City Council - Special Meeting

The meeting is called to order. Can we please begin with roll call and determination quorum?

Lehman? Here. Maher? Here. Roberts? Stroman? Armstrong? Here. Sechrist? Here. Bieberdorf? Tamang?

Here.

Evans?

Here.

Mayer? Meyer, sorry. We have a quorum.

Thank you. Next, we will proceed with the Pledge of Allegiance. If you are willing and able, please stand.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Next, looking for a motion to adopt the agenda. Second. I have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Agenda is adopted. Next, we'll move to general public comment. I have no public comments in front of me, so we will open and close that and move to non-public hearing items one through three. Number one is the 2027 Monument Budget Presentation by Executive Director Craig Altzer. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Mr. President and council. It's a rare occasion. We get to speak to all of you at once. And so we do look at this as a real opportunity for us. And we don't have a whole lot of time, so we are going to jump right in. I do want to introduce, this is Tracy Hige. She is the deputy director over at the monument. She'll be talking to you as well. First of all, Most of you have heard this before, but we have three main goals at the monument. One, we need to be a community center. Now, I'm not going to go into all the good work and all the good organizations we work with. I wish I had time for that. It was really good stuff. But I'm going to say it this way. Still to this day, 50% of our rental income comes from non-for-profit organizations and school events on a 30% or more discount. So that's more than half our business comes from that. We're very, very strong in community. And if you ever want to learn more about that, I'd be glad to talk to you about it. Number two. We need to be an economic engine for the city. I can't think of any other reason why cities invest in facilities like ours than to help drive taxes and help drive business for the businesses in town. For us, we drive a lot in hotels, restaurants, retail, bars, services, you name it, we do it. During the Stock Show and Rodeo, I can't tell you how many times a car dealership tells us how many pickups they sold during the Stock Show and Rodeo. So it's extremely important for us to drive that. What some of you might remember, in 2023, you, the city council, the monument, and Visit Rapid City combined together to do an economic impact study on the monument. And that was for the completed year of 2022. That economic impact was a very healthy 131 million. And I can tell you, working with that study group, knowing that the government was involved, I made sure there was no fluff or it was straight economic impacts of what we were looking for there. So that's a very healthy number. but I want to remind you that was 2022. That was still a recovery year from COVID. All of our events weren't back yet. And for other reasons, we've grown a lot since then. So that economic impact has only grown. We were expecting to do an economic impact every five years. In the next one or two years, I'm expecting to come back to you with information about that in the future. I'm looking forward to that. Number three, we need to drive our own revenue and think like a business. I think it's widely known amongst council that we do receive a portion of the BB&B. The BB&B bed board and booze tax goes to us and it goes to Visit Rapid City. We do get the larger portion of that. That portion represents one third of our entire budget. That's very important to us. couldn't operate without it on the level that we're on. But it also means we need to drive two-thirds of our budget, and we need to think like a business. I can assure you that's what we've been doing these past years. Since 2018, we were a $10 million operation. And now, as the budget you're looking at, it says 19.5%. million-dollar operation since two thousand eighteen i wish i could say double it nearly doubled during that time and that was a lot of growth probably one of the significant mile markers during that time was the building of the summit arena which opened in november of twenty twenty one That opening, we knew that moment that that opened, we were accepting a lot more operational costs. In order to recover for that, we needed to get serious about how we were changing our business. Just one example of that is we changed how we were handling sponsors. We went from a place that sold signs to creating a sponsorship relationship program and developed all the programs that we have today. Our sponsors are very, very important to us. Specifically, our naming rights sponsor, Monument Health, who's been a great partner all these years, and we couldn't live without them as well. The other thing that's important to mention about us thinking like a business, and I think it's important to council and the citizens as well, Within that, we operate our own capital. We are not coming to council and asking for, hey, we need a new roof, or we need supplemental money for this capital project or not. And I'll remind you how much rooftop we have, and I'm going to remind you that some of that next year will be 50 years old. So there's a lot of capital improvement. We don't ask for vision funds for capital improvement. You build buildings with vision funds, but then we maintain them. Right now we're on a $2.1 million project in the ice arena, updating all the video production that was outdated in that room. And so we're keeping up the asset. In fact, Tracy's gonna dive more into this. Since 2021, November, when we opened up the summit, to the end of the budget we've got in front of you, we will have invested $8 million into capital, into the project. So we're very healthy there as well. That growth that we're talking about, 2018 till now, nearly double, is probably around about a 10% increase every year. That is leaps and bounds, jumps in growth. We know that that's not sustainable. We know that's not even healthy to have that kind of jump. We started seeing that kind of slow up this year that we're on. We're predicting a more healthy and steady growth in the future, 2% to 4%. With that, it's going to allow us a time, because we've been growing so much, adding staff, adding equipment, doing all the things we need to do to keep up with the business load that we're getting, that we are now focused on how do we be more efficient? How do we make things better? smarter, make smarter decisions in how we're doing things. And how do we grow our business in a healthy way? Just a couple things I want to mention there. Sometimes I see it on social media, referring to our house as the box of empty air. October 1 through Christmas and March, I'm sorry, January, end of January to the first two weeks in April, we have no more room on our calendars than any of our event centers. And that is the crucial time for our industry. That is the busiest time of the year. I'm going to tell you, that's when touring concerts and indoor venues go out. That's when monster trucks happens. That's when a rodeo happens. That's when all school events happen. Just about everything we do happens during that season. So how do we free up more dates in the calendar? That efficiency I was talking to you about, one of the things we invested in last year is more of a conversion crew overnight. For every large event we do, you need a conversion date because you have to convert the arena for the next event. You have to clean it. You have to move stages. You have to do all the stuff that you have to do. How do we do this and be ready for an event at 8 in the morning, the very next morning? You do overnight conversion crews. We've always had overnight conversion crews, but we need to put that on steroids to free up more dates in the calendar. We started that project this past year. It's opening up a few more dates. We need to try to find people to work that overnight shift and drive that even harder. That's one of the efficiencies I'm talking about. But there's other things about growth that we can do. We do have a summer season where we're a lot lighter. Traditional events indoors do not play in the summertime. So what about non-traditional events? Last year we invested in a position called Business Development Manager. that her sole job is to go after events that happen in the summer and can help fill up our summers and drive more there. This job is working directly with Rapid City Together, Visit Rapid City, and driving more events to the monument. These are conventions, these are organizational events, corporate events, that kind of thing. By the way, these are great events for us because they're great on our bottom line, but they're also great events for economic impact because they fill up hotels and bring people to town. So I can tell you that that effort we started last year in May, between May of 2025 and May of 2026, that effort is generated just in catering alone, $240,000 for us in its first year. And that was a year I was expecting nothing because those events typically three years in advance. So we're expecting lots of growth there. I think we're going to project that we're going to be able to maintain that healthy growth that I was talking about. And at this point in time, I already went over time and I'm going to turn over to Tracy.

All right. Awesome. Thank you, Craig. And thank you, Mr. President members of the council. We really appreciate the opportunity to come before you today and talk about our 2027 budget. But first I want to thank our board of directors. They really help us on a daily basis. They spent a lot of time over the last couple of months. diving into the details of the budget numbers that you have in front of you, meeting with our staff and really being involved in the process. For us at the Monument, because we have to generate the revenues if we're gonna have the expenses, budgeting is really a year-round process for us. Every single month, multiple times a month, but at least once we sit down and take a really deep dive into where are we at? Have we generated the revenues we expected to at this time frame? And if those revenues haven't been generated, then we look at our expenses. And it may be time to pull back on those expenses to ensure that we are handling our business the way that we should be. So we're constantly adjusting our operations. We're reducing those expenses if we need to. And just because it's budgeted doesn't mean it's going to happen if the revenues aren't there to handle the offset of the expenses. So again, our board of directors spent a considerable amount of time last month going through the details of this budget, meeting with our different teams and making sure that we are on task and ensuring proper planning for 2027. They did pass the budget that you have before you. at the end of last month. So we are glad to work hand in hand with our board on this project. It's important to note that the budget book that you have in front of you shows the energy plant combined with the monument because they're under our umbrella, but our finances are completely separate. The energy plant finances don't really change much. In fact, they're down a little bit from where they were last year. The revenues were kind of recategorized a little bit. So we're going to talk today about the $19.5 million monument budget and not the energy plant because it just really doesn't change a whole bunch. So we're entering our 50th year. Crazy. Crazy to think 50 years back and if the monument, the civic center, the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center of old didn't happen, what would this community look like? So it's really hard to think about things like that. But let's take a little step back and take a look at, give you an idea of what things look like behind the seats, if you will, in 2025. So there you have on the left-hand side of the screen are three main venues and talking ticketed events here. So these are only events that people are purchasing tickets for. You can see there the three major venues, the Summit Arena, the Ice Arena, and the theater. Total ticketed events between those three venues was north of 140. Plus, all of the other daily events that take place in our building and in our convention spaces, things like seminars and trainings and non-ticketed tournaments and all different sorts of things. We have things going on at the Civic Center all the time that aren't ticketed. So a majority of our events, hundreds of events happen that aren't necessarily ticketed. But we wanted to give you this concrete data because we're not taking attendance at every event that takes place at the monument. So between those three venues, more than 383,000 tickets were sold in 2025. So who were those folks? Where did they come from? And what were the largest events? You can see in the summit arena there, just shy of 10,800 folks attended one day of the Black Hills Pow Wow. So nearly 11,000 people in the building for the Black Hills Pow Wow in October of 2025. If you haven't been to the Pow Wow, you need to come. It's pretty amazing to see. As far as the ice arena, they had a March hockey game. There was an attendance of over 4,100. And then in the theater, we had a few sold out shows. But one sold out show in particular was Kevin Bacon, which is a Vukorovich event. And that event, of course, sold out the theater at 1,691 seats. So where did those folks come from? You can see we had all 50 states buy tickets to events at the monument in 2025. One US territory, six Canadian provinces, and actually six foreign countries. It's kind of fun. a few couples from Europe that come every year for the Black Hills Pow Wow. We've kind of gotten to know them a little bit, but it is so fun to get to see things kind of through their eyes and their perspective. The map there in the middle gives you an idea of the top 10 markets of sold tickets that attend events at the monument. Not a surprise that the cluster is mainly in the Midwest, but obviously we have some snowbirds in Arizona, and then we have that kind of outlier in Virginia there. But again, people come from all over, all over the world, and every state in the union bought tickets to events at the monument. So let's take a look a little bit about impact of 2025. We feel very strongly about supporting our community because our community supports us. And just like many other city departments, we struggle to find enough seasonal and part-time employees to handle the load of events that we have and that we continue to build. So we have the opportunity. We've been partnering with lots of local community groups. 155 community groups, in fact, in 2025, and those could be groups like church groups and Ellsworth Air Force Base groups, South Dakota School of Mines groups, softball teams, various school entities, dance teams, you name it, Boy Scouts. I mean, there's all kinds of different groups that we work with at the Civic Center, and it's a win-win for both of us. We can't have enough staff to handle all the events that we've got going on, So we work with these groups. They help us out in our concession stands. They help us. Craig mentioned conversion crews. They may help us set up a basketball court or tear down a basketball court, usher, take tickets, all different sorts of things. But we are able to pay out over $288,000 to over 155 community groups in 2025 alone. So that's fantastic but it's so beneficial for us as a civic center and it certainly is one of those big pillars for us that helps us to support our community like the community supports us. So very important for us. Likewise our job is economic impact. Our tax base, the monument paid out just shy of 1.4 million dollars in sales tax in 2025 alone. Again, that's tax on tickets sold, that's tax on services provided, all of those sorts of things. And we couldn't do what we do without our part-time and our seasonal employees. We had over 350 part-time employees in 2025. We probably need Almost double that. But we had 350 part-time employees in 2025 that worked 140,000 hours total of part-time labor at the monument in 2025 alone. So obviously we wouldn't be able to do what we do without our part-time folks. And it's fun. We have some part-time folks that have worked at the monument for 40 years or more. So real dedication from that team. We're proud to say that our team of 60 full-time employees, we're not adding any additional FTEs in 2027, but our team of 60 full-time employees at the monument has a combined 350 years of experience in our building. So we've got, again, some full-time employees that have been with the building more than 40 years as well. as well as folks that are just starting in the last few weeks. So great combination of energy and efforts. And it's that type of combined experience that really allows us to create the opportunities and operate at peak levels for the events that come into the building. So we appreciate the community very much. So let's talk a little bit behind the numbers. So the monument has four separate funds within the city operations. Those four funds, fund 775 is our civic center fund that really supports our daily operations. So all of our revenues we generate, our expenses are all handled through that fund. Fund 775A is our capital reserve. This is really our savings account. As we've been able to generate revenue that didn't need immediate expense, it was added to this account for us to be able to take on large capital projects. And we're going to visit about that a little bit more in a minute. We also have the Civic Center Reserve. This is the fund that holds designated monies for investments in future touring shows and events, again, self-generated revenues there, as well as Fund 784, which is our Civic Center Ticket Trust. That's the account that holds all the ticket revenues that we collect when we have events on sale, and we hold that on behalf of the event promoters until the event actually takes place. So let's look at revenues there in the middle of the screen. So again, we're looking at a $19.5 million budget proposed for 2027. It's a 2% increase over the 2026 budget. And Craig had talked a little bit about the history in 2021. That was our last full year of operation before the summit arena opened. And that year we had generated $12.8 million in revenue. We're at 19.5 projected for 2027. So that's, like Craig had mentioned, it's about a million dollars a year in growth. And we know that's not going to continue to happen. We're going to have more targeted, more effort-based, and more sustainable and strategic growth in the future. So 2027, like I said, 2% increase in our revenues. Of that $19.5 million in revenue, about 2 thirds of it, $12.8 million is self-generated revenue. Food and beverage, that's what we say floats our boat. Food and beverage is obviously very, very important to us. It's kind of why we don't have 50 cent hot dogs and 50 cent beer night at the monument. But food and beverage is obviously a very important piece to our puzzle. We're continually evaluating our offerings there, evaluating our pricing. And obviously, every time we go to buy something, the prices can change. So every time we purchase, that obviously can impact what price we're charging for things. We are always evaluating our offerings and adding things as the demand is there. One of the things we're kind of excited about in the last year, we've opened up our own permanent and portable coffee kiosks within the monument. If you haven't tried it, it's called Latte Daw. And so we encourage you to do that, working with local vendors to be able to provide the coffee to be able to provide to our events. And it's been very, very well received. So $6.3 million in food and beverage. Next largest line item for us when it comes to revenue is reimbursements and box office, sales tax collected. That's $3.1 million. These are fees that we charge our events that come into the building for the services that we render, whether it's stagehand fees or event staff fees. even our police services that we offer through the police department and ambulance, ushering, ticket takers, all of those sorts of things. That's what the reimbursement line item is. Our box office is we charge a fee for all the ticketed events that we do in our building. So it gives you an idea of what those line items are. Building and other rentals is the next largest at $2.2 million, just like it sounds. So our building rentals that we charge to events that come into the building, we increase our rental rates 3% per year. That's in an effort to keep up with the costs of things rising and utilities and all of that. 3% per year is what that space rental increases. Likewise, we rent equipment to events that come into the building. Maybe they need production equipment, maybe they need tables, chairs, maybe they need staging. So obviously all of those things as well account for a source of revenue for us. Craig had mentioned our sponsorships. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without our building sponsors. $1.2 million is our projection when it comes to our corporate sponsors. And, uh, like I said, we wouldn't be able to do what we do without our corporate sponsors. So our self generated revenue altogether at $12.8 million, like I said, two thirds of the overall revenue. Obviously the BBB is a huge, huge piece to us. It's imperative to our operation. What you're seeing here is 100% of the gross of the BBB. Now we share 25% of the BBB flows through our expenses to Visit Rapid City. And like Craig mentioned, we work very, very closely with Visit Rapid City. We have a great partnership with them. work together to promote the community as a whole and obviously our venue specifically. We are a big contributor to this tax as well, along with our partners in the hotel business and the restaurant business and our local bars. So important, important piece of revenue for us as well. Again, overall revenues at $19.5 million up just 2%. So let's look at the expenses. Balanced budget, that means our expenses are $19.5 million as well. So for us, we're always generating and always trying to find ways to generate more revenue. To us, generating more revenue means more events. More events means more staff. More events means purchasing more food and beverage for resale. More events means more utilities used. More events also means more economic impact. And that's our job. is to bring people to town, put heads in beds, and butts in seats, and people in our restaurants, and bars, and retailers. So our major categories of expense, as you can see there on the right-hand side, we're in the people business. We talk to our staff all the time about, unless they purchase a $60 or $70 concert t-shirt, they walk into our building anticipating an experience, and they walk out of our building with that experience. And it's our job to ensure that they have a great experience while they're in our facility. So we definitely are in the people business. Not a surprise that 45% of our overall expenses are related to people. So salaries, wages, full-time, part-time, seasonal, and benefits. Overall, this is about $8.7 million, up just 1.4% from 2026. Again, we have developed a great relationship with our community groups. We rely on those groups, and they in turn rely on us as an opportunity to generate revenue for their causes. Of our total wages and salaries budget, $2.7 million of it is for part-time and $4.4 million of it for full-time. So it's also important to note that we're exploring other collaborative ideas and opportunities within other city departments to see if maybe we can work together to potentially share some staffing. So that is something that we're looking into right now. More information to come on that. In order to generate the food and beverage revenue, we've got to buy the product. So that's what the merchandise for resale is. That is where we purchase the product that we need. We have some challenges in this area. In our part of the world, there aren't a lot of large supply houses that are close by. So it's always a challenge for us to find competitive pricing and quality product combined in the same purchase. So that is one of the things that is a challenge for us, that we're always looking for avenues and opportunities there. Visit Rapid City is the next largest line item. Again, when you see the non-operating BBB revenue, that is 100% of the revenue generated, and 25% of that flows through to Visit Rapid City. That's $1.7 million projected for 2027. Another large line item for us is utilities. We're all anticipating that we could have a large increase in electrical So we have always and well not always but for last many many years working diligently within our operations budgets and any opportunity that that we have on the capital budget side to increase our efficiencies when it comes to electricity we've done a lot of conversion of we have a lot of lights in the monument and We've done a lot of conversion of lighting to LED, adding VFDs whenever possible, improving our control system, whether it's lighting controls or HVAC controls. Obviously, all of that impacts utilities, so working as much as we can to create those efficiencies. Professional services at $1.3 million. This is where our groups come into effect. It's also the services that we have for the larger type of equipment that we have in the building. In the monument total as a complex, we have 12 elevators and escalators. So that's a lot of equipment to keep track of. And obviously, those service agreements are not inexpensive. Again, I mentioned our controls companies, garbage services. This is also where our credit card processing fees come into play, categorized into this line item. And that amounts to about $475,000. To generate $12.8 million in revenue, a lot of that is through the use of credit cards. So credit card fees can be sizable. And then we go on to capital outlay, which we're going to talk about here in a minute. And on down the list, interdepartmental charges and insurances, debt service we're going to touch on again as well. So overall, again, our expenses are up the same as our revenues, 2.2% and $19.5 million. Let's talk about stewardship of the facility a little bit. So as you saw in the budget book, we identified that our 2027 strategic priorities include reinvestment in our facility. Again, 50 years, it's hard to believe that next year is going to be 50 years for the monument facility as a whole. The picture at the top is kind of fun. So that is the original monument. I shouldn't say original. That is the mid eighties model, right? because you can see the Barnett Arena, you can see the theater, and you can see most of Rushmore Hall. So now you have to envision that with the ice arena on the southeast corner, the summit on the northwest corner, and then the hotel, of course, isn't even in this picture. So kind of fun to look at where the facility has evolved from. so long-term capital maintenance plan i brought this up last year when we were here presenting to you our board of directors and our team have been working on a long-range capital maintenance plan for about three four years now we're constantly evolving this plan but this long-term capital maintenance plan is our stewardship to the city's asset that we feel very uh... is very important to continue to improve over time. So this long-range capital maintenance plan is a one year, three year, five year, ten, fifteen, even twenty year look at the asset out over the course of time and what we anticipate structural improvements are going to need to be, furniture fixtures and equipment improvements are going to need to be. So this is really our playbook for our team and our board of directors when it comes to reinvestment in the facility. SO WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE YEARS, FISCAL YEAR 2021, AGAIN, THAT WAS THE LAST YEAR BEFORE THE SUMMIT ARENA OPENED IN FULL IN 2022, CRAIG MENTIONED THIS, FISCAL YEAR 2021 TO 2025, WE INVESTED $5.7 MILLION BACK INTO THE FACILITY FROM OUR OWN CASH FLOWS. SOME OF THOSE PROJECTS We have touched nearly every roof at the monument. And we're always looking for new and tried and true, but new ways to be able to do things. The roofs that we have touched, which is probably 70% or more of the roofs, we didn't rip and replace those roofs. Rather, we went searching across the country at what the alternatives might be. And we found an option to really seal those roofs with a process. So we were able to seal those roofs, get a sizable warranty, and be able to do that at about half the cost of ripping and replacing the roof. So of course, there had to be qualifiers and all of that, but huge amounts. So we put more than $2 million into roofs alone. We've also converted a lot of our old systems, almost 50-year-old building. lots of pneumatics and outdated, inefficient systems that we have upgraded. Some of those systems include our pneumatics, our fire protection system, our ice arena technologies, and our doors. We have over 1,100 doors in our complex. So those alone and upgrading the controls and technologies of those gets to be very spendy but very important when it comes to security. Not to mention all the equipment improvements that come along with that. And you can see there at $3.7 million in 2026 and 2027, we'll be investing $3.7 million additional into the facility. We talked a little bit about one of our funds being our capital reserve. This is a point in time where we're beginning to use some of those funds for large capital projects. Craig mentioned our large project we've got going on in the ice arena. So it looks like a construction zone currently. But when you come to the hockey game for the first time this fall, you're going to see all new digital boards. Combined with the fact that over the course of the last year, we improved our lighting. We went to LED lighting, which allowed us to add some pizzazz and some color. And not only that, but also cut down on our electrical costs. So along with those sorts of things, we also are doing some sound improvements to the ice arena, improving the HVAC in that area, updated the dashboards for safety of the players, and as well as a number of equipment improvements throughout the facility. So large amounts, a couple million dollars is going to come out of our capital reserve for some of those improvements. Also wanted to mention today our debt service. So we do currently have two different sets of debt service, the first being in 2008 when the ice arena was about to open. Our board of directors took on a $5 million bond, $5 million loan, and that was to add the parking lots and get the equipment that we needed to operate the ice arena and do some much needed HVAC improvements throughout the facility. So that was a 20-year bond, and that will be completed and paid for here in 2028. We're very excited about that. We'll free up some capital for us to be able to do, again, additional improvements. And then in 2021, when we were getting close to the end of the Summit Arena, it became evident that the center hung and ribbon board was not going to fit in. to the original budget. So our board took on a $1.2 million loan from the city. That's a 10-year loan. And so that will be paid for in 2031. And we are happy to do that to be able to do what we needed to do in the Summit Arena. So final note, I just want to thank our board again for their involvement in our process. And I just want to give a shout out to our team. We're very blessed with in-house talent at the monument. We have wonderful trades folks and engineers and production folks and operations technicians. Not anybody is afraid to crawl through a ceiling Lay cable or do the dirty work that needs to be done to be able to keep our project costs as low as possible So we wouldn't be able to do a majority of the projects that we do without our team in-house So I really want to thank them and give them a shout out Yeah, I just want to apologize the public work so we obviously went over time but we do want to answer any questions that the council may have for us and

Thank you, Tracy and Craig. We will start with Councilor Meyer.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just a quick comment. You spoke about being an economic engine, but I just want to speak to your contributions to the quality of place. I think there's an intrinsic value that's really hard to quantify. I know like Kevin, Greg, and myself got to enjoy a USD basketball game this past winter. That was just incredible. And then I know you've got a really busy week this week with Luke Bryan and then a Goo Goo Dolls concert Saturday, which I will get to enjoy. So thank you for what you do in addition to the economic peace. Thank you.

Thank you. Next, Councillor Evans.

Thank you. I remember a couple, well, maybe five years ago, Craig, you and I were walking around downtown and we were talking about the hotel situation. You talked about needing three, four-star type hotels. Now we have rebranded Holiday Inn, that's one. The Hyatt would be two. Do we still need a third? And has the new hotel actually helped you land the bigger conventions we talked about?

A lot of our clients, and especially when we're talking about some of these events that we're talking about going forward, these conventions, organizational events, things like that, are looking for full-service hotels. Not to mention a lot of our shows, when you're talking about the higher level of shows, they're also looking for full-service hotels. type of hotels. The Doubletree has done wonders. I mean, it was always a full-service hotel, but it had a moniker of a Holiday Inn and gave the impression of a family place, which was much nicer than that. When they changed their moniker to the Doubletree, it helped out a lot. It's right in our parking lot. The Hyatt being added downtown, AJ's has always been good for us as well. So the more of that, the better, the larger convention and organizational events we can get, and it's good for our other events as well.

Another question. I look at 33 event things there in the theater and that obviously isn't just 33 days were used in the theater but how many of those days does the theater just sit unused.

Ticket events. So she was only showing ticketed events on that. There's a lot of non ticket events that we do there. My wife's dance studio puts three performances a year in that, well, actually eight performances a year in that building. So it is focused on ticketed events. However, the theater during our season, meaning October through Christmas and to late January through first couple weeks in April, if you want a Tuesday, I might find you one. I mean, that's it. Now remember, there are load-in and conversion dates with all these events as well. So it's not all events, events, events, events, events. We've got to have room to make room to convert those spaces from one night to the next night for one event to another event. But it's hard for me to find a space for... We've got a good Broadway lineup coming this year. I'm going to... Let you know right now a great lineup coming this year and But it's really hard to find Two nights in a row for them to play or three nights in a row to play during that time So do we still have and when these road shows come do they bring their own lighting and everything now?

We're still using the original strand system from 1987 or whatever

Yes, that is, and Tracy knows this, that's one of my focuses on Capitol in the future is to update the equipment in the theater. Even when we do like a comedian, you know, which is a guy on a stool on a stage, we need to bring in extra lighting and extra sound. If we produce anything of our own or have some local events in there, we're bringing in lighting and sound, and a lot of times it's at our cost. So upgrading the equipment that's in there to be more concert quality, lighting and sound specifically is something we need to go to in the future.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you again for the presentation.

Thank you.

Much appreciated.

Thanks for having us.

Next, we will move to the 2027 Public Works budget presentation by Director Mike Tice.

Good afternoon, Mr. President and members of the council. Um, thank you for giving me and my team some time to talk about our budget presentation this afternoon. Um, just a quick reminder on the groups that are, are part of public works. Now, um, this includes our public works administration, as well as all the engineers, uh, maintenance, which includes fleet and facilities, our streets department, our water department, water reclamation, and solid waste departments. So you're going to see a lot of similarities here to my slides and what's in the budget book that you already received. But I wanted to elaborate a little bit more on some of the strategic priorities within our budget presentation of what's in the budget book. One of the first and foremost things is looking at the number of headcount. So you're going to see consistently that we did not add headcount other than one small group in our streets department to assist with the the huge amount of new street work that's going to take place in 27 and 28. So other than that, headcount has remained flat across Public Works, and you'll see that consistently from slide to slide. So 158.5 FTEs in Public Works Administration. I'm pretty convinced that I'm the .5 employee in Public Works, but that's only because I've got a great team behind me here that's also going to come up and assist with the presentation today, but In all seriousness, we do have a fantastic team in Public Works and not just the group that's here today, but all of the employees that are out there on a day-to-day basis. And you see it demonstrated time and time again, the activities that are going on in the streets department, the activity that's going on out at the water rec facility, the storm damage that we had, the wind damage that we had back in December of all the employees coming together. That's not an anomaly. That is something that takes place day in and day out. just becomes more visible when we have a big event like the windstorm that took place. But some of the strategic priorities that we've had for Public Works, again, I think you guys are well aware of what's happening with streets and sidewalks. The biggest initiative that we're gonna have moving forward here, the biggest amount of expense that we're gonna have in road history for Rapid City. We are undertaking a pavement condition index study this summer that should start here in August. For the first time, that pavement condition index study is going to evaluate sidewalks and curbs and gutters, so that will take that into account in addition to the street service themselves. So that will also assist us with looking at and prioritizing which streets need to be repaired first and which ones need to be completely rebuilt. It will also assist us with the ADA requirements and looking at where do we have gaps in ADA compatibility today that we are not meeting ADA requirements. So this will help us to address those items as well. uh... one of the other common themes and and priorities for us to centralize services and efficiency uh... you have seen that take place within our our fleet and facilities group over the last year so uh... we continue to do that across the board in public works on looking at centralizing our our services and getting efficiency so it's looking at uh... How can we reduce the taxpayer dollars that are spent by us gaining efficiencies and consolidating things into maybe one facility, utilizing the same staff to do multiple different things so that we're not hiring additional staff all the time? uh... third priority here is strategic cell performance uh... again this is something especially our streets group has proven time and time again our facilities group our maintenance group is doing out on a daily basis as well i'm looking at self-performing services where it makes sense for us to do that uh... doesn't mean that we try to self self-perform everything there's a lot of things that don't make sense for us to do but we can do it more efficiently and more cost effectively than we can hire outside firms to do it uh... we want to try to do that as much as possible and we've demonstrated time and time again that a lot of that work we can do for fifty percent of what it would cost us to contract it out a lot of cases it may be jobs that are smaller than bigger contractors want to take on We can do it more efficiently ourselves by self-performing that work, and we will continue to do that going forward here in future years as well. Safety standards and oversight. This is an area that I think most of you know my background in safety, but this is something that as I came to the city was obviously on my radar and looking at how safely are we operating on a day-to-day basis. Because we're a municipality, we do not fall under OSHA requirements. My view of that is we should not perform any differently than any other entity that we're working side by side. So we've got contractors out there that are working side by side that do fall under OSHA. I don't think we should be doing anything any differently. At the end of the day, the reason that we have those safety procedures in place and safety practices in place is to make sure that we're sending our employees home safely every day. And so you're going to see that ramp up here over the next year and especially in 2027 as well as we bring on some safety resources to assist with that. And so you'll see that as we move forward here as well. Asset management systems, this is going to be one of the biggest initiatives that you're going to see over the next few years within the city. Probably something you haven't heard a ton about at this point. What this really looks at is taking all of our assets in the city, so whether that be water lines, sewer lines, buildings, vehicles, anything that we have in assets in the city, getting that into one common asset management program, getting it into our GIS, Having the tools available to take a look at what are we spending on those assets from a maintenance perspective? What are the investments? What's the condition of those assets and prioritizing those based on? solid criteria that we can look at and determine what the priorities of those those assets are and when they need to be replaced when we when it's still efficient to to invest dollars into those from a maintenance perspective. It's a huge undertaking for us. We're probably 20 to 25 years behind times on an asset management tool. So you're going to hear a lot more about that coming into 2027 as we start to ramp up that program. We've already done a lot of legwork on it at this point. We did visit Sioux Falls, visited with them and their asset management team to take a look at what they have. We have a good roadmap of what we want to do to get to that. But, again, we're probably 20 to 25 years behind the curve on that. But something that we need to do, and it allows us to make better, more informed decisions, and also opens up that transparency to council members and the public both on why we have things prioritized the way we do. So you'll hear a lot more about that into 2027 as well. Um, and then finally facility and traffic modernization. Um, we've talked a fair amount to council about our operations and maintenance facility. You've seen the facility that we're working out of today. Uh, very outdated, very undersized. Um, so we are undertaking that. Um, we're well underway in that process now. and so you hear a lot more about that in twenty twenty seven as well as we start uh... getting into the design phase of that operations and maintenance facility in addition to that looking at some of the modernization um... i heard that in the monument presentation as well on things like looking at a lady lights Our traffic group is looking at conversion on LED. That's a part of the budget for this year on converting to LED lights out on the streetlights. That will pay off for decades to come. When we start getting the LEDs that are more efficient, again, we're looking at the same electricity increase in rates. And so the more we can do to minimize those costs, the better. And so installing LED lights does a couple things. One, again, it provides decades of cost savings for us as we get those paid off. with energy efficiency and then in addition to that we also get better visibility into those lights from when those lights are out we'll have more of a SCADA type system that are involved in that so we can see when those lights are are out it also helps us make a more inviting city with more dark sky dark sky compliant lighting out there on our street lights Um, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the numbers. Um, again, you guys have these in your budget book, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on these, but happy to dig in and answer more questions on these, but we will have more information on some of the items that, uh, are exceeding budget. They're offset by some of the cost savings. The main reason I wanted to pull this slide up is just to show the percent change in overall operating expenses for the year. Um, you'll see this consistently from, from department to department where we've got a reduction in overall costs for the year. And then just some additional highlights here. Something you're gonna see a common theme as we go through all the different slides and all the different departments today is looking at the overall focus on teamwork and shared resources. Again, getting away from the silos that we've had within the city in previous years and having more of a teamwork approach to looking at things. and utilizing those resources so that can be manpower, that can be vehicles, that can be equipment, but where we can eliminate having to buy additional pieces of equipment where maybe one is underutilized in one department but they still have a need for it, they can share that resource with another department. We're also not just looking at public works departments when we're looking at this teamwork. We are looking at all of the departments within the city Looking at a teamwork approach on how can we share those resources we partner on a daily basis with parks We just partnered recently with the monument on tearing a building down there north of the of the monument So we're doing that across the board with all departments within the city not just in Public Works but again avoiding some of the duplication of those costs and resources and how do we work together on those things and minimize some of the cost for our taxpayers uh... the road project again we've talked a fair amount about that uh... but this is really the result of listening to what the public has said and what council members have said on the number one complaint that we get across the board is condition of streets in rapid city we listen to that and that's why it's a number one priority for us moving forward here our budget in twenty twenty seven and twenty twenty eight on increasing those dollars in making sure that we're addressing those three problems that we've got You've hopefully seen some of that. It's been very visible in 2026 with just one minor piece of equipment that was added in streets has already been a noticeable and visible impact to the city that I've heard from council members as well as the public on just seeing some small repairs that have been made over time. double what we've done in the past. So our crews have demonstrated that day after day that they have that ability and we're gonna ramp that up even more with the addition of that internal street crew to be able to do more of that type of work. I already mentioned the staffing increases or lack thereof. Again, with the exception of the street crew, to help us ramp up those street repairs, there are no added headcount in the budget for this year. uh... one thing you will see across the board and it's it's a little bit confusing as you look at it but we had a major shift this year and how we allocated time for employees and how that issue or how those costs are allocated out in the air departmental charges so as you look at the slides and you may be see increase head counts in some areas reduce head counts in other areas uh... almost across the board you'll see increases in our departmental charges I just want to assure you that that is not because we've added any headcount. It's just how we've done things to clean things up on the back end. Traditionally, how we budget for that is different divisions would maybe budget 33% of an employee's time because they utilize that employee a third of the time. They all had to do that 33% budget allocation, and that – opened us up for a lot of opportunity for maybe somebody to miss that third of an employee and when you're doing that across the board with hundreds of employees we just wanted to avoid that confusion so we changed how we did that wherever that employee reports to on the org chart is now where their time is budgeted and then those costs are are allocated out through the interdepartmental charges and that's why you see some of the increases in some of the areas for that but again no added head count just a change in how we're doing things on the back end to clean that up a little bit Again, little to no increase in the majority of the budget line items. You'll see on the right side of this slide, I listed out any of the notable budget line item increases from 2026. So when I say notable, that's anything that's $10,000 or more that we've increased from the 2026. approved budget So a lot of cases not big dollars all of those are offset as you go through all of these slides today I did not include the the items that we had reductions in but all of these increases that were above budget on Those are all offset by decreases on other line items within the budget and that's how we achieve that that overall budget reduction And then the final piece that I wanted to mention on this is succession planning to build future bench strength within public works. You're already aware that we lost our assistant public works director to retirement. We lost one of our key engineers to a competitor. We now have our city engineer that's going to be leaving in October with a retirement there as well. is one of the things that scared me when i came in the door to work for the city is not seeing the bench strength to fill those positions continues to scare me even more now that i'm inheriting a lot of those day-to-day duties as we as those people are starting to retire and obviously other team members are going to help absorb some of that but i don't want to see us in that position in the future so that's a big piece of the priority for me is making sure that we're building that succession planning and building that bench strength for the future that we don't end up in this boat down the road as well so You'll see that as we go through this as well. So I'm going to ask Gerard to come up. Gerard Kemmerer, he is our superintendent over the maintenance division, which includes fleet and facilities, and have him talk a little bit more about his group.

Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Mr. President and members of the council. Gerard Kemmerer, maintenance superintendent. I'd just like to start off by saying thank you for your support, kind of getting the maintenance division where we are now, especially the maintenance campus going. We're definitely planning for that future and how we can make things a lot better. We have a true professional group of employees that comprise the maintenance division. A lot of what they do goes unnoticed. The heat we've had lately, they're out working in these bays, no air conditioning, eight hours a day, so kudos to them. The maintenance division is 45 personnel. 2026 initiatives were to kind of centralize through self-performance and reduce the outsourcing costs. So we look in 2027 to kind of continue to meet those initiatives. I would say our most robust operation is probably going to be our fleet and equipment maintenance for the maintenance division. We started dabbling and delving in some of these other areas and that led to kind of a consolidated effort Last April, we took over the Parks and Rec Canyon Lake maintenance facility. We perform operations out of there along with Meadowbrook and of course our Steel Ave operation and our landfill operation. A lot of the challenges there, which I'm sure you're aware of, is our constraints on the facility requirements that we have. So we look forward to that new maintenance campus. But we're making do and we continue to succeed in that. As far as our other type of support, supporting the facilities and other infrastructure, we have a very small team right now. We only have two facility maintenance techs, so it's more along the lines of like a handyman type work that we're able to perform, but as we're able to continue to develop those teams, we're definitely eager to take on more challenges and more opportunities for those maintenance actions. Like Mike had mentioned, asset management is now a city-wide endeavor. So we are making those strategic decisions and kind of aligning with those disciplines of asset management. And with those things, because we are, kind of like Mike had mentioned, so far behind, there's a huge cultural shift that comes along with that. You know, change management, personality management, and just everyday processes that we do. So kind of aligning those things with Governances, SOPs, and a standard way of doing things, we kind of set that up for that redundancy and that continuity planning that the next person that comes in line to take that job, they could just pick up something and run with it. Right now, we ask five different people. We're going to get five different answers, so we'd really like to streamline that. And that really kind of helps us put our arms around all of our assets, like what are the attributes, what are the costs, what are those lifecycle calculations and those sorts of things. So it's really a huge lift to kind of take all this data, sift through it, decide what's good data, bad data, and kind of get that into our systems right now and develop those processes and procedures, get that buy-in from the employees so they could be those change agents and continue to move forward in that direction. And that kind of takes us to our next step is kind of having that system to capture all that data and contain all that data and that's going to be our CMMS or EAM system. We haven't necessarily decided on what that's going to look like yet because we kind of need to build that architecture and that framework of those processes and that would align with that system. But that system would also help kind of identify what those life cycle costs are, how we make those capital investments we have all that data rather than sifting through paperwork looking through emails and that sort of thing we have a one-stop shop everybody's on the same page and we align with 2026 right now we're kind of lacking in our innovation I could say so if we can kind of get with 2026 and beyond and leverage technology I think we'd set ourselves up for success going forward and then that that kind of ties into that last point our KPIs Standardization and SOPs just goes along with what I said, you know, just having those processes that someone could pick up. Everybody's going to do the task the same way, you know. Joe, Bob, and Charlie could do things the different way, get to the same result, but we want to kind of have that continuity, and that also ties in with that safety concept of things that we're making sure everybody's being safe because everybody's following the same sheet of music. So it's going to be a long process, but I think we have the drive to do that. We have the professionals to make it happen, and we're definitely visionaries to... kind of capture that going into the future. But, uh, I'll stand for any questions if you guys have any questions.

No questions at this time. Is that the, uh, is there more to go here? More to go. All right, let's keep going.

Thank you. Thanks Gerard. And Gerard has done a fantastic job. Him and his team have done a phenomenal job on again, demonstrating That we can self-perform a lot of the work that's taking place both on our fleet assets as well as the facilities. Gerard has exemplified that teamwork on working with the library, with other groups within the city, on how do we work as one team, and he's got the resources to help with that, and he's done a fantastic job of doing that. So with that, we'll move on to streets, and Jesse Reeb is our street superintendent. I think you guys...

I'll know him well and he'll come up and talk a little bit more about the streets division Good afternoon council, mr. President My 2027 focus I got up here in the board. I'll go through each of them what I really It's no surprise. We've all heard the screaming about the streets and so we're we're focusing on Roadway preservation, like Mike said with the mastic, I'm sure you guys have seen all the black tar on the roads. And that's something that for rather cheap, we can extend the life of these streets. I'm hoping five to eight years. Sioux Falls has seen luck up to 13 years before they have to come back and do maintenance on these streets that they have mastic. So we focus really heavily on the roadway preservation at Actually, a rather cheap cost. So all that black mastic we put down has cost us $41,000 in repairs, and we have repaired 11 blocks of streets. If you were to measure that out, and I didn't go measure it out, but the price per foot is pretty low. So we're going to focus on that. We're going to extend that. With the additions coming to streets, I would like to get more into... doing mill and overlays and doing full depth removals, blocks at a time that we can do for a fraction of the price of the contractors. But we also need the investment into that. If we don't get more people, then something else is gonna have to suffer and I don't really want anything to suffer because we got a lot of streets to take care of. The other focus is the technology and data. So when I started, Streets had this software called Samsara that they used just to watch the trucks drive around so they knew where all their snow plows were. We have dove in and expanded the technology on all the pieces of equipment have this software. And it has helped tremendously. So when I started, they were putting 492.18 pounds per mile of salt on the road when they... when they would snowplow. Now this software tracks it, it tells us what the suggested rate is, it tells us what the temp of the road is, it tells us how quick the salt's cutting it. This last winter we were able to cut that down to 245.95 pounds per lane mile, so we've cut it in half. Salt per lane mile cost us $12 per mile. In a typical storm, we run about 5,000 miles. So we've been able to cut $30,000 to $60,000 in salt per storm event. We had a large one come through last year that was a four day. We cut out $117,000 in salt that we would have spent just to do to this, just the data and the software. Yeah, there's some price into the software, but we've well beyond exceeded that. Another thing is the ADA compliance and controlling the cost in that. Last May, we hired four guys to start a concrete crew to help engineering do some of their ADA, to help the monument, to help the police cut down on hiring these small contractors. Last year, we did $1.4 million worth of work that cost the city just over $400,000. So we put back in about nine, a little over 900,000. And then our other focus is workforce development. If the guys aren't, the more they're trained, the more they know, the quicker we get it done, the most cost effective we get it done. The fall before I took over the street department, it's been the fall of 23, their street department was down 15 people. And now we're down two, which I think is a lot better. But just getting these guys in, getting them trained so they know what to do, they can come in, do their jobs, they can do it efficiently, the most cost effective way possible. And that's my four main focuses in 2027.

We'll talk a little bit more about the road improvement plan. And again, this is the largest investment in roads in Rapid City history. So this is a huge undertaking for us. Now, obviously, that's not all. Jesse and his crew is doing all of this work, but he is going to be a pivotal piece of this. The $450,000 that's part of this road investment is the new crew for Jesse. So that is strictly just the labor costs associated with that group and their overheads. In addition to that, we'll have some additional equipment things that go into that. But Jesse has done a fantastic job. Him and his team have done a great job on demonstrating over and over again that they can do this work at 50% of what it costs us to contract it out. If you've never had the opportunity to see Jesse's spreadsheets, I would encourage you to go visit him someday down at his office. When he talks about the salt used on roads and things like that, he's got every storm event down to the penny on what it costs us, and he's got a spreadsheet for, I think, probably everything. I'm not sure anything that he doesn't have.

I can tell you every mile an hour, every piece of equipment costs the city to the penny.

Thank you, Director Tice. The chair recognizes Councilor Seacrest.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I hope it's okay to ask a couple questions. First of all, thank you, Jesse, for the presentation and emphasis on our streets. Director Tice, I greatly appreciate that. I know we've had some conversations, a few. My question is on the $3 million investment that we're putting into the mill and overlays through the CIP. Is that in addition to the $4 million annual allocation? So we're going to have a total of $7 million in 27 if that's approved?

Yeah, thank you for the question. So there's on an annual basis, there's usually roughly around $3 million in street rehab dollars. So those will continue. So that additional 3 million is in addition to that amount. Um, that 3 million is spread over 27 and 28. So it will not just be, um, there's going to be four and a half million spent on it in 27, I guess is the short answer to your question, not the full six to 7 million.

Okay, so roughly 4.5 per 27 and 28. Correct. Which is going to make a huge impact for us.

Yes, it will. And again, with Jesse doing a fair amount of that work, that will stretch those dollars even farther and allow us to improve more streets than if we had contracted all of that out.

And you had shared with me too that we would focus on any of our pavement condition index lower than 40. And so those will be our top priority focus areas.

Yep, that is correct. And I mentioned already that we are doing another PCI study this year. So I fully expect some of those priorities will change based on that new study. But obviously, if they're below a 40 PCI today, they're probably not have not improved since the last study that we did. So a lot of those will still be on the top of the list.

And is that something you could share with us when that information becomes available?

Yes, absolutely. And they it does go out on to rapid map where you can see the pavement condition index on rapid map so you can click on the street and see what that pavement condition index is obviously from the time we do the study it'll take a little bit of time to get all that data into gis and out onto rapid map but you will be able to see that on there too okay so if you were interested in one specific roadway to see what that is i'd just like to see the list of top down just kind of what we're looking at um of of where we're at with the um condition index and then

so with the additional crew I think it may have been in the mayor's presentation but we talked about how some of those crew members could help cover some of that snow removal lift when we do have snow removal events which I think is awesome that's great because we do have a significant lift will that balance out well for them in the winter to kind of focus on that and then in the summer to do or do you have other plans for this particular crew

So no, this crew will still do snow removal and all that. So in October, we do a winter switchover and get all of our equipment ready. And right now, we have 21 routes with 24 people. So we kind of have three floaters. What them floaters do is city hall parking lot. They help parks with the parking ramp, transit, the bus barn. So what we'll do with that additional six staff is we We have critical roads that we know we have to hit. That staff will increase that. So that would be your emergency routes, your fifths, your eights, your stuff to the hospital, your Omaha, the main travelers of the public in the morning. And that will also help us get, because right now we pull everybody in to get those done, then they go out to their areas. With this, we can send people out to the residential right away. When Omaha's getting hit, your main route through your neighborhood should be getting hit too.

Thank you for that. And I see we have a pretty good decrease in supplies and materials in the overall public works budget. And I'm assuming that's maybe some of our savings that we just discussed with some of our streets technologies. So thank you for that effort to convert and modernize our processes and find us savings and all those ways I guess my final question was just that we've talked about in the past just our streets crew members not having had the same pay raise adjustment and so those crew members work extremely hard and maybe aren't recognized in the same ways as some other areas of the city. So is this kind of looking towards some of those adjustments as well?

I think it will and obviously we're going into union negotiations here soon and that will be a part of those discussions that we have there. But definitely something Jesse and I have had a fair amount of discussion on as well as with human resources on it. So It's an area of focus for us, and Jesse and I, in fact, today, we're just comparing our wages versus some of the other cities, the county, the state, and looking at that to make sure that we are comparable. I mean, obviously, if we don't have competitive wages, we're not going to be able to get that staffing in place, so we need to remain competitive with those wages.

Well, they're doing exceptional work. I feel the impact in my neighborhoods. I see the impact and I can't express my appreciation enough for that. Number one priority. Thank you very much.

Councillor Evans.

Thank you, and maybe this is not the right party to be asking. Maybe it should be engineering more involved with the overall design, but as I drove up Catron Hill the other day, as my thermostat in the car was, going over 115, going up the hill. I was looking at that gigantic, between the lanes, is it called the median? I don't know what we refer to that as, filled with concrete for nearly, God, what is it, a mile? I think back to when the road was built out by Menards and it used to be a gigantic green median. Now it's all concrete. I look at the entrance into Rapid City from the south. We filled the middle of these streets with all of this concrete that must cost millions and millions and millions of dollars. and it creates a very hostile sort of environment. Is there any way that in the future designs we can go about thinking of different ways to do that rather than concrete everywhere? Because frankly, I don't think it's very attractive, and I think it's very ecologically hostile. Creates horrible hotspots and now we're finding out that these things really do matter when you don't have tree-lined streets And you have under degree days I just that's just a question that maybe we could be thinking about alternatives to this street design that we do now No, I think that's a fair question and then I'll visit with engineering more about it.

I know there's a balance there between reducing ongoing maintenance on having vegetation in those medians that are hard to keep up and keep them weeded and keep them watered enough to where they're not dying in that hot pavement and things like that. So there is a balance there, but I'll visit with engineering and Michelle can maybe come up later here and help address that question too. But definitely something we can take a look at.

Councillor Maher.

Yeah, I have a question. It's been over a year. I think since we talked about the grading of the streets in the ranking of the streets conditions and That we were getting this new software and maybe the study that's going on this summer But eventually that is suppose was the idea was that would be put online. Maybe it's our new website Is there a timeline on that?

Michelle, I don't know if you know the answer to when we would have it out there. I mean, obviously it'll take some time once we get that data to be able to get it out there online and see it. I don't know what that timeline is from past studies, but Michelle can maybe answer that question for us.

Yeah, so I just got an update today that they're planning on being here the week of the rally. So they may want to wait and come right after the rally is over. And that should take them probably four to six weeks to drive all the streets in the city. And then we anticipate that project to be complete by the end of the year with a data analysis. So I would say early in 2027, that information will be available on GIS. And then I would anticipate to a presentation at the conclusion of that. I think we did that with the 2022 PCI where the consultant came in and, or maybe it was our streets engineer did a presentation to public works committee to talk about the findings of that, of that pavement condition study.

Okay, I have one more question, maybe two. The rehabilitation of Skyline Drive, when I look in the budget book, it shows phase three in 2031. Does that mean that phase one and two will take place before that and they just didn't make the list because of the cost was lower?

I'm not exactly sure what the budget book says about those, but we currently have the first phase of that in the design process right now, and there's obviously several phases of that reconstruction, so it will be staggered out over the next six to seven years.

Okay, and then one more since I got the mic. Carriage Hills Drive, the old Carriage Hills Drive from Corral Drive going north, that project was supposed to be in design, and it's not showing up. Just curious if that's progressing.

It's in a CIP budget in two phases. The first phase is supposed to be under construction in 2027 and the second phase in 2028. So I'm not sure what the difference in what you're looking at.

Yeah, and I think that's it.

Mr. Maher, I think what was in the budget book was just random picks of items out of the street improvement plan. Um, so not all inclusive by any means. And I think they just randomly picked a few. And, um, so that's probably why you didn't see phase one and phase two.

Okay. Thank you.

All right. Um, I will invite Eric up to, uh, Eric Boyd as our water superintendent to talk a little bit more about water. Um, one final piece that I will mention and Michelle probably could have stayed here for this, but one of the concerns we have is with the dollar amount of street projects that we have coming up in 27 and 28 is just resources to get that work done. So, um, obviously we're going to fully utilize all of our internal staff on as much design work as we possibly can. Uh, we will probably. exceed what some of the local engineering firms can handle on top of that with that massive amount of street work coming in 27 and 28. But just so you have an early heads up of that, we do expect that to be somewhat of a constraint for us on getting those dollars spent, but we're gonna try to manage that and make sure that, I know we've got other engineering firms looking at coming into town, and there'll be plenty of opportunities for everybody involved in that work with that quantity of work. I'll turn it over to Eric.

Mr. President, counselors, I'm Eric Boyd of the Water Superintendent. So our 2027 strategic priorities, we've got the upcoming lead and copper rule compliance. So preparing for that rule implementation, Um, we'll be focusing on resolving the remaining unknown service line materials. So, um, despite sending out three letters and four postcards, I still have customers that have not submitted their materials for service lines that we're not aware of what they are. Um, so we've started transitioning to scheduling appointments to help them so that we can, um, find the remaining lead and galvanized requiring replacement lines. Um, we'll start developing our, um, public education materials campaign. and then establishing our sampling protocols for schools and day cares. So we'll have to start sampling all schools and day cares for compliance of that rule. The next one is the service line replacement process. So once we finally determine all of the lead and galvanized required replacement lines, we'll have to enter into, at the end of 2017, a 10-year replacement strategy for all of those lead and galvanized required replacement lines. So figuring out our process of how we want to implement that. and whether the city absorbs the cost or looks at developing a loan process for customers to replace their service lines. We've got water treatment plant optimization. So both of our water treatment plants are going through a water optimization process. It's called the Partnership for Safe Water. It's a national partnership with the American Water Works Association that outlines how that we can improve efficiencies of our treatment plant facilities. We've got the groundwater supply improvements. So we've been working on rehabbing well number four and drilling two new wells, well 13 and 14 in strategic locations to improve our distribution system, water supply, and then also add in some additional groundwater capacity. We've got our utility billing modernization. So I was really proud this last year. We had a very abrupt notice that our billing process was only going to be able to occur for two more months. And it was an OCR function that would review how the bills are printed and then it would print postage on there. and that process was gonna go away and we're gonna have to pay first class mail and all of our bills. So we revamped our process, changed how they're printed. We didn't wanna shock our customers with, change in how the bills were in an envelope form and then also change the format. So now that customers are accustomed to the new billing process, we want to revamp how the bill looks, modernize its appearance. We'll be able to print color at no additional cost. So we'll make it feel more modern and have more information on it. And then we're going to continue going through our effective utility management process. It's a process where water utility management and lower level staff evaluate deficiencies in our operations and look at developing strategic work plans to improve those operations. So our proposed budget is $31.8 million and we have 60 FTEs.

Sorry, the slides are not changing.

Oh, sorry. It's changed on your computer.

Oh, yeah.

There we go. Some additional highlights that I wanted to talk about. So over the winter time, we finished the rehab of Mountain View's filters. We had a catastrophic failure of the filters at the plant, and we had to do a complete renovation of those filters. I think it really showed the potential of Mountain View Water Treatment Plant for a restoration. As part of that project too, we changed some of our chemical dosing processes for coagulation. And so our coagulant costs at Mountain View were $18,000 a month. And with our improvements, we should hopefully reduce it down to $5,000. So quite a substantial savings by changing to dosing two different coagulants versus one coagulant. We're also focusing on strategic planning to ensure system reliability, replacement, and making sure we have available capacity to serve new growth. We continue our water conservation measures. This last year we added a leak detection trailer. We are regularly doing water auditing processes and we're looking at ways to improve the city's water use in addition to providing ways for customers to save water. We've propped up a preventative maintenance program for hydrants and valves. We had been doing hydrant and valve maintenance, but we've actually separated out in our distribution staff, we have a preventative maintenance crew and a repair crew. So this preventative maintenance crew now consistently works on leak detection, hydrant and valve maintenance. Our AMI upgrades, so that's our advanced metering infrastructure, upgrades to customer metering. So our previous infrastructure was a radar-based system that was not a technology that we could continue using. And so we had to update to this cell-based system. And I wanted to bring this up mainly because of the self-performance aspect This is a very large project that we performed over numerous years using staff. So staff visited every single home and updated homes to this new MXU. It's that little tan box that's sitting outside of your house on the side. That's where we actually get our readings for the meter. So all those had to be changed out over the last five or so years. And then I wanted to bring up backflows on hydrant meters. It's kind of a... unimportant thing, but I just wanted to show that we're continuously working to save money for our operations. So our back flows that we have on on hydrant meters where we sell water to construction companies had a style of double check valve and those check valves were breaking within you know, one or three deployments out in the field. And repairs to those backflows were costing anywhere from 280 to $560 per year. And we have 95 hydrant meters that get installed regularly throughout town. So we updated to a new RPZ-style backflow. That backflow only costs us $1,000, and we've already had a return on investment by swapping over entirely to that new backflow process. Some notable budget line item increases were increasing our self-performance in our water production, and we're starting to replace larger pumps, motors that historically would have been passed off to consultants, and we're finding significant savings by doing those maintenance things in-house. We're doing SCADA upgrades for cybersecurity purposes. That's why we have a $30,000 increase for electrical. Despite having the proposed cost savings at Mountain View for the coagulant cost, chemicals are continuing to increase in price, so we do need to increase that line item. In addition to that, our cost for materials for breaks and repairs is increasing too, so we've increased that line item. We have a four cent increase for postage. So we had to increase our postage limit for billing. And then we're proposing a replacement of a truck with a van that's gonna be better suited for repairs of backflows and our hydrant meter program.

Um, I just wanted to point it out here again on the line item increases from 2026 that, um, again, it's a pretty minor list of items. Um, this is all of the items that are above the 2026 numbers for Eric's area. So pretty minimal list. Um, those are all offset in other places by reductions elsewhere. So. Again, how we achieve that net decrease overall on budget. But wanted to highlight those items where we're exceeding 10,000 more than what it was in 2026 and just talk to those items. But overall, fantastic job that Eric's doing. I also wanted to highlight again on the Mountain View Rehab. If you've not had an opportunity to go over there and see it since they've done that first stage of rehab over there, I would definitely encourage you to do that. I think that is making it a viable option for us to look at for the future. We've had a lot of discussion about an east side water treatment facility still on the table, but the work that Eric and his team have done over there with rehabbing Mountain View shows that as a viable solution as well. So it's an area that we're going to have to spend a lot of time exploring the rest of this year on determining what's the path forward that we want to take. And maybe it's a balance of both. I'm not sure yet, but it's definitely great work and a great demonstration of rehab possibilities.

Chair recognizes Councillor Evans.

I have a question for how you guys do things because I was actually quite impressed with something. Several months ago, I kept hearing water running in my house. You know, it was that leaky toilet sound at night when the house is still, where is it? And I looked for a week. Then I get up one morning and the crew has dug up And they found a leak in the water line where it meets out in the street. And by noon, it was all fixed and the problem was solved. What was the technology you guys have in place that allowed you to find that leak out in the middle of nowhere like that?

So we can do, it's called correlation. So when we look at curb stops and valves, we can connect equipment that hears sounds. So when we hear the difference in the frequency from this valve to this valve, we can determine kind of where on the line that leak is. That helps us find it. We also have a leak detection trailer where we have a trailer that has water in it and we isolate a part of the system and we pump water into there. And so we can identify if there's like a three gallon per minute leak in a stretch of line by pumping water into there and metering the water that we're pushing into the system. So that's several of the tools that we use to try to isolate leaks.

So we're actually really sealing things off even without people knowing that there's a problem. The general person out there may not know that the main is leaking outside their house, but I was very impressed. I got to say that was pretty cool. So thank you.

It's hard to go over the whole system, but we try to target those efforts in areas where we're identifying that there might be a larger leak problem in that whole neighborhood or that stretch of line.

Well, it must result in some significant reductions in just wasted water over time if you're doing this.

It does help out.

OK, thank you.

Next, Kevin Maher.

Yeah, I have a question with what we're going through with water, and we're going to be going through this for the next 30 years, right? Is there any initiative to look at their building codes to change the landscape requirements to minimize the water usage on new construction of not only homes, but we got some big buildings going to be built here in the next couple of years?

That might be a good question for Vicki, but I do know that they were looking at doing some landscaping requirement updates. I do think that it's important for us to have healthy landscapes, but looking at ways to reduce water. And some of that is also looking at more passive ways where we can capture stormwater runoff from a property to water landscape at that property. so we can kill two birds with one stone, reduce our water demands and also reduce the storm water load.

Thank you.

Councillor Sechrist.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My question is concerning water rates. And I did miss some of your presentation, so I apologize if maybe this was covered. But we've talked about some of the changes in our long-term use of capital improvements funds and things that have shifted with a couple of the TIFs that were approved I just was curious if we've had a serious consideration of reducing some of that water rate future increase impact for the community as was discussed at that time.

I know I have had conversation with Daniel on looking at that long term, if we're able to alleviate some of those strains on the CIP budgets through some of those TIFs, that does open that opportunity up. And it is something we're looking at. We don't have any concrete data yet to say we could reduce by X amount, but it's an area that we're looking at.

And it looks like our finance director, Daniel Ainsley, might want to chime in there if we could get his impact or his input. Thank you.

Chair acknowledges finance department.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. We have done several different things to try to reduce the overall cost for the CIP projects. As you might recall, when the council adopted that five-year plan to increase water rates 10% every year, that was really largely being driven by capital improvement projects that were needed for the water department. Several of those projects are now being done by TIFs. We also have been able to make use of the state revolving loan fund at a reduced cost. But in addition to that, there are two very large projects that Water is now working with all of Public Works on. One is the maintenance facility. And so there was a very substantial, and I'm sorry, I don't remember the exact amount, we had budgeted to build its own maintenance facility just for water but by integrating that we should see some cost reductions but also what director tice has brought up is the water treatment facility on the east side of town i believe in the rate study that was anticipated to be approximately a hundred million dollar facility If that facility can be sized smaller or if we can make updates to Mountain View and maybe build a smaller facility there, something like that, that that facility ends up becoming, or not just that facility, I'm sorry, but the upgrades that are needed for water production, if that, instead of being an $80 to $100 million CIP project, can be more in line of, 30, 40 million or even 50 million, there would be sizable differences. So we are not at that point yet. We are still trying to identify areas where we can make changes to the CIP, but we are working on that. And we do plan on bringing that forward to the council soon, but we really need more clarity on those two very large projects before we do that. So we're trying to make adjustments where we can, but those two are really substantial driving projects that will determine what our rates can be.

Thank you very much for that update. I'm really excited to see that come forward. I think especially this next year when we're anticipating some hefty increases to our electrical bills, utility bills overall, some rate relief for our water users would be much appreciated by our community. Thank you.

Councillor Meyer.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. As you were talking about the lead notifications and the issues you're having, I'm admittedly one of those people who has not responded. But I'll tell you why. I am so worried that I'll find out I have lead, and you're going to tell me I have to replace something. And so I think that's maybe a common concern. And so as you start to build out that 10-year plan of who pays for what, I think council would probably like to be close to those conversations, especially considering Older homes are probably the ones we're concerned about. And first time home buyers tend to be in those homes who probably don't have as much of a disposable income. And so I think it'll just be a conversation to stay close to. And then I was just going to comment on water. Conservation measures I keep thinking about the presentation we watched a couple weeks ago about a four billion dollar pipeline and Or that stuck out to me from Gerard's presentation was visionary and I think if there's any like opportunity where you guys want to think outside the box and come with some don't know crazy ideas on I don't know last year I think you talked about how efficient toilets would make a big difference in things and so if there's ideas you have on how we could incorporate that into policy or different things I think everybody would be pretty interested in hearing that so more of a note on please reach out or don't hesitate to bring ideas forward so thank you

One question that I wanted to raise. There's a group of constituents in my neighborhood that expressed concern over poly butylene water lines. They've been pretty persistent. And I'm just wondering, from Eric standpoint and Director Tice, if this is something the city has concerns on. And if so, what plans might be in place to mitigate potential dangers?

Um, so the, the neighborhood that you're talking about, um, actually has, uh, HDPE pipe. Um, it doesn't have poly, uh, butylene, uh, pipes there. Um, Mike Tyson and I are hoping to, to have a meeting with the homeowners and talk through with them with their issues and hear their concerns. Um, but we spent substantial efforts up there with our leak detection trailer, our, uh, correlation equipment that I was just talking about and identified, uh, some leaks on our mains that we fixed, and we've also identified some leaks on service lines that we've either repaired ourselves or have started a notification process to the customers to initiate those repairs.

Thank you, Eric. Very much appreciate that.

All right. No other questions on water. We'll move on to water reclamation. and I'll have Jeremy Castile come up. Not sure if you've all had the opportunity to meet Jeremy yet, but fantastic add out at the water reclamation facility. Dave Van Cleve decided he needed to retire, and so Jeremy was a higher head with that strategy in place on having a replacement for Dave, and that has worked out extremely well, and Jeremy's settling into his new role, so I'll turn it over to him and let him talk about his area.

Council members, council president. Uh, my name is Jeremy Castile. I'm the water reclamation superintendent. Um, like Mike said, I've got big shoes to fill with Dave leaving the city. Um, one of the main big things we have going out there is the big water make water reclamation, uh, facility upgrade. Uh, part of my job is making sure that the old stuff is still running while the new stuff is being built. Um, it is a challenge. There are some things that we have that are from the sixties that are still running out there. Trying to keep it running so that we can keep treatment going and meet our permit The project is progressing along nicely Hopefully we'll have a big start up here Maybe by the end of this year beginning of next year with some of the new upgrades and then we'll have to rehab some of the old stuff The next thing I have on there is surface water discharge compliance so that is our permit for us to discharge into the creek and We have to make sure that everything we're putting back into the creek meets our regulatory compliance. A big part of that is making sure that the facility works like it's supposed to. Just like water, we do effective utility management process also. So we're doing an analysis on our stormwater group right now and our environmental process group just to kind of see where our gaps are and try to give us some strategic initiatives to work towards. Sanitary sewer overflow mitigation. This is when sewer comes to the surface. Our goal for 2027 is to have no more than 12 sanitary sewer overflows. You may think that sounds like a lot. We have 373 miles of sanitary sewer in the city, and we have over 7,800 manholes in the city. So there's a lot of ground to cover and a lot of lines that deal with sanitary sewer overflows. Part of the maintenance for keeping sanitary sewer overflows down is our sewer line collection maintenance. Um, so on here we have a goal of 400,000 linear feet of targeted high pressure, um, jetting. With that, we go into the pipes, we hydro jet it, we clean all the debris out. Um, 400,000 feet may sound like a lot. there's two million feet of sewer line in the city so we're trying to get a big chunk of it knocked out every year we also have areas in town that we call blue book lines These are the areas we know that we have sanitary sewer overflows in the past. Maybe we have some flat spots in the pipe. Maybe we have manholes that grab rags and other debris that causes the sanitary sewer overflows. Those are the areas that we visit regularly. We may go there once every three months. We may go there once every six months. We may go there once a year. It all depends on what our history has been in those places. So we kind of target some of those issues with our Blue Book areas. We have 44 FTEs. I think last year it was about 56, which is a big change. The industrial electricians were a big part of our group, and they have now moved into the maintenance department. But those guys have been a lifesaver for us because they help us with all of our electrical motors out on the plant. They also help us with our SCADA system. Those guys are available 24-7, 365 to help us when we're in a bind. Because I don't know if you guys know this, there is no off switch for sewer. No matter what you can do, it's always coming downhill towards the plant. So you can't stop it. the next one there. So I didn't make this slide. So it says that I'm settling into my, into my role very well. It was Mike that put that on there. Um, the WRF project is at 57% complete. Uh, as of right now we have 0.3% change orders. So to put numbers to that, that's $650,000 in change orders versus $169 million project. Um, one of our big focuses this year is stormwater identification and proactive maintenance. You might kind of look at that kind of funny stormwater identification. Stormwater is not that old of a utility. It was formed about 2015. There is a lot of pipe that was put in the ground in the 50s and 60s and before that. We don't know where it is. So we are actively finding inlets all the time, we're televising them, we're locating it, we're getting it updated on the GIS maps, just so we have an idea where all these items are. Those are kind of my notable budget line items for 2026. We are getting a big generator as part of the plant project. It's a 10,000 gallon tank, so that's a big part of that 24,000 for gas and oil. The machinery, the SUV is actually for me, the superintendent, um, in the side by side is for plant staff just to kind of help because our plan is going to expand greatly, uh, to help us do the work side by sides are way better than pickups because we can put the tools in the back of them. We can go cross country with them and take them out to the job. Um, the pretreatment tools, the analyzer that was recommended by Danner. There's also some samplers in that thing too. And the lab equipment, we have a couple pieces of equipment in the lab that are, one of them's 10 years old, another one's 15 years old. We have to have specialized equipment so that we can meet the requirements of doing a lot of our in-house testing, that if we had to ship it out, it would cost us an absolute fortune to do all the testing we do. And the last one is for stormwater drainage. That's repair equipment. That's just kind of keeping up with some of our equipment that we have, the mowers, the skid steers, the mini excavators, things like that. So I welcome any questions if you guys have any.

All right.

Well, we will move on then to our final one, which is solidly. Excuse me.

Sorry. Councillor Seacrest.

Thank you Mr. Chair thank you for the presentation and it was really nice to meet you I haven't had the chance to meet you in your new role and so thank you for your service my question was regarding the stormwater is that utility underneath the water reclamation is that yes okay i didn't realize that that was housed under the water reclamation division and just shout out to our stormwater crews i live kind of nearby the eastmead street drainage canal and they do a wonderful job of clearing the canal ways and just making sure that our waters are flowing off the hill rapid city is primarily a runoff the entire side of the city so it's Fascinating to see in the rain events how that flows down. I mean you mentioned that you were locating runoff Inlets and or stormwater inlets throughout the city. I just found that really curious that Since that utility I believe it was established in 2013 as an official division but is there a plan to continue to expand those in the community where needed or Are we just adding those to our GIS database?

As time goes on and we find them, we are mapping them as we go. So we're televising, making sure where inlets are, where pipes are. Some pipes we find were not abandoned properly. So as we need to, we're doing projects to abandon the pipes that are left behind because as they rot away, you can have a sinkhole.

And these guys are really the unsung heroes of our community, keeping us from flooding. So I just cannot stress the appreciation enough for what you guys are doing and your division as well. We're excited to see the new water reclamation facility come to life. Yeah, so thank you.

All right, we'll move on to solid waste then. That's our final item. So I'll invite Jeff and Tori here too. Tori, you can come up too if you want. So Jeff and Tori, Jeff is our superintendent out at the landfill. Talk about some of the strategic priorities and then maybe answer some questions related to solid waste as well. But landfill development and long-term planning, I would say a lot of these strategies are not new for solid waste. Always looking into the future on, we're already starting the development of the next cell out there. We've got a few years until We need that cell, but we're starting that planning process now and the design work to expand to the next cell. Obviously, that work has to happen so that we're not running out of space in the landfill to put that debris. The permanent renewal and regulatory compliance, Jeff and Tori and their team have done an incredible job out there on making sure that we are in compliance with all the regulatory permits out at Solid Waste. Obviously, there's a lot of different factors that go into it, a lot of different permits out there associated with that, and they work very hard to make sure that we've got zero compliance issues out there. Do that on a daily basis. The technology and operational efficiency. One of the items that we hear a lot of complaints about is the lines out at the landfill and they're pretty visible at times on traffic backed up all the way out onto the highway. One of the major issues associated with that is our is our scale software. freezing up all the time. Tori has done a great job of educating me on the problems that they've had over the years with that scale software. So that is one of the pieces that is in the works right now on getting rid of that old scale software and installing new scale software. That will not only help us be more efficient and hopefully avoid some of those backup and lines, also gives us the opportunity to bill credit card fees that we have not been able to do because we've been fighting with our current vendor for that. Lots of changes in the technology on that. One of the other pieces that Jeff and Tori are working on out there is Jesse had mentioned SAMSARA earlier that we have on a lot of the city vehicles, especially the streets division. They're getting that installed now on our solid waste vehicles so that we can have that information available. We have better tracking functionality with that, have better visibility into what's going on. One of the common items that comes up associated with the landfill operations is collection and people claiming that we didn't pick up their can. We have the cameras on the trucks to be able to demonstrate what time they were out there and whether that garbage can was out or not. So it solves a lot of debates on whether their cans were out or not. Also solves a lot of problems when it comes to vehicle accidents and things like that. So they are getting their trucks equipped with that. They've had cameras in the past, but this is just an extension of that to help us better with our route wear and things like that. Revenue sustainability, enterprise fund stability. Again, no surprise, we've had some challenges out there financially, mostly related to the MRF, but making sure that we're running a sustainable operation moving forward. One of the items that we're looking at is the opportunity to explore the landfill gas capabilities out at the landfill. Black Hills Energy earlier this year had done a study for us and shows that it is viable, so we will be expanding on that work later this year on looking at how feasible that is and working with some companies that actually specialize in that area and hopefully provide another revenue stream for us associated with the landfill gas versus just flaring that gas off today. And then again the final piece just operational sustainability on making sure that everything we're doing at the at Solid waste with the material recovery facility collections that we are have a sustainable model moving forward and that Jeff gets what he needs. One of the big concerns that I've had out there is Jeff has done a phenomenal job, and I shouldn't just say Jeff. Jeff and the entire team have done a phenomenal job of taking a lot of very old equipment and using their bailing wire and duct tape and whatever holds things together to make that equipment last a lot of years. I knew he had a lot of old equipment. I didn't realize how old until today when I was visiting with him. that he's got a 45-year-old road grader out there that is still in operation. And so, again, they have done a phenomenal job of taking old equipment and making it last a long time. Obviously, that's not a sustainable model long-term, and that's part of what we're looking at with this operational sustainability is having a capital improvement program for that equipment to make sure that we're getting it on a regular replacement program and making sure that he's got solid equipment out there to run the operations with. uh... just some additional highlights uh... i won't spend a lot of time on the swiffer grant uh... when i know we've talked a fair amount about that already but again opens up some opportunities us for additional revenue streams uh... expanding our recycling program overall and uh... you know just better all the way around on on better utilization of of uh... recycling across rapid city in the entire region. Um, part of that Swiffer grant is the improvements to the north remote site. Um, we do still continue to look for a better site on the west side to replace that location so that we don't have to move those, those dumpsters all the time. And we've got baseball tournaments going on. But, um, just the improvements to the north site will be much safer for the driver, safer for the public that's using that facility and keeps it secure and helps us reduce the contamination at that recycling site. our hope would be to do something similar when we find a new location for the west side as well. Successful management and continued processing of windstorm debris. Again, the solid waste team did an absolutely incredible job dealing with the debris. They continue to deal with that debris. Jeff shared with me that they had most of that tree debris in the yard waste cleaned up going into the end of last year. Um, with the wind storm, he has got piles upon piles out there of, of storm debris that continues to come in yet today. Um, we expect that continue to come in through 2027. So this will be an initiative still going into 27. Um, The next couple items I have, I guess I'll drop down one, I'll skip the one with GCC for now, but we are evaluating a potential partnership with another community partner on being able to use some of that yard waste and specifically the wood chips from all the tree debris. That could be an additional revenue stream for us, but also a good opportunity for us to get rid of some of that storm debris and ongoing debris that we have with yard waste going forward. Um, good opportunities associated with that. And Jeff's been working closely with that group as, as well as myself. Um, and then again, continue with the GCC tire shredding partnership. Um, I think, and Jeff, I don't, you might be able to answer this better than I can. I think we're probably maybe a month, two months away from them being able to shred their first tires out there.

Yep. We're about 30 to 60 days. We've been working with them, um, all this week and last week they're getting the final touches done and getting things assembled and, uh, hopefully, uh, Within the next 30 to 60 days, we see them shredding the tire.

So again, good news on that front of better utilizing some of that debris that comes in and finding a new purpose for it, you know, that helps help with our our sustainability overall as well.

So.

Then again just with the improvements that we're making on recycling just supporting that regional recycling infrastructure this is the only material recovery facility within a 300 mile radius so an important asset not only for the city, but for the entire region So with that I'll open it up any questions you've got related to solid waste and between Jeff and Tori we can probably answer them Councilor Meyer

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And this might be for Daniel. In our 2026 budget, it says we were projected to collect about $16 million in utility fees. Was that based on raising rates? And then in the end, council decided to have lower rates?

Director Ainslie.

This is actually kind of a challenging question to try to answer in a way that that's understandable, but by state statute, your expenses have to equal your revenue. And so when we have the revenue line item, that is not necessarily what we're anticipating to collect for the year. Actually, in all of our utilities, we're anticipating to collect more revenue than what it shows. It's just you have to have a balanced budget. So the only way that we could show truly what we're anticipating to collect is if we had an expense that was savings. And so that can be difficult when people see you have an expense that says savings, what are you planning to do with that? So we budget according to our expenses and ensuring that our revenue is going to meet or exceed that. I hope that was clear.

That makes sense, and I think it answers my next question around utility fees being projected to be lower this year. Yeah, okay. Thank you. That was my question.

Director Tice and superintendents, thank you for the presentation and keeping this city running. We'd be lost without you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Any discussion or direction from the council regarding the items will go to Mr. Evans.

I just want to thank Mr. Tice. Those of us who've lived here since 1960, we notice when things change all of a sudden. And I don't know whether it's the attitude or the vision or whatever, but just in the short time you've been here, I've seen so many good things happening. And I attribute a lot of that just to your leadership. So I want to thank you for coming on board. Hope you stay a while. Thank you.

Thank you. And it's obviously not just me. We've got a great team back here that, again, they take a lot of pride in what they do, and the teams underneath them take a lot of pride. So, again, I think I can help set the direction and the vision, but this is the group that's making it happen.

Looking for a motion to adjourn if there's nothing else. We have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. We are adjourned.

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