that Chief took the Prescott House off of General Fund and moved it under your department. So could you work with them? Yes.

It's the second oldest child advocacy center in America. And we're proud to partner with them. They, they help us when we have to investigate a crime that's unfortunately committed against a child. They help us provide resources and interview that child victim and things like that. So it's great, great partner that we have that we contract with.

Moving into supplies if you're ready for me to go to supply 15,000 for supplies five for printing seven for janitorial 180,000 for uniforms 10,000 for the SRO program 24,000 drills and training 10,000 physical fitment fitness Community engagement supplies, 2,000. Ammunition, 110,000. Tactical team supplies, 32,500. Lab photos, 5,000. Minor tools and equipment, 6,000. Animal control expenses, 20,000. K-9 supplies, 25,000. safety and equipment 2500 for a total amount 454 500. Yeah.

So if I could point something out about physical fitness, you may see that we haven't spent much of what we were budgeted for the current budget year that we're still in. As we speak that is being spent probably the vast majority of that money that's left over in that account. And it just so happens that we could not coordinate with our health provider to conduct the annual physical fitness exams and pretty comprehensive medical examinations that we do on all of our personnel. That's happening right now. So we haven't paid for that yet. But when we do it will exhaust a lot of that line item there. A good portion of it. Then we don't well and I misspoke. We don't do that annually. Last year, we did it for the some of our older personnel. That's where we started this year. We've done it for some of our younger personnel and then we'll probably take a break next year and then resume once again. I'll probably ask you to put a little bit more in there the following year so that we can do that again. We'd like to do that every couple of years to give a very comprehensive medical examination for our personnel to identify problems and it's been very helpful. I think maybe Brandon's guys do that too with our health care provider. But it's very valuable to us. So that's why you might see money left over in that account today. A month from now, a lot of that will have been spent.

So is the $10,000 going to be sufficient?

For next year, I think it will be. But the following year, we'll go back to doing those comprehensive and try to handle a bulk of our personnel.

Just curious.

This is just physical fitness. There's no lab work or anything like that? It is lab work.

It is very comprehensive. EKG, lab work. So you're doing metabolic stuff? Yes, sir.

How's that going to cover it then?

You really think $10,000 is going to cover that then?

Well, we won't have to do that this coming budget year because we've just completed it in the last two years for all of our personnel. We'll have to do some people that maybe we didn't touch that may have joined us. You know, the insurance covered any of that?

No, on the blood work and stuff. Oh, this is blood work for other reasons. No, man, I got it. I got it.

Yeah, and really one of the reasons that we do that's a great point. Captain Sutton just made to be in compliance with our with our health insurance provider requires us to have some sort of health screening done every year. That's another reason we scheduled this later in the year. So it would be it would put us in compliance with that health screening thing that we have. Right.

And then we'll control, is that still Vulcan? I know we had some questions about that, or is that, are we moving? It is, well, we're, yeah, we've had some,

some concern expressed by our citizens about that, and we do have a contract with the Greater Birmingham Humane Society that we're very anxious to put into practice and put into use. We've been delayed on that because of their facilities, so we have been using Vulcan, but that is about to change very soon. And it may have already changed. Any day now we're going to be able to use their services like we intended to. So that's good news for us.

Anything else for Chief? Or Chief, you got anything else?

Contractual services total $281,480. That includes $245,000 of maintenance contracts. How do your contracts drop in $50,000 on maintenance on the grounds for the building and stuff?

Am I looking at it wrong?

Where is that, sir?

On your building and grounds maintenance. 14. I mean, we're at 85,000 now. It's not even year to date yet. And 86 in the budget. And we're dropping down to 35,000. I mean, 30,000. Is there something special that's going to be coming up that's going to take care of the building and maintenance on that end of it?

I think what we budgeted for in the current budget year that we're in is we had to do a lot of repainting and some renovation. And we've taken care of that this budget year. So we feel like we'll be OK in the coming budget year with regard to repair like that that we have to do from time to time.

The axon is in this fiscal year. The axon contract is in this fiscal year.

Yeah, so if you look on the first page of, so it's page 12, it's at the bottom. It's called Taser 62,000. That's what we just passed. Last night, yeah.

Yeah, we just revised that, and I appreciate you doing that for us. Yeah, I got that. And repeat that again, I'm sorry. That's a company that we contract with called Axon. They provide our tasers, our less lethal weapon system called a taser. And we have a purchase agreement with them that we went into a couple of years ago that we're going to continue for the next couple of years, and that will be our payment for that this coming budget year.

Under utilities, all he has in there is comms for dispatch. I imagine that's what that's for. Yes. And then other expenses, total $153,500 for... travel and conference tuition, subscriptions.

All those bills on the utilities now go under one?

It comes out of general government.

General government. Are we having any way to separate that as far as knowing what our expenses are for each?

For each facility? Yes. Yeah, I mean, the bills come in separately.

Separately? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

OK. No, just so everybody knows.

And so the address shows up. We know where it comes from.

And.

Are we going to, where are we, just through the utility patrol? We're now just going to other expenses, correct?

Yes, sir. I didn't read any of those, but I certainly can.

No, no, I'm OK. It's just we're only talking about $153,000. I'd like to, I need to go back to page 12, though. Going back on the salaries. Yes, sir. I see where we're. Actual to date, we're at $8.3 million as of today, correct? I mean, as of August 31st. And budgeted for the year of $8.9 million in salaries, correct? That is correct. OK. But we're budgeting, where we requested budget is the same as where we are today. Yep. So how do we come up with that figure without having

That's a good catch. I think it has something to do with bailiffs potentially.

So you'll see a line right below that called wages and wages is the part-time staff but when the Paycom system doesn't record the journal entry splitting up part-time and full-time people so everything is hitting the salaries line item so you notice underneath that wages are budgeted for 110 but there's zero expense to date those

I see that, but I still don't understand why you got zero under the year-to-date on this year, and then you got zero under the date for the requested budget.

And I'm still confused here. So start with year-to-date actual, zero for wages. So imagine that all of those wages, $110,000 that were budgeted, should be, we should not have paid $8.4 million out of salaries. We should have paid probably a much lower amount than that and then paid some of it out of wages.

So are you telling me, OK, so you're saying $8.3 million, less $110,000. Is that what you're trying to say? That's right. OK, so in other words, but OK, but we're only in the 10th month.

So what's that about? How much is that a month? $800,000? I mean, about $800,000 something, right?

$900,000 maybe? $800,000 probably. But what I'm getting at, I'm just trying to find out, At the 8-3, so that's going to, year to date, is going to end up being closer to 9. Am I wrong?

No, that's right.

OK, it's going to be closer to 9 million. So at 9 million, and that is with us putting a freeze on everybody as of April as far as heading with the police officers at 84. We're at 84 right here on this salary, correct? If I'm wrong.

8.4, yes, sir.

Okay. So I'm saying 84 city patrolmen. I'm just going by the patrolmen, not counting everybody else. Sworn personnel. Right. So we were budgeted at that 9, that 8.9 was actually budgeted for 90, correct me if I'm wrong.

I can't speak to what was budgeted in 26.

I tried to find it. But we've gone six months right now. Six months with it being April, May, June, July, August. Four months, actually. Four or five months. How long has the freeze been? Four months. So four months that we haven't had the full staffs where I'm getting at, which was budgeted.

In 20 seconds.

Yeah, I'm making sense. So if those were allowed to have the quota that we needed at that time, that would not be $8.3 million right now. It would probably be closer to another $200,000, wouldn't you say? Or more. Or more. OK, so we're still but I'm just lost with $8.3 million as salaries for this coming year. I think we're under what we're supposed to be. Now is there something I'm missing here is what I'm trying to find out.

No, I understand your question. I don't know that I have a good answer for you right now. But let us look into it because I see what you're asking.

I mean, are we budgeting already where we are right now?

Yeah, I want to make I know that I know that I'm good in the 26 budget, but I want to go back. I mean, in the 27 budget, I want to go back and check it.

Okay.

And then I want to make sure that we have everybody included in this department that should be there. There was some there were some issues that we were having earlier in the year and just honestly confusion around some of the jail staff getting paid out of courts and some of the courts getting paid out. Yeah, okay, there are a lot of there are a lot of Yeah, so jail and the police department are pretty closely connected. And so for us to separate, that has been kind of confusing. Okay, is that fair to say?

So fun fun 21, fun 14 have exchanged funds back and forth, I guess, many times over the years. Things that have been paid out of Fund 21, to pay the salary of a corrections officer, for instance, or overtime for a corrections officer is pretty common practice over the years, and we've tried to sort that out.

And here's another possible solution. Sorry to interrupt, but also this probably includes the SRO officers, and we get reimbursed.

We just got back a half a million dollars for that.

Right, we get back a half a million dollars for that.

I've got them. Understandable. What I would like to do, I mean, ideally, you would like to have 90 patrolmen. Is that correct? Or am I wrong?

That's what the personnel board says we're slated to have is 90 officers, sworn officers.

And right now we're at 84, maybe 83. And if we lose anybody, we could be now out of the 83, six, as we talked last night, discussed last night, not eight, but six of them are paid for by the school board. 80% of them. 80% of them. What I'm trying to get at is what can we do is to maintain where we are, where we want to be. And in doing so, it's not, because we don't know what the revenue is. It's a discussion we had last night. I think we're speculating on a conservative revenue. I personally would like to see us maintain where they are at this time. And when I say this time, is to go with the 90, whatever it's going to cost the budget, what 90 patrolmen would be. and whatever we're doing with the jailhouse, and then wait. I would like to see us wait on this for cutting, and then let's see what we do this year. Because I think we've got a good group here. I think we're heading in the right direction as far as controlling the budgets, controlling losses. I mean, we had a lot of problems. problems previous to this administration right here. And I think y'all have done a heck of a job getting it under control. So I don't want us to sell ourselves short and underfund this when maybe we're going to have a really banner year more so than you think. I'm going to be optimistic with what's happening. And I don't see our revenue falling. And if our revenue is not falling, I don't think we need to decrease the budget, especially with the first responders. And I mean, if you talk to any other metropolitan area, school and first responders are your top priorities. I mean, that's what makes Homewood great. Now, everything else behind, the support they do, does a heck of a job. Judith does a heck of a job. We've got a great group here. I just don't want to sit here and, as we go over these budgets, and start knocking things down on a guesswork because we don't know. But we can go with the revenue we've had previously and make it work. And if it doesn't work, just say it doesn't. Say we miss it by $800,000.

What's the worst thing that's going to happen? It's going to come out of debt services.

It's what they've been doing forever, right?

It's going to come out of fund balance.

But I'm just saying, give us a chance before we eliminate. We're not eliminating, by the way, is what we said. Nobody's eliminating. We're not going to eliminate anybody. But the problem is, by not... I need that right now. Go to Trisha's treasury and you can get all you want. But what I'm getting at is, though, even though we're not cutting anything, but we're not filling in where we're supposed to. I mean, I would like, personally, I would like to see our police department fully at full capacity like it's supposed to. Because please tell me how much it costs to train a police officer. What is our average cost to train a police officer?

A newly hired officer, anywhere from $8,000 to $12,000 is the initial outlay with the cost that we have to incur on academy charges, equipment charges. other training that we we put our officers through is probably depending on where we send them to the academy, and there are several in the state, it's anywhere from eight to $12,000 for the academy costs and the the initial outlay of equipment and uniforms.

And I would like to say the same thing with you, Chief. I mean, what kind of?

For us to send a freshman through just recruit school, we are about $15,000. If we send them to paramedic school, that's a two-year process. And without salaries, we're at about $27,000 to $28,000.

OK. So what I'm getting at with the first responders, we don't pay attention to what goes on under the radar, OK? And I know whether it's Berkeley over there, I don't think you pay $25,000 to train the people in your department. You might do if you do. So tell me. I'm just using that for, I'm just pinpointing here.

If you're wanting to fund everybody, you need to fund everybody. We all running short on people. And for you to make that comment, we all got a job to do.

I'm not disagreeing with you.

I've been here a long time, but I'm just telling you, there's a lot of things that happen that a lot of people don't see in the city. But we all are running short of staff, but we're all trying to do what we got to do. So I'm going to disagree with your statement.

No, that's OK. You're more than welcome to disagree. But the point I'm saying, if you're short six, if we lose three more, we're short nine, how long would it take you to hire nine police officers, or just four police officers? How long would it take our city to get four right now?

Yeah, it's, it's hard to say the hiring process usually takes several months for, to hire somebody, to put them through all the testing, the battery of tests that we put them through before they're hired. And then the training and depending on when the Academy sessions happen. Um, you know, if we had to hire four officers starting today, it might take us four or five months to actually complete that. That's, that's why I'm going with this.

I was at a meeting. I was involved with some people here the past week. I ran into some of our contemporaries to different cities. I had one person come up to me. And I'm not going to mention who the name is and who they were. Said, Chris, we're getting ready to take a few of your police officers. That's coming from a elected official. That's what's going to happen. Why do they know they're going to do this? So if this happens, look, I'm putting a fear in this. Now, Berkeley, go back to where you're saying, if they come and they get four people from over there, then so be it.

But I'm just saying right now, first responders is a must.

It's just like teachers. It's the schools. I mean, we've got to make priorities. Now, if that's not our priority, if that's not Homewood's priority, if we're not built on education, first responders, then OK, I'm fine. But we won't be Homewood for long. I'm just telling you. So I personally want to leave the budget how we have. Right now, where it is, to make sure we have the 90. Whatever it costs to keep 90 patrolmen. And I do not want, and I say that, it's like I'm ordering people around. I'm not, OK? Because it's a vote, OK? But it's my feelings. And the people working, whether it's in the jailhouse, whether they're Individual not sworn in officers. Civilians. The civilians. There's families we're talking about. Like we said, we're not trying to leave them. But if somebody leaves, we're just not going to rehire them or we're going to redepartmentalize them or something to that nature, which is neat. Doing the, trying to get, I don't even know how to explain it anymore. I just feel we need to pull the reins in a little bit before we overreact to anything. And then let's just see this coming year. And then, hey, say four months down the road, we see something's happening. We can react. We can start making adjustments. But we don't have to get everybody all fired up about, what everybody's here for tonight. I mean, like I said, we need to take our time. But at the same time, I would just like to see it slow down just a hair on that part of it. But that's all I can. I mean, that's for that. CHRISTIE WOODARD.

What are your thoughts, Steve? STEVE GROVE.

Well, I appreciate your concern. And anybody that's here that's concerned about what Councilman Lane has brought up, I do appreciate your concern and your interest in the staffing of the police department. But I could say that Cale and I have had discussions about staffing and about the budget of the police department now for two plus months, I guess. I've met with Mayor Andrus and met with Sam Gaston, probably some other folks about this issue and my staff. We make a we make a proposal for what we feel like we need to, to run the police department and combat crime and keep homewood safe. And we leave it up to the city leadership as to how to how to interpret that budget and whether or not they want to approve it or not. And Cale listened to me and took my request under consideration before he made his proposed budget to you guys. Since that has been done, I think I have seen just in some conversations with kale that, you know, when we first started talking about this, there might have been a six to $7 million shortfall that we anticipated citywide to propose a balanced budget. You've heard tonight that that's thankfully that's come down a good bit. And I think it's it's made it to where Carol and I and the mayor and I have been able to have some discussions about how the police department can examine its budget especially since it's the biggest i think it's the biggest budget of any of the departments if i'm not mistaken and that we could examine our budget a little closer try to find ways to be more efficient streamline even we've had those discussions And I think we've even had discussions where I've expressed my desire to get back to what you're talking about Councilman Lane about 90 police officers. And I think I think we have talked about ways in which to get back to that in the future. And I'm encouraged by that because you know, I'm probably I'm never going to come to you and tell you we need less police officers. I don't know any police chief in America that would do that quite frankly. And I know a lot of chiefs I've been doing this a long time. And most of our conversation, when we get together, the thing that we immediately start talking about is staffing because we're all, we all have budgets. We all have budget constraints. We all have challenges and hiring and retaining our personnel that we do hire. So we're always talking about, about staffing and, uh, all of us, would like to have more people. Berkeley would probably like to have more people, as I think you heard him express. Brandon would love to have more people. But I understand there's a finite supply of money, too. It's not an infinite supply of money. And I want to do my best to manage what we're given. And I want to do my best to examine my organizational chart to include the whole organization, whether it's sworn personnel or unsworn personnel, and try to take the challenge upon myself to manage our department and to be a little bit more efficient in the way that we spend money and give some thought to streamlining. But keeping in mind that if I can do that, and I believe that I can, that we can get back to having a fully staffed sworn police personnel within our organization i think that's possible i'll give you an example of how we have taken it upon ourselves to streamline in the past and not so distant past you know we've had custodial staff we've had building maintenance staff we've had all sorts of staff in our police department to accomplish all things that you can think of and that organizations need We've lost some of that staffing, and I've made a concerted effort when we've lost some personnel like that to do without them and try to find other ways of having those jobs done to keep from hiring another person and to streamline the police department with regard to its civilian personnel. Those are just a couple of examples, and I think we can continue to do that as we lose people via normal attrition, not through layoffs. or putting people out of work, but through normal attrition, as we have discussed, I think we can accomplish what we need to accomplish, what I want to accomplish, and what it sounds like what you want to accomplish, sir.

so i hope that i hope that makes sense if it doesn't i'm happy to answer questions about it i will say that we did talk about having a meeting first week of december when the fiscal year closes out to look i mean we talked about that yesterday and having that on the books ready to go so i think i think mayor will also

And even Councilman Simmons, there are things in the future for Homewood that we need to be proactive on. For instance, the Brookwood deal. We've got that. What's the time period when all that comes? Do we need more support from the police, more support from the fire? I mean, those are things we've got to be ready for. I'm just saying. And once it's built, then we say, we've got to go start doing this. But that's going to be a lot more revenue coming in, too. And somewhere along the line, we're going to adjust it. It's going to be coming, OK? So it's coming. And we got to be prepared for that also. Not only what's maybe not working now, but it'll be working then. So I'm just saying we need to be a little bit proactive on those things also. And one other thing I want to say. Berkeley. I just want to make a point. The point I was trying to say, and I meant to say, MGT said, I'm just going by what MGT said, okay?

So that's all I was trying to say.

Let me retract that. I'm moving it back in. All right.

Okay, Councilor Simmons or Mr. Smith, anything else you want to add?

I don't have anything to say other than thank you for your efforts. I think ultimately, you know, it's going to take a collective effort for everyone to work together to make it work. Instead of being siloed, you know, I've seen this happen in the company that I worked for, you know, in the past. I won't name some of the other companies out there that work in silos, but it's not productive at the end of the day. What works best is when we all work together. And I appreciate your efforts. And everybody here. So I think we have to be mindful not to target anyone or any department or anything and know that we're working. And I'm going to use what you said earlier in council meeting to be patient. Correct. As we're moving forward. We can't put that tooth back in the toothpaste. I don't know. You can't work that out either over there either. So you might have to be there. Oh, birthday. We really need to do it.

But I hate to tell you this, but probably a lot of public comment might be here for you. So I'll be happy to stay around.

Let me just say this while I've got your attention. I was looking at our crime numbers and, you know, regardless of any controversy that may or may not be out there, our guys and girls are working hard. And I'm proud to say that we finished with record lows in crime last year in 2025. And as I look at the numbers through August of this year, we're down 37%. Crime is down once again, I think I told you at the State of the City Address in January that I don't know if we can go much lower than this. And I was wrong. And I'm happy to admit that because we're down. We're down once again, a substantial amount. And I plan on us finishing strong and having resetting record lows in crime. So Homewood is a safe place and we, that's all we want to do. We want to keep it a safe place. I want us to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Thank you.

All right.

Chief. Thank you. You can't go anywhere. We're on 15. Fire Department. Chief Broadhead. All right. Total personnel. Same number as last year.

10.4. Oh, you're talking money. Same positions as last year. Numbers are the same.

Contractual service is 675. That includes?

That is our ambulance contract, our private ambulance contract. That is the only thing in that line. He went to contractual work. Oh, the professional. I said the wrong word. So the EMS services? EMS services. Just transport services. Make sure I clarify that we provide EMS services. That's right.

This is RPS.

Yeah, that is RPS currently. The contract expires January 1, 2028.

And we are getting our two transport.

One is already back up and running, and we have a plan this next year to have the second one. Okay. same one repaired yes yeah we repaired we replaced the motor and the one that is back up and running and the next one we are ordering a new chassis if the budget passes to get it repaired i made a mistake the other day brandon heard me say that uh that the firefighters get to the scene and wait on the paramedics to arrive he said no that's not right at all they are paramedics every fire truck you see has at least two paramedics on it and can and has all of the equipment that you will get in an ambulance so we can do everything in a cardiac arrest that you're going to see for the first 20 minutes in a hospital so well that's easy I'm good with that. You want me to keep going? So supplies, 281,000 in supplies. A big number there is employee physicals and uniforms like Chief Rose we do that every single year we follow NFPA NFPA stipulates that we have a physical every year to track their wellness and that they're able for fit for duty so that is every single year for us and originally we went back to the previous numbers and I told cows like that is not a I can't do half of that number that's the number I have to have if we do it or just not do it but that also gets us a hundred percent compliance on our city insurance wellness screening in the fire department

Building grounds and maintenance is 85,000 total.

Station two and three need a lot more love than that.

Well, two, we have pretty much stopped doing anything to station two because we expect a replacement in the near future. So we are just doing what is absolutely necessary to get us. I will note that you look at the year to date on that one at 56. I checked it just before I came up here. There's 24,000 encumbered in that account. That is painting at station one and some repairs at station three. That leaves $4,000 left in that as of right now. Yeah, I think we'll probably finish the year close to 4,000 unless something breaks, but So we are at the end of the design phase I have a pretty good design and then we will get you an estimate and come back to the council for The bid and all of those things. Don't worry about it. You got it. Station 2, it's got to be replaced, and we know that.

And it will be on that lot facing the newspaper.

That is where it is currently selected.

I'll be back. I'll run outside. You can take it through the contract.

Contracts. 217.6 is my requested budget. Do you have a list of those? Yeah, you see the same thing I do. So the only thing I would note, we are a little bit, so year-to-date actual, we're under our 200 that we had. Our radio maintenance came in under budget this year. Since we contracted dispatch with Shelby County 911, we lost money. We had six consoles. We're down to two. So that saved us about $10,000. We also haven't paid medical director year to date or cardiac monitor. So that should bring us as soon as I get those invoices that we paid, that should bring us real close to the budget number that we expect. Any questions on one of those contracts? some of these are the ones that we're working to condense like pest control we pay like 80 a month per building but we really need to get on a contract with everybody else station landscaping that you see there that is all of the grass and stuff that is on the same contract that berkeley has for everything else in the city that's just our portion of it so apex yes and it's the same rates and everything that berkeley negotiated it's just i pay that portion out of my budget

Can I ask about the pest control? Just curious. So I noticed it was you had the police at their dollar amount. You've got yours. Why is it broken up? Why don't we have a contract citywide?

I think that's what's coming. That's what he said.

So these pest control contracts have been in place since I've been up here in admin for sure, and it is something that we need to renegotiate and recontract for the whole city.

So he said, he canceled.

And that's one of the things that happened. When we get to October 1st, we're going to look at all contracts, review each one of them, see if there's any overlap, bring everything. Like I said, let's, you know, one paper, you know, one paper product, you know, one pest control, everything.

Perfect.

Any other questions?

I have no utilities.

Do you have your expenses or is that capital for the third floor?

I think that is going to be in a general budget account, but it will be a capital. It's not a new budget. Um, we were a little bit under on our membership subscriptions this year. We negotiated a free year with the Amazon. So we currently cover the Amazon prime for the entire city. That was one of those consolidation things we did two years ago that each department kind of had their own thing. We put it under one account and instead of everybody paying $110, we now pay $1,200 total uh for i think 150 employees citywide but we pay it out of our budget because we manage that account that's one of those things i hope to pass off to finance in the near near future but we negotiated free year this year because of some of the problems we had so that i did not spend that money it's easy any other questions for chief

Yes, sir. Explain to the residents that are here what you discussed this morning about what we go through, how we've downsized to narrow fire. Absolutely. Explain to them what's happening here.

Over the past two years, obviously, we know that Homewood streets are not getting water. Parking is an issue for us. I know we discussed it the other night. and so what we have done in the last two trucks that we purchased we have bought smaller shorter trucks we have called a lot of equipment because also a couple years ago when we started talking to the council about pays and colas we realized that we were going to have to become more efficient to pay our people what they what we should pay them and so we started combining equipment getting rid of things that we couldn't provide the data to keep One of those things extrication equipment we used to have a set on every single fire truck. We we have not used it enough for me to justify replacing it. So we as we did that, we were able to shrink our truck sizes. So our two newest trucks engine one and engine two that's on Carr Ave and the one here at Central. They are much shorter, much. like shorter in height and wheelbase and narrower so that they can get into your streets and hopefully navigate the parking the other piece to that in 2029 we will expect a delivery of our new aerial apparatus the one with the ladder on it it is a tiller truck so it drives from the front and the back what that allows is our firefighters to maneuver in and out of parked cars tighter turns it will serve our city better for our very narrow and congested streets Fire trucks are not one of those things that you buy today and pick up next year. We ordered that one October of last year and it will be here in 2029. Yes, a fire, we will have to pay for it in 2029 as well. So a fire engine is every bit of 28 to 36 months. The last two we bought were 750,000. We expect the next one to be about 1.2, 1.3 million. They're a very expensive piece of equipment. We keep them 20 years at least. Our current oldest truck is a 2004 that we just refurbed. Plan to keep it on because it doesn't have a lot of the deaf stuff that the new ones do that causes Blake a lot of headaches. He's shaking his head. He loves that old truck. But we've kept it for 22 years and as long as it's in good condition, I'm going to keep it in as a reserve because it's a very reliable truck.

And that was my question. Is that Blake's department that does that?

He does all the maintenance. Yes.

They do a good job for us. I also explained to him, which is really a cool feature, going through the red lights.

you get to be like batman batman yes so i have a history of and i think it's important to know where i come from back when i was 16 my mom got hit at by somebody that was running an emergency ton damage so for me every time we turn those lights on it's a it's a personal thing for me to make sure that you're safe when i say you when you cross that intersection when you get a green light you expect to be safe when you go through that intersection well if my trucks aren't paying attention or something happens or we think you see if we don't catastrophe happens so we put a system in place last year the council funded it it's called hostile learning and glanced we get green lights In our direction, so the system is GPS based and it tracks the trucks everywhere they go when they turn their emergency lights on. It tracks traffic patterns and will give us a green light at the next intersection. The goal is to make sure that if you were in the cross path there you get a red light and you're not waiting to hear that fire truck. The second piece of that hostile learning. You know in these new cars. you can have a fire truck roll up behind you and you're not hearing until the last second. This system actually projects into newer vehicles and will turn your radio down and flash a sign or a thing on your screen that says emergency vehicle approaching from the rear or emergency vehicle ahead on the right so that we get your attention despite the noise. Now the horns and sirens are loud, but new cars, are extremely good at sound so we want to do everything we can to make sure that not only we get into the emergency as fast as we can but we're not hurting anybody on the way and i just want to say that's what some of the funding that we do that nobody pays attention to and that's in under license contracts that's 3 500 a year to keep that account active which is a pretty small cost um in the grand scheme of the time we save anytime i can slow our trucks down i want to do that It just is too dangerous for the residents as well as my firefighters to do that. And, you know, Chief Ross talked about crime statistics. Luckily, we don't have those in the fire department. We gauge metrics based on property losses and ISO ratings as well as national standards. We are an ISO rating one department that is absolutely the best in the country you can get. There's less than 1% of departments nationwide that hold that rating. We hold that at Homewood, something that we've had since 2018. The other thing we have not had since 2017 is a total loss. We have not lost a complete structure since 2017. I talked this morning about the two Walmart fires we had and how important it is to get to those fast and get those out, not just for the residents and the safety of the people that are in the buildings, but also for the continuity of business and our tax dollars as well. We've got to get them open back as soon as we can, and that's that's the part that your fire department plays. in the daily life that you guys see every day. Because I would bet that most of you have never called 911 and actually used our services, which is a good thing. And we had a save tonight. We had a fire alarm. Turned out to be a basement fire. The owner was in New York. Didn't have a clue. And our guys pulled up, found the fire, got it stopped to the point of origin. So they had an alarm in their house that called it in, which is common. We get a lot of falses, but tonight was a real one and luckily they did what they were supposed to do.

We got up on Wellington with your truck.

We did. We got up on Wellington with three trucks.

Wait, aren't you offering that up for charity? Actually, yes.

My wife hates this thing, by the way. But I told her I was going to grow it until after our 5K. And whoever would like to make a donation will be allowed to shave it. I think social media has something to do with that. I got a blade. Switchblade.

Okay. All right. We are skipping courts, right?

Skipping 16. We'll talk about them on Thursday. 17 is not a department anymore.

Oh, dirt. Sorry.

That was dumb. All right. 18. Mr. Squires. Let's go.

All right, personnel costs, 3.7 million. Professional services, 2.2 million. That includes the contract for sanitation, so for Amway's, at 1.9 million.

Berkeley, I know you've got Mark Thompson. I saw it, but I don't remember where. Is it here or Mark Thomas, Mark Thompson? Yeah, it's in there.

It's in contractual services. It's in the landscape. It's in park.

Oh, it's in parks. Okay, I knew I'd seen that. Okay, thank you.

Supplies 128. Contractual services 29,000. And then under not much in utilities, under other expenses, you've got $178,000 in dump fees. DAVID BURRAGE.

Blue sky.

DAVID BURRAGE. We're going to go down now since we don't want to pick up Mr. Lane's anymore.

DAVID BURRAGE. Take that down. DAVID BURRAGE.

You got to take that up more. I don't want to mess with that.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I don't I mean, our stuff's kind of cut and dried. I mean, you know, most of this stuff is, you know, one thing I know Chief Rod had mentioned the cyclic fix, which is on page 20. It's gone up. And the reason we did is that's now going to be part of our maintenance process throughout the city that people put their stuff in there so we can track HVAC unit work and all that stuff. So all of that now would go into that. So everybody will be utilizing that.

And that goes to the respective department head? Yes. And Allison has copied that too.

And we'll work through it to begin that as we talked about with Councilor Simmons. That will be a part of our long-range facility planning. So there's an external component and the internal component is the one that we have. Yeah, we have one on the outside that the public can use for whatever it may be.

But we also have one internal that says I need a water faucet fixed on the second floor of City Hall. We can track it.

It just allows us to track any of the maintenance and upkeep that's going on in any of the buildings.

All right. Any questions for Mr. Squires?

on streets and is you know that's capital your sidewalk repair that'll be yeah that's no no not sidewalk repair you know that's going to be in in in the street department that's going to be under contractual services or wait a minute yeah It's down under small infrastructure. We moved everything to small infrastructure. 205,000. Yep. That's new sidewalks, ADA ramps, sidewalk repairs.

What do we do on the sidewalks? For instance, kind of selfish on this, I guess, on Mayfair Drive up going where some trees have really, you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, we will. What can you do? Those are all in a, we have a, damn long list of everybody. It's on there. Every one of those are on there. you know, we went, you go back to the whole garbage thing, like we went about two years, we didn't do hardly any because all the personnel was doing garbage. So we we got behind on sidewalk repair. So now we've got we've got two crews, that's all they do five days a week now. Yeah, so we've probably knocked out more in the last two years, we did the last 10 years combined a lot of mean adjusted. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it, you know, the tree roots get to them. And so you know, kind of what we're running into, you know, downtown. Same thing.

And going into the parks, once again, Overton Park, for instance, that we've discussed before, people are, neighbors are curious, what are we going to, when are we going to do it? But that's a capital, that's going to be a capital fund. And, Kale, I don't know, when is that, is that in for?

27 or 28 or when are we talking we're looking at the 27 i think 27 28 budget right on overton it's not overton's not included in this kind of issue not this year and i will tell you we took to heart what everybody is going through and we cut capital budget like could you know the park board we voted OVERTON AND WOODLAND WERE OUR TWO NEXT FACILITIES THAT WE WANTED TO ADDRESS.

AND IF YOU COULD JUST GUESTIMATE, NOT ESTIMATE, GUESTIMATE, LIKE THE COST, WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT AT OVERTON, JUST THAT DIGIT.

OVERTON, TO DO WHAT THE PORT WORLD WOULD LIKE TO DO, PROBABLY $700,000. OKAY.

SO I WANT EVERYBODY TO KNOW WHO'S FROM THAT AREA, FROM MAYFARE, FROM WARD 3. THAT'S A COST THAT WHEN YOU GO DOWN THERE AND YOU LOOK, YOU KNOW, OH, WE GOT A LITTLE crack here or something here. It's going to be a big overhaul. It's going to be a big project. So as Councilor Simmons says, be patient. That one's got some drainage issues that we've got to address.

But it's going to drive the cost only a lot.

Yeah, I just want everybody to know what kind of cost we are talking about. So we need more revenue.

Yes, we do. Revenue. Please. All right. Thanks, Burke. All right.

Thank you. Library. I mean, same order of business personnel services at 3.26 million. Professional Services is 92. Eight. That includes 89 a in data processing services. What is that?

That is our membership to the Jackson County Library Cooperative. One county one card and 40 libraries work together.

supplies 384 750 that includes 320 in books and materials we had about a quarter of a million visitors last year and had over half a million checkouts And then 211,000 and contractual services. And I mean, there's a whole list of all the stuff you can see most of it is I can't read most of the words.

And you're done. I'm sorry, capital, but you're done with everything. Your construction is done. Yes, it looks great. So we're done renovations. Programming, we have 1,200 programs last year. We did 1,400.

And then we had about 90,000 people attend. And they were all free. That's why we stay busy. Except for the 100 people.

How does the auditorium work as far as meetings and things like that? I mean is that just they just sign up to

so we have a meeting room policy that's approved through the library board and people of local community members can reserve a space there is a rental fee that comes back to the city as revenue there's a non-commercial rate and a commercial rate so if they want to do a commercial rate they have to have a homewood city business license and we do about 900 rentals a year it doesn't generate a whole lot of revenue but it's about 30 000 for the city it brings in a lot of people So HOAs can meet, we have a few churches that meet, book clubs, Birmingham canoe places, you know, different society groups. Rotary and Kiwanis. Rotary and Kiwanis, yes, every Wednesday and Thursday.

Any questions for Judith?

Thank you for all the support that y'all given us. Like you said, we're one of the busiest libraries and being able to do this 1400 events a year has allowed us to reach a lot of wonderful people in the community who might not have known what the library can offer. Thank you.

Parks and Rec, total personnel, 5.28. Professional services, he's got a lot of these, 657.

That's covering a lot of the mowing that we do that we have with the fire departments, as well as the maintenance. The police department, all the flowers downtown, Edgewood, West Homewood's in there. That's all included in that. Maintenance around City Hall, flowers, pots, and all that stuff's in that. Of course, our Jefferson County pool stuff that we have to do for both of the pools included in that. ALDOT mowing of right-of-ways is in there.

We pay a contract to do all of the right-of-ways coming into the city of ALDOT.

utility stuff now is they've combined all of them to do through through one on that gas and water and electricity and wireless don't find that thing we do now is this our telephone which is 5500 through utilities

park activity. That's recreation programs.

Yes, that's all of our things, which I mean, we're, you know, we're in record numbers. We have a little bit of over 1000 and youth basketball. We had a record this year we got 637 kids and first through fifth grade of black football. 134 girls and girls volleyball, baseball, softball was around 700. Soccer was it I think 13 over 1300 kids. So we've grown substantially in all of our youth programs.

And I think great job on the Central Park. Yeah, the floor was fantastic.

Oh, yeah.

What does something like that cost?

We this year, we had it up every 10 years, you have to grind down all the way back to the original wood. And so I think this year, it was around 70 something thousand to do both courts up. But that's You gotta grind it all the way down in sets and then you come back in and we did a, we changed this year and did a water-based coat. It doesn't yellow as much as the older oil-based does after about four or five years. But every 10 years, it's kind of like tennis courts, all that. You've got to come back in and redo them about every 10 years. That would be great. It would be great to walk in. It just jumps out at you.

Is that the first? I mean, it's been 10 years, right?

Oh, yes. We're on year 13 in the building.

Yeah. So is that the first time you've done that?

That's the first time we went all the way back to the original wood with it. Every year, we come in and take the layer off and then reapply it. But now it'll go a whole year. before we'll do anything, or two years before we'll do anything again on it. So after you skin it down like that, it's a two-year wait period to do it again. But yeah, it's in a year, let's see, I think in 29 we'll do the West home with Jim. We'll have to do it to those. That's right. That's right.

That's what I did.

So that's it. Unless y'all got any other questions?

Can we hear the questions first?

Let's see.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

All right.

All right, Blake.

I feel like you sped this up. I know. I'm sorry.

Well, I realize that I took over calling the door heads up. I apologize.

No, that's great. Judith had the over-under set at three hours.

OK, what are we at? Two.

We're at two right now.

We're doing pretty good. Thanks. Y'all have a good evening.

Thank you. Thank you for what you do. Oh, wait a minute.

I'm gone. He gave me a go-ahead. All right. Let's see. Okay.

Well, you want to take us to the camp? Yeah. Personnel services, 989,000 supplies, seven 40, which is heavy on the fuel and lubricants because he gets all the fleet vehicles in the city. Go to see Blake.

And last year was the first year really that we separated that out or not separated out, put it into your department. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah. And we wanted to leave it, the structure and the format of the budget kind of the same. But we have talked a little bit, and Aspen is here now, so we'll probably regroup and figure out if that's the best way to show that or if we need to do something else. As far as call centers go across all departments. Sorry. Contractual services, 464. Utilities, $4,000. And other expenses, $60,500.

How is this incorporating the fleet study? Or is that more on hitting the departments individually?

So kind of like what we said last night with the org study, it's not, it's not an, right. The fleet study won't be an immediate call savings. Right. But over time, right. It will naturally show up in future budgets. Okay. Yeah, Blake has done an excellent job working with all the departments. He's got a list of 50 or so vehicles that he wants to take. His list is about 100 vehicles he wants to take off the street. So he's working with everybody right now to figure out what we can surplus. And once that you know, we have 330 rolling stock, I think was the last count. Once we get that number to a more manageable number, his job will become easier and more efficient.

Okay.

At what point at what point when you get into the fleets such as police vehicles or police vehicles more important right now? At what point, when you go to auction them or sell them, is it kind of a minute return on investment? There's hardly any. I mean, what do you get a return on an average one?

Well, right now, we're in our stages of implementing a replacement plan with them, more of a- Trade-in? No, not much trade-in, because we're going to own them. It will be a- replace a plan on a cycle like when we get them 100 120 whatever that mileage is that we're going to be pulling them off the front line and rolling them down to other officers that we're still is a viable option uh but we've got to get we've got to get the fleet a little bit newer and once we will i mean right now when we surplus them we can get i think the uh two 2012s we just surplus about three thousand each. So but the 15th through 17th that we've got rid of five to 8500. So there is still a return because of it being a PPV cruiser that there's a high demand for that.

What's the mileage?

Usually between about 140 to about 190.

Yeah.

Something like this is suggested I think what he's working getting rid of them a little sooner when they're worth a little bit more money. Therefore, we get a better return on our investment.

We're going to that what I was talking I think discusses with Paul months and months ago, when we first got in. When I think it might be an idea where we can have police, not surveillance, but a police car just parked, let's say, downtown. Chelsea does. I'm just saying in general, whether it's you or just police presence, if it looks it slows somebody down, I promise you.

Well, we haven't done it for that purpose.

I mean, I'm talking about as far as we have done it, Robert or something like that.

When we've had a crime trend here, we have utilized a marked police vehicle to park in a certain area to, to have more presence in that area. And it is, you know, it's hard to measure the effect that it has, but it's worth trying. And we've done that from time to time with an older car. that we might have as a spare. So we're going to continue to have cars like that that we can utilize, even with getting rid of what we're going to get rid of.

We've done that in a lot of complexes occasionally, business districts, this district. You just risk vandalism sometimes. Oh, you're going to break into it? Well, then you get insurance. I know, yeah. People zoom past that in there. They wave at the dummy in the car. I heard that somebody took selfies with her. Are we trying to go to

I like the idea of giving allowance, car allowances, trending that direction. I mean, is that our goal? I mean, is there a goal there or just?

I think so, over time, eventually.

Does that help us as far as liability or anything, insurance and things like that? Sure, yeah.

OK.

Because in the past, the track record wasn't very good on some of these. Right.

Yeah. I mean, the fleet study is comprehensive. And I mean, for Blake to implement the whole fleet study would take a decade, probably. I mean, it's.

I'll retire before he does. He's young.

It's policies and procedure recommendations. It's a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. OK.

Thank you, Blake.

Thanks, Blake.

Randy Hanley.

There's my man. Christmas lights.

You're putting decorations in my budget.

We'll work on that after the first.

You're going to have to fund that. All right. Personnel 213, 353.

Supplies, $9,900. Contracts, $26,000. Other expenses, $6,850. about Randy's group is that for his personnel costs, 30% are paid out of the general fund and 70% are paid out of the gas tax. And we talked today about something that we'll talk about when we get into gas tax. So that may change a little bit. The percentage might change. But that's something we've got to talk about over the next day or so.

I'm going to tell you, those six, they get at it.

I ain't going to tell you. What a burden. No, seriously. Unbelievable.

Especially up in the trees.

When they get up in those trees.

Christmas lights. Your supplies for like signage, like your signs that you make and all that.

That actually comes out of 7th Sense. All of our signage and stuff like that. there will be there will be more to talk about the street signs street sites to for like a top of Mayfair with that ugly yellow washed out been there for 65 years already got new overhead signs we're waiting on aldot to get through with their project they're replacing the traffic lights so as soon as they get done We'll have new signs down 31. OK. Any other questions for Randy? Thank you so much.

Is Chief Brodhead still here to talk about maintenance?

So the maintenance department has its own department. It's two people, Lee and Matthew, and they are managed by Chief Rodman.

And Lee's out of the fire station now, right?

Recently changed.

And Lee's out of the fire station now, right? No, he's not. He works for the fire department. Yes. He's not at the station.

No, he's still here.

And the bulk majority of his work is HVAC. That's C-Click fixes given. I've been over it about two months, a little over two months. So we've gotten a pretty good data set of what they do. And to be honest, this is the budget that Wyatt and Lee prepared prior to my taking it over. And I went with what they had just because I don't have a good handle on it yet. But I do know, looking through City Hall with JJ and Berkeley, we have identified some things that we know we can do better. So we're working on those. So we didn't really add many of them into this budget. I'll answer what I can. That's just a one page.

Yeah, that's short. Yeah.

What are all the maintenance, I mean, besides City Hall?

So Lee does HVAC maintenance across the city. So I know he has done a lot at the police department recently since they lost their maintenance tech. He works with the library as well. Now they have their own HVAC tech, which also helps out back and forth. So it's a concerted effort.

We have a building supervisor who just happens to be certified in HVAC.

Okay, good. I'm trying to take him. And Park and Rec building? They have some general maintenance, not HVAC or any of that, no plumbers or electricians, but they do have people that will change light bulbs and do the generalized maintenance. and they have their own tracking system so we are working to combine the two so we have a better idea of do we need one maintenance department or do we need a couple of people across the city and maintenance in the fire department we don't have any maintenance personnel so they they will help you or not they will help us on some projects but their workload's pretty high for two people we do most of our stuff through contract and also if you know anything about firefighters they are contractors and handing free time

You see him running around the block a lot over there.

We've seen significant improvement since with the system that we're getting in place, I think we'll have a really good tracking system to understand where all of our stuff is going.

And I know that Lee has been here a long time and he does a ton of things across the city that we could never put on paper before. Now we can actually show you that he is busy. He does a lot of work for us.

All right, Brandon, you ready? Are you awake back there? I think that's it. What's that? Oh, no. One more. Aspen, after this. Almost there. Finance. Real close.

Finance. Can't wait.

All right.

So Brandon, y'all know him. Personnel services, $604,000. Professional services, $60,000. Supplies, $15,500. Contractual services, again, I don't know what any of these, these are all like letters and stuff. I don't know what most of them mean. Means he knows what they all mean.

Password. Yeah, exactly.

Duo, duo level. Well, I do just want to say one thing. I've been here 10 years, and we are light years ahead of where we were 10 years ago. And it's been the last two, it's not three yet, is it? Two years. Yeah, and it's been because of Brandon. I mean, we had no IT. I mean, our IT, we were, Melanie, am I right? Am I right? I mean, we were so ancient and just really sad, really sad. and so what you've done in the last two years is remarkable and you've really brought us up to the you know where we need to be and so thank you for everything i think he would tell you we're not we're not there well yeah of course i know yeah of course but anyway the difference between now and when i started 10 years ago is is right right though am i right yes he does so i can't say enough i agree 100 so thank you what kind of cost did we have like in the spyware stuff i mean you know when we had that issue remember when we were was it about two months ago

we we got hit when i got fished or when i got back again i mean what do you have to go through something like that so let me make sure i understand your question do you remember do you

which time you want to know pricing on what do you have yet you have to farm that out or you do you take care of that yourself you are how does that work and what kind of cost is involved yes so let's see so it is sure I'm giving you the right number here it is about 41 I'm looking at this number right, $41,000 per year for coverage for all of the city's email accounts. That includes a additional SOC monitoring. So when someone receives a spam or phishing email, they can report it and instead of waiting on the internal team to have a chance to review all of those. We actually have a third party that will rereview those. And if they're found malicious, they will go in and block any links, any attachments and things like that across the board. So it's kind of a sense of a herd immunity type deal. They also go through and give us ratings on people who are most highly targeted, so we can see who's getting the most legitimate phishing attempts against them, things of that nature. So it just kind of helps us figure out where our hot spots might be. Because I'm not as scared of it, I mean... So not to pull us off track, but just the other day in personal life, I had a friend who their computer was completely compromised from clicking on a link that looked like an invitation to a birthday party. Not only were the people able to completely take over their machine, but they were able to effectively pull all of their e-mail contacts, all of their phone contacts because their phone was connected to their computer, They attempted to go through their browser and look through their history, get into their bank. It was a serious situation. And all of that can happen from a single click. so it is something that we take very seriously that is why our our approach is a layered defense you kind of have to mix and match tool sets and try to build a number of defenses so that if they get through one space they get hung up on another space so i would take it on the uh how are we on that

Do we have an insurance plan or something when we get compromised banks?

We have cyber insurance. That's what I'm talking about. Apparently. So Alabama.

Is that in this fund? Is that in this fund? Is that Cobb's Alley? Cobb's Alley, yeah. No, what I'm talking about is where is that line item? In the general liability. OK, gotcha.

That's a part of it. That's the coverage under it. I think Brandon would agree. We have learned that cyber insurance isn't wonderful insurance. So if there was a cyber attack, then there's more risk than there is reward from the insurance company.

Yeah.

Yeah, your best bet in the event of a cyber attack is to have extremely good accounts for everything that you have and have a strong backup and restoration policy and process in play. If you don't have good copies of your data that live somewhere other than where the bad guys might be attacking,

you're you're in bad shape so to an example with city of birmingham they had to wait a full quarter before they passed their budget last year yeah yeah so i mean it's real like that it's for real yeah you download the thing uh at the end every night uh yes sir so we um we actually in this

Earlier this year, we implemented a new backup and disaster recovery platform, so now we don't wait to capture backups daily. We actually snapshot all of our critical servers on an hourly basis, and we move those into a repository, and then at the end of each day, we tick those off-site, so we put a copy in two different places.

Kudos.

Anything else to add for anyone?

The only thing I have to add is welcome to the world, Neffy Mason.

That's awesome, man. Nice stuff, good stuff.

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Okay, Aspen, welcome to Homewood.

Thank you. You're here.

Ah, the best relax. Show me the money.

So, finance budget is being reduced by $400,000 this year. $160,000 of that is in salaries, and the rest of the reduction is in professional services. That is a reduction in our accounting and auditing costs that we've paid over the past couple of years. Those have been reduced, and those contracts have already been approved, and you saw some of those on the agenda last night. And that is basically it. We don't have a big... budget, not a lot of line items. They are still in there. I don't know that we will use the amount of budget this year that we have put in there, but we did want to leave that in there for any residual.

we have been talking a lot about technology for finance and so probably pretty soon we're going to come back and pitch a whole different strategy around our financial software it we have talked every year for the past since i've been here five years about upgrading to encode 10 right but we've never been able to make that happen for whatever reason yeah so what where that leaves us is that we have a really antiquated financial software um in code nine that doesn't that has like very mediocre support it doesn't really talk to the payroll system so we're working on a plan for that and probably I think the plan to pay for it would be to use some of the car rigs money that we don't anticipate to use next year. But we're thinking through some of those questions.

I didn't want to take the opportunity to say that I've been here a little over a month now and all of the department heads in this room and those have already left are amazing. This city has the best team and I feel so fortunate to be a part of that team. And I look forward to

continuing the work that you guys are already doing so we're so glad you're here thanks okay anything kill do you want to put the cherry on top uh i think that's it that's that's it i don't have any to add all right okay well all right if anyone wants to speak um if you will come up to the front and sign in please I really do have to come to the front. Yes. Well, there's a microphone. Yes, we will get my next door neighbor to waltz. I know you're watching. He waltzed.

You just stand.

No, you just stand right here. I was like, no, I don't want to do that. Christy Wilson with a K. K-R-S-D-I. Wilson.

K-R-S-T-I.

Wilson. I live on Overton Drive. I've been in Homewood for 44 years, and I just wanted to come here tonight after just seeing some of the, mainly on social media, put out there about the budget being proposed for this next year. But I just wanted to first say how proud I am to be a citizen of Homewood. I think it's the best place in the state of Alabama to live. I want it to continue to be that way and I do believe that this city council will continue to do that so I just wanted to I know I can I speak for a lot of people that are not here tonight as I'm headed right now out to a little league football game for my grand there'd be a lot of people that would be here except they are at home with children but I just wanted to say how much we entrust in our city council to really, really look at this, just like you said, work with your department heads to come up with a budget that you know is the best for the citizens of Homewood. Yes, I do believe that the first responders are so, so important. As I just attended a funeral on Friday at Dawson for someone who lost her 59-year husband, 59 year old husband to a choking incident in Hoover. I realized the importance of first responders and then getting there, whether they're the fire department, the paramedics, the police, whoever. Yes, I have used 9-1-1 twice in 44 years and I do appreciate all that y'all do. I appreciate Berkeley and everybody. Our streets, our sidewalks, everything is so important in Homewood and I just I want y'all to know that we entrust in you to really look at this citywide, all your employees, where you can make cuts if you need to make cuts from early retirements or wherever it is. I just want y'all to know that we entrust in y'all to do what's best for the citizens of Homewood, however that looks. And I just wanted to thank y'all for your time and all y'all do. Everybody, all department heads. Thank you for what you do. And I'm going to Little League ball game.

Thank you for hanging out with us. Thank you so much for hanging out with us.

Bye.

Anyone else? Thanks.