Remarks by Stacy Goss
117 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 5 of 5
I feel like we've made, we've found savings in other areas that... yes, we could potentially push this off, and yes, there's some efficiency in having your own machine, but I hear what Cecil's saying as a cry for help, that we are so far behind that we will never get caught up, and yes, I could buy my own machine, but buying my own machine and doing it in-house is an eight-year project, whereas hiring a contractor to do it for two years and take a huge bite off of it makes it a four-year contract or a four-year project once we get our own machine. So I feel like, and correct me if I'm wrong,…
It seems like your staff would be pretty busy with, as we do get the machine and we start doing things in-house, it seems like you would stay pretty busy with with the restriping after the arterial maintenance program runs through each summer.
And then if you have a warranty issue, you're waiting on the contractor to come back and send someone to look at it, and then your project manager is tied up taking pictures for the warranty work. If it's our guys, you just send the crew over to take care of it, and then it's done, and you're not waiting until the next season to fix the things that went wrong on last year's project. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot of efficiencies in having our own staff work on that stuff.
I think that when we raised our water rates in 2026, part of that was the promise of delivering better services and addressing aging infrastructure. And without the engineers on staff, We won't be able to accomplish those things as quickly. So I fully support this. I'm glad that we talked about this. I think this is going to help get us ahead. And hopefully we don't have a backlog to work through. But I know there's a lot of projects in the pipeline with utility and water. And hopefully planning and zoning is going to be busy with some kind of boom soon too. So yeah, I think this will be…
Do you know what page that's on in the budget?
I think that I remember the parking lot and the Jim P. Martinez savings, and I feel like right off the bat, you have a third of it paid for in savings just on those two projects alone. I understand they're multi-year projects, but I think that's a significant savings that justifies the machine and all the things that go with it.
So what you're saying, just so... To kind of summarize what you're saying is removing this project from the budget doesn't actually save us $260,000 because it would be bonded and it wouldn't necessarily just come out of the budget for this year anyway.
I will say that I think it was in March I mentioned, I don't remember what month it was actually, but I mentioned the transient gas tax that we would be able to go from Based on the state statute, we'd be able to go from the 7% that we're at now up to the 9%. And when I brought it up, we didn't have time to dig into it because it was the middle of budget season. So I know that that's a conversation that we're going to eventually pick up. And my rough estimates on that is it brings us about a quarter of a million dollars in And it's something that we would plan to sunset after the second golf…
We may have been at one time, but we're not right now. We're not currently. A lot of municipalities like up by Kansas City just did it in advance of the World Cup. And they got a good amount of money from it.
Yeah. So are we in agreement that we're going to move this?
Justin, what's the final year of the master plan? Because our CAP only shows to 2030.
This is one that I would like to see cut. half it just seems like there's a lot going to the golf course when we consider the offsetting of the budget this and then the the water reuse project that we haven't talked about I mean that's a lot of money that's going to the benefit of a golf course that I know people use it, and it brings people from out of town potentially, but overall it is not a moneymaker for the community, and I know that municipal golf courses aren't, but this is something that I would definitely cut in half.
So you would have no construction in 2028? Correct. Okay, because we're already not doing anything in 27 because we didn't fund it in 26. So you would have two years of non-construction, but you would be banking that 330. Correct. So then in 29, when that came...
Yeah. Then you would have your full 660.
So, and this would probably be for Justin too, but so McQueen Fields is just north of the golf course. I don't know what hole that is. The east side of the golf course. And then there's a playground right in the middle of there. It's the blue and green ones, two to five. Would you consider irrigating around that playground?
So I think that the thing that catches me up is still simply that this is, I mean, it's still $5 million and I get that it's not directly coming out of the general fund. It's not Not doing this project might not increase our reserves, but this is still a lot of money for a 20-year payout. Spending five saves us $2 million over 20 years. I mean, I know everybody else on the council is for it. I'm still not really in favor of this. And I get that there are safeguards in place and guarantees that it wouldn't be used for what it's not being said it's used for. And you know I love the parks. I…
I do want to just touch on what Greg just said. Yeah, if we're looking at how many employees do we have year to year. But I don't think that that's really what you judge government efficiency or a good budget on by any means. All that is is one lag measure showing you how many people you have working for you. And I think the most important thing is Are we delivering the services that we promised? Are we maintaining a good budget? And are we helping our residents live the quality of life that we're promising they should have and could have in our city? And I think at the end of the day, that's…