City Council - workshop

Good evening. I'd like to call the Northwest City Council study session for Monday, August the 10th, 2026 to order. At this time, I'll turn it over to our city administrator, Mr. Jim Clifford.

I think this is great, talking about the credit card payments. So is that going to be where if a person is going to use their credit card, Do it right. I mean, what I'm saying, is that going to, are people going to have to wait in line while they're doing that? Are we going to have that where I could be missing my credit card and a person can come and walk up to one of the workers?

Okay, okay. And the tax portal upgrade. So we're going to make it where, you know, people don't always have their previous tax bill. They don't always have their water bill. Correct. You know, all people want to do is pay the bill. Look at it. What is my bill? Yes. So this tax portal upgrade, that's going to make it easy. That's going to make it easier to find your bill. You don't have the exact number of the parceling, that kind of thing.

Will there still be, jumping around back to Wells Fargo, we still have people, there are third party vendors out there that people think they're going directly to the city, but they aren't, right?

So if people are already currently having it drafted like mine every month, you know, send me the bill in advance, say, hey, here's what it's going to be, I can do that. But for some reason, if I didn't want to do that and I just wanted to pick my date as long as it's within the time, with this app on my phone, I can go in there and do that, right?

So I can't make it like I want to make it today. I can't pay my bill today on my app with this yet.

On my phone? Yes. Okay, but you were saying what were you not sure about?

Not auto-draft, I'm sorry. If I just want to. I do with my minion.

A couple things. What's going to be the time frame of how we're going to communicate this? Have we used it? No, it is not ready.

That is something maybe we could put on the screen, walk through some examples of how you could use the app. Yes, we can do a how-to. So council can all see, because we're the ones who are going to get hit by the questions.

And the gentleman from Wells Fargo, the nice thing about that is we're not going to have to be getting on the phone and multiple different Zoom calls and all that kind of mess like we did before. We just have somebody we can call. We know where to find you, right? Okay, good.

Any other questions on this one? Thank you Linda. Thank you. We're excited about that.

Rory, under the assessment, is assessment just going to be the neighborhoods or the sections you have picked out? Yes.

So if we get asked about it, our reasoning behind that is because these areas where we have larger trees, a lot of live oaks, and we are concerned about the importance of the pruning and moving forward so they can continue to grow healthy.

I'm just curious. How many communities, how many grants do they offer this out to? How many communities?

We got 400 of them. Well, I'm just going to say this. You've heard me say it from this dais, and Rory's just another example of we can go down the line. I think almost every director that has a department that is able to find grants, the number of grants the City of North Augusta directors have gotten for this city are incredible. Incredible. This is mostly money that our citizens are not having to pay for to get $400,000. I know there are a lot of folks who thinks, myself and everybody on this council, we don't care about trees. I can assure you, Rory Kilburg cares about trees and his staff.

Green space. Ah, yeah. Did you hear that?

Would they do that? The developer would replant that? Or do we do it?

So there probably won't be anything in between.

Let me just say one thing. I just want to thank our directors. This is one of the most in-depth, detailed ones we've had. And I just want y'all to hear that why it's important and the information you're giving us is so important. We're very appreciative because as a council, the more we know about, the way we can answer questions. And as more and more citizens are watching us online, this is good information that they like to hear. So just please understand how much we appreciate y'all being here tonight and giving us this information. This is good data for us on this dais, but also for our ci

those counties i mean because there's no state law i mean i guess those counties have opened themselves up to possible litigation and then as we've seen from the state in the past legislature they don't always grandfather in either so you could go down this road and then based on what you said coming out of the senate or the house change the rules of the game, right?

Well, Tom, you've done a really good job being very objective on this. I will tell you, Elizabeth's employee, the post and courier, have written a couple articles uh about this in this this year in may february may that are pretty good actually and copied some of the things that tommy you have shared uh but the reality is you can't even get the legislators up their degree the senate's looking one way the house is looking at one way and um so anyway questions from mr faraday

Um, I think I'll respond is that, um, again, this was something we need to get out there, out there because a lot, it's a lot out there in the media, uh, on Facebook. So we thought it was important for council to get some objective data. And, um, so I think it's good that we got this information out there.

So, all right, with that, we stand adjourned. Thank y'all.