City Council - Regular Meeting

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Hello. Mhm.

Heat. Heat. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

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Here we are. I want to count with you. I don't know. Everybody, I love you.

Heat. Heat. N. You ready?

Talks Mike.

We ready? Good morning. Welcome to the April 23rd budget workshop meeting for the city of Myrtle Beach. This is our second budget workshop. We may need a third before it's all said and done. The city's budget for next fiscal year, which begins July 1, will approach $400 million. It is one of the most important things that city council here does. Credit to Dr. Render and Bill and Mike for bringing their budget books back. Mine's sitting on my desk at at city hall.

The building a budget, as our finance people well know, is kind of a dance between revenue estimates and expenditure estimates. City Council has already managed to add back about $2.8 million to the budget based on last year's by adjusting the property tax credit from the TDF, saving $1.6 million estimated this year and and $1.2 million that was approved in last year's budget. So, that's a plus. So, that's an additional $2.8 million. But, here we are to talk about a recap of that first workshop, where we are. We had some questions and issues left over from that. So, Michelle can bring us up to speed on that. And then, as you see on the agenda, we have a long day. Hopefully, we'll get done by by the 2:00 time frame. Michelle,

as Michelle's welcome, I do want to mention agenda. A lot of these things are incorporated into Michelle's presentation. Like the health insurance is included in it. Um, MBDA is included. So, a lot of these are rolled up in there. So, we hopefully will be might be a little bit quicker than two, but we'll see how it goes.

Presentation's not working. Let's go home. The clicker is not working. See if it's on. Good. Always helps to turn it on.

All right. Like the mayor said, this is we're going to start with a recap of the uh budget retreat and that follows the adjustment of the TDF credit as he said um where we where council instructed us to close the gap of 2.2 2 million estimated for the FY27 fiscal year. Dr. Render, I know this is one of your favorite topics, the K-shaped economy. We don't see anything changing right now. We we've not I have not seen anything in the news that really indicates we are not still feeling this other than consumer spending is still strong. Gas prices have come down some. I think that the larger financial analysts that I have been reading about feel like that that we will get out of this quickly, not in weeks but months naturally and that the gas prices will come back down. We have budgeted cautiously as we always do and we will talk about the built-in measures that we have that we'll take if something happens with our estimates whether they're higher or lower. The adjusted budget now is 4.5% higher than prior year. That is the operating budget only. That's 3.4 for the governmental fund operations. That includes the general fund. Our convention center, storm water, sports, tourism, and your tourism revenue funds. The enterprise operations are up 9.7%. That is your parking utility, your solid waste management fund, and your water and sewer public utility. Capital projects in the general fund are well I say general fund general governmental those are projects that sort of follow along with your

governmental type funds and those are actually down 4.3%. Your water and sewer projects the enterprise fund projects are up 89.9%. The largest component of that is your $18 million 48 inch parallel water line. Transfers are up this year. Um that is for the most part where we take funds from your tourism related funds and subsidize the other funds that operate to serve our tourists. Also for capital I have a schedule for that. We'll talk a little bit more about what the transfers are used for later. This budget does not include a property tax increase, but it does include a reduction in the TDF credit from 67.45% 45% to 53.4%. We don't have any increases for recreation programs, business licenses. We do have increases for cemetery. The cemetery fee schedule proposal was was uh presented to you guys at the last retreat. We do have proposed increase to the encroachment permits, both soft and hard, at $100. We have a proposed 3 and a.5% increase for solid waste fees and a 6% increase for water service, 9% for sewer. So those have not changed other than the TDF since our original presentation of the budget. The cost of living remains at 3%. I have gotten uh additional information or health and dental premiums. We'll talk about that in a later slide. We are continuing the police take-home vehicle program. The education reimbursement has increased to 30,000. Um, we will use the CDBG funds for housing rehabilitation in conjunction with Yes.

Excuse me. Just one question, please. Um, vehicle takehome with the police department. Where are we at with that as the number of officers that would be an officer that would take a car home and where are we at with that now? How how close are we being to where we'd be at 100%.

We've been I think we've been doing this is our third year, fourth year at it. I would think by we should be getting close to having all of that taken care of. This coming fiscal uh year will be the completion of the final phase to issue at our current staffing levels for our senior patrolman. That would issue everybody a take-home car under our current policy. That's correct. Now, that's subject to change in the future just depending on the time frame. It takes about a year for an officer to come through our field training program to be released to solo status and then six months for the patrolman first class rank. Thank you. Do you have a total cost on that? Cumulative cost

cumulative just a guess an educated guess. If I were to guess, I'm adding up. Sorry, math is Yeah, probably about four and a half million. Okay, that's a very rough guess, but going year to year, it just helps us if you quantify these. That's correct. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. The tourism development fee as adjusted down to 53.4% will result in an increase of $47 on a residential 4% property tax bill per $100,000. Um that's the same as we presented and discussed in the earlier meetings. I've got the graphs up here that show the the disperate growth patterns between both the revenue and our 4% property valuation. I always like to show this graph. Uh you can see with our full millage at 83.4, we're about 19th when compared with these other 26 uh taxing agencies. When we include the tourism development fee credit, it brings us to a 38.9 mills and puts us at number 26 on that list. Those same agencies.

Another question. Okay, we we talk about where we are with our tax millage rate. Uh where question I have is where are we with our services such as water sewer and and trash pickup? with those fees compared to somewhere in South Carolina that would be relative to what we're we're our citizens are paying versus what

right Janet covered that in her presentation at the previous retreat. We can have her talk about it again, but what we see time and again is that our rates are very competitive and often under what our our closest competitors are. When I say closest competitors, I mean those people who are more like us than other entities. I'd just like to see where that compares.

We've seen those graphs through the years. Our water and sewer rates are very low compared to other similarly situated cities. Our solid waste fees are probably average at the end of the day, but we provide a tremendous amount of service for that solid waste fee that is not included in most of the other solid waste fees that are similar to ours.

That is correct. The reason I asked that because um each each budget, each time we come here, we always talk about we're not raising property taxes, but we're raising fees. And so I have a number of people come up to me and say, "Well, isn't that just another way we're charging? We're not It's just fees are almost like tax increase." And so those are things I I I just need to answer to folks who ask that. And uh so what I wanted to be able to do is say well I understand why some of the fees go up. I do understand that. One of them is pass along. The other thing is we do have to put money aside for replacing some of these existing pipes, sewer and water lines that have been here for since day one sometime. Understand that. But I just need to be able to say, "Okay, well, here this is where we are. This is where cities that or towns that our size compared to us." And then you have to also mark exactly right what you get for your money versus what this crowd gets for their money.

Does that make sense what we ask?

Absolutely. If it um if it pleases council, when we come to you for first reading, we can give you a recap of the budget that will include just that. To Mike's point, the increases in the solid waste fee of a little more than a dollar and the average for the water and sewer service increase blended about 550 give or take. That's an extra 650 7. So time 12. I'm not good at 7 time 12, but you're looking at $85 additional per year per family in Myrtle Beach. And Mike, I think we've always looked upon the water and sewer supplements as a need, not a want. Right.

Very simple. And one question I might have, how many families in Myrtle Beach benefit from the 4% uh credit roughly? There is no number of families that I can tell you. So, I can tell you between 24 and 25% of our property assessed value is assessed as 4% residential property. Okay. But I I would what six 7,000 families? That's a number for the public's benefit.

I I don't have that information anywhere. I can see if there's something I don't even know the placer could do. It's the whole city. So, we'll see what we can find. I would think the county could tell you how many 4 percent properties there are inside the city limits. It It's not a matter of 4% properties. He's asking how many people, how many individual human beings benefit, how many how many families families, rooftops? Yeah, basically. And again, a rough guess in 23 I think it was seven or $8,000. I'm just wondering how that has grown for homes. Seven or eight,000 homes

households. All right. Governmental fund revenues for the city are budgeted at 365 million for the coming year. That's only increased by the amount of the tourism development fee, credit offset, and health insurance, which we're going to talk about a little bit more on some later slides, our governmental fund budget expenditures. Um, I like to break down on the side so that you can see how much of our budget's actually allocated to public safety. At the the whole budget level, it's 22.8%. And our recommended or the increases in the recommended budget are listed below with personnel wages and benefits at 2.4 million, performing arts theater 2.4 4 million the storm water outfall lift station debt service at 2 million workforce housing projects 800,000 now I budget the workforce housing projects like that so that when an opportunity arises the budget's there but if there is any sale lease of property or major program entered into for workforce housing that has to come back before this council either way so just to assure you on that and then finally capital projects cost allocations we have people who work and manage capital projects throughout the city. Therefore, it makes sense to allocate some of that operational cost to the fund in which the projects are actually managed. Now, for the general fund, the general fund is 143.5 million for the ne coming

year. The general fund is the main operating fund of the city. It is the fund where the majority of the people work and and create create the atmosphere you find here in the city of Myrtle Beach. They provide the services with the exception of your solid waste and your water and sewer employees. Everyone you see out out on the road is paid for out of this particular fund. And I think it's really great to note that there are four major revenue sources. One of which is tourism transfers. Uh that is specifically important because it allows for the tourists to be bear some of the operational burden for what we do here in the city rather than putting it all on the backs of our taxpayers. With regard to expenditures in the general fund uh this year as in every year the largest component of our our budget is public safety at 58.8% 8% when you include capital personal services in the general fund are 74.6%. Um and and that makes sense because what we are as a service organization and we provide services. Therefore, that would be the most costly line item in our budgets. That capital A rem outlay remains unchanged from our last conversation at $1.2 million. and the recommended budget for our tourism revenues, again, unchanged. Um, I haven't seen anything thus far to convince me to increase those estimates. Although last weekend looked pretty promising and there's still some people down on the beach and around this week, I'm still not quite ready to bump it up yet. And then the I spoke earlier about the transfers in the general fund and I wanted to point out the amount of those transfers that actually come from our tourism driven revenue funds to our

other funds to either cover the cost of capital, the cost of debt service, or the cost of operating. So $60 million from those funds covers specifically those things, debt operating or capital projects in the other funds of the city. the recommended budget for our enterprise funds that your parking water and sewer and storm uh solid waste 68.8 million. Now, one thing you will notice different on the slide than last time I received an update from the Grand Stream Water and Sewer Authority about their upcoming rate increases um due to is it PAS or PAS? PAS

PA the PAS the plastic molecules in the water. Um they're facing some real challenges there and they're going to have to start cleaning that up. That pass is that cost is going to get passed down to us. Um it won't affect what our rates are for this year but it will next year because if you look and see what those rate increases are 427 you're talking about 9.9% in water and then at the Schwarz plant 13.4% 4% increase

for sewer and the the sewer Myrtle Beach WWTM is a 2.9% increase. And then look at the following year, you see similar numbers. So Grand Strand Water and Sewer is going to be passing on some large increases in the next two years and and I want us to try to keep that in mind as we move forward. I I'm curious how do they purport to clean up the PAS problem when it is everywhere? It's on this desk. I mean, how do you how do you quantify a cleanup cost for an item that is pervasive in our environment, right? And I just learned my magic eraser is is guilty of doing that, too. So,

new things are discovered every day. Do you have any comment on that, Janet, or do we not know at this point? I would just the little bit that I know about it. They're being required to implement new filtration systems that remove the plastics from the water. So they are being told what they have to do. Um and so new systems um and that's just in talking with their um executive director. And I'm curious, but how about the plastics? And I it's everywhere. Just a quick comment. Thank you,

Michelle. The Schwarz wastewater treatment plant increase is greater than the Myrtle Beach wastewater treatment plant. Does all of our waste go to the Myrtle Beach wastewater treatment plant? Are we looking at that or are they splitting that at some point along the way? I think the the majority of us ours go through the Myrtle Beach wastewater plant, but some that serves the north end, North Myrtle Beach goes through the Schwarz plant. Is that correct? No. Which one? South End. South End is the Schwarz. Okay.

Okay. So, we wouldn't be experiencing a citywide 13% increase as a result of the Schwarz plant increase. Do you know how much Janet a percentage of the cities would experience that? Is it small, large? Okay. She said that the the amount that will be applied to that rate is small, but they're expanding Schwarz and that's why it's that much more than the other. Now it's time to have fun. health and dental insurance. So I just want to start off by talking a little bit about what we have encountered in our health insurance program over the last year or two years and I don't think it is anything unusual. I don't think it's out of the ordinary. Um I think other agencies are dealing with this constantly. Um chronic health conditions, high cost patients. So about 68% of our employees account for 21% of the high-cost claims. And our high-cost claims account for almost half, just over half of our total medical insurance claims. We also have a situation where, you know, there's a lot of emergency room utilization that could be avoid it. GLP1s are a huge cost driver for us this year. We do not provide GLP1s for weight loss, but we do for diabetes. And it just so happens diabetes is one of our our chronic conditions that is prevalent within the city. You've got COPD, you have got

CAD, CHF, hyper lipidmia, hypertension. So, you've got coronary artery disease, chronic heart failure, um chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, high cholesterol. High cholesterol is way up there. So, we and we are an aging employee base. We've added employees over the years and we've increased our dental health coverage, Dr. surrender um in the past few years which has driven that cost up as well. So there are a number of factors driving the cost.

Speak to the addition of your mobile clinic or whatever we're entertaining. Is that still on the table? As far as I know it is. Kathy would have to speak to that or Kevin. Yeah.

I don't know that I'm familiar with that. My concern there is when you have a facility that provides just preventive care and basic restoration fillings type things, lots go untreated unless this modality of treatment also had a private office somewhere close where treatment could be completed. I would question that that move. Understanding though a lot of folks don't utilize their dental insurance. That is true. So only about 63%.

Well, my point is this is not a this is not mana from heaven. It's it's it's perhaps a worthy effort, but is it cost-effective and is it best for our employees? I'd much rather see them in a brick and mortar where somebody can follow you, but that's just the way I was brought up. Well, we want to see them in there twice a year for the cleaning so they don't come back with a root canal next year or or for their first visit in their first experience in a dentist office in 10 years. So, absolutely. But if they need a root canal, they can't get it in the mobile clinic. That's my point. Thanks.

All right. All that being said, um we finally did get the health insurance information and the dental insurance information in that we needed. The It's not pretty. It is not pretty at all. The amount that the city would pay for our employees monthly goes from 8.96 to $1,040 per month. That's a 16.1% increase or 1.7 million. What is that dedicated to again? Is this I've got another slide for you, Dr.

Okay, good. So, as we come down, I wanted to look at what the impact that is on each of our employees. And I've got dental and health broken down, but the bottom line is for an employee who ensures their spouse, covers their spouse with our health insurance, the increases would result in a $52.50 increase per pay period. For the employee that only uh covers a child or children, the increase would be $41.98 per pay period. And for the employee who covers their whole family, the increase would be $9866 per pay period. Now, I know that that is something that that does not feel good at all to this council. So, we've got some more things to talk about. We the city supplements the the family coverage

at this point in time. Yes. Until it is adjusted. Yes. We did an adjustment last year at 7 and a half%. It had been some time since we had done the last adjustment. Um and the hope last year I'll go into that in just a minute. Yes. Okay. Um Dr. Render, your question about the breakdown is here on this slide. So the total cost of the coverage is estimated to be about $18.3 million. And again, the percentage increase over last year is what?

16 well of this total 17.6% overall. And it in part it is such a large large increase because we had anticipated there being some level of decrease in the claims for 26. If you'll look at the graph here on your left, that is how our our claim claims typically act. You'll see a high year. It'll build up. You'll see a high year and then you see a trough and then you see a buildup to another peak and you see another trough. Well, we really were expecting that 26 would be more of a trough. Um, with the aging of our employee base and their spouses, with the increased cost of medical care medical care, our increased cover coverage in dental care, and the addition of these designer drugs, the GLP1s and some of those others, it's really driven up our cost. The breakdown as I said is here. Uh, one thing I'll note, we do have we have added a behavioral health services this year. One of the reasons is last year we paid $222,000 for behavioral health services for families, employees, the whole the whole thing. Um, last year it was 141. So, in any case, we feel like we can make an impact with our employees and their families and save some money by employing some of our own more readily available mental uh behavioral health services. Um, I think it's important too to note life insurance. We also bundle that here

as well. And life insurance for our employees is 84,599 a year. The OKMed and Premise Health are included in these numbers as well. Michelle, as you try, and again, I I hate to monopolize here, but I know we all are interested. As you try to predict or recommend to staff future increases, do we employ a certified actuarial that actually that's their that's their only job is to make predictions for organizations like this?

Well, our consultant that that is what they do for their clients. Well, actuarials are really pretty good and and I a 17% increase I think is is high. I understand the climate but there ways to predict this and prepare and to that end we have to depend on whoever our consultant is so you can advise him. That's that's all I'm trying to make clear how important that is. This is not a dart that you throw against the wall. You're absolutely right and I agree.

And I would just encourage whoever we use regular quarterly contact. I mean, $18 million is a tremendous amount of money in our budget. And I don't know how often you folks meet with them, but you just have to have complete confidence with whomever you're talking with. I can tell you'll be more next year. Well, we'll we'll see. I have um some things I'll talk to you about great with that. Also, Michelle, I've got some basic questions that you may have at the tip of your tongue.

Let's see where to start. The city covers the premium cost for the employee. So, the employee pays nothing for his or her medical coverage. We also offer a clinic that covers most prescriptions, drugs, that that sort of thing. How many of our local jurisdictions do that? I don't think anybody else does that. Somebody else does that. Who else does that? The county has a clinic. I do not believe they cover medications. Mara, do they go to medication? Okay. Don't cover.

And and medications are about $142,000 of that that clinic budget. Do they? and North Myrtle Beach does as well. Do the employees in either Ory County or North Myrtle Beach pay a piece of their health insurance premium and I'm not aware of that in North Beach. That that's news to me. So that's good to know. How many by category of our folks are, you know, single? Have one family member covered, two family members covered, three family members covered, four family members covered. Do you know that? I do. break down,

but it's not something I think it would be confusing in this setting because it's different for dental, it's different for health. Understood. I was wondering though, we do and that's how we track and estimate the the revenues and the cost and are able to divide that out among our our members, our plan members. I I was wondering of those folks who are going to experience the I want to say there's around 600 between 600 and 650 that have either spouse, child or family. That's the answer I wanted. Okay. And it's give or take a few depending on the Okay. the coverage. So a little more than half. Yes.

Okay. I'm sorry. You're good. Anybody else?

All right. So, we've talked about if if we continue down this path, how do we lessen the burden on our employees? Do we take and spread this cost over two fiscal years perhaps? Um, that's certainly something that we can do. And I've got some little fund balance information below. With the change in the tourism development fee, we now have an estimated $1.6 million increase in fund balance in the general fund. If you chose to cover this, we would actually recommend to cover it with fund balance as a one-time expenditure because we'll talk about those other priorities that were mentioned in the last retreat as using some of the other fund balance amount that would be available once the TDF was was rebalanced. And I've got that in another slide, too.

I did see in one of the earlier slides where you've got the extra 1.6 6 million that you're going to put into the fund balance based on that. That wouldn't be recurring revenue. The 1.6 1.6 would be recurring. Okay. Okay. And that's why I would recommend for us to use that for your landscape crew, your uh striping crew, road maintenance crew, those things. But since this would be a one-time occurrence and our fund balance is extremely strong, I would suggest that if I'm not even going to say suggest, I offer that as one option to lessen the burden off of our employees. Well, and where does that leave us in future years? That's the question.

Well, that and see this is this is where it gets where we'll have a little fun with it. So, I have a question to pose for council. Um, we have been looking at the state healthcare plan which increased to 40% the last three years thereby.

But we also know that our public safety employees have been very vocal about wanting to us to move to the state healthcare plan because that gives them an option to purchase health insurance after retirement. The coverage is not quite the same. It's better maybe in some ways, not so much in others, but that is something we will explore because we do have a feeling it would save a few million dollars, not hundreds of thousand dollar dollars if we were to explore the state health plan. I don't know that we could do it by January for this particular year because I think it would take we need to really educate ourselves to be completely sure and and of all the nuances but then we also need to have a time to educate our our employees as well so that they understand. We've we've all seen what happens when you when communication is not done over a long period of time. I don't I didn't get the sense that we would save money by switching to the state health care plan in previous years, but I don't I didn't get the sense that that was a potential solution over the last 20 years.

Our cost is much greater now. And our cost is greater now because our our population of employees is aging and the chronic health conditions out there, not to mention GLP1s. GLP1s cost $283,000 last year in our budget for six or seven patients.

So Michelle, one thing I know just how I feel, you know, we work so hard to hire good people and it's so hard to keep those good people. I know specifically with police and and other areas. And so I think it's smart for us to explore either the state health plan or to allow our retirees to buy into our health system um to maintain their health coverage after they retire um because we're losing good people to other areas. They might make a little less money on the front side, but they're willing to do that because they're planning for their future. Um, so we've got to really, you know, if we're if we really want to take um our, I guess, our initiative to hire and keep good people. We have got to consider a change.

I will tell you, selfishly, I would love that. Um, right now we do allow our retirees to buy into our health plan. It's $1,400 a month. When I looked at the numbers this time, um, you know, last year, no issue. We didn't need to increase the retirees. They were fine. This year, it would increase to $1,927 if it was just based on this year's claims. I don't know that one year of high claims warrants that adjustment. But in the real world, that retiree, nonfrozen chosen under 65 retiree would be paying almost $2,000 for our health care based on the claims. Yes. Based on the claims for that group

and you can buy it from the market for a lot less than that, I think. Yes. And again, I'm not suggesting we do that right now. I think if if we stay here and look next year and it's still up there, you've got to. And would that be coverage post Medicare or until Medicare? Until Medicare. until Medicare. So at Medicare, you you switch to Medicare and the city is not an option at that point. That's right. However, if you are employed at 70 years old, you're still on the city's plan. Say that again. If you're employed here as an active employee at 70 years old, you still are on the city's plan. Yes. And as I understand it, that's different with the state. When you turn 65, Medicare becomes your primary provider and the state provides a supplemental.

Yes. Um before we talk about jumping ship and I'm I'm cool with examining whatever is best for our folks. Has as our organization at the advice of our consultant um made any programmatic program changes or changes to service providers with whom the city contracts is negotiate. Well, I don't know that you would know that though.

Yeah, I do know that. Um last year we did go from one particular stop-loss provider to another because we were able to save money. Um we have done that same search out this year. I can't say anything about else about that but but we do that with some of those groups. Not all but some about it's either every year or every two years depending on the provider. So those are those are some of the things that they're working on on the provider side. Now, this should have been done years ago is what I'm saying. Pharmacy clinic, reinsurance, we just have to it it's a negotiation.

It is it it genuinely is um some of the things that have been offered or discussed are the um and I do want to implement this one way or the other for July one, a 250 copay on that emergency room visit. We need our folks to think about um when they're going to the doctor and understand there's a cost to that. Sometimes you don't have a choice to go to emergency room, but looking at it over half of these folks, this was something could have been handled in a a doctor's office. It was a non-emerent visit. So, if they have a little more skin in that game and have to think a little bit more about the medical chair they're choosing, that could help tremendously in this plan. rough idea of what we pay for an emergency room visit.

I believe it's around 2,00 2100 2,200 just rounding it up. So yes, every avoidable emergency room visit question. Um I would I'd like number one I'd like to see all this explored. Okay. The question I do have, if we were to decide to go with the state program, would we still have the clinic that the employees go to? Now, we would recommend that because I just want to make sure that that's that's still there.

Yeah. Because of the fact that, you know, when you jump on with the state plan, you're not just getting a rate that everybody in the state gets. Your rate is going to be based on your claims rate. They're going to look at you and they're going to see what kind of a risk you are and how much it's going to cost to cover you and they're going to apply that to you. And with the clinic, we can help mitigate some of that increase in cost. It's been very beneficial to many many many of our employees and it would we're going to now we're going to do an analysis on it too, but we fully believe that that would help lower any costs that we would encounter with the state plan. I think the county has still done that as well. Can you back up one slide? The administrative cost a million5. What is that?

So that is that's across a couple of different agencies. So we have Flores that manages our our debit cards and there's a per month fee on that. You've got a broker's fee. You have got a per month fee on your stop-loss insurance. Okay. And the same will be for negotiable

for the dental side of life. Medical claims are the big hit there. The idea a long time ago was that through concentration on wellness we would lower medical claims. That does not appear to have been the case. Is that my imagination or is it just the fact that people get sick? Well, and then the sick people, they they will go to the clinics and get the money to help pay the copay with our wellness program, but then you find I mean, you find illness, too, sometimes when you go through there, you hope to to keep it from escalating to a point where it's a more expensive condition. One of the things we've talked about, and we talked about this back when Coleman was here and Mike was here when we first did this program, was let's let's put the carrot out there first. This is the carrot. We need buyin in the clinic. We need people to realize how great the clinic is and what a benefit it is. Well, we are at that point now. We have even discussed having a um an amount that an employee would need to pay monthly for their insurance if they do not participate in the wellness program.

We still have a a smoking. We do $40. $40. Okay. Yes. So, I mean, we we thought about sort of trying to get people to really pay attention to their health. Now, the likelihood is that's going to drive the cost up, you know, at first, but hopefully eliminate some of the high claim cost later on down the road, but that is a a long-term plan really. At what point does our stop loss insurance kick in? Where's the the inflection point on that? So, that if the claim is above a million dollars, where does it kick in? 200 200,000. Okay.

And it went up 30% to keep it there. But we did do some analysis so of of what our high cost claims are, the number that are likely to exceed the stop loss. And if we increase that stop-loss amount, do we still come out to the good? In in the different scenarios that we looked at with 250 and 275, we did not we did not come out well. It cost us more. or in one case 25,000 the other case 50,000 more were we to increase those stop losses. So we just don't feel it's prudent right now to do that. It would lower our cost but it would also uh expose us to a higher level of risk.

Okay. And then the occupation medical clinic at a million dollars we we get the benefit out of that. Absolutely we do. Um when we look at the number of patients that we send there versus a you know doctor's care or whatever the current version of that is or the emergency room we save both in downtime and in treatment of of our employee. Okay. The the seismic consideration I see here beyond even who we choose to be our advisor, our consultant, whatever is this thought of about advancing with the state health plan. We need to really explore the ups and downs of that.

Oh yes. From from diagnostics to preventative to uh to the the health of that system. Every year in the state budget, there's a line item of hund00 million plus where they have to supplement their state plan. So it's there no good answers to here. What we must concentrate on what we can do for our folks at the most economic price and provide an equal or better service to our employees. That I mean that's the way I think we all feel. One other

go ahead. One other option that we've also looked at and will be looking into further if it's something that again that that council feels like you're willing to look at is a high deductible plan. Um this is where you offer your employees to join into a separate plan which is a high deductible plan meaning they pay all out of pocket cost until they reach a certain amount and then the co the insurance kicks in. When you have a high deductible plan, you typically set aside funding in a sav in a health savings account for that employee. Money that they can bank and earn and it rolls forward can only be used for medical expenses. I believe the initial recommendation was 2,000 for an employee, a th000 for a spouse, something like that. That would be sitting in that health account so that they could basically take their debit card and pay their medical bills up until they hit that deductible, whatever it might be. two things with that type of plan. Number one, all your healthy people are going over there

because they know that the likelihood of them having to be in the doctor multiple times a year is pretty far off. So, they're going to want to build up that health savings account for the future. The other part is to make it attractive enough an option, you've got to charge your employees who stay on your existing plan monthly for that coverage. So there two things we don't already do. Ask our employees to pay and then have a different tell level of plan where we put money into an account for them.

Walk through the numbers on that slide one more time. You've asked this council for direction on how to potentially cover for the employees some of these increases. But run through that one more time so that we can see it because there are some options there. None of them is cheap. Oh no. So the first option would be for the city to cover or Okay, take it back. First option would be for the city to spread the cost increase over two years being mindful that the fact we might have another increase next year. And when you say spread the cost, you're talking about absorbing the additional cost to the employee. Yes, we are. Yes.

And paying for that out of our general fund with recurring money with non-recurring money because it is not anticipated to be a recurring expense.

Okay. I mean in worst case it the the balance of the increase goes to the employees in the in the following year. You could do it over two years and your first year you would subsidize by uh 2.1 million and the second year after that you would have to put another $1 million toward the health insurance in order to spread it out over three years. four years. Your first uh year the city would have to subsidize 2.4 million. Second year the 1.5 million and the third year $783,000 in order to offset that cost for the employees.

We are on that graph are those numbers in the box. Oh, thank you. Okay. Yes. Yes. And Michelle, would this alleviate then the wind up ordinance necessity for catching us up as we often have to do for health insurance? Maybe a firm maybe. I mean I mean you know medical probably better than the rest of us and the unexpected can easily happen and in the same token we could save money. They could come in less and and we're not cross-examining you. We just want information. You know, we appreciate the resource

for an employee. If there is no subsidy, it would be an increase if you've got family coverage, full family coverage of about $1,200 a year. Is that math right? That's correct. Okay. Michelle, I've got uh a question and an observation for you. our consultant, whoever that is. Uh, how long have we been dealing with this particular person or company? I think three years. Yeah. Three or four.

Do we I know in industry, the industry I came from, uh, insurance obviously is a big deal. Uh, and we employed uh what we call brokers and we would uh every two years go out for bids with other companies, try to see what they could bring to us, what they thought. Uh, and it normally, not all the time, but I would say eight out of 10 times uh it uh brought us uh substantial enough savings that we wanted to switch. you know, we weren't going to switch for a h 100red bucks, but for 150,000 that got our attention, that type of thing. Uh, so I'm just wondering if if we ought not to be thinking about doing that. Uh, and I just throw that out there. Let's think about that. Uh, the other thing is, and I hear what you say about emergency room visits, uh, and a 250 copay. Uh, I may be the only one here uh that feels this way, but I think 250 is too low. Quite frankly, if you want to get people's attention, uh, as Mr. Lauder used to tell me, you may need to get in their pocket. And so, you know, if we have something up there that's $500, uh, because the purpose of this, as I understand it, is let's help people think before they jump. And so, um, you may have done some studies and where you feel 250 is the right number. And if so, that's fine. But I I would ask that we consider maybe something higher because we need to get people's attention.

I'm glad you brought that up because there's one important component to that that I think I need to add. And I think 500 is is fine because the way that we want to establish this program is if an emergency room visit ends with an admission, the co-pay is waved. Very good. Because obviously it is a necessary emergency room visit and we don't want to penalize that person who is walking in there with a heart attack or or anything else like that. Um, so we definitely would wave that in the in the event of an admission

and I think maybe even some certain conditions that require u medical care at that level without an admission and and I agree with that. That's fine. You don't want to penalize somebody uh when they're walking in with a heart attack. I absolutely. But I'm just talking about the general, you know. Well, let's go to the emergency room. Mhm. Oh, yeah. And I think 500 is fine. As long as we have that safety net for those who really need it.

I I understand and appreciate all of that. I would probably say let's start at 250 and see if it has an effect. And if it doesn't, we can bump it up next year to 500. um because that that's a significant out-of- pocket expense for an employee who is supposedly covered by our insurance. Do you have a number of emergency room visits per year? How many times does that happen?

I don't know if I can read it on my slide here. If that's something you are really interested in knowing, I can probably get it. But if we're talking about a thousand emergency room visits a year, yeah, if it's 30, that may be a different story. Oh, it's more than 30.

Somewhere somewhere under 200. Okay. So 200 times 2100 or 2200 is 44 is $440,000 a year. Significant. Yes. That's a lot of money.

It is. And uh one thing that gives us a little hope too, uh I think has offered up they will bring the cost of their GLP1s down to 175 a month starting in January. Um but I saw that the other two look like they're actually going to make it available for $50 co-pays to some of their folks. So there could be some relief in sight for that. But I'm very hopeful. you you said we only have a handful of folks who are on the GLP protocol. Um so asking them to pay a small co-ayment for that wouldn't save that much money at the end of the day, would it? So

Michelle, we did talk about that as well. A higher co-pay for the what we call designer drugs.

One last comment from me on dental. Is there any reason that would preclude City of Myrtle Beach from um inquiring with Ory Georgetown Tech who has a state-of-the-art hygiene and adult restorative clinic uh how we could somehow partner in um joint use of that facility. In other words, we have uh or they had dentists on on staff or guests that would treat uh at the time years ago indigent adult patients with filling type work um and as a training mechanism too. I didn't know if that might be fertile ground to explore before contracting with a mobile unit to come in.

It's absolutely something you know very good to consider. Well, it would serve multiple purposes and I think be cost effective, too. Plus, you get good care or you you used to. It's like going to the college. I'm sure you still do. If you'll back up to the other slide one more time, the medical claims 11.5 million. Does that include the dental claims? The dental claims? No, it does not. The dental claims are estimated at 94,000. So that that's a claims number on the dental Yes. side, not the cost of the dental coverage.

It that's what it equates to because the the coverage divided by the various classes of employees and coverages. Okay. So we're spending we're covering $900,000 worth of dental care annually at this point.

And that did increase. I can't remember if it's 2004 or five when we increased our coverage for orthodontic from 8020 to 50/50 and increase that max to $4,000. We also uh changed our um I forget what they're called, but it's the more involved dental work. used to have an 8020 co-pay on that one and we changed it to um or 5050. It had 50/50. We changed it to 8020. We we tried to lower the cost because we want to encourage our employees to take care of their teeth and and their children and we don't want cost to be prohibitive. We all know that dental care is one of the area where insurance frequently does got covered enough to allow it not to be a burden when you have a major procedure.

I would have thought the number would have been higher than that. It's actually almost double what it was before the changes. So, and we do see more people taking advantage of it now. So, increasing and expanding the care did work. It just doubled the cost. And that's one of the reasons, you know, your dental care is going up so much as well. But $500,000 out of 18 million isn't that much money at the end of the day. Okay. Do you all have a thought process on this? We're still thinking. Yeah,

I think we've we've put out some things for Michelle to think about. I don't know as far as firm direction. In other words, caution with a state plan, explore with some vigor our consultant field of fire to make sure we're getting the best whatever. But we need a budget by July 1 and this is a big question. I need direction

big ask from us is that 1.5. It's either we implement the entire amount and it's the will of the council whether it's you know twoyear four year whatever my recommendation would be one year because every year the costs are going to increase and one year because during this next year I will be looking at programs and exploring the um pea and joining the state health plan and whether or not high deductible plans work if council has an appetite for having some employees pay.

In round numbers, the question that she's asking is for the 600 or so employees who have some form of family coverage, do we charge them an extra $1,200 a year for their coverage? For the 500 employees who don't have some sort of family coverage, we're covering their cost automatically. or do we as a city figure out a way to either lessen that $1,200 a year burden or eliminate that additional $1,200 a year burden? That's a lot of money.

It is. Fortunately, one of the things that has allowed us to to manage what we had to manage at the increase as far as the cities um you know, we've talked about the RHR, the $100,000 a year for employees a number of times. Uh we've finally have um handled the catch-up contribution. So the decrease in that RH investment annually is very close to what the increase in the health benefit cost is for the city side of things. And that's why when you see that operating increase is only 3.4%. It is because we had the RH cost going down and the health insurance going up. As you mentioned, the subject of health insurance after retirement, particularly in the police department, has come up as part of the discussions this week. So, we've heard that several times sitting in on those conversations. I assume it's possible to

split this so that you could say, "Let's do a $20 a month increase for staff who do have family coverage and the city will cover the rest of that." Have you looked at some sort of number along those lines? 20 * 12 is an extra what? 240. When you say 20 for the staff, do you mean 20 for all staff members or No, 20 to cover the increases. Yes. If I if I understood your question correctly. Yeah, that's No, I I think we need a a predetermined time frame to get this paid off.

No, that No, I didn't I didn't ask that correctly. Then um your question is, do we shift all of the burden to the staff who have family coverage or do we cover all of the burden for staff who have family coverage or some portion? My question was or some portion instead of $1,200 a year is $200 a year. Okay. Acceptable. That was my question. Basically, instead of making it a one-year subsidy,

something you want in place going forward because what we're offering for the the first year is a one-year subsidy. It is just that the city taking on some proportion of that burden um to cover this. But are you talking about making it a city policy going forward that we will subsidize? We already subsidize the family coverage right now until we adjust our rates at the rate adjustment. We are not subsidizing it. Uh only only this employees cost is subsidized or was covered. Oh

not. Yeah. It it is not the intention of the plan to subsidize. It ends up doing that some years simply by the fact that that claims are never the same from year to year. And you don't ever know if you're going to have a high year with your dependents or your employees. One dependent gets an MS diagnosis or cancer and and and their share of the cost goes up. It is an everchanging thing. So these rates for spouse, children, family coverage eliminate the city subsidy for those. They do. Ah.

And and that has been the goal for as long as I've been working with insurance. It does occasionally happen, but we try to avoid that. Michelle, it would be helpful for me if you would present your top three option recommendations in writing so I can digest them. And I would think this body can give you direction in a week, but

and we might have a little bit more information on the state. It's going to take a while to dig through that one and make sure that that in doing so we don't inadvertently cause problems that impact our existing retirees, people who are immediately going to be retiring, those various things. We have to look at what the what the those uh outcomes will be and it'll take a little while to do that. So, yes. Well, tough job, but you can your folks can handle it. Do it. Michelle, just for clarity, could we go back to that slide that showed three options? Two, three, four year.

Yes. The last slide. There we go. Yes. I don't think anybody sitting up here is in favor of adding $1,200 a year to the 600 or so employees who have family coverage. If I read this right, uh if we chose uh to do it for two years, right?

Yes. Then employee with a spouse is going to be $26 a pay period. Employee plus children is going to be 21. And total family is going to be 49. And then if we went to three years, it it just keeps dropping down and decreasing. Yes. But from what I understand that you said, we're probably also looking next year at another increase. So, how do we what how do we balance that out or do we just figure it out when it happens?

I think the goal next year would be number one, if we stay with this plan, we're going to have to raise the deductibles, both individual and family. We're going to have to look at raising co-pays. We're going to have to look at having employees pay if they don't take advantage of our wellness clinic. We're going to have to look at some of those things that they will hurt too. Unless unless we see that trough begin to happen that I showed you in one of the earlier slides because in in the whole time I've been working with this, it's a peak in a trough. A peak in a trough. I'm waiting for that trough. Okay.

Right. So, as Dr. Render asks, uh, one of your top three might be some form of what we're looking at on the screen. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

And so, we've already talked about MBDA. I just wanted to take the opportunity uh before we come to you with the approval of the assessment role and just give you a breakdown of what their budget request is. Um as I told you when I was here before the request is the same as last year the funding request and the breakdown goes as follows. Um management and overhead is 704,000. Ambassadors are 880,000 and then marketing and advertising is 492 493 493,000 for a total of 2,18710. Now that's more than what we gave for the grant last year, but it includes two other things. We also give the MBDA $250,000 through the ATAC process for events downtown and they have additionally received a $51,000 grant 51666 from some other organization to do some engineering work. But our level of funding is the same. Um the amount of min mid revenues we expect to collect to help fund that is $793,000. The ambassadors make up 49% of that $1.8 million budget and as I said the allocation from the based solely on the MID as it was set up is the 1 million 1.8 million that is the same as was funded in the prior year.

Say that last sentence again please. The portion of the money that's going to go to MBDA for the mid based on the mid will be the exact same as it was the prior year. The 1.8 million. The additional 250 is from the accommodations tax fund and is not in the the mid agreement. And then there is the $51,000 grant that they're getting from elsewhere. So our budget stays the same. I don't understand the 1.8 8 million if the mid generates 793. Oh, the funding with that we have to supplement that funding and one of the things we supplement it with is

so you're talking about theou versus the the mid necessarily. Yes and no. Because all money collected in there has to be included. When it comes down to having a mid and when I bring you that assessment role and I I mention or I talk about what that budget is, I have to include everything that's coming in there regardless if it has anything to do with these programs. Okay? So the MID generates 793,000 estimated and the rest of the 1.8 million comes from city funds, hospitality tax. Yes. Okay.

The mid doesn't generate 1.8 million. No, no, no. This is me and I've had some conversations with Jason who's here in the audience today.

I'd like to see some savings on the ambassador side. I don't know whether Jason's got that in his back pocket or not. Um, it's it's something that we're requiring them to do. So, if it's something that we want done, I could see us providing that service as opposed to farming it out to a second and then a third entity to do. I think that may be worth a conversation at some point along the way. Um, one of the questions that's come back to me was whether the MBDA needs to be the entity that programs Nance Plaza, Platter Park, and other activities downtown at this point. Yes. Although I could see a day when the city had uh an not an events coordinator but an events promoter sort of person, someone who does for the city um the kind of programming activities that Conway presents for example. So that someone would schedule and program events and activities and work with public and private sector sources to bring life to the various areas of the city where we could hold events and activities. And I could see that being a a city function, not necessarily an MBDA function, but at the moment my preference would be for it to remain an MBDA function since we're talking about a fairly small area at this point. Back to my first statement. I'd like to see the ambassador cost come down.

You looking at the u kind of hard to read it. Management overhead. Management and overhead. Management. Is that like management as in Jason? Yes. And the other three employees. Now, now the company that blocking that block by block is that the name of it correct. What we pay what percentage of all this do we pay block by block not the operating what? 49%. H 49%.

The ambassadors we pay the ambassadors $897,000 a year. That's going to be the cost. We I say we pay we allow that in in the budget that's been requested of us. And when you look at that, it is 49% of that budget, that $1.8 million budget that is requested of us. So we go back to the question again, the actual block byblock corporation, what what's the management fee? I think is his question.

Management. The total cost is $879 proposed. What's the management fee component of that? Good morning, members of council. Thank you. I brought uh Eric Souza. He is the regional manager for block byb block for this area. He oversees the administrative side of Mike Snow and his team. Um brought him here today to speak about any specifics around block byb block and the contract that we have. Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for having me in Myrtle Beach. I'm coming from Baltimore, Maryland. So, this is a a much better place to be at this point in time of the year.

What's the management piece of that 879? Sure. Uh, yes. So, our management fee runs right around 7.6%. Okay. Of that total. So, $60,000 right around there. Yes, sir. And how many staff are there in the current or how many staff are in this proposed number? Uh this proposed number right now that we have 12.5 12 and a half

this is I seem to be carrying this conversation. Y'all speak up. Okay. The concern that I have is that when I see the ambassadors, it's invariably west of Kings Highway. It's on Broadway Street. It's sweeping up a pile of leaves. And I'm not I I struggle with that as a as a useful enterprise on their behalf. I'd love to see him east of Kings Highway in the Boulevard area, making that pretty and nice. I know Jason's concern is that he's got him covering the entire mid.

Um I I would consider restricting that a little bit, making it a little more pointed and concentrated. And I suspect you could do that with a smaller number of people at the end of the day. Uh yes, sir. I mean currently right now with the assessment that we have we've got about uh with the staff that we have we're effective I'd say about what 33% uh and in regards to like I'm sorry say that one more time. Yeah. So about a third one like 33% of the entirety of what Jason has uh 12 and a half team members can take care of about 33% of that I would say from an assessment which is what we're working with. So you're saying that of the entire footprint?

Yes, sir. That with 12 and a half staff, you can only take care of about a third of that. Is that what you're saying? Yes, sir. Okay. Which we do not clean the entirety of the footprint of what all the acreage that Jason has right now. Again, I I would move all of the activity east of Kings Highway. Sure. Y

I would strongly caution you against doing that. Um when we develop and implement a municipal improvement district, it is for the benefit of the citizens that is are paying that mid and when you take one of the major uh most visible things that people see and you remove that from their areas of the district,

we're not doing what the mid says we should be doing. So you have to be very careful about not not providing that service in those other areas for the people who pay the tax. And I understand that. I would argue that a disproportionate percentage of time is spent east of Kings, west of Kings Highway. And theou with the city and the MBDA speaks to the midp paying for the management side of life, not the ambassadors. It may speak to one thing or another, but the ambassadors are included in the umbrella of what the MID's going to provide. It was one of the big selling points to our folks when we had that discussion. So that I just caution you. That's all

it. It was that I agree. So, mayor, but are you saying that out of the 12 and a half employees, should there be eight still working on the other side and maybe not as many working in a concept? Yes. But my my my question is Jason, maybe when you do the heat map and it shows the amount of stuff they pick up, where is the biggest concentration? And

the biggest area where they spend most of their time uh is in the area between 9th Avenue North and 16th Avenue North on Ocean Boulevard and the boardwalk in that section as well. If you look at the heat map and the time that they spend in the entire mid, that's the largest concentration. They're spending more than 30% of their time there every single year. So the north end is getting a whole lot more than the south end. That's right. That's the way Isn't that the way history has been in Myrtle Beach? I think so. And some folks, but that's not perception. That is real. Yeah. We're going to talk about something that's going to fire Mike out of rough. That's it. We digress. So there's certainly a larger number of um foot traffic in that area as well based on the foot traffic data that we have. So they're spending more of their time

might be, but there's still trash on the sidewalks and everything down on south of 9th Avenue North too, isn't there? There is. And trash cans need to be empty, correct? Yes, sir. We need to work on that. Yes, sir. But you said more than 30%. So that leaves 70%. And it's probably larger than that. But they do spend the propundance amount of their time north of 9th Avenue North on the ocean side. Well, 30% is not a prepoundonderance. Well, compared to the,200 acres that were serving, that's less than 100 acres in that area. Okay. So,

again, I I don't see the utility of the work on Broadway Street. That's that's where I see them. And I don't see utility occurring there. I'd rather see them east of Kings Highway. If it's the full length of the mid, fine, but I'd rather see the east of Kings Highway for the most part.

We're happy to stretch this any direction you want. Uh if we reduce the number of folks, we could effectively cover peer-to-peer on Ocean Boulevard and the boardwalk if we cut it down to seven specifically. And that's where 100% of their time would be would negate the rest of the mid. We've done some analysis. We talked to Mike about service areas and what we could effectively do with the current staff versus if we shrunk that in half, shrink it in half, we would be uh really just working peer-to-peer um on Ocean Boulevard and the boardwalk.

We had reduced the number of shifts in the offseason to one shift. Uh by doing that and two shifts during the summer. So that would not give us coverage for the fall series and the spring series that happen. I can tell you from the data that spring break weeks are the dirtiest weeks and the amount of trash that we pick up during those two weeks is extraordinary. Um I mentioned before that we they pick up about 14 trash trucks a year of trash just from picking it up off the ground. That's a significant amount of trash that is just being picked up and by hand. Not to mention the trash bags that were taking out of trash cans um outside of what the city is doing already. So There's no question the service needs to be provided. It's how we do it, how much it costs, where where we're spending our time and effort doing it. I would recommend maybe that um clearly we need to cover the entire mid somehow um that you bring back a plan of how to redeploy the ambassadors um so that we can show one coverage but also um adjustments and what currently seems to in concentrated areas.

Um, based on we've done some initial analysis. I don't have a slide to show you today, but based on the current staffing levels we have, we believe we can cover the peer-to-peer area on Ocean Boulevard and the boardwalk, 9inth Avenue North, and a portion of Broadway Street. That's about effectively what we can do with the current staffing levels we have. If we shrink that, we would negate anything west of Kings Highway. I think your original plan was to ask for additional people in funding.

It was we had been on an escalation the last couple of years. So we we were going to the third year to add two more. I think that the number could be larger than that for the entire mid. Honestly, I think that there there's a point of diminishing returns where you want more equipment rather than more people and get more efficacy from different equipment that might be able to pick up trash more effectively. Um but I'm not sure we're at that point now based on our current staffing levels. If we get to 20 staff levels and add some additional equipment, we might have the benefit of maybe 30 full-time equivalents with additional equipment, but not 30 full-time people. Um, so that's the kind of math that we've been going through, try to understand what we can do versus what we have to be able to do it with. Do your folks frequently deploy able to deploy public works or parks um recreation folks to come and when there's a large amount of trash or whatever that they can call and get support pretty quickly.

Um I I'm not exactly sure on the response time, but when we feel like there's something more, I usually get involved in that. We'll contact Fox or Ryan, talk to them about that. uh or uh Mike Snow and his staff will contact the other uh building maintenance, parks and public works for specific maintenance requests that they have and I get copied on all of those emails that they

Jason just for so everybody tell as well as again the the how far south does the um

yeah I I I realize that there's some confusion on the size of the mid but it starts at 21st Avenue North and in fact it actually includes the businesses on the north side of 21st Avenue North from Ocean Boulevard back to Kings Highway and it kind of makes its way through kind of Oak Street at certain points through Broadway Street all the way down to 12th Avenue South comes back to Kings right after winter squash after south. So the area is fairly large relative to other mids in the state bids across the country. So we are covering a significant amount of area in terms of the service uh that should be provided. So by comparison sake uh downtown Colombia's mid uh in the main street area is about 150 acres. I can't I don't know exactly what the Vista area is. That's a second mid that they have there. Virginia Beach is around or 40 blocks, whatever that equivalent is, maybe 120 acres. You start looking at the geography. Raleigh is about 180 acres, I think. You start looking at that. And there's certainly varying degrees of service that are provided by bull caps, not just picking up trash and ambassadorial like here. I believe Virginia Beach just I'm sorry, Raleigh just does ambassadorial or security, not trash. So these things can be created in any fashion that's necessary to be able to address the need of the community. How we operate is trash and ambassadorial services mostly. They do help with some of the event support as well when we need to do a few things to get ready for some of the events that happen.

Michelle or Jason, could one of you uh help me with regard to definition? Uh, I think when we voted for the infant in in the infancy of the yellow hat program, it was not to be a not to supplant what the city does, but to supplement. Is that still the mission? Uh, I would I would say so that we're here to supplement. I can't speak to the level of service that's being provided provided by the city, but I can tell you what the goats are doing. Well, our concern at the time, we didn't want a complete backoff of the city. We wanted to work in concert and hopefully that's happening now.

Yeah, we work very well with public works and building department and and the parks department as well. There's a lot of coordination that happens behind the scenes and directly from the gold caps to those departments. I feel like the coordination is there. That's I don't think that's the issue at all. Um In fact, I I think where the goal caps supplement is after hours um on weekends at nights, they they cut their shift off this time of year around 10 o'clock. They do change that from time to time based on the uh the time of the year. For example, they don't work past 8:00 and during the summer or during the winter times uh because there's not a lot of folks out at 8 o'clock at night. So, they during the summer time they'll work till 10 o'clock at night with two shifts starting at 9:00 a.m. in the morning. So you'll see a gradual increase in staff during the summer and then it will reduce the number. So that average number of 13.3 right now in our current staffing levels is uh is the average throughout the entire year. So I think we hit 18 or 19 summer.

And one more technical question. Do do your folks man the the gum removing machine or is that purely a city? They have a little wand for it's a smaller machine. It's not the big one that uh the city usually contracts out, but um they can do spot cleaning system. They can't do full sidewalks. That's important. Anybody else? Don't have anything else to add at this point. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jason.

Thank you, Jason. That also concludes this uh section of the presentation. I believe box, you had a break on the agenda next, but we can move on however council so desires. Take a break. Yeah, let's do that. We'll take a 10-minute break because it'll be 15 minutes at the end of the time. So, we'll we'll shoot for 10 minutes. Thanks.

Welcome back. Everybody's stuck around. That's good to see. Um I think a couple of council people may have early commitments today. What time have you got to leave? Need to leave at 1. Okay. Let's see if we can't get through most of this by one. If we can swing quickly, um, we can eat and work. We might be able to eat and work. That's true. So, um, outside agency reviews, is that a complicated thing, Brooke? Okay. Run, Brook.

Um, there was $35,000 allocated for outside agency funding this year. Um like with a tax, they were required to turn in proof of their grant expenditures. Um the increases and decreases that you see under the staff recommendations are just based off their uh reporting of how many city residents they assisted this year with their programs. You said 305,000. Yes. I can't see that. And I don't think I've got one I don't think I've got a printed copy of that in front of me on screen. Yeah, I know. I'm trying to read it on the screen. That's the problem. Brooke, remind us again how these report back to us what they're doing with our funding

and their applications. They report back what they have um what they have done in the previous year with the funding. Is there any thought of quarterly or or semianual reporting, progress reporting? Yes. It it seems like I used to do that with the with the county grants through the college. Yes. And it's just setting it up. So, this is my first year I'm looking at improving both a tax and outside agency grant. Well, you've done a great job, but the more the marrier, if you know what I mean. Yes. Did it help with the um the changes to the application for the applicants to fill out that they do in the summer?

Yes, it pul it pulled more information that we were we were needing. Do you think anything else needs to be changed? Anything needs to be added? I'm gonna look at it again and see after after this year. Okay. I think they responded pretty well to it. So, we'll see if we can anyone has any recommendations on changes. I don't know about the rest of council, but I'm pretty pretty sad that I'm pretty satisfied with the recommendations.

I am too. I've got a couple of quick questions. What's the $40,000 for the United Way? What are we paying for? I should know the answer to that question. I don't. Some staff cost um and some programming.

Okay. Just provide a little extra color specifically to the United Way. We provide a couple of um community outreach folks that coordinate with our opioid response team activities, that type of thing that that work for United. Okay. That also supports the 411 211 211. Sorry. Okay. 211 gives you the 411. Thank you. Okay. I'm good with your recommendation. Y I'm good with that.

Um capital projects. Can we enter into that at this point? We've got an hour. All right, just a general overview of the projects in the plan for the first year. As we all know with the five-year plan, the only year of the plan that is actually appropriated in a budget is the first year. Furthermore, if a project is slated to be funded with debt, uh it takes additional steps. While it's appropriated, it is not funded or authorized because we need council to authorize any debt issue. We're looking at about $74.7 million in the first year. The largest category in that group is going to be for water and sewer. Uh you have the like I mentioned earlier, the $18 million 48 inch parallel water line. Your next group is general and hospitality debt. And in the general or in that is going to be your fire station number one $26 million. It's uh we've presented that to council and talked to that about that several several times. Funding categories of course the largest is long-term debt. I think the big factor in that is water and sewer. You've got $28 million, 28.7 million in projects that are funded with long-term debt in the water and sewer fund and then the $26 million for the fire station number one. The overall capital improvement plan makes up is made up about 463.9

million in projects. I've got those listed here based on the type of project and then also by the funding sources for those projects. Again here hospitality debt a general and hospitality debt make up the biggest part of the pie. Water and sewer follows next. Uh, I do have included in here ANI projects and the funding source for the ANI projects listed right now are grants or public private participation or tax increment financing debt. We won't know that until we get a little farther along. We won't know what some of the exact projects will be until the development begins and there is an ask of the city for that infrastructure. Um, these are on here because we know that the original plan included a children's museum and there's been some talk of that. the parking behind the train depot, certain things and and parking downtown. And you'll see that when we get to that slide.

That's not No, no, that's in this is the whole of the five-year plan on this particular page. And no word on the proviso budget from Colombia.

Not yet. And that's another one. When I say grants, it could encompass the proviso money. Michelle on the Myrtle Beach Tennis Center renovation. Um, I know the USA offers grants for tennis improvements. I don't know if we've reached out to try to get funding for USA grant. Georgetown got a big one.

Just for the audience and those who can't hear, Brook stated we're not typically eligible for those grants based on our population size. And when we look at grants, we typically look until we get a little bit a little bit closer and have a little bit better cost estimate. that the numbers in years three, four, five are really estimates based on what we know now. So, because we haven't identified a grant at this point in time does not mean we won't um we actually have in for a grant for the Mloud Park that Mloud playground um put in for a million-doll grant. Don't know how much we're get or if we'll get any, but we are hopeful. In years 2, three, and four, you've got an additional $13 million for the baseball stadium. What work would that contemplate? What what's contemplated with that work?

Oh, um, part of the contract we have, we will meet with the team in January to review what may or may not be necessary and have a conversation. So, it could be something we don't for this. There's even coming year they think it's zero. We don't have anything in next year. CIP. Yeah. Initially the So there could be some coming up the following year. We also have the SKA report that we have we're but there's no time frame on when that must be necessary. So we're trying to we got to have a conversation with the team in late fall. What is the amount of money spent thus far? Oh, I don't know the answer to that. We had 20 then

it's under 20. No more than we appropriated at 20 is it's not more than that it's less than that I believe okay so is and we recoup that correct we've also spent 1.5 million on emergency and necessary SKA improvements but the total figure thus far is again I have to get the total figure I don't know what the total figure we haven't gotten all the bills yet I'm sure that we will be very soon but in the neighborhood of 21 a.5 million not off for PDL. Now some of that's SKA work that that had to be done or that we could gain some savings by doing at the time that the other improvements were being done.

So 20 million 21 million so far. Yes. and another possibly I'm just saying possibly maybe 15 million at some point over a period of years. Thank you. And Michelle, did you mention again I'm sorry the tennis center rehab? Yes. Uh there is in this budget $3.9 million I believe it is 3.8 3.8 in 202930. Is the school board partnering with us on that?

They've already handled their section and this will be our section. Well, we'll ask them again. $1.4 billion. We might be asking them again. I thought we just repaved the tennis courts about five years ago. We didn't really repave. we just sort of resurface them and it needed a more extensive it would be nice to have a really first class tennis facility there. And with regard to the fire station, is that number hard as they say or as hard as an estimate can be? I wish environment.

Yeah. Yeah. You're saying that's a very very educated guess. Extremely educated guess. Yes. Um I will note that regarding the fire station,

if you look out into 2930, you see $10 million there. Um that funding would be necessary if council chose to upfit the EOC center at the fire station. The current numbers um what they include is basically a shelf for a second floor. If at a later time the council wants that to house an EOC center, it will cause it'll require additional funding. and our present EOC at the base is has shortcomings. Pretty impressive to me. I'm sure

we could improve on it. But it it is not that u it's not that we have to have it. Understood. This includes 1.5 million each of the first two years for the YMCA. Yes. Okay. That's that's a plus. And then it also includes in the second year carpet replacement at the library, but in the first year some library and park revitalization concept money.

Yes, we assume that whatever we do at the library will will take a manner of years. Um we'll probably just hold off onto the carpet till we get a firm plan. But if we're looking at a five to sevenyear buildout, we would recommend going ahead and taking care of the carpet. Now, and what's the hammer throw at Doug Shaw? That's a lot. They're going to have a presentation on that one. That's fine.

As you notice, the the items in red are new projects. We typically don't like to add new projects in the first year, but occasionally things come up like the uh wait the HVAC system for the pool area at Mary Canty. Those things don't last very long and they are imperative to pull out the pool chemicals and everything. So we do have to add that into the first year that 800,000. And then we've been requested to add the stage to Charlie's place. Something that that I know will be a really great addition and area to activate there. Is that on this list? I don't see that. But maybe it's on another page and I haven't got it yet. page. I haven't got the other page. Thank you.

What's the 1.1 million for information technology renewal and replacement? I'm glad you asked that. So, um, our server system, our storage system for the city is out of of warranty and out of maintenance. Um, and it's getting hard to get parts for replacement. That's not something you want to to let go unmaintained. This thing actually the majority of what it holds and why we have such a large system police camera data that we have to maintain and store. So we need to to replace that next year. When was it purchased originally? Seven years old. Okay.

Ancient and technology terms. council.

So, unless you all have any other questions. Oh, yeah. We can um move on. Look at the transportation. Now, Janet and her folks are going to talk about this. I just want to point out that in the transportation projects, we have uh increased the milling the new road milling and resurfacing program to 3.2 million a year. If you recall um when Eric came and talked to us about that when public works talked to us about that, they said that would allow us to resurface all city roads within a five-year time frame. We've also increased your marking, pavement marking to do the same. Um, they're going to talk to you, I think they're probably going to talk to you about the Ocean Boulevard milling and reservicing and what the additional 850,000 to multimodal transportation projects is going to um afford you. I think you'll be excited about that in this plan. So, we've tried to address all of the the street related street and sidewalk related requests for the city. Sidewalks are included uh grinding and repair sidewalks are included

where in that list uh directly under the major road resurfacing. Okay. And it's my understanding that that is um that is plenty of funding if we will fund the new road crew and allow those folks to to focus on those sidewalks. Sh, this isn't your Bailey wig, but is with regard to field replacement, is artificial turf still in vogue? You hear about injuries and that kind of stuff? It must be because we just redid a whole bunch of them. It's it's wonderful. Dustin can give you the technical side

with regard to repeat play and drainage is excellent. I just I didn't some of the sports literature says folks in other arenas are drifting away from that. I don't know if anyone else has heard that mild criticism. I don't know. It seems the school districts have been going have actually be begun doing that now and paying for it themselves. the Mloud Park splash pad and park renovation is listed in this coming year's budget. The the park Yeah, he's going to talk about it, but the park was in the 26 budget. The other half is in the splash pad is in the 27 budget. It was split across two years

reversed for two and a half million. And that park was eventually built with a $180,000 grant from the Pine Lakes PUB deal back in '06. We're waiting on another grant, hoping to get another grant this time. In year three, the Grand Park new youth ball field 12. Is that coming up in that presentation, too? Okay. All right. Anybody?

All right. The next group are our Myrtle Beach Air Force Base redevelopment projects. The only project you will see here and and this is going to be discussed as well is a fire station 4 and the proposal to rather than build fire station 7 on the Clemson track, actually build one station to accommodate our our fire team from fire station 4 and add additional staff. and and build just one station to respond to the whole of the neighborhood. So that's the only project you see here. We partially funded with those tiff revenues that are the incremental revenues that are in the fund, but we'll also have to kick in some other funding, be it debt or hospitality or whatever as that time comes. And like I said, I think that's one that Josh is going to be covering in his presentation on the project. Just so I'm clear, fire station number seven is now off potentially. Yeah.

Assuming the city doesn't grow substantially, it would be. Yes, this would cover it. Tom's going to come up here and talk about it a little bit response time. Just wanted to be Ocean Foot Front Boardwalk and Ocean Boulevard projects. Nothing really new here. Uh with the exception of Wither's Alley and a proposed restroom renovation in year 31. We all know that one gets a lot of use and needs some love.

Question about restrooms there at between the boulevard and Wither's Alley. We got those repaired and they're ready to be open. I know we had some some I know we had some damage in there, so they were closed. That's um that's an hourby hour answer and question. I get that. I think as of right now it's a I get it's a work in progress. I I I will I think I will confirm that at 11:07 on a Thursday they are open. Okay. Thank you. We had had a discussion at the first budget workshop about additional

Yeah. restrooms along Ocean Boulevard that were in the budget and then came out of the budget. Council staff, where are where are we on that? What would we like to do and what's the cost for doing those things? We will defer to you all on what to do. It was left after budget retreat last year, last budget cycle, that we were not going to continue to explore additional restrooms on the boulevard. I got shut down.

Yeah, we we have so we we have not done as staff, we have not done any further investigation on additional bathrooms on the boulevard. If the will of CH council is going a different direction, we can pick that back up. Um, I'm working with year old numbers. Dylan's here. He'll throw something at me. Roughly 200, $300,000 per bathroom. We have a handful of locations that we could pursue restrooms from the south end all the way to the north end. Probably three to four locations um that we have looked at and would work. We just defer to council on priorities

at the next whenever the next budget meeting we have workshop. Can we have a presentation on where those possible locations could be? I will I will send you I will send you the presentation that we have um at some point today. And yeah, we talked about that last year. Those haven't changed. We can I'll send it to you and we will come back to you with a presentation. Can you find money to put one or two of those into this coming year's budget? Sure, we could take something out and or we could use fund balance. I mean, there's there's nothing new to appropriate. Okay. But if you So, it's fine.

And you you did say that we have a very strong fund balance and these would be onetime expenses. We do and one a year wouldn't wouldn't break the bank at the end. M maintenance is not a one time expense. Building's one thing, but maintaining and parking and then you got parking spot and then you talk about losing parking spaces. Uh very

So all all of the locations where we would we would propose putting new restrooms would probably take up three to four parking spaces per location. Um it it will cost us roughly $200 to $300,000 to build a new restroom. Understand the Wither's Alley restroom cost us about $120,000 a year to clean and another $100,000 a year to maintain just repair and maintenance. So it will cost us as much every year to clean, repair, maintain as it will to build. So don't I would not encourage you to look at it as a one-time capital cost.

That's right. Or at least pay for it as a one-time capital cost. Okay. But bring bring a number back to us on adding one a year maybe. Is that where we want to be? Do we want to be more aggressive than that? What what are your thoughts? I think we really need to look at it again. I mean, I just from I I probably be the one of the few who sit up here and say, um, some things hadn't came across my desk, but this is one where I've had several calls from people saying that, you know, how do y'all expect people to to

they they're going into businesses and and um or they're going in the ocean. Yeah. So, you know, I I just think it's something that we need to look at. That's not the kind of outfall we want. No. So,

they have added in here a generator replacement. They uh they need a new generator for operation. And then you'll see in red to the right the HVAC replacement about $15 million right now. As you know, they are working on the facade of the building. There may be funds available to handle some of the HVAC replacement. They don't know what to what degree. Um, but this is in the fifth year. We have time to make that assessment and we'll know by probably end of next year what we'll need as far as HVAC replacements go.

When's the last time we replaced the HVAC? I don't time has a way of morphing. So, it it's hasn't been that long ago. 12 years. 12 years.

Yeah. So, and and saying that it's why if we did have to some sort of field to buy this not 20-y year, but perhaps a 10 year lease. If that's the case, the the hotel has been spending off very good franchise pay payments the past few years. We estimate three and a half million this year. We got three million for 26, two and a half million year before. So it would be good if we could begin to kind of save some of that too and reduce any future debt costs. So the hotel does provide a positive cash flow at this point. Yes. Significant.

Last few years it's only been like two years that they didn't. But that was when they had to do some major renovations based on their agreements with Sheran. Right. Our agreements with Sher. Yes. And we let them use that money that would have come to us to do the renovations at that point. That's right. And Michelle, what is the the primary bonded debt now on the hotel? Around 50ish. No, I'm actually looked at yesterday. It's more It's closer to 40. Great. Yeah. And that's down from 65 and what was there?

And a 15 $15 million Jetta bond that's been refinanced and added to a couple of times over. It's Yes. Where's that three three and a half million dollars from the hotel show up in the It goes into the convention center fund. Okay. Yeah. And it's just other revenue. So when you look at the the numbers on the fund summaries that I give you, it's other revenue. Okay. And the rehab council voted on last year, was that a $20 million or was that housed in an $81 million big bill? is 20 million. Okay.

But I think the bid on that came in below 20 million. I don't think we're spending 20 million on that. Are we? We are.

I said yet. Um what they want to try to do. First off, you don't know what you're going to encounter with the steel. I think we had Monteth up here and he was talking to you about that. Um I've already mentioned the fact that if we can redo some HVAC, that would be great and some cost savings in the future. But also, there are restrooms down on the hall down the halls. Really, really, really need some work. They've got it in the plan. I've left it in the plan for now, but we may be able to address that. And we're also replacing all the red doors along the front. That was also a project previously in the plan that we've taken out.

Brian, thank you for the rendering you sent. Looks pretty good. The sports center doesn't have any ask right now other than the one they asked last year to close in that back patio and activate that space and we have included that in the budget at $746,000 and the renovation the replacement of their HVAC is underway now. They're waiting for the the unit and everything to arrive. as they're all ready to have it done.

The Whispering Pines, we really don't have anything here as a request. Uh many of you may know that a portion of the fee that they pay to us is to be set aside for capital improvements. Um he doesn't have any big issues right now, but we do include 50,000 here just to in case he has emergency that arises. 50 or five? Five.

Okay. baseball stadium. We've already kind of spoken about that as as well as the ANI district. All of those projects are further out in the future. And I would say other than the the parking lot behind the train depot are still all up in the air for discussion and debate at this point in time. I didn't want to leave them out because, you know, I want to be completely transparent in all the projects that we discuss, but they are not happening in the next year and I'm sure could change over the next year.

We we've heard from the Children's Museum in recent weeks. They've been here. I think they're eager to move forward. I see you've got 14 million out in the third year. any chance of moving that up a year? Sure. Um I think they were I don't remember that conversation exactly. Fox or Brian, do you remember that conversation specifically? They they were eager to to make that happen and we had some financing ability I think.

Yeah. So I think they will they will be ready to move at the same pace that we are ready to move based on all of our conversations. Just to give you an update on that, you all have heard from couple of months back, you heard a couple of weeks back, you heard from the two finalist from the RFQ that we've had. We are moving ahead with with the preferred choice of council. They owe us a presentation proposal, I think June the 1. June the 1st. Uh they've been in contact with the children's museum. they've been contact in contact with some other folks that would be um development partners in that area. So the next milestone that we have to cross with that will be June 1st.

And and hypothetically, how's that 14 million going to be debt serviced? I would say it's TBD. I think back to Michelle's comment earlier. Um we're trying to trying to maintain as much flexibility as we can. uh it could be debt service, it could be a lease payment, it could be uh for some core piece of infrastructure. That's one of the things we expect back on June 1st is is sort of a development framework of how this public private partnership would work in an ideal scenario. We will then take that and and you all will will help us edit that proposal to something that that all of us can council may

council may have differing opinions as to children's museum library expansion. We need to provide y'all some insight. You do. I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. Yeah, I don't think so either necessarily because the the children's museum anticipates paying a a rent a lease for the for the property. market lease. Yes, 35,000 square feet. That's a lot of market. I would suggest looking ahead that we approach state lawmakers with regard to the 2728 proviso budget. I mean, that's the way it works. Ask as directed by council. Thank you,

Brian. I'm sorry. Remind me again which one of the um the uh consultants that we went with uh and Flity and Collins the combination of those two. Both of them. Yes, sir. Okay. One that came together. Yeah. Okay. In year three, Michelle, you've got $40 million for two municipal parking decks in the Arts and Innovation District. I anticipate that as we work towards redeveloping the pavilion site that that money may may end up being spent in the pavilion east of Kings Highway rather than west of Kings Highway.

I had a we had had an intentional conversation about that line item showing up in that location. I think right now we would like to keep something in the CIP for downtown parking. Whether we place it east of Kings or west of Kings is still very much up for debate, but I think maintaining that placeholder in the CIP is the more critical part. I mean, based on our conversation with the county the other day and, you know, phone call with Chad Carlson recently, we need to begin to get a list, a scope, an order of magnitude of what sort of public improvements would be necessary as part of a pavilion redevelopment project.

I think that's ongoing. Water and sewer is is always the heavy lift when it comes to projects. New here is a $170,000 generator. It's not until 28, but the public works is one of the remaining older generators on a building. So, we plan to replace that one next year. No, year after next. A new project there for the 48 inch force bane highway 17 bypass to King's Highway. And then there are a few additional pump stations as well as the last two phases of the 48 inch parallel water line. Janet can certainly talk to you or whoever's doing a presentation can talk to you about all of those projects.

There are a lot of pump stations on on that list. Yes. Yes. What's the life of a pump station? If we're replacing 15 of them, 12 of them.

I think my daddy built some way back when. Okay. two, four, six, eight, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 of them.

Right. Over the years, we put in um gosh, at least the last eight years or more, I think. Um we tried to phase in replacement of these because we have several of them. the the life of them can be 30 to to 40 years but as you grow uh the capacity of them needs to change as well. Um we also have the environmental factors here of the um the saltwater and everything else especially the stations near the ocean front and a majority of the ones you're seeing on the CIP right now are the ocean front ones. um those components, the electrical um boxes, the the pumps, all of those are susceptible to those environmental conditions that we have to to manage. And in in terms of the 24th Avenue North, we're actually improving with a let's call it a retreat strategy. We're moving it out of the street end and west um as well. So, there's a number of factors that we consider. So 10 $9.7 million this year, this coming year for four pump stations.

And I will say also, mayor, that many, many years ago, we could replace a and rehabilitate a pump station for 250 $300,000. Now with today's dollars, it's $1.52 million a piece. Unfortunately, thanks. That's the escalation. say that again.

Absolutely. When I first came on board, you know, 20ome years ago, we could replace station for 250 $300,000, which at the time was very expensive to us. But now the price has escalated to 1.5 $2 million each. I remember giving Mike Petraus a hard time when the first one came in at $640,000.

Solid waste management. The project here are the concrete pads which you've seen and you're familiar with. They've replacement of the pads. You can see the pads in the in the pictures there. What we added to the plan this year doesn't start till the third year, but it's added in the five-year plan this year is replacement of our compactors. Years ago, we leased them. The leases went up high. They were in disrepair. So then we actually bought them through a lease purchase. It wasn't a lot of interest. It was still interest. It was a cost to us of doing it. So what we are trying to do through this program now is create our own replacement plan. We do where we do not borrow funds to replace these compactors. Their lifespan is only 7 to 10 years. So I don't want to go out and borrow money even if I got a seven to 10 year lease. I I feel like we should be able to do it this way. So I have included him in the five-year plan. And you can probably expect to see that going forward with us replacing so many compactors a year. And then I was asked before, I think a couple years ago, to provide some detail about the debt that was planned in the that was included in the five-year plan. What debt funding? What projects are we debt funding and when would we expect to issue debt over the next five years? I put together a schedule here for you. Um, and I broke it out and actually the project's broken out. Uh again, as I said earlier, you got $26 million possible debt issue for fire station one in 2027. And then you've got about 28 million possible, 28.7 million possible for the water and sewer fund in 27.

Now, just because we have all of this debt listed throughout here right now doesn't mean that that is a hard and fast plan to issue debt to that extent. Right now, I'm running off of estimates of what I've got for hospitality fees and all of these volatile revenues. So, I'm going to put hospitality fee or hospitality tax debt up here. I'm going to put water and sewer debt up here, storm water, whatever it is. But if I can end up paying cash for these, that absolutely will be the preferred method. If I can end up getting a grant for these, that's even better. If there's private participation, even better.

Where are we standard and poor wise as a risk compared to other jurisdictions? I forget the AAA, but we are just a step down from the highest levels. we are regarded in the same you know very very very safe credit risk and as long as we maintain our fund balances um then we will remain as such. Can you tell us how we compare to Colombia or Greenville or that would be interesting coffee talk for us if you could get that at some point because people ask

it it's really hard to compare let's say somewhere like Colombia I know we say this all the time we're very different but if you look at Colombia and you look at their tax base and and not just their tax base but their revenue base there's a lot more business in Colombia than here. We rely on hospitality tax and funds. We we are controlled and driven by the tourism industry. For that reason, we're always going to have a little ding against us that we're not going to get away from unless unless we are able to expand our job base into something that is more than, you know, retail or hospitality. Those are are great jobs and thank God for the hardworking people that do it. But that's not what S&P is looking at.

That's not what Moody's is looking at. It's not what Fitch is looking at. Makes sense. And that would be the same for other coastal towns. Virginia Beach, Shen City, Maryland, all of them. If they too have no other industry. Yeah. If they don't have a paper mill or or some big factory or a a school, a medical school or you know that they have to have if they don't have any other catalyst. We have nothing other than tourism right now.

Michelle, what year was it that I saw the um 80 million for police department? And does that also include a new jail? It does. And do we have land that we've identified for that yet? We do not. That is one of the reasons why the first year has I think 25 million in it and the second year the 80 million. Okay. That would also house a new court

if council so chooses to maintain court operations here and jail operations here. I mean that that'll be another discussion for council too. I'd like to see us partner with some of our other municipalities and a more regional juvenile detention center. I know 29 is the first year of funding with 25,000 and then 30 would be the $80,000. Okay. 80 million.

Yes. I want these numbers smaller. I know.

Okay. And then I just gave you a little debt comparison. Now I I'm going to say this. This debt comparison is on the par value of debt. That is what is outstanding on the debt. I did not include capital leases. I didn't include Gazsby 87 adjustments, adjustments for Sabita. They they do nothing but cloud the conversations because they're not real expenses. They're the conversion of lease payments and maintenance uh agreements on software into long-term debt even though they are not. So, this is simply bond and SRF principle. Now, while the hotel corporation, the 9inth Avenue improvements, and the performing arts theater are not directly debts of the city, I have included them here just for transparency's sake because I didn't want I didn't want to come up someone come up and say, well, why haven't you included that? And here those are too. The jetted bonds are simply one of the the debt instruments on the hotel. The 24B bonds, hospitality bonds, refunded the hotel debt back in 2024, so it's included up in the hospitality debt. Michelle, do you keep your eye on opportunity, which currently I think there's not one, but to refinance um

and we fortunately have an awesome financial advisor who's been with us for a while and knows intimately knows all of our debt and if there's even an inkling, they're with us and we're working on that. We're watching those markets and that's why I'm I'm bring these refundings to you frequently. And we come out to the better even with issuance costs and all that's factored in. Yes, sir. And and bond council fees.

Yes. Yes. Those are fac those are factored in as well. Now that that concludes my part of the presentation. we could um turn it over to the folks who are going to talk to you a little bit more about the projects themselves. And thank you. Let's ask one quick question about the because we've gotten emails this week about the additional part-time expenses for staff at the library. Where are we on that?

Uh it's at $120,000 right now. We I I know I've heard a few different things on that about it's been cut sort of drastically since 2020. Uh there was one year the budget was up but it has not is the budget is actually larger now overall than it was back five years ago. Um one of the issues I guess 2025 is when it was first cut to $120,000. That was done because there was some discussion and comparison about what it takes to operate other libraries. And our library employs many more people than other libraries of the same size with the same with a similar program. And it was the charge of management to budget your part-time people

more wisely. But it repeat that. It was cut in 25. It was 120 in 25 and in 26 and it is 120 in 2027 budget. Yes, it was reduced in 25, but it it had it went way up in 25, but it was never that high before. I don't know what we did for it, but the requests and the the emails that I've seen cite a variety of different things. One of them is the the mobile library and we figure that in.

Did we we added a mobile library two or three years ago? Did we add payment for staff for the mobile library at some point? There is staff that is being paid to operate the mobile library. I don't remember how much we added, but there's a full-time person dedicated to that. Okay. The difference between requested and funded is like $92,000. It is.

Council, what I understand is that the reduction from the request of 212, I think it was. Yeah, that would be that would be $92,000. uh means that a 11 part-time employees uh would not be able to be retained. Um two or three of them are IT related uh because when they used to have an IT person at least partially dedicated to them, you could get things done. But now that's not there. And if you, you know, if you spend some time at the library and and you look at what they're doing, you look at the computers and you look at the people on them, um, you need people there to service them. U, so, you know, just eliminating those part-time positions. Uh, that's troublesome to me. Um,

we're not asking for elimination, just management. Well, I still think that the their ask at 212 uh, is appropriate. I'd like to see us go there

and I too would like to have senior staff have some conversation with whoever's in charge library wise. Uh I hear from constituents not from staff rightfully so and u pretty passionate people who and it remind me that I've said you can't put a price on education or reading. So, if senior staff would re-evaluate, I'd appreciate that. But that's just me, as Mr. Chestnut would say. And just to make sure I heard you correctly, it was cut at some point. It was cut from 24 to 25.

Yes. And it was I I don't remember. I'll have to go and look. It's It's up to council. Do I sense that not you particularly but staff feels that the library is not being managed efficiently? I think that from what we've seen in visits and looked at in other libraries that it could be distributed and managed in a more cost-effective and efficient way and have with those observations have you also made those recommendations? I mean, if I'm running the library and you say, "Hey, look, you know, we're we're we're here to help you, but we're going to cut your budget, and one of the reasons is and you need to be more efficient." Um, okay, fine. Show me what you're talking about. Maybe I have missed something. Have we had those discussions, uh, that type of thing with the library staff?

Yeah. And Michelle, I've I've visited one county library and Chapen Memorial and the level of service uh I mean it's fine at Carolina Forest, but the programmatic uh opportunities at Chapen is just far above. We compared to the Conway Library, main library. I don't get that far west, but uh not with the traffic, right? And that's a great library for ourselves. Yeah, we will pull something together and take a look at that.

I don't know whether there are four of us that would say find the $92,000, but I suspect that's where we're headed at the end of the day. Maybe. So, I still think we ought to also, and I don't know if this came up at the meeting Tuesday have with the county, anything about library. We did ask for additional funding from the county. Yeah, it did come up. I don't know. Well, I mean, I don't know how well that went over, but it did come up. Well, I mean I mean, you think about it. I mean, what what is it? 85,000. 20,000 or 30,000 from the county? 35. I mean, and help me again. Um, what does state law says?

That is the library, the designated library. We are not a public library because we are not a county library.

City residents are double taxed on two things. One is EMS service. We provide a higher level of EMS service because the county doesn't meet the service levels that we think we need here in Myrtle Beach. So, we pay for two ALS ambulances off season and an extra BLS ambulance during season. So, we're funding three additional ambulances that we believe the county should be paying for. So, we're paying taxes as city residents and businesses to the county for the county's EMS service and then paying for our own EMS as well. The other area where we're double taxed is for library service.

Our library existed before state law said libraries were a function of the county. And we've kept Chapen Memorial Library because the residents seem to like Japan Library. It's a part of the community. Um, but the state law says counties are responsible for library service and we're currently getting I think it's 35,000,000.

It's a tiny little amount of money. So, I did ask at the meeting with the county if they would consider funding to the level of $300,000. So, we'll see where that goes. That that would be a big help and that would cover the $92,000 if we can get that. We have done a uh that's all of my budget presentation at this time. As we've been tasked, we we do what we can each year to cut. We hear the public. We see the comments. Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. We have done what we can in this budget to do that as I think it's easily demonstrated in the 3.4% increase in governmental operating alone

this year.

Are the service enhancements included or not included? they are not included. The only service enhancement included is that for the meter um maintenance tech in revenue but is fully covered by the water and sewer fund which is turn the expectation that the revenue generated will offset that cost. I mean and that is that was the final thing that I was going to ask you today is we we need to pull this together and wrap it up. we need to know what to do on health insurance and and have some guidance there. And then also on the three recommended service level changes. So when I come back to you with a budget, I want to show you what that budget's going to look like after these folks, these positions have been added. Are you of a mindset to add your road maintenance crew, your landscape crew? And we really would like that benefits coordinator to help us with the health insurance.

Will the That was a $120,000 ask for the benefits person. Yes.

Will the PRST landscape crew help improve the look of the city as we've discussed here? And I seem to get some buy in from council that we need to look better than we do at the moment. I believe that is the the purpose of that crew. Okay. Well, the question is if we hire this crew, are we still going to pull this crew off to help with all these special events and stuff? Because if we are, we're not doing what we said we're going to do. It'll have to be a management directive. I mean,

it's going to help, but I mean, you have some sort like CCMF. They're going to get pulled off for CCMF like everybody else does, but that's an all hands- on deck type thing. I hear you, but we're doing CCMF without this now. True. So, I mean, if we get this crew, I mean, they need to be if we say we want them to make the city looks good, then it's going to help. They need to stick to dedicated. It's going to help. So,

Josh stepped away. So, I'll enter my I will channel my inner Josh for a second. We are still going through the process of re-evaluating routing, re-evaluating how we deploy the staff we have today. We are finding some efficiencies in deployment. Now, we will also be adding this crew to help us. And to Michelle's point, uh, if you all say we we can add this staff and they have to be used for this 247 365, then then that's how they'll be deployed. I just think we ought to stick to what we say we're going to do. Walk into gun into what department does the benefits manager fall?

It's going to be Go ahead. It is going to be um moved under finance, right? We're going to have a an area in finance that will take over the health insurance and benefit plan. Does that mean we can not have somebody in another area who's currently doing that? No. Now going in in the future if we end up going the way of the state health plan maybe but you still need people to leers with your employees and help them through some of the the tougher issues.

We're currently programming $800,000 for the take-home police cars. Yes. 200,000. I' I'd move the 200,000 out to next year and see if we can do it next year. Sure. Um and then the road maintenance crew that's to take care of the additional sidewalks, the additional maintenance that needs to be done. A road paving crew is that's not the pothole crew. We've got one person doing potholes, two people currently doing potholes. Is that one truck or two trucks? One truck, two people.

And that amount includes the truck and the people. No, this that's not what this is. This is something different. Just this is new. Um, so this is three people in a supervisor. It's four folks total as I remember. I think the presentation said four. Yeah, she's saying four. three plus a supervisor and a vehicle to go with it or whatever is required the equipment necessary. Do you have a funding source for those two or three items

after rebalancing the TDF? The fund balance in the general fund becomes $1.6 million. that would cover these which will be recurring expenses and the leave and leave a little bit more that could be used to if you so choose offset that health insurance um the subsidation of the health insurance the savings on the TDF the property tax credit is a recurring savings it's not a one-time savings you're proposing taking just this year's and sticking it in the fund balance yes but it is a recurring $1.6 million. At the end of the day,

the proposal is for either employees to pick it up next year or um we and we fully intend to do plan modifications whether it is going to the state health plan or modifications to our existing plan because we really just can't we can't keep this growth up. We can't keep paying for growth at this level for health insurance. So the 1.6 6 million savings from the TDF credit readjustment could be used for these two or three items. And then you're proposing using additional one-time monies out of the fund balance to cover the Yes.

additional health care costs. Just make sure I understood that. And did everybody understand that? That is right. recurring money afforded to us by the rebalancing of the TDF for the recurring expenditures as that as you said is a recurring revenue and fund balance to offset or subsidize the increase in health insurance costs for the first year half of it for the first year. And you can write that down for us. Yes, I will. And and that all fits into the budget without any tax increase at this point. Correct.

Okay. The PRST landscape crew is two people, four people, three people. I know it's not four people at that money. Is it is it two or three people? Three. Okay. So, that's three. Um, and then y'all have a an opinion on the benefits manager.

Yeah. I mean, if you telling me that we need a benefits manager and it's going to make us more efficient and and help our employees. We asked for this last year, we had to defer because of funding availability, lack of funding availability. So, yes, I'd say let's do it.

That's just me one now. And then just as a general thought process for council, while we're approving funding, we also have the ability to approve unfunding. Is there anything you would consider as a reduction that hasn't come to us from staff along the way? May not be an answer that you can give today, but keep that in mind if you would. Okay. as we go forward.

You know, we talked about the the benefits manager and providing a service that will make us more efficient, uh, be better for our employees. Um, how does it make us more efficient? Efficient. You've got someone who knows the ins and outs of insurance, where to look and how to do it, as opposed to me fumbling around and trying to figure everything out back and forth with our consultant. It makes that more efficient or even who we put over it more efficient. Isn't that done in risk at the moment?

No, HR. And they don't have that position in HR. So could that person over time replace the consultant? I would hope so. It it could in time. It could. Yeah. And that's why I want someone who is knowledgeable. Yeah. In in the intricacies of health insurance. It's an important it's an important skill set. Yeah. Who knows how to shop the brokers and the plan. And I understand that and and and if you if you do if we're lucky enough to find that right person,

okay? Uh because it's an important skill set looking down the road. Uh one of the other benefits is we may not not need a consultant who we're paying whatever we're paying. Uh because this person becomes our in-house expert and can help manage us. That would be a very that's a goal. Okay, that helps. Thank you.

Me, I want to ask this thing just kind of keep rolling back with me. Why would we have an inhouse consultant about insurance and not have hire brokers? I know for the 23 years I was in insurance I mean the security business vice president and president of the company we hire broker each year Bill you spoke of this earlier to find us the best insurance for our needs for the company and that was a that was a one time fee a year. And uh to be honest, I don't remember what that fee was right now. I've been out of pocket from that for a little over four years now. But instead of and if we I'm just thinking that we had we did that uh through a contract basis through a through a broken agency that does that. We used to use one out of out of New Jersey, I think it was. I can't remember the name of it now, but but they every year. Matter of fact, it wouldn't go every two or every three years. We would do that every year. And it's amazing how you got somebody out there that's constantly shopping that. And I'm not saying that we do that with our with our health insurance every year, but I think I think that's something worth looking at.

We have that right now, and that's sort of what's led us to where we are today. So we have that right now and it's part of what has led us here to where we are today and why we are exploring other options. But so but we have outside plus an inside person. We do not have plus inside. We have outside. Oh, I thought I heard you say you was an inside person.

No, I was talking about they want to hire a new benefits manager. Yeah. And that is a specific skill set in terms of insurance. And so hopefully that the person that is hired uh if they have time on the job would actually be able to replace any of the consultants that we have out there based.

Um but I have to tell additionally the the the level of work it takes to help our employees with insurance far exceeds the one person we have right now anyway. I mean we we are not adequately staffed for insurance management right now. I would say a benefits manager can earn their salary back in savings to the city based on helping our employees manage best their benefits, their care. Um you know ensuring that people are going to the right places. all of those things. And when you're out on the market sharp shopping, that's a whole another thing. Um, but I think a benefits manager is there to help the employees to minimize the cost to both the employee and to the city and that's a great benefit.

Yes. So to the extent that we can afford the PRST crew, the road maintenance crew, and the benefits manager, I think you're saying yes. Um I would ask we're probably pushing out another year, the additional 200,000 for the take-home cars if we're doing 800 already in this year's budget. Um, I would ask if we could consider, and I brought this up before, um, some way to phase out the cost of the mids on the resident population. Um, I think the total cost annually for both the mids, the three mids at the market common plus the contractual arrangements that exist on the north end are, you said is in the neighborhood of 550. I may remember that incorrectly, but it's in the neighborhood of 550. Um, I realize that's a a a big bite to take, but is that something we could consider phasing out over three or four years?

That's a question. Yeah, I I think if it would be wise for all of us to express our opinion to some point, yay or nay on that. U and again, I have no problem. I I tend to agree with you appreciating the expense. Uh there's always a fairness issue to contend contend with, but rather than dancing around the tambourine, you know, we need to decide yay or nay. And that way she doesn't waste a lot of time pursuing that one way or the other.

And and I've stated my position before, but I'll do it again briefly. I'll attempt to do it briefly. the the mids pay for additional levels of street lighting that serve Pharaoh Parkway, serve the public streets throughout the market common area and yet the residents are paying for additional street lighting on the public streets. Um and the same is true for the the north end contractual relationships. the the street lighting level at the market common is obviously desirable because we required it as part of the development of the market common area. Could that level of street lighting not be the standard for the city uh and and the city be responsible for it just as the look of the city should have a standard as well. everything should look as good as the market common does or grand dunes if you want to use that as the example you know let the additional lighting that needs to occur occur but it's a it's a municipal expense not a property owner expense at the end of the day

I I'll just say this I I forgot I feel mixed about it and let me say why some of the streets you're talking about in the beginning they were private streets they were in developments that were private streets

that's And when the homeowners bought their houses in their those neighborhoods, they bought into paying for those lightings in those neighborhoods. That part I I'm struggling with that part. Now, as far as Pharaoh Parkway goes and the other main roads through there, that's something to talk about. Uh if you're talking about removing a fee from something that the residents bought into to start with when those streets were private streets. Now that's

it was always contemplated that the streets would become public. They it was never they were never intended to be private. um the Grand Dunes, those streets are private up there, but you know, the Market Common Area Streets and some of the other streets east of US17 that are part of that contract arrangement are public streets at the end of the day and they were always intended to be public, but as new developments occurred, new street lights were added and the cost of the mids went up and I don't know that that was ever clearly explained to anybody. So as Mark comment

I think I think there I think we need to have time to to actually discuss that issue and kind of break it down other than what we're talking about here. I mean because I just I just I got to tell you I I kind of get it. Uh those those street lights are you know they're definitely not in my neighborhood. No, they ought to be. Your neighborhood should look as good as those neighborhoods. that I'm just saying those street lights are in their neighborhoods. They're not necessarily like Farah Parkway. I see Farah Parkway and um yeah, I think Coventry.

Yeah, Coventry. Another one. Coventry and in in Pharaoh Parkway. I see those different than I do the neighborhood. And yet the mids are paying for the lights on Pharaoh Parkway. Well, that's what I'm trying to say. I see a difference there. So I think that's some further discussion we need to have. But I would I would suggest that we look at a way to phase in that sort of phasing out of the mids at some point. Well, do you not think we should give a majority opinion to her one way or the other sooner rather than later? I mean, I'm it it it's existed for 15 years probably. Um, I I would love to be able to provide some

confidence to the community that that we're going to address this at at some point along the way. I would like for that to occur this year. I realize that it's a big bite of the pie or apple or however whatever metaphor you want to use. Um, which is why I say maybe it's something we could phase in over three or four years, which would be, you know, $100,000 a year, which is not a significant amount of money. And yet it would relieve, you know, a burden on many of the the residents of the city who are paying those costs right now for street lights that light public streets. You know, I I don't get the benefit of lighting my property at all from this mid that I'm paying. I'm paying for lights on public streets at the end of the day.

But are are you talking about just Coventry and Pharaoh now or it sounds like you've gone back to all of them? I No, I'm I'm I'm with all of them. Yes. So the total cost is 550. I want to give you direction one way or the other before you what I'm thinking is we need to have a workshop. I'd like to see a full breakdown of where they're at and what they involve across the city because just talk about market common needs to be Well, I agree with Mike that we need to break it down and if the workshop is the way to go. Hey future workshop. Yeah, it it it probably is. Can we get it done this year? I don't know until we break it down. When we say this year, we got to get a budget passed by June 30. That's the That's and I don't

Well, and that's why I said I'm not sure it's going to happen this year. So, when you say this year, you talking fiscal year or calendar year? That's kind of what I'm trying that was my question. Fiscal year, the upcoming then we let need to let them know soon. Yeah. I don't know if time's a ticking. We got And that's why I suggest phasing it in so that you take a small bite, not a not a giant bite. I think you need a workshop to see what the bite what the magnitude is before you decide what you want to bite off. Exactly. Exactly. We've been given

and and just to be clear again agree with Mike that we need to break it down. What I'm talking about is I don't know that in trying to do this understanding when Michelle has to hand us a budget or you the manager's budget uh that we're going to be able to achieve what the mayor wants right now. I think we need to recognize that it it may be uh in the next fiscal cycle, but we do need to break it down. That's what I'm talking about is the next we do a workshop and maybe not for FY27 but for

FY2. I realize that's the reality of it. So I understand that at the end make sure we're on the same page but I also think it would be helpful to hear from the from the residents as well as part of this process. So I heard on the discussion of the service enhancement um recommendations if funding is available. I think the mayor said not to include the 200,000 for the take-home vehicles. I would be supportive of that 200,000 for take-home if that money is available. I'm not sure how other folks feel, but I think we need to continue that program. Looks like we're getting close to the end of that and that makes a really big difference with um our officers.

I'm not constitutionally opposed to it. No, but

I would say that, you know, if if they have hired and have on staff more than what we have cars for with this, we can find some way to accommodate that with a um vehicle in an interim because these things are taken off the road after very short amount of usage. They retain them very frequently. So it is not that we would not be able to take care of any new officers that come aboard if they came on and we needed more for the year. And I imagine even if it came to allocating some other fund balances to do it, we would do it

if it happened. And this is actual vehicle purchase money, correct? Yes. Purchase and upfit. How long does it take to get a vehicle and to upfit it? Six months, nine months? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's not like this will happen July one. No. So, this would be well into the future. And that is one of those things that at year end that when we do a windup ordinance, we'll sometimes come back to you and say we want to allocate. We need to allocate this money for that. Which way do you want to go? I'm going to leave it in there. I'd leave it in there. All right. Leave it in there. And right now we're spending what? For a year. Yes. No, I mean Yeah. What are we going to spend per year?

Yeah, it depends on how many more officers we hire annually. Um, this from what captain just said or the chief just said, this gets us up through the people we have on staff right now. And this new recruit class, we hire more. How many do we have? 40, 30, what? Officer positions to fill. It's going to change all the time. 29ish. 29 more cars. Maybe I misunderstood what the mayor was saying. I thought he said 800,000 a year. It there's 800,000 already in this year's budget for cars. 595. This will bring it up 5.95. The 200 brings it to Brings it to eight. Okay. Yes. Correct. Okay.

All right. Mayor, before we break for lunch, I do want to say I appreciate you your $300,000 request to the county for the library and that I don't think is a big ask as the city of Myrtle Beach pays one-third the advoran taxes for the whole county. So, I hope our colleagues across the river understand that. Actually, there were some talk about five as well, but

yeah, Michelle Michelle was more eager to make a bigger request than I was. Is there while you're standing there, is there a correction I need to make on something? I I believe when we talked about fund balance uh couple of meetings ago, uh there was some discussion about Seacape property funds and there was mentioned that they're reserved in our fund balance. Um when you use the term reserve and the technical term in accounting it's not technically reserved. It is set in it is in a separate bank account until everything is settled but it is not reserved. I used the wrong word.

Yeah. And and sometimes words are just different for us accountants. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, you've got to go at one. We've got a couple of brief executive session items that we'd like to do today if we can. We're going to do that while we eat. Um, do you want to take a lunch? What What did you anticipate? You've got a lunch for everybody.

We're ahead of schedule. We do. Um, we have the two executive session items possibly, but the only thing left with these presentations that we can that are in your system there that you can look at that we don't have to do. We've talked about they're all CIP stuff that we're doing. And the fire station thing is not this fiscal year. In fact, it's a couple of fiscal years out. That's correct. That's out in the future.

Yeah. Go ahead. Speak. Not necessarily today, but I would like to hear from the chief at one of our workshops about one station versus two. How that would work, whether it would be better, whe Not today, but it can happen. That's not It's not like it's going to happen. Yeah, it's not this budget year thing. It's not this budget year. Okay. I'd like to hear about their chief at some point in time. So, if you want to Are you suggesting that we call it a day? Let everybody eat and we do it in executive session. Perfect. I'm putting that on the table for you to consider.

Good with that. Okay. So, we have food for everybody and we'll go I guess eat and meet. We'll go in the background.

So, we have two items for executive session. Need a motion to go into executive session to discuss negotiations concerning proposed contractual arrangements with the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce regarding the tourism development fee and a motion to go into executive session to discuss negotiations concerning proposed contractual arrangements regarding the acquisition of a local artist's historic archive. following would be invited in to the invited to attend the discussion for both items. Fox Simons, Amy New Schaefer, Brian Tucker, Josh Buger, Michelle Shumpert, Mara Bell, and Meredith Deary. We have a motion. So move.

Second. Motion second. All those in favor of the executive session, please say I. I. Can we grab lunch first? Is that doable? Yeah. Let's see. I think why couldn't we just grab lunch for and and us go in there before everybody else and then that that's what that's what I just said. So, we'll do that and then y'all can eat and while we do our little executive session things.

Didn't you get to see Josh's presentation? All right, welcome back. We met in executive session, talked about a couple of items, took no action, took no votes. Is there a motion to come out of executive session? Some moved. There's a motion and a second. All in favor, please say I. I I Any opposed? Is there a motion to adjurnn? So move. All adjourned. It is still a meeting at the end of there is no work.