Remarks by Karen Hiller
86 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 3 of 4
I'm just not sure that It's complicated, I think.
Right. And so this dollars, which is revenue to us.
Just the process, which somebody was asking earlier too. What you're planning to do is there's an assumption that we'll get to the motion to adopt the budget at the end, and we're going to do one amendment at a time. Councilwoman. Stack it up.
Some folks say you can't do an amendment until you get a motion.
Well, I think everybody knows I've got lots of issues with this, but it sounds like where people are going is that we need to just get this adopted, but understand clearly that we're going to start working immediately on the programmatic and specific pieces of all these possible changes. I would like to propose a proviso that would go with this motion. The proviso would say that all concerned are aware that various alterations and changes in personnel and programming will likely be needed starting immediately and through the 2027 year. and the city manager is expected to continue to invite…
I think the flip side is we have so many moving parts here and, and, you know, to have the city manager with this budget or even until then just be totally on his own about it when there are so many pieces to go through. And just to make sure we've committed as well as we've done with people.
And I haven't voted for the budget for the last couple of years, and I will this evening. Okay. based on the fact that we have really broken it open, I think, in terms of all of us understanding what's at stake. And my proviso was important to me, and it sounds like to all of you that we'll talk about the sales taxes in two weeks and three weeks and so on, but really get inside those. We've kicked it off. We've just got a lot of work to do, but it seems like we have a framework. I appreciate that on the part of everybody, the staff. Council and the public has really weighed in as well. Thank…
Not quoted here: it may name a member of the public. Hear it at the meeting.
Thank you, Mayor. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for all that you do. Sort of in line with some of the conversation here at the beginning of this conversation, There's so many things that seem unsettled in our world these days, and so many things that we say, you know, we used to be good at, we got to get back at that again. Something that you all have done well, and I think that the press and the communication in the community is quite something to handle, but along the lines of these crises, There's a fair communication from you, from our chiefs, expectation from the press at this point, and certainly…
Thank you. I've got kind of three overarching questions. One of them, you're saying we need 4,220 new units across the board. Yet the same census data that you drew other numbers from says that in 2024 we had 60,213 housing units and only 57,797 households. So there's a gap of 2,416 which are vacant structures. And those are in my neighborhoods and David's neighborhoods and so on. Yet the sentence in the beginning of your vacant housing assessment said, oh, we weren't asked to talk about that. And you mentioned it today. I appreciate whoever... Probably trickled that for me and maybe some…
Thanks for that. And I mean, if you weren't asked to, if you were just asked to look for how many people, how many units we might want to develop, fair enough, I guess. But I guess a challenge to all of us is I just can't imagine us having an overall housing strategy that doesn't include all those structures. Many of them have been sitting for a while, others not very long, but they're part of it.
Well, I very much agree. I guess when I look at that, if we identify in a certain neighborhood that we actually have 222 existing housing units and we really focus on fixing them up, shouldn't that 222 or whatever it is come off the 4,220 goal if we've brought back into the marketplace one way or another?
Well, just because if we brought those existing units back into the marketplace, and I say that, I represent Central Topeka, and when if somebody is just building brand new subsidized apartments or houses someplace else and people are moving out of my neighborhood, then who's going to be in our neighborhoods? And at least... The third question I had was when you have a number like that, it's much more exciting, at least to some people, to do something new and build something new someplace than to go back and work with what we have. Is there a mechanism that you have built in to this report or…
Thank you. Just didn't want us left out.
to have those either not replaced or removed at certain for certain circumstances thank you other comments or questions from the governing body council member hillary mike is your motion for the latest schedule that the staff has brought us yes I will second that motion.
Mayor, it's a question at this point since this item 5B and item 6A look kind of the same. I mean, are we going to do other discussion on the budget?
Council Member Hiller. I'll kick it off. I think people have known for a long time that I've been concerned about the budget overall. I feel like we need to, for our staff, for our city, and for whatever our next steps are, to take at least some very affirmative final moves right now as we pass this budget, some things that we can start right now in 2026. to move forward, but also to head off getting deeper in the hole. What I put together utilizing to a great extent, the list of possibilities that the city manager had would be a package that would reduce our spending in the city budget by $2…
But they were itemizable positions. I do think that for the capital budget, if we take out, 600,000 a year for the first three years of the 2027 to 2040 plan. That's how Josh has helped me to try and get this on paper. And I don't think we have the numbers quite fully hung, but I can describe it. I have some handouts if people want it. But if you go all the way to 2040 with the extension of the capital budget, Anyway, just take three years of the city sidewalk project, 2027, 2028, 2029. That's 600,000 a year. Then pick it up and continue on out. Take out the fire station. that is in the plan…
Thank you for the question on that. For me, I guess I think that the public will vote to support the fire stations if they are done through the sales tax. From when we first started talking about those, basically the way we do construction projects, big ones, whether it's a building or a street, is a three-year project, right? We do design the first year. We do the site preparation or whatever needs to be done. And then we do the construction in the third year. for each of those fire stations was proposed at roughly $11 million. Right now, a tenth of a cent has been about $3.6 million. So…
And once again, with the fire stations, this is how I thought about it at first, but it could be any way. I thought if we did them just three in a row, that would just be a nine-year sales tax, and it would one after the other get them done. They could be done one at a time, just single three-year projects.
The reduction for starters would be just to take only three years out of the sidewalk program. which, by the way, since we're doing the huge Lyman Road project, we'll be spending more than $600,000 a year on sidewalks. So just the 123 on sidewalks and then take the fire station out and then take the fleet garage out, which we talked about before. We're not really sure when that would happen and if it rolls up because we've got something going with the riverfront.
It's a way to move the financing around. Every one of those projects is going to get done. The sidewalks, those that don't get done now, assuming we continue a sidewalk program, that program is intended to go indefinitely. The DREAMS program, the idea is to move it into the fund, into the cash fund, not to not do it, and to move the fleet purchases into the cash fund, not to not do them. It's originally seeded with $2 million from the general fund side.
Again, that is to get those projects done with cash, not to not do them. And the way that starts to pay for itself, and it takes time, and that's where... Josh, I'm pretty sure we don't have it run out right yet. But... When you pull those, when you don't bond them, then your bonding, your total bonding indebtedness starts to drop, so you don't need as much money for debt service, and you can use that money for cash projects.
That's true. Okay. That would be, at this point, we do a CIP every year if that didn't pass. And you've got a lot of other stuff. You're kind of wedging on the table, hoping that people will pay for it. I just feel like we've needed to get this done in the capital budget for a long time so that we, instead of paying, let's use a single fire station as an example. It's going to cost $11 million, and we can do it for cash instead of bonding it. And we've got that $5 million to spend on something else.
Again, just pushing that sidewalk program down. Otherwise, I don't think there's anything in there that wouldn't ultimately get done. It's a matter of how we pay for it, not whether we want to do it.