City Council - Regular Meeting

All right. We will call the Olivet City Council on June 9th, 2026 to order, please. Can we please have roll called?

Mayor Lewis.

Present.

Chairman Pro Tem Pashaun Hellman. Present. Council Member Clark.

Here.

Council Member Solomanov is absent with an excuse. And Council Member Jurgel.

Present. Excellent. All right. Can we please move to item two, communications?

I have no written communications.

All right. Item three city managers report.

Good evening everyone. Let me share my screen. And as again usual, this is the first meeting of the month and so. We will talk about the progress at all of crossing. So lot 3 is essentially complete with the exception of the one vacant tenant space and I spoke to the developer today and they do have. some interest in that space. And so I would expect that that space will not stay vacant for much longer. So as soon as I know, I will let the council know. And then lot five, I have some good news. The tenant and the owner are coordinating a press release to announce the tenant. So as soon as they have decided on what the press release can say, then of course we will also be making an announcement in coordination with that. So what that means generally is that the lease has been signed by both parties. And we will have a long-awaited announcement for Lot 5.

Do we think week, month, you know, or too early to tell?

Soon is what I get.

All right.

You know, I don't want to speculate.

And that's only one half of it, correct?

That's correct. That's correct. The intent is to split Lot 5, and this tenant would be on the north side. Okay. of lot five. And then lot six is the hotel. As you've probably seen, Bomarito has removed between 6,500 and 7,000 cubic yards of dirt. They did pause removal because they want to make sure that they have the topographical survey for Lot 5, as in they don't want to remove too much dirt, and then You have to buy the dirt to bring back that you took off. So they have paused it. They do expect to have those final grading levels for lot five by June 12th, at which point they can begin, uh, grading again and removing dirt. The developer continues to actively work with their partners for the hotel and received some good news and some data about how they expect the hotel to operate and revenues and expenses and things like that and some financing information. So we are hopeful that that project continues to move along. And then, of course, lots one and two are complete, as is lot four. They did say that the Clover is about 96% leased, so that is excellent news for the apartments there. I do want to follow up on the blood drive that the city had on May 28th. 17 generous donors came in and provided 17 units of blood, so that is always a needed and well-received donation by the Red Cross. And then again, we will do the Battle of the Badges in the fall that is between police and fire. So if you are able to donate blood in the fall when we have more information and a specific date, we will put that forward. But we would certainly welcome anyone who can donate blood. And then when you donate, you get to vote for police or fire. It's a running friendly battle between the two. And I think fire's in the lead. Fire's in the lead. So you might want to, you know, give some love to the police department. And speaking of the police department, you may have seen them towards the end of May. Both Sergeant Lothan there on the left and police officer Weckman, they participated in the law enforcement torch run, which benefits Special Olympics. So they picked up the torch near Price and then came up Price down Olive, down Dealman to Ladue, where they handed the torch off to the Ladue officers who were participating. So we acknowledge them for their efforts. And then we do have open Commission seats, we have received I think five applications you have about five applications. We have openings on parks and REC planning and Community design Sony board of adjustment and the economic development Commission, so we will continue to take applications until about the middle of June. So if you or your neighbors are interested, you can certainly come to the city's website or follow the qr code to be taken to the application. And then this is a save the date. All of at night out will be September 15th. In the evening, usually sometime between 6 or 6.30. Registration for the neighborhood parties is not quite open yet, but it will be open in July. So any interested neighborhoods that want to have a party, you can register in July on the city's website and the social media pages will direct you to that link. And as in year past, the Olivet Council and various staff members will divvy up and travel to the different neighborhood parties. It's a very popular event. And we actually have so many parties that we can't get to all of them. Like every single council member can't get to all of the parties without going until, you know, very late into the evening. So please put that on your calendar. And then we have some upcoming meetings that are on the screen, as well as a notice that the city center offices are closed June 19th in honor of Juneteenth. And then Five Oaks on Warson will be open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on that day. and then lastly i would just like to recognize that it is mr darren mann's final city council meeting he is going to be the new finance director for town and country so we do want to recognize him for his many years of service to the city of olivet and our interim our senior accountant tanya is here and she will be serving as as the interim while we look for a new finance director so Yes. Yes.

Can we at least give a round of applause?

I think we should give a round of applause.

Are there any final remarks?

I have to stay for the budget meeting. But I started here in 2014 and it feels like a different era from where I stand here today. I'm really proud of the symbiotic relationship that has been a part of me and the city. The city center we're in here today. We changed our finance software back of house. Five parks, five oaks built, constructed, two bond passages, a TIF commission established, and then redone, and then redone again. And three abatements inside of that, three abatement negotiations. And it's really been a... been a part of a team that's really taken the finances that was at the time of the Great Recession in a little bit of a different place than we are today, as we'll talk about here in a little bit. But as the city improved, so did I. And so I thank everybody for that. I look in front of me now, and I know there's people behind me I'd only push everyone to keep being brave, keep going forward. Don't make this the end of the era. Make it part of the era that we're in. As part of this work over the last 12 years, we've looked at a lot of the history of the city. When did we get City Hall? When did we get these parks? Everything pointed to the middle 70s, early 70s of an era of like, everything was happening. We acquired many of our parks, our city hall was redone, bond passages, bond votes, some failed, some pass, acquiring community centers, lots of things were happening. And I hope that this era that I've been here is something in 40 or 50 years that the same thing is happening. We look at the signatures there and like they were everywhere. We were doing stuff. So continue doing that so that when in 40 or 50 years from now, we can look at the signatures and say, wow, they were really doing a whole lot of stuff back then. So thank you all for everybody. Thanks for everybody for coming today. But I've enjoyed it.

Darren, I've only had the pleasure of working with you closely for the last two years. And I must say, from early on, it was pretty clear from at least myself, and I can speak for others, that you have it all buttoned up. And I think it's very clean. No, but honestly, bringing a lot of new council members on, explaining things, patience with us answering questions you have a you have a willingness to answer them and actually even encourage our questions so i wish sometimes we ask silly ones but i appreciate that uh and you're open and the way you explain it is great and so having confidence in someone but also understanding that they'll respect the questions and you have full confidence in everything you're doing and i think that's you know, without a doubt, clear that you, you like what you do. You're good at what you do. And, you know, we appreciate what you've done. So cannot thank you enough and all open to the council to say anything as well, you know, and good thoughts.

I'll say this just personally, I think you're probably one of the most intelligent people I've ever worked with looking at the reports that you bring to us, the, the, They're very detailed, as big as a novel. But it has truly been an honor. And what it feels like is when the Cardinals lost Pujols and the other team picked up Albert Pujols. That's what I think that they're getting when they signed you on. You're going to have some big shoes to fill. But I thank you for all the work that you did to help us get to where we are today. And we've done a lot together. And I appreciate all that you do. And I hope that you have success at the next city. And you're always welcome to come back and visit. Or come back.

We appreciate it. I'll be back here for Turkey Truck. How about that?

Well, I appreciate all your help bringing me up to speed, getting things going and all the other times when I've in front of PCDC and things like that. So I really appreciate it. Love the graphs.

Some good ones in a little bit.

Yeah.

just to echo really what everyone has said and add my own. I know that I am incredibly grateful for you humoring all of my millions of questions and whether they're in-depth or they're surface, in fact, responding at 1 a.m. to all the old days, recent questions. And your eagerness to help the council. And I would imagine I don't see behind the scenes as much, but help the staff really understand the budgeting at a deeper level and understand how budgeting isn't just numbers. It's about culture and goals and objectives and how do all of the pieces fit together so that we can move forward. You're not just a number cruncher. You are a big thinker.

I'm an accountant. Thought leader. Thought leader. Yeah. Well, thank you. Let's give another round of applause for Darren. Not to say that the budget leader is not going to bring that excitement, but, you know, it could. All right. Ms. Shackley, you're done from the city manager report?

There's nothing else for the city manager.

All right. Thank you very much. All right. We're going to move on to item number four, city council liaison reports. I'll start with Mr. Carr.

I have nothing to report at this time. I was not at the last one due to situations, but nothing to report at this time.

All right. Thank you, Mr. Trayvon. I have nothing to report either. Our Parks and Rec meeting is next week. All right.

And Chairman Pro Temp?

Nothing to report at this time. The PCDC meeting from June 4th was canceled.

And I do not either hadn't had any council meetings. Obviously, we talked about it the last council, but all the exciting opens on openings over in the businesses. But those are not new, but encourage everyone to go. So, all right, we're going to move on to item number five, hearing from citizens. So this is a portion of the agenda where anyone present or in person or virtually may address the city council regarding any topic, including those later in the agenda. Each speaker is allowed up to three minutes to address the Mayor and the City Council. We'll take speakers in person first, followed by any online. If you're in person, please complete a speaker card and give it to the Clerk if you haven't done so already. If you already have given your card, we'll take you in the order in which you submitted your card. If you are online, and wish to speak, please use your raise your hand feature and you'll be added as a speaker. For all speakers, we ask that you state your name and address for the record prior to delivering your remarks. And just as a reminder, this is a point where we want to hear from the citizens, but the council won't be engaging in kind of a Q&A with the group at this time.

But it allows us to reflect and take the input, whether it's us or staff.

So wonderful. And we have a few comment cards. We're going to go in order of those. So Ms. Buckles, I believe. Welcome. And don't forget to turn on the mic, please, and your name and address. The button right there. Yep. Thank you.

Is it on?

Yes.

Okay. My name is Louisa Buckles. I live in 9638 Haran. I have a lot to say, but I'm going to stay within your three minutes.

All right. I appreciate it.

Okay. The park on Haran, ever since that park has been put up, There's been nothing but activities and problems there. We greeted the council or made them aware of this many years ago. You should have some reports on that. We were told they were going to move the pavilion and they were going to get rid of those tables and things. But since they put the walking trail in there, it would be nice if they get rid of the pavilion. the benches, and also that concrete floor because we get all kinds of activity at night and day. And also when we call the policeman, there are some of the neighbors who are interested in where we live and put our head. So we call the policemen, but a lot of times the policemen seem to think that we are lying or these activities are not going on, but they are. And they go on all through the day and the night. And ever since they put that park in the media where everybody comes from, from north, east, south, and west. We just had an incident last Friday. All these people showed up. The park was loaded with them. You couldn't hardly move down the street. And then the loud music. So we would like for you all to get rid of the pavilion, especially the pavilion. and also the benches that are over there and the concrete floor. And by doing that, that would take care of some of the matter. Now, we were promised, and Sidney know some time ago that they were going to move it. And to this day, it has not been removed. So that would help out a lot and keep people from coming over there all times of night and all times of day. And if you could take that park off of the media, because people come from way from Washington, you from Illinois, from all over. to that park because they go out there and they see that this park doesn't cost us anything. So we'll come and use it from Florissant, from Ferguson, all over, all times of day and night. And I live across the street from the park and it's horrible. It's horrible. I'll be back later. Some of the other people want to talk too. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Appreciate your comment. All right, Ms. Miller.

Hello, I am Allison Miller. I live at 9620 Huron Drive. I appreciate you all letting me speak. I'll also try to keep it to three minutes. So I've lived in the neighborhood now for three years and I'm very blessed to live across from the park. They need Meadows Park and that's one of the things that attracted me to the neighborhood, the schools, and the park. Unfortunately, the park has turned out to be a big headache since we've lived there. Kind of as was already alluded to, there's been multiple very large gatherings under the pavilion. The pavilion is located way too close to residents' homes. There's been frequent marijuana smoking that I can smell. It comes into my house. I live right across from the park. I know that parks seem to be popular places for people to smoke marijuana. And so they go at night because people can't see them. We do call the police, but, um, actually just happened yesterday, but often they leave before the police gets there as happened yesterday. So I don't know if, if I spooked them because I was kind of walking by staring at them, trying to, you know, give them the evil eye to, to put out their, um, their smoking. Um, but so not only do we have marijuana smoke that I have kids, I have asthma, my kids have asthma that is coming into my home. And I really do believe it's because of the pavilion. Cause that's where they sit. They can't, they sit at the picnic tables under the pavilion. We're dealing with the loud music. Very often people bring amplified speakers. which I understand that that's something you have to get a permit for, which you can't even have a permit for that at Indian Meadows. At least according to the website, you have to have, you can do that at Stacy Park. One time a group brought inflatables, which I know, again, that's not something you can have at the park either. So they just bring all kinds of things when they have these parties. I can barely get out of my driveway. There's not enough, there's nowhere for parking to hold these big, huge gatherings under the pavilion. So it, It doesn't make sense to have a pavilion there. There's not a parking lot. These people end up parking, like I said, all up and down the street behind our driveway. I can barely get out. I have a van. There's not a lot of space. My kids drive. I worry about them backing out and hitting some of these cars. They're parking on the grass. Just the other day when there was a big party, they parked their SUV right under the pavilion. So I had to call the police because I care about the park and I didn't appreciate them driving up on the grass on the park. So I had to call about that as well. So unfortunately, there's been a lot of problems with the pavilion and the bathrooms. The bathrooms as well, I wanted to mention. I have seen... If we, you know, we kind of all as neighbors. Oh, and I want to say to you, I'm on the HOA board for our neighborhood. So I do represent several neighbors in the neighborhood. They call me on a regular basis and kind of tell me what they see. And so as you go in the bathrooms too, you'll find condoms in the bathroom on the floor. You'll find fireworks. You'll find marijuana, all kinds of things. The bathrooms are not being used for what they should be used for. And so that's another thing I wanted to bring up is asking that the council consider removing the pavilion and the bathrooms.

Thank you very much. Appreciate your comment. All right, we'll move on to the third one. Shackelford. Thank you. And remember, name and address, please.

Good evening. My name is Wilhelmina Shackleford, 9656 Heron. Of course, I live a couple of doors from Allison. So rather than go over all of that, you guys have seen us quite a bit. But I do know that there's new... Councilman here. So I just kind of want to do a little bit of a history and maybe you can understand why we come up so much because initially this has been going on since the pavilion came in 2008, which we were told it was going to be a small gazebo to see maybe six people. So We met with, back then Ruth was here, and she said, what do you guys want for the park? We said, more playground equipment, because we only had a little roundabout, a merry-go-round, and maybe one or two swings, that's all. We never asked for a bathroom, we never asked for a pavilion. Indian Metals is a private subdivision which owned the parks, and they were, at some point, probably before I got here, conveyed over to Olivet. So they were owned by the subdivision. So Olivet has them. And that's what this has turned into. And we have since 2008, we have protested. Some of you seen us on Olive, been in the newspaper, been on TV. We have did petitions. We have done everything. What we got out of it from the council was we won't rent it out. But it's still a problem because it's on the website. It's listed first and it doesn't say not rent it. And we do know that people have been referred from parks to use that park because it is free. And so that doesn't help us if you say you're not gonna rent it but you still advertise it as if it's for rent like all of the other parks. So that's a problem right there. So back with the history from all of the protesting and this is 2008, we're in 2026. And we still having the same issues. I'm just going to ask you guys to go take a look at it and see how close it's located to Jenny's home, my home across the street, how narrow our streets are, you know, and how in, you know, it's just for all of us, it's a big inconvenience when anyone has an event over there. You know, we did not want the bathroom for sure, nor the pavilion. And so both of them. need to be moved. We were told initially in 2008 that you would consider moving it maybe in two years. Well, we come back every year, don't two years, but nothing ever materialized from that. So we still in the same situation. We still coming up here with the same complaints and comments. And of course, everybody's exhausted. And you know, so for you to think about when, when will something be done about this? I think once you go around and you take a look at it, you will see then. Because we do have more traffic coming past the park. Because there's the trail. So even if maybe they didn't go to the website, they can see it there. And it looks like a good hangout spot. We're not going to have it. It's not going to happen. So as long as we have our Olivet police officers, we know that they care and they're going to come out. Whether they believe us or not, they still have to come, right? So there you go. My question is, how long? How long do we have to wait for something to be done?

Thank you very much for your comment. Appreciate it. All right. Ms. Littleton.

Hi, my name is Jenny Littleton and I live at 9639 Huron Drive. And I'm here also about the pavilion. It's right next to my bedroom window. So when the people are there, you can hear their music. You can hear their conversation. They're laughing. I've been here since 2008 asking them to please move it. My husband works in the hospital and he has to be at work at six o'clock in the morning. There's many a times he had to get up at three 4 in the morning to go ask those people under the pavilion to leave or we're going to call the police. Sometimes we just call the police and when the police come, they'll talk to the people, whoever are under there. But it's such an inconvenience. I went through a hard time in my life and my husband came on my behalf because I got sick. And he said, please move this pavilion. My wife is going through something very bad, bad where I had to go to Siteman Cancer Center. It was horrific. We needed that pavilion to move. And they said that they would. And they, matter of fact, Mr. Asini even talked to my husband. He said, I'm so sorry. You and your family, your wife are going through, we're going to do what we can to get that pavilion moved. It has been the worst. And I say, Let's tear it down. Let's dig it up from the ground. That's two choices. Let's move it to Five Oaks. Five Oaks is the only community center that does not have a pavilion. So you don't have to look for a grant for a new pavilion. We have one perfect right next to my bedroom window. So you can pick it up right there or you can tear it down, move it to Five Oaks. So when the kids are having... Birthday parties and family reunions and graduations, they can enjoy the inside as well as the outside because they have a pavilion. So I'm suggesting that you all please move that pavilion for my family. We've been dealing with this for 18 years, morning, afternoon, and night. We have been the police along with those police out there. And I don't work for all of it, but this is where I lay my head. This is where I paid my taxes out. This, this means a lot to me. The little bit that I have in the lot bit that I have, I don't deserve that. When I drive down Dillman and I see that park that's in Elmwood, that's how they have my neighborhood looking. And when I picked that house, I picked it because I said, one day God's going to bless me with some children and I want to be next to that playground. And I bought that house for that reason. And when that happened, I was blessed with children. And then this came about. We marched. We protested. We called on everyone. And they said, we'll look into it within a year or two. So I'm asking this new council, if you all would just get together, talk, come to my house and see what I'm talking about so you could see. Because the old city council all did agree to all of us out here. No, I wouldn't want it next to my house. So if you don't want it next to your house, don't put it next to mine. Don't put it across the street from her house. That's not where we bought our home. So that's not what we signed up for. So I would love for you all to call me. You have my cell number. Come by. Even if you don't call me, just come by and look how it's set up. to have to call every day for 18 years. She's been here three years and she calls so much. So we're just asking if you all would please be willing to move that pavilion. And I have a spot for it. Five Oaks, all that land. There's a place already for it to go. I will be so grateful. So I'm asking God to touch on all your hearts. to do something different that hasn't been done in 18 years. So I just wanted to say that to you all. And like I said, I'm Jenny. All the kids know me as Miss Jenny, but I'm Jenny from the neighborhood. So please, that's what I wanted to share with you guys. That's my biggest issue, that pavilion. And of course, I'm already dealing with AZ galvanizing, the smoke, the emission that comes in through my vents, that I have to rock my babies. Spray perfume so he can fall asleep because it's coming, seeping in through our vents. And I'm already dealing with that. And this pavilion, let's mark something off my list. And I'm willing to, the pavilion, then we're going to work with the Goliath, that AZ Galvanize. Okay. Thank you so much. You all have a blessed one. I may come back if you all let me talk again.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it. I appreciate everyone stepping forward. Are there others in the audience that wanted to speak in any public comments? I'm sorry, hearing from citizens. No? Yeah, can I reserve, if you don't mind, we're going to have another session for hearing from citizens. You can come up at that time. That'd be great. And I'd welcome anyone. So, but we'll look online. I think we have one hand raised. So we'll go there. And absolutely encourage you to do it in the next session too. All right, Barb, I believe so. If you can turn on your camera, please. And well, hello there.

Hello.

See you.

Hello, good evening. I just need to, I am here to just say a little something for, about Darren. I'm sorry, I have to find my paper. One second. Okay. There it is. Okay. I'm going to try to be brief on this. You'll understand, I think, the world, Darren. So when I started at the city in 2013, we were without a finance director. And hiring a finance director can be difficult because government accounting is unique. And simply having an accounting degree is doesn't prepare an accountant for the intricacies of that public sector. Well, Darren knew public accounting. He knew governmental accounting because he was part of a government auditing team. And so I felt really lucky when Darren came on board. And little did I know at that time exactly how lucky both I and the city of Olivet were going to be to have Darren accept his employment offer. It would be hard for anyone not familiar with the city in the early 2010s, 2013s to understand just how far Darren has taken the city. During Darren's tenure, the city's investment policy was revised, the city's procurement policy was updated, and the city's reserve policy was created. He worked with all departments to create a comprehensive capital improvement plan, And these fundamental policies have worked together to provide all of that with a solid financial base. Darren spearheaded the revamping and the improvement of the annual comprehensive financial report, the CAFR. And he began the publication of the popular annual financial report or the PAFR. These reports are critical to the transparency of the city's finances. The GFOA or the Government Financial Officers Association awards three awards each year to municipalities that achieve excellence in their annual financial reports. And these awards are the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting, an Outstanding Achievement in the Popular Annual Financial Reporting Award, and the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award. And if a city is awarded all three of those, it receives what they refer to as the Triple Crown. I want to emphasize that 0.3% of all municipalities achieve the Triple Crown. And under Darren's leadership, Olivet has been awarded the Triple Crown four times since 2020. Darren revamped and improved the city's budgeting process and monthly financial reporting. Preparing and presenting understandable financial reports is critical to the council's understanding of the city's financials and thus vital to the city's future financial success, which translates directly to being able to provide services to its residents. Darren served as the point person for all technological improvements. He worked for a successful passage of two bond initiatives and was vital to the success of the completion of the Municipal Center and Five Oaks on Morrison. And he was integral to the work that created the city's first TIF. Darren worked with all department heads and with all staff to improve understanding of the city's finances and budgeting. He wants everyone to understand the numbers and how they work and how that work and how those numbers impact the work that the people do and the services we provide. He helped to tear down departmental silos and improve cross-departmental coordination because that just makes sense financially. Darren understood that working for a smaller city meant that sometimes he would be negotiating a multi-year contract for technological services. And sometimes he'd be picking up kegs of beer for the annual turkey trot. And he did both activities with an open heart and a smile. All of that was fortunate to have this, as I would always say, scary smart. caring, thoughtful, honest, and all around good egg as its finance director. I was blessed to have worked with him. And I wish Darren the best. And to town and country, get ready because the random facts you are about to hear are going to knock your socks off. So Darren, I love you. And thank you for the time.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Good to see you. All right, before we move on, anyone else in the audience or online who wishes to speak?

I just wanted to address the council. I've been to where she's talking about, Miss Jenny. Her bedroom window literally is from where I'm sitting to that picture. I couldn't imagine having to hear some of the things that are going on up under that pavilion, especially after they've gotten high and to have a child within ears distance of hearing those things. I know that we took this job, not for the money. We took this job to be good stewards of the people. Your people have come here and spoken. I've seen it. I couldn't imagine how they must feel to deal with that noise. and to deal with people who don't care about Olivet. Those aren't our neighbors. These are people who are coming in to take advantage of a free spot. And I know that this is a good council and that we can do something. And I promise you, whatever it takes, I'm on board to help them because that could be my home and they should be happy in the place that they live in. And I think we should do our due diligence to help This young lady has invoked the Lord to get help. I don't play. And she brought it in. And so this is our duty to help them. I just, I had to get that off my chest and say it because again, we are responsible for their wellbeing. That's why they elected us. So I know I've used up my three minutes and so I'm going to shut up.

Thank you. Um, well, and thank you to everyone for coming forward. Um, I think it's always critical that citizens come and speak to the council. Obviously a lot of us knew in the last few years, uh, this is a new issue for some of us, not all of us. So thank you for bringing it forward, um, and speaking up for yourselves in your neighborhood. So I think that's important and we can take that. And then, you know, I can, I can commit and promise to following up on everything we can and understanding and identify what's possible. Like without knowing anything, we couldn't promise anything. But I think it's important to know that you have our ear and we will look. And so I really appreciate it. So, okay. All right. We're going to move on to item six, bill 3063. If the title could be read, please.

Bill 3063, an ordinance making appropriations for current expenses of the city government of the city of Olivet, Missouri for the fiscal year beginning July 1st, 2026, adopting a certain budget and adopting a certain salary schedule. First reading and public hearing.

All right. With that, I'm going to open the public hearing. We will have a presentation and then we'll have questions from the council and then we'll open it up if others wish to speak and ask questions. Mr. Mann. Thank you for the floor.

So we have this under our new format with public hearings at this first reading. We'll say it first. Usually when we do this, it's all kind of set in stone, but today it's not. We have two weeks from today in order to make changes. Those will be delineated, you know, in the in any kind of packet that comes out in a couple weeks. So with that, it really worked out really well for me because I would be here for the presentation. So thank you, Jennifer, for letting me stick around for a couple more days. Good. We'll get started. Barb took my thunder a little bit on our first slide, which is, what's this for? Here are our three GFOA kind of transparency documents that ACFER Audited financial statements, the capital improvement plan, which we'll see in a couple weeks, and then the annual budget, which we're going to be talking about tonight. So we'll go through a little housekeeping here. Let's go to our next slide and we'll see. Here's our cover from up at Worson Park. It's available right now at 151. I didn't print any, first time I've never printed a copy off, so I think we're going to be okay. So if you want, anybody wants one, let me know. It's on annual budget. You can go see it now. Let's go to our next slide and we'll kind of do, see Barb stole my thunder a little bit more here. We'll hear what we do. So it is, it's a lot of work. A lot of the stuff that's in here is dictated to, in order to get this award, which is great. Their whole focus as an association is transparency. We do expect to get this for the 27 budget, but at a high level, it's a financial plan. We're going to see a financial plan here. That's a lot of the nuts and bolts of what we've been talking about over the last three or four months. It's an operations guide that we use throughout the year. A lot of our department heads print it off multiple times for their staff to use in order to kind of pay bills. We do mid-year reviews on this in order to kind of gauge where we're at. It's also a communications device. It's a transparency piece. It's for you. Most people, this is about as close you're ever gonna get under the hood of what goes on in the City of Olivet departments without coming to work here. So let's go to our next slide. I bring up the budget schedule here. This is more of the timeframe, but let's go to the clicker one more time and you'll see here. This budget process is very lengthy. I begin on it in more like January. We have meetings here in March and they go through many iterations. Many of the council members are here. Several of you have eight to 10 hours in this thing, just in meetings plus what you read at home. So like I say there, it might be a little smooth for one night to kind of go through this stuff and it seems a little rubber stamped to get voted on. at the second meeting with very little discussion, but a lot of work goes into this. And then as a more caveat to the document itself, if you got 15 minutes, start at the top and read on down. If you got several hours, you can kind of get through the whole thing. The further into this document, you get the deeper into the woods you get as well. So let's get started on a couple of things. How do we read this thing? And I'll go super quick. The real tie here, there's a couple of big keys. First off, we have audited financial statements asset left column. We look at this, we call this the A1 sheet. That's the tie from last year's audited financial statements as we carry this thing forward. The far right is our fund balance, more like a bank account in governmental accounting. And that is used to kind of gauge, here, what's our savings account? What do we have for the future? And that's big for our reserve policy, that top right number, 9.077 million. And then what most people kind of look at and what we're asking for approval for on our first reading here is essentially that third column from the right, which is the expenditures. The expenditures essentially say as a certified certification from the city manager and their finance officer, that there's enough revenue and fund balance to cover all these expenditures. So the authority is expenditures. That's our authority to buy. So with that, uh, we can click through a couple of times. We're gonna see a couple of arrows. We got a couple of fund balances. Here's what we're expect to see for this year. One more. And then we see our fund balance for this year and it keeps going. I'm sorry. One more there. Now let's go to the next page as we go down into page 55 to 56. Let's click one more and we'll see the A1 sheet come up. And then how do these things tie together? So we're getting deeper into the weeds. This is our top level of all of our funds. And then now we're going into the different revenue categories. And on page 56, these are the same categories that we report on every single month in our monthly financial report. If we click one more, you can see the numbers kind of tie together there. So it brings it up from the same columns all the way up. And then if we go to our next slide, we'll see a page. This is the administrative budget you can see at the top. How do these things tie together? Now we've went from 56 all the way to page 80 and click one more and we'll see it kind of tie together there, the administrative and they're in this order in the document. What is in between 56 and 80? This is a header. This is the actual numbers that we see. Here's how the numbers tie together. In between there, you'll see a department header. How many people work in these departments? You'll see things, goals, objectives, how these departments are tying what they're doing to our council's values from the top level down. You see accomplishments and then some graphs and KPIs. So from there, that's a quick, how do we read this thing? That pretty much takes up most of the document. But tonight, FY27, every year has a little flavor to it. In 27, as I go through this, as you kind of look at the numbers, the graphs, I think we're seeing signs of change. Our revenues have recovered a little bit. With that, our transfer activity remains high. Is it here to stay? It maybe seems like maybe it is, but we don't see it really increasing a whole lot. So let's go to the next slide and we'll get into our fantastic graphs. This is something we've looked at over the years, and you can see how it changes. I only use this because of the variability. We see two really boring lines at the bottom, steadily increasing. Those are our property taxes and our utility taxes. And then we see this wild sales tax red line. And you can see there, 24 was more of like, are we seeing what we think we're seeing? 25 was... yeah, we're gonna have to adjust. We're gonna be looking at a reserve policy, leaning on it a little bit. And now we see in 26 and then into 27, we see a nice recovery. As we've talked over the last several months, this is driven a lot by use tax. We'll see a graph here in a second. And then the purple line is what we call our remainders. And it includes a couple of things that we just talked about. One is that, when is those transfers? Let's go to the next slide if we don't have any questions there. And this represents more of a pie chart. And this is roughly, historically we've been at a quarter each way, at 25% in each one of these, and it's waned back and forth. The remainder now is at 32. That's up from just several years ago as our charges for services, which is what Five Oaks is classified as, for our memberships, our rentals, those kinds of things. And our sales tax now with that chart we saw with that red line, it's now a little bit smaller. So let's go to our next slide. And here's our sales tax. We looked at the red line, which is sales tax as a category. It includes 1% sales tax, which we collect, and then use tax. And so here we are with a use tax that's climbing and a sales tax that's recovering from a pretty decent high. Let's go one more slide and we'll see these things side by side. Now, just several years ago, you can see that the scale, I could say use taxes were going great and then it just would never meet scale to make a difference. Well, you can see these lines are getting pretty darn close. Now, governments are always a little slow. If we were to rewind in our households what's happened over the last decade, 10 years, how often would you go somewhere versus you buy something online? And that's exactly what that line is kind of showing. I could see us at some point, maybe kind of getting these things in either lined up or getting even closer and closer. Now I will say, I know we've talked about use taxes, a lot of it's commercial activity too, but this is exactly kind of the slow down or the slow down, the re kind of retooling of city finances. So for us, Um, don't forget about that when you go to vote on this for St. Louis County. This is exactly what's happening, you know, at least statewide for the state of Missouri based on the sales tax.

Let's go ahead and clarify again with use tax, like examples, you know.

Sure. A really good example for us is just buying something from Amazon.

Yeah.

Yeah. There was Nexus rules at some point, but most of the sellers on Amazon don't are, it's not Amazon. It's a third party. They're just like, you know, holding the material for them collecting a sale and then shipping it out third party i'm not an attorney so i don't know how the differences are but the nuance there is very important for the use tax piece of this we have backup to you know kind of support that uh there's other things that happened um as what we get is a really big commercial activities that if they don't have a sales tax anywhere for it to go it remains with us that's kind of a it's a way deeper conversation that I'm only seeing like more anecdotally, not the real rule maker of how I just see how it works and I can put stuff together. So that's an interesting kind of thing that really showed up this year as we see those use taxes increase. Let's go to our next slide. And then we see this mess of tangle of our remainder kind of revenues. Let's go one more and all I'm gonna do, we can go back if we want. I want us to highlight the top four. We see top fours. And then we see, if we just go back just a year, we were talking more heavily about, and this is more like the signs of recovery. We can see a lot of this stuff. retooling kind of going up. The green line is parks and rec and that in a big sense, that's memberships, rentals, all of our youth sports, pavilion rentals, those kinds of things. And it's steadily going up. And that's exactly kind of what you want in an opening of a facility, obviously, is that you kind of keep going up as we find our marks on what the real market wants and how we're going to operate this thing. But what we saw in 25 is this transfer activity that really had to make up from that drop in our sales taxes. And this is where it happened. And those transfers come from our fire operations sales tax, and they come from our public safety tax. I don't see a way in our current kind of makeup of revenues where that stops very quickly. If we were to rewind, you go watch me from 22 and 23, I said, that's the canary in the coal mine. That's when you know that something, this is our last kind of aces to kind of pull out of our sleeves to kind of take care of this. So now we have to monitor not only our general fund, but we have to look at the rest of these. And we're gonna look at them here in a second. And we have over this whole time period of our budgeting time. The good news is that these are recovering. In 25, we were looking at this and unknown what the budgeting looked like. If we were to rewind again a year, we didn't see that tail like this and then even out or even increase. We didn't know what was happening in the end of 25. Was this gonna project down or is this gonna keep flat? And we ended up keeping it flat. The interest earnings, that's just because of interest rates. The economy was looking hot. Interest rates were falling. I didn't think we were going to be, you know, no one knew at the point now where we're, you know, pushing at 4% kind of going up on these on these. We're long for us at three, three to five years of earnings on our interest rates or idle cash. So with that. Do we don't go back and look at the other one? Are we okay right here with these top four? Good. So that's what we were seeing. 25 was showing this downward turn. 26 ended up being very well. And so we see this recovery. And I think we're going to lean into it a little bit and keep going. But we don't see the transfers really accelerating at that rapid pace.

That's a question that I had. Because the transfers with this kind of roller coaster look of the transfers, that's mostly our choice, right? How we're moving forward. money from one fund to another.

Yes, it is. This is all your choice in like a grand scheme. Yes, this is killing budget hold interest rates. Yes, this is. That's true. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And, you know, there's a diminishing return on your interest rates, too, as you kind of enter deficit budgeting, which is what we were kind of faced with in twenty five, twenty six. As there's less cash, there's less to generate kind of this idle money. So this is all good news about being able to kind of lift things up. Yeah, but you're right. These fills budget holes. And to say, if you were to, I, it's a really good, uh, chart just entered, you know, if, and we can look back at the sales tax goes down, transfers go up. Those were the kind of things that are, that fills those holes, but it's not, I guess, an infinite bucket of, you know, we'll look at these charts a little bit about how infinite or how would not infinite that, but how much room do we have to kind of go through this kind of stuff? Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a very good conversation. Yep. Uh, so let's go to our next slide.

One quick question.

Yeah, absolutely.

Medical transports, why is that fluctuating and going up then?

There's a couple of things. For 26, at the end of 26, we have a GEMT program called Ground Emergency Medical Transport. It's a federal program designed to reimburse municipal districts and governments to make up for, actually, essentially to make them whole on their Medicaid transports. It's, it came from West Coast, Oregon, California were the first ones. We had some really forward-thinking people, just, I'm gonna say 18 was our first year that moved it to Missouri and they got the legislation passed and it's been a really, really great for us. And now the, really the uptick we see in 27, two things, two there. One, the state, there's many kinds of Medicaid, ones that we do, and then there's like crossover, managed care, all kinds of different new Medicaid. The ones that have come through the state were not qualified for the GEMT program. They were able to change the legislation federally, I believe, or got a determination from CMS that they can now participate too. So we have an influx from the state Medicaid GEMT program, which we got one part of, we're thinking there's gonna be two, two per year, which... boosted about 40 or 50,000 a year. And then, so that has helped out a lot. And then the council raised fees last year was another part of that. There was for 25, we had a billing issue that kind of worked its way through. And now I think we've got it figured out and it shouldn't affect us from now on.

It's looking good since it almost doubled from 2025. Yeah.

We had a question, how do we compare if there's anything that anybody has worked with me knows is I love looking at stuff like this, so I spent some good quality time last night with the budgets of. Three of our peer cities, as we kind of talked about it, we can look at it some more if you want um we do have a. In our 25%, I've always said we've had really good diversification of our revenues. We got two boring ones, utility taxes, property taxes. Sales taxes then kind of run the gamut. Goods and bads are volatile, and we acknowledge it with our reserve policy. And then that remainder, those are under our control. We kind of, in a micro sense of two to three years, we kind of control what those things kind of do. And so that's good. Shrewsbury, Crestwood, Maplewood, we see here a little bit different mix. Sales taxes represent a little bit more of what they do. And then property taxes run the gamut. Utility taxes here and there. And I don't know what to make of it other than I believe ours here in Olivet is a little more diversified than what they would run in those places. What does that? Um, they can't have any more sales taxes than us. We have, uh, we would have at our disposal is a half a percent quarter percent economic development, another half percent fire tech. Is that correct? I'm not sorry. Another quarter percent, which would be a total half. Is that right? Is there one more? Okay. I don't, I didn't, anyway, there might be a quarter, but I don't think so. So what would do that? And it has to be mixed. One, mix of service or mix of your businesses. And we could look into that a little bit closer.

Is it also just as simple as they have more real estate, more businesses?

Yeah. Oh, sorry. That was, that's what I said. Zoning and business mix. And it could be more just as simple as that. And I don't know. That's always one thing that's been really great through fantastic planning or just pure luck. the amount of ratios of residential business corridors of commercial in all of that is fantastic for nearly any kind of diversification of, what's the name of that thing that they ran? Anyway, and that's great. And so it kind of lets all of that weather a storm a little bit different than you would see in these kinds of places.

In a recession, if people aren't buying.

Sure. Yeah. Any kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Simple as something is like maybe a pandemic where people can't go to these places and, you know, they look different ways. So that's really good. And so this is a great little snapshot of that's what it told me. We can look into it further. And this is, again, like 45 minutes of work. So don't hold me to any of this stuff if you want to go. Yeah. We'll get it a little more refined. Let's go to our next slide, though. And we'll go into threes and fours, which more of like move from revenues to the expenditure side. The wage pressures are now addressed that we've been talking about. We do see updated scales in the budget document toward the end, 120, 124, if you're really curious about looking at them. The page before that, those scales, you can see the changes in our FTEs. which is a full-time equivalent. So three positions have been added and one reduced. General fund is net to a zero plus one minus one. The other two are added in our parks fund, stormwater parks fund, and then another one added in their capital improvement fund. So let's go to the next slide. And we see how does this break down for our expenditures? Like I've said, 77% of all of our costs are in personnel. That's training, taxes, insurances, those kinds of things. Contractual services at 20, commodities at 3%. Those are old terms. You're going to see here in a second that we're not the only ones with these goofy old kind of classifications and terms. We hardly ever use them, but this is how they kind of fall with this. By function, we're about 50% public safety, and then public works comes in a little over 10. This has remained fairly steady. Parks and rec did take a little bit more of a chunk once Five Oaks opened, naturally, and you can see that kind of relates with what we would see on the revenue side. Let's go to the next slide, and we're going to see this spread out over time. You see nothing's really strange outside of that Parks and Rec, like I just said, has increased with the opening of Five Oaks. And I do have little arrows there for the upticks. You can see what a full-time equivalent position kind of does to that and kind of ticks it up. From there, let's go to our next slide and let's look at a couple other places. And as a whole, the city of Olivet and most municipalities run a lot like a service industry. We have people that do things, firefighters, policemen, people that go out and work on things like the technician, if you will, in like an HVAC place, something like that. And so we're relate pretty closely to to to those other places, the city of Crestwood does not kind of break this stuff out as much that I could see. And so you can see we're pretty close there and that's about what you. 75% is always kind of been since I remember something for many years, the email is come around and that's about where all the all of our cities kind of kind of live or end up so. There's our comparison. Let's go to our next slide and we'll see where we are as far as public safety compared to these other places. And you can see it's with not even any misogyny of anything. You can see we're real close to what these other cities are kind of doing. I look at the public safety one, the public works, and it was like pretty close. I didn't go any further than that. If I were to look, maybe if I had 10 minutes, I'd look at that Shrewsbury one to see if maybe I missed something here in our budgeting. There's no rules. There's rules on what you do with the sales tax. There's no rules on how you account for it. You could put it in a fund. Most of them are called stormwater parks. You don't have to. Some of these other dollars are sitting all in the general fund. So there's lots of ways to do it. And so I may have missed something, but I think overall the theme here is we're about.

I appreciate you doing both on the revenue and expenditures because it's actually very, it's very encouraging and very fascinating to look at it and just kind of see where we're stacked up.

Sure. It's something, it is interesting. I take it for granted. Like this is what everybody does, but then for you, you don't know this kind of stuff. No, and that's right. But you don't take, you don't, you don't take it for granted that. that this is the way it's supposed to be. Is this normal? So that was a good thought put in my head. Let's go on. We'll go on five and six. Our grants activity does remain elevated. The Greenway is... kicking off on one of the final sections there between Dealman and all the way down to Price Road. The cost share, if anybody has went down there, it's underway, expected to be just in the early parts of FY27, August and stuff be done. North Price Road is expected to kick off. I was hoping to get some really great news, but we don't really have any final news on the board presentation, but it appears that a lot of Bruce's hard work in massaging these numbers, maybe taking some of these advanced costs is gonna lead us to some success in getting this approved. So we're gonna see that remain up, but then these fund balances, they're tepid, but strong balances going in. Still pushing on a reserve policy where on compliance, but it's all very good. Let's go to the next slide. Like I said, it's in compliance. We can see a write-up. It's the upside in development. The majority, go ahead.

Since Council Member Jurgel is new, do you mind giving a 30-second summary on the reserve policy?

You bet. I'll do a second on the next slide. It's a lot easier with the chart. Okay. Grants remain elevated, like I said, reserve policy restrictions continue to guide our decision making. And I think that's a good thing compared to what are we gonna cut this year? We can kind of massage our way into this thing. And most importantly there, we can look at these balances and so far we've been able to keep our capital spending in place. Overall, let's go to our next slide. And this is in a 30 second, the orange line on the left, the policy is we have 50% of our expenditures in our fund balance for one year and five years. So we're projecting out not only our budget this year, but an additional four years. And that's what it represents, that orange line is half of what our expenditures are projected to be. in four years. Some of these things, in our next slide, we'll look at it here. We're in compliance and everything is fine. You can see the margin is pretty slim. This is after a good year in 26. We're seeing some relief in a couple areas that we weren't so sure on last year. We're also seeing, you know, this includes those wage pressure increases that we had talked about too. So this is seeing pressures coming back and forth. Let's go to the, go ahead.

Sorry, can I clarify? State law says you have to keep a certain percentage. We have changed that percentage, correct?

State law has no rule at all. You can spend... I don't think you can approve a budget if you don't have any money, but we're not going to get into that. Okay. All right. But ours is what we're doing.

But GFOA does have a standard.

GFOA has a standard of, I think it's two months or something like that, but it always depends on your revenue mix.

Yeah.

And that's, it's always, but it's highly dependent on lots of things.

So this council many years ago decided 50%. So basically we have to kind of a rainy day, so to speak, or 50% are expected of the general fund. We need to have that balance.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

It was 75 originally when sales tax was going up. We got that sales tax leveled off and plummeted, kind of starting going down and saying, our risk is no longer our risk anymore. Let's get 50% at five years too. And let's keep evaluating this. And here we are. Last year was more of an adjustment period the last couple of years. Now here we are, maybe with some signs of some upticks in what's going on. Let's go to the next slide and we can see kind of what this looks like in the projection and revenues and expenditures here. Black at the top is expenditures and then blue at the bottom is in our revenues. You can see we've made it this year, it's negative 13,000. But then you can see the diversion there over the next several years. Amplifying this, there are things like wages. Amplifying this are things like we did see some relief in some of our insurances were really expensive. It's a very unique industry. I mean, it's what government is, highly concentrated. Our municipalities are highly concentrated in one area, and we saw that with the tornado hailstorms come through. If an earthquake hits here, it will affect every single person that holds a policy in this area. if you have something like a slate like a regional insurance policy high concentrations in an industry that's not very well known um how we do our books how we you know we concentrate all our vehicles every night in one spot um and that's uh it's very unique industry uh slate has done a good job of working through that or it's uh who's it mcgraw the insurance company thomas mcgee i'm sorry I got stuck in the old one. So why is this okay? It really is the big question of the last several years. Why is this okay for me? Revenues have an upside and we're seeing them a little bit and we're seeing hearing of announcements of new businesses and we're seeing lots of redevelopment. People want to invest in their businesses here. They want to invest in these buildings and their houses. Revenues have an upside, but we don't have any control over them in this like macro or sorry, the micro term, the macro that's bigger. However, on the other side, expenditures, they're easy to control. We can button this up in about, I could button this up pretty quickly, this whole thing, and have this thing going flat in probably about 20 minutes. People are not going to be happy with what gets cut out of that. And so we have a lot of control over it. It comes with consequences to our citizens to employee morale and, most importantly, you know I guess have those services and so that's why this is kind of an okay kind of arrangement. We can talk through over time what services, we want to cut and continue to kind of control that and what if we have an upside. If we have an upside, then we didn't have to cut a service that we would have to anyway. At this current rate right here, we have about 12 years worth of, using the assumptions we have, this'll all be done in about 12 years, no more money. I think that's a reasonable amount of time to kind of get things in order. So that's kind of a precursor on the reserve policy and why this could look scary at first, but maybe it could be okay. It's something to talk about like we have been over the last several years. So, Uh, let's go to our next slide and then our capital spending remains in place. Uh, we don't have any updates. Let's go to the next one. No updates there, except, um, as I was doing the capital improvement plan, uh, I neglected to include the fact that we're going to be, uh, there's currently plans to, for the order of a fire truck, which is, uh, we'll run about $1.1 million. Um, and that will come fairly early in the year. So no dollar amounts, no budget. But there will be asked for a contract for that and we're anticipating having that delivered in three years. So that's it does live in the budget on the capital improvement that spending sheet, but in three years when we're going to pay for it, it is anticipated to be debt finance through at least purchase arrangement like we've used in that. Not recent past but a little bit further back. So there's that. Other than that, new ambulance is expected to arrive. That was ordered two years ago. That's expected to arrive in March of 27, I think right now. No other changes there. We do have the integrated, that's the payment for our body cam, car camera stuff. I'm in the police department now. Video surveillance system, which is the... That's the LPR is the other side for the flat cameras. That's included. Now, I'm going to have to get back to you on that. Anyway, nothing has changed from what we were there. What is that? Yes. Can you look that up?

That was... Block stuff, I thought, was the LPR system. That was building stuff. I remember the picture of the building cameras.

That's the server. Yes, server for the cameras we have here. I'm sorry. And then there is a request for a drone that's been in there for the last several requests. A lot of the street work at North Price, beginnings of that. The right-of-way and easement improvement projects at Oliver, the Oliver at Tower Hill, and then all of Indian Meadows as well. So these are all things in our capital improvement plan. Our budget document has little snippets of each one of these. And I'm more than happy to answer any questions we have here. We will begin the individual parks master plan process at Warson Park this year. And that what we would see inside of our capital improvement plan, which let's go to our next slide here. We'll see some of these charts and how these play out. And this is over time. We can see kind of the steady decline with the addition of that FTE and the streets maintenance fund. You can see it drags it down a little bit to a negative balance in just a couple of years. We're going to have to see how the timing plays out with North Price Road, which is what those really large increases on both sides are. in order to kind of see how that'll play out into the future.

I understand by our expenditure with the pumper on the 29. Why is revenue jump as well? Is that because we're doing transfer?

It's a grant. That's the grant reimbursement from MoDOT.

And we timed it for that.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so those will all kind of line up. If we have the expense side, then we will have the earned revenue on the other side. Yep. And as we see kind of a jump in a lot of those. Let's go ahead and go to our next slide and we'll see going toward some of our other funds, which is in the stormwater parks fund again. So we see this is the first time this year that we'll see the parks master plan with individual parks master plans processed and the associated grants kind of built out into a plan. And every individual park is going to have it right now is slated for an order to go. And then two years after that, so Worsham Park is in 27. And in 29, after that plan is completed, and we get all of our ducks in a row with our budgeting, it's anticipated to apply for the max grant, which is currently $410,000. And that's what you see there kind of going back and forth. The expenditures exceed those because there's other kind of things being bought inside of there. And I'd invite anybody to go to the capital improvement plan and kind of look what those things might be. From there, you can see, if we go back just for a second, this one is a kind of a decline. Again, this is where the FTE kind of went into. This is something we have to pay attention to as we go forward. The improvement of our parks requires an increase in maintenance. So that's something we're going to have to really pay attention to. The amenities like Great Rivers Greenway increases the amount of time we need to pay attention to parts of our park that we were not paying attention to as much before. because there was nowhere to walk. There was no trail going in back there. So that's something we'll have to pay attention to as well. Let's go on to the fire operations fund. And this is one part of these operation transfers that we saw coming into the general fund. And we can see this thing stays pretty steady. The increase in 29 is that fire truck that we talked about. That increase is debt. That's cash coming in from debt, not a grant. So that will be repaid. The repayments there kind of elevate the dark green lines in those future eight years right there. So overall, though, that's a solvent fund that's able to maintain those transfers that we saw increase from last year. Okay, and then 1 more, we'll see the fire up. Sorry the public safety finding. You can see there that it is more than capable. Kind of funding a little bit more of a transfer. All that goes in there is that there's an operating transfer and you can see the acceleration. If we were to go back just a year, you could see that really ramp up in 20. in our current year 26 and into 25 and then um but that has still some room there all that's in there is that transfer and the capital spending for the police department you would will notice the lack of the replacement of police cars this year um during covid we were not able to get cars at all so now we got this kind of like backup of good low mileage cars that we're going to keep around a couple more years than we usually would have in a a normal cycle or two per year. So that also increases that fund balance just to begin with and lessens the need for it. And that's what you see that hump and then it kind of goes down as we resume those purchases. So let's go to our next slide. And current year kind of overall, where are we? Essentially a balanced budget, negative 13,000. No adjustments to that long-term financial picture. We see that kind of widen out even after this year, but we were able to solve it this year. Capital purchase remain in budget as planned, which is kind of everything kind of rolled on where it was. We adjusted a little, but everything kind of rolled on right where we thought it was going to be. Our FTEs increased, and they are projected to remain steady from here on through. That's an assumption in that projection. The FTE increases were outside of that general fund, so it doesn't impact what we see as much as far as the projections in just for the reserve policy. Employee raises via that pay scale, those are in the budgets and they go forward. However, after that, I put here, there's very few adjustments you'll see after that for some of the reasons that I talked about. So it does remain kind of structurally imbalanced as we move forward, which means structurally imbalanced. Is that what your question is? The structurally imbalanced means that it's like structurally nothing will change. If we continue on this path where we are today, the way it's designed, these revenues go here, these expenditures go here. Sorry, the other way around. It never fixes itself. And so with a structural imbalance, you either have to address it or keep pumping money into it. It's a money. If we were looking at a business, it's a business that's losing money. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to fix one piece of this or are you just going to keep putting money in? And so we have a good stack of money to kind of adjust this through with, again, some of the things I talked about with the revenue side of this. The revenues have upsides, but we don't really control where they're at.

So we have time, but we need to watch it and see.

Yeah, and we have something in place. That reserve policy has a trigger on it, and it says exactly what will happen if we trigger it, and we did last year. And we followed through and looked back at it and we were okay. And here we are again this year, okay.

And I think to your point, a lot of the revenues have upsized. You and I were talking as some of the things we know are coming, like the hotel or restaurant, as we mentioned, we're not planned on the revenues yet until we actually have more concrete, you know, let's get the building started, right, so to speak.

Yeah. Yeah.

So those are upsides that we anticipate coming, but we're not counting on them yet.

Yeah. And then, you know, important pieces of there in a, in the tip, it's only get kind of half. And at what point are, you know, what is, what, what is half? And if we can get some good, good numbers, I'm more than comfortable with putting those in there. We can play that game and put them in there. What happens when something bad goes, you know, you know, and that's just as we have to acknowledge that could happen just as easily tomorrow as, as, as a hotel or sorry, a restaurant announcement.

Yeah.

Agreed. The triggered intentionally is more of a... That was left over from last year. That's my mistake. But... All these points from last year are exactly on point, remain on point this year. The revenues are in a state of flux. They're sending our expenditures into adjustment. We do have to address other things that are going on, like those wage pressures, like the need to kind of alleviate some of the things in our parks and with our streets that people are needed to do. The higher interest rates are helping revenue. I didn't, but how long? And they seem to be a little more resilient than we thought. What is the balance at Five Oaks for our revenue and expenditures? It's something we've spent a lot of time over the last two years looking at. What is the subsidy amount that we're looking for? How much does it cost to provide these services? And are we willing to do anything to change it? The subsidy numbers look good according to national averages as we kind of look at this stuff. The revenues are going up. And so how do we balance that? And then we're all doing this with new council members. And so it's hard to kind of be brave with some of these things when you're still learning at the same time. So only final thought I would have, you know, make no bones about it. This is the most important kind of forward-looking document that we do annually. And we've kind of talked about it over and over and over. It's our intention to use your tax dollars. You know, what are we going to do for the next year? You can see it all in this document. I've seen many questions from you, which is fantastic to see people, people read. I wish you'd go click on the website though. I really like to see the numbers on the clicks to how many people actually read it. Mostly it's just me making sure the link works, but I really, if you want to keep going and really make me feel good, click on it a lot. Okay. But use it as an accountability measure through time. If you look at these through time, in individual departments, individual revenue sources, you'll see progress, you see stagnation, you see lip service to things, but really nothing getting done. So use it. Use it. refer to it, you see the flavor of the people kind of running these departments, even as a written, you had, you know, mentioned some really good finer points of they consider it one thing, but on the place is kind of like a given. And that's, uh, that's the flavor of the folks doing it. Um, refer to it, you know, look back at these and use previous versions. I know you have, I can tell by the comments that you've looked back in, in these things. So, so, um, Use them. They do take time to do. It is what I'm doing with your taxpayer dollars. So use them and push us on them. So that's my final parting words.

Well, I think, as always, very thorough, very complete, and I agree. It's 100%. 40 pages, I think? Yeah, I know.

The first couple were like 170s. I've worked really hard to get them out. I do review these for other places. I hate a long document.

I appreciate everyone on the council was actually digging into it over the last few days and asking questions. Thank you for your very detailed responses. I guess the question I would have for you is we obviously need to see those updates in there and kind of reread it again. And I think that's great because I think that you incorporated those updates. We just need to click on the website so we can see them and get your numbers up. Anything from all the questions you saw come across from the council, Is there anything that you think is worth addressing or calling out specifically?

I don't remember them. I'll look at each of you. Is there anything in there that you wanted to talk about tonight?

There was a couple. I guess if you have questions that weren't already addressed in the emails or that aren't being updated. I was late in sending mine in.

Yours is good, though. I'm going to ask how you got that.

Okay.

So... All right.

I did have one question. Let me see if I can find it. It was on PDF page 21 of it, but maybe I'll send you it.

What's on the page?

Well, it's about the Capital Improvement Fund, and it was talking about the transfers in and transfers out. And it listed in fiscal year 29, 750, let's say, hold on, 785 being transferred in. But then I saw, you know, where it was transfers to capital. Yes. And the fire fund, it was 1.2.

Okay. Let's take a look. I'm surprised. One of the things that is a real booger with the way we kind of do our capital spending is all of our capital spending for the accounting from our fund comes from the capital improvement fund. And that is causes some confusion in a couple of places. Let's see. Page. What was the PDF?

PDF page 21. And it was document page, let me say, I think it was document page 15. 18. I'm sorry. There it is. Yeah, right there. So if you look at, see, it's changed now from what I had, but you have transfers going in 802 and then the fire operations fund transfers and it says capital and it says 1.2.

so i wasn't sure but that 1.2 it represents all capital purchases if we were to add up all the cat all of the capital purchases in the fire department fund on the next couple pages which is is what it is it the the transfers from the in from the fire operations funding and the capital fund include all debt service and all capital and that's why that that that number is right there so the 150 is for operations 1.2 is for capital Oh, yeah. So debt service external and debt service internal, we had classified differently. One's a lease purchase. I do see that that was a hair off.

Wouldn't you say part of the transfer of the capital is here at the debt proceeds?

I'd have to look at it a little closer.

If it's fiscal year 29 and we're getting the truck and we're going to lease purchase it?

Mm-hmm.

and the fire operations total transfer is 1.2 million. A part of that is going to be the 1.1 in the debt proceeds and the 802 number is all transfers in. So from fire, from public safety and from anywhere else, not just fire.

Okay. I just, like I said, I wasn't sure where this was, where the numbers were coming from.

The 1.2 will come from everything below it when you see all the capital, right?

All the pages behind.

Yeah. So all those, like the safety gear, the walkie talkies, the radios. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. Thank you.

Good question. Yeah. You're in there. There are, you know, good questions. A lot of them are kind of more policy discussions that really kind of weren't answered. And you'll get a chance when those things are, when they come up for capital side, there's a lot of questions there. Some of the people are out of town now that would be the, probably the best to answer those too. But.

I have a procedural question. If there's an item listed on in the capital improvement and we approve the budget with that item in there, can we later choose not to approve that capital item? Or if it's approved in the budget, we have to approve it when it comes.

This is a funny thing when you got me sitting here wearing all these hats. I'm the budgetary director, I'm the finance director, I'm the purchasing director, but we're all wearing these different hats. So what you just described was a budgetary approval and policy and procedure versus a procurement policy and procedure. Anything over $10,000 comes in front of you and you have a chance to turn it down, even though you approved it with your budgetary hat on. Yeah, it's a very strange. kind of thing. But absolutely. And that's kind of alluded to in that email a little bit. But yes, this is just budgetary and this is approving the budget. Now, if you don't want to do it, don't approve it in the budget because you might get overruled.

25, I believe. And it's in the budget and it's approved and it's signed off. If it's over a certain amount, then the city manager has to see it. I forget the exact amount.

Right. So like Darren said, anything that's over 10,000 comes to council, right? So again, reiterating what Darren said, if there really is something in the capital improvement fund that the council does not want to purchase this year, please have that conversation and take it out. Because what The expectation from the department head is that they, you know, once the budget is approved, like they would move forward to either putting out an RFP for whatever it is that they're going to purchase or they're going to spend the time getting the three bids. Yeah. And then coming to council and presenting to council with, I mean, they understand that council is going to approve it and can have questions. But the expectation is if you have put it in the budget, then you want to purchase that. And they will have put in a significant amount of time to prepare that for you. So if there really is something that you don't want to purchase, please have the conversation now and consider taking it out.

I think the point was if, you know, as we go through the year, if some of the revenue streams decrease like what happens, we do have a mechanism to adjust, you know, as well.

But I would agree that's a difference versus we're sure now we don't want to do it versus because I think it's only fair for departments to move forward with what they plan and budgeted.

You bet. There's a little level of responsibility here with administrative staff to not put something forward that's going to break the city.

Yeah.

I mean. Talk that through.

What's going to happen with the capital improvement fund when it goes negative? And that seems like a problem.

Yeah, these are projections. What will happen? We actually had a fund go that was negative when I started and it reclassified accounting wise as an unrestricted fund. It's backed by the general fund. Yeah, and that's why we've always kept the reserve without making it terrible complicated. Keep the reserve policy in the general fund. That money can be used for anything and we'll monitor the rest of these year by year.

Does the council have any more questions specifically? I have none. All right. Thank you. I'm going to take, if anyone in the public has questions specific to this topic, the budget itself, Please raise your hand if you want to come up and speak on the budget. Come on up to the mic, please. And if you don't mind stating your name and address again.

Sure, Allison Miller, 9620 Huron Drive. My question was, I was just wondering, with all the new development in Olivet, if that's helping with the sales taxes, a significant amount?

Yeah, you bet.

Yes, so half of the money that's generated at the... at Olive Crossing. We talked about the market center. Yeah, half of that sales tax we get to keep.

The other half goes to the pay down the TIF debt.

And then we get to keep the increment, the base levels of our property tax. Remember there was an office max there and a couple other buildings. That stayed with us as the base, the increment of the property taxes then does go to pay down that TIF debt and to the developer.

I think it's a good call out because one of the comments we're making is that in our revenue projections right now, we don't have a lot of the businesses that we plan to have come because, again, so many things can happen. Developers can change their minds, people, you know, whatever. But that's why it's exciting to think about our we have upside to the revenue around that. So, yes, when those things come in and then eventually that tip many years goes away.

Thirty four.

Twenty four.

Thank you.

Good question. Appreciate it. Anyone else? Questions online or in the audience?

We'll see this in two weeks without no presentation or anything, but any changes will then be delineated as we go to that second reading.

All right. With that, I'll close the public hearing. All right. As mentioned, the second reading of the bill will be conducted on June 23rd, where we will then vote on it at that time. All right, we're going to move on to item seven, bill 3064. For the title, please.

Bill 3064, an ordinance authorizing and directing the amendment of a contract with St. Louis County for housing municipal inmates. First reading.

And yeah, please. Yes, please. They put presentation on it.

Okay. So the city of Olivet has an existing contract with St. Louis County to house inmates. The city of Olivet does have holding cells, but those are not designed for individuals who need to stay in jail for a long period of time. They're generally for individuals that The city of Olivet has arrested and will be releasing on bond or they're holding for another agency to come and pick them up because they they have a warrant in another agency. So St. Louis County adjusted the fee, the daily fee that we pay to have individuals housed at St. Louis County's jail. So the fee is going from $50 to $75. And so the council needs to approve an ordinance accepting that change. so that we can sign it and send it to St. Louis County. So I know a question came up about, there's a section in the contract that talks about what happens if an individual is ill. So... And did reach out to. Major Barry as chief and risky is on vacation but major Barry provided excellent information so individuals that are arrested by the police department if they say that they are ill if they appear to be ill. If they have an injury, the police department has the fire department come, the paramedics come and evaluate that individual. And if that individual needs medical assistance, then the ambulance will take them to the hospital where a doctor will evaluate them. And if their illness or their injury is minor and can be addressed by the hospital, then the doctor will fill out what's called a fit for confinement. And then that individual can be taken to St. Louis County, right? The doctor has signed off that they are healthy enough to be held. And then when they get to St. Louis County, they then again go through a medical evaluation by the medical staff there at the jail. If an individual is not, their injuries are such that they need more serious medical intervention, and they have been arrested for something that is minor or we're just holding them for somebody else that has a warrant for them that is minor, then the police officers have the discretion to release them on bond, right? Which happens all the time for individuals who are not ill and they get arrested and they process the paperwork and they are released on a bond and given a new court date for them to come back. If that individual is is has been arrested for something that is very serious, then you know the police officer then stays with them, you know, until they have had their medical issues addressed by, you know, medical personnel and can safely be transported to St. Louis County, where again, if they need medical attention at St. Louis County, it will be given to them. And then we pay for that. There's a stipulation in the contract that if St. Louis County is holding an individual on our request and they need medical attention, then there's a fee listed in the contract and we will pay that. So that is kind of how all that language works. And so the language in the contract basically says, one, the city of Olivet is responsible for any fees associated with... individuals that need medical attention and, you know, that it's our responsibility to make sure that they're healthy. Because I think what St. Louis County is trying to prevent is agencies just taking an individual who is injured or sick and just sort of dropping them off at St. Louis County and kind of walking away and saying, you know, that's now your responsibility, St. Louis County. And St. Louis County is saying, no, no, no, this individual, you know, remains to be your responsibility as far as paying for their medical care, making sure that they are healthy to be in our confinement.

And if I remember, I think one of the, I think if I'm correct here, well, actually, why don't you voice your concern versus, or did that answer it?

Well, no, my biggest concern is that in the contract, it says that if a municipality wishes for a particular inmate to be held despite the need for infirmary or hospital care, municipality shall so indicate in writing on the warrant at the time of the booking. So my concern is that this language makes it sound like if we, and I would hope that we would never do this, um, find that an inmate needs hospital care, that we could say, no, we, we want you to continue being held despite your need for hospital care. That's, that was more my question is, is it, am I reading that right? Or is that.

No. So, um, But what would happen, so let's say that they have a long-term issue where they're going to need medication and they're going to need routine hospital care, such as dialysis or something like that. If they're going to continue to be held, they're going to get that, right? they won't be held in jail and deprived of that. But if we wanted to say, okay, this is a long-term situation, or let's say that you have an elderly person who's going to need some type of routine care, they're going to be spending most of their time probably in the infirmary because they do have you know, maybe they have a diabetic condition or something like that. We could say, we're not going to hold them and pay for all of that. And then they would be released and then be expected to make their court date.

And this would be for an individual that had like a minor, like a minor charge, right? This is not going to be for somebody that has been arrested for a felony, a very serious, say an assault or, you know, God forbid, a murder, something along those lines. The policy of the police department is very specific that it has to be a minor offense that we would say, this individual can be released on their bond and come to their court case. If it is a very serious, like a felony charge, The officer has to contact the chief of police before saying, you know, we're going to let them go.

Is that where, because I read it slightly differently in the sense where the county is almost saying, hey, they're saying they have a medical thing. We'd like to release them. And we as a municipality could be saying no. We don't want you to do that. It's kind of how I read it. In that kind of situation, could it be like, hey, they have dialysis. They'd like to be released so they can do dialysis, you know, at home or a center.

Right.

And we're saying no because of the seriousness of the charge or because of whatever circumstances. We're saying no. We want you to hold them. But in that case, they would still get the care, but they'd get it there is what the call is.

They would get the care there and we would accept the bill.

Yeah, because I read it that way.

Okay. So I think that helps in the clarification. That helps clarify.

Okay. All right. Any other questions from the council? So, all right. So this is the first reading. So we'll have a second reading on 23rd as well. Right. Great. All right. We will move on to item eight. We are back hearing for hearing from citizens part two. So same conditions or expectations apply where we'd want to keep to three minutes and for people to give their name and address and state. And again, won't be necessarily a Q and a, but I think it's important and really appreciate everyone sticking around if they, If anyone would like to speak, both in person or online, we'll start with people in person. Does anyone want to come up and speak to the council? Yeah, by all means, please. And if you don't mind turning the mic on, thank you. Please, yeah. Oh, can you turn the mic on, please? Thank you.

Wilhelmina Shackleford, 9656 Heron. I left out something that might be kind of key in trying to give you a little bit of history. Initially, when whatever the design was from the grant and all of that, they were going to actually put it in another area in the park. And the person who lived in that area came and said he did not want it behind his home. Ed Castner, he works for the city. So they made the decision to move it down to our area, but did not let us know. And when we found out, that's when we came up to appeal it and so forth and so on. So the park was initially, it had picnic tables, we had picnic tables and benches, you know, just that kind of stuff in the little playground equipment. So we don't want it to be just completely empty when that big pavilion is gone. So I did want to say that because I thought that was, you know, a true point that I left out in trying to give you an idea of the history and what we've been going through for the last 18 years.

Thank you for the clarification. Appreciate it. Anyone else in person?

the way to Buckles 9638 Huron Drive. There's other issues that we have over there and especially in the subdivision. I don't know if you're familiar with AZZ galvanizing. That is a mess. And at the present time, whatever they're making over there or things is making people sick. It's coming up in your house through the vents and it's really horrible. And we would appreciate if each one of you would look into it and support us in this matter, because we're not going to sit dormant. This plant needs to be moved. And it's a money-making plant. But it's horrible. I mean, we have smoke sometimes in the park. The children can't even play. We have smoke that's coming out, look like fog. on the streets. So can you imagine whatever they're making there or doing there? It is affecting all of us. With hospital bills, children get sick, and even some of the animals, the squirrels and the rabbits are dying because of this. So we would appreciate your support in this matter. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Once again, I am Jenny Littleton, 9639 Huron Drive. And I just want to piggyback on what Mrs. Buckle said about AZ galvanizing, the noise that they make all day long. And that's why I reached out to you for dealing with the pavilion. Let's move that. Then we'll deal with the bigger issue, which is the Goliath with the AZ galvanizing because they make the noise. noise morning afternoon and night then the emission is so strong and it stinks that when the kids stand by the bus stop in the cul-de-sac they cover their faces because the smoke and the emission is so thick they're running to the bus stop like this and they're standing at the bus stop like this it's horrific And now when you go to the playground in my backyard, we're finding dead squirrels, dead rabbits on a regular basis. And my husband is like, there's no bite marks. A fox didn't get him, a coyote. What's going on? We've seen a couple of birds, but lately it's been the squirrels and the rabbits. So we're just definitely... I know you guys have a lot going on, but we can, you could look into how, what we can do. Cause we talked to the surrounding businesses around there and they said that they wish that they were to leave. And we had an attorney to look into the mission and the grass and the playground equipment was hazardous. So if they're inside that plant suited up like astronauts, but there's you and all of that out. And when people are walking the greenway pathway, you're seeing them do like this. They're doing like that as they're trying to walk. And if any of them were to get sick, they can go back to Olivet and say, you all didn't do your due diligence and you put this greenway right here. Now I have this issue. Now I have that issue because you all didn't check that this place is right here. And when they were first there, They were very small and they got, their building got caught on fire and they were out for like three to five years. And then when they rebuild it, they built this big monster of a building and it's just spewing and spewing and spewing. And so I just need some support with that. If you all can look in, we know it's the industrial part and it's not all of that municipality, but if you all could help and pair with us so we can get them to move because they're a million dollar company right now. They have a lot of power, you know, but with you all and with us, a lot of things can get done, but we know there's baby steps. We must crawl before we can walk. First request of mine. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Don't forget your papers. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Hi, Alison Miller, 9620 here on Drive. Real quickly, again, I wanted to talk to the pavilion. So I know I spoke with Beverly and then listening to the budget, it sounds like they're doing a redesign of Orson Park right now. I know that's where the budget is spent for 2027. It looked like to me for Orson Park. And then Beverly mentioned, you know, the next thing is to do a redesign of Indian Meadows Park is kind of the next project. My concern is, that we're going to get told that we have to wait until the new redesign of the park, which is probably going to be three years, because according to Beverly's timetable, it's going to be two years until they can open it up for public hearing. And then, you know, and then once that, I mean, it's going to take another year to redesign and do all of that. And so I just am asking you guys to please, please, you know, Do everything you can to get it moved and also not have to wait three years. I mean, I've already waited three years. They've waited 20 years. I understand budget constraints and you can't just snap your fingers and do things. You've got to plan years in advance for budgets. But if there's any discretionary funds anywhere that can be moved around so we can make this happen, I don't want to have to wait three years. It's just not fair, I don't think, to all the residents around there. And then again, I want to just add to AZZ as well. I can see the plant from my house. I can see inside the plant from my house. That's how close it is. I couldn't see that when we first moved in because before the Greenway was there, it was all covered with plants, trees, very tall trees. They took some of that out with the Greenway. So now I can see the plant. I can see inside the plant from my front porch. I can see the smoke coming out daily. I mean, I can see it coming out as I'm sitting there on my porch. The noise is, I mean, I can't even describe it. I mean, I would hate, I hate for anybody to have to deal with it day after day, the loud clanking and dropping of metal. I mean, it's, it's unbearable. Like I'm sitting there eating with my family, having dinner, and I'm hearing this clanking, banging inside my house. I can't get away from it. I wake up in the middle of the night because I hear the clanging. It's too close. It does not belong that close to resident homes. Honestly, I'm shocked that it was allowed outside. to be there in the first place. So again, we've been working as a group, as an HOA, Citizens Olivet. I mean, we've been trying to do our best to work with the attorney to get this thing taken care of. We met with the county a couple of months ago and we're basically, you know, railroaded. I mean, there wasn't much the county could do for us. The mechanisms that they have to try to catch the violations, they don't quite have the equipment to do it. So we weren't able to get anywhere with them. We have other avenues that we're going to explore next, but we just wanted to let you guys know that's what we're working on. And again, just to get your support. to help us try to get this plant relocated. Thank you.

Appreciate it very much. All right. Anyone? Yes, please.

Hello, everyone.

I'm Felicia Ford, 9416 Grandview Drive. And I just want to piggyback on a couple of comments. AZZ is... an incredibly dangerous nuisance to our residents. And now that we have the Greenway, we're inviting more people into that area. And you really don't know what it is and the amount of smoke and the amount of noise when you're on that trail until you get right there. And then you're trapped because there's no quick way to get away from it. Especially if you come up from Five Oaks or another entry point, you don't know, then you're stuck in all this dangerous smoke. And then we're having, it's right there by our parks. which is incredibly dangerous for our children. There are a lot of small children, new parents that come down there and play. And it's scary to think in the future, that's going to do to our kids here because a lot of our residents that come through there they've been in all of it forever and so i just ask that you look into that for the safety of our community and the fact that we built a greenway that's wonderful to walk and it is very busy um we don't want that danger on on our people and then too with when it comes to the parks um We are, our streets are narrow and our kids are playing in that park all the time. So it is not safe to have a bunch of strangers coming in from who knows where repeatedly in and out of our community. And they're not, they're not being safe with how they drive and move through our community. They drive fast and it's dangerous for our kids because the streets are so narrow. A child can come out in front of a car and the noise and the trash, it is very dangerous. It keeps our children out of our park and we wanna be there too. And it keeps the nuisance for our neighbors and it's not safe. And Ms. Jenny's house is way too close too. And there's no timeframe that these people leave. They may be there until dark, until they're ran off. And that's also uncomfortable for them. And with it being the summer and more of our children are gonna be out, it just becomes more dangerous, more hazardous. So I just ask that you do consider at least, not allowing people to come in to use the park. Maybe if it's listed on the website, make it private for the community so that we can find it. But people coming from Farmington and who knows where don't come for our quiet park to destroy our safety and our habitability of our homes. So thank you.

Thank you very much. You can do it.

Well, good evening, everyone, council and residents and president online. My name is Tanya Welch. I'm the senior accountant for the city. And I would be remiss if I didn't say at least a couple of words in response to departure of Darren. He has been a pivotal part of the accounting department that we have here. I came in to the city of Olivet in 2015, March. March of 2015. So we've been working together for about 11 years now. Starting out, there was a three-person department, myself, another clerk, and Darren. I came in as Darren's, excuse me, accountant and clerk. He's taken the department to such high levels to where we are on a very high functioning type of a department with just the two of us to where work is done between the both of us. Third person is not needed. So I just want to take a moment and thank him for the time he's put into me to help develop me to where I am today. I came in as accounting clerk, went to an accountant. And now I'm the senior accountant and I'll step in internally for you while you're gone. So thank you for all you've done for me in this department. You will be greatly missed. It is very rare to find someone that you work so well with. He will be missed. And I thank you for all you've done.

Thank you very much. It was very nice. Anyone else? A quick one.

Yes.

One of my things concerns about the AZ galvanized and we're trying to stop him for prevent another cold water Creek, another Flint, Michigan. We don't want that in all of it. That's what we're trying to prevent before something like that happens.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

I had one more thing. If you don't mind. I don't know if any of the council members have seen the smoke that they're talking about. I have a warehouse. literally about 200 yards from the facility where I store all my supplies and whatnot. First time I saw the smoke, I thought it was on fire. And it comes rolling in like a big thick cloud. It's low to the ground and it's kind of scary looking. It looks like something out of a movie. So I understand what they're talking about because I've seen it. And unfortunately, I had to walk through it. So I don't know what may be in me or not. But I think if you saw what they're talking about, you have a real understanding of their urgency. So I just wanted to let you know that I've seen it. I know what you're talking about. So that's the only thing that I have to say.

Thank you. Okay, if no more comments online as well. So we will move on. Thank you. But as a pause moment, thank you everyone for coming forward. It's obviously, you know, we talk about this a lot, but it's important that citizens come forward. It's important, you know, that we hear you. I know things can move slower than you want, but, you know, we'll guarantee, you know, for myself and I know this council, you know, we'll listen, we'll try to take action where appropriate, where we can, but at least keep the communication open. So thank you for coming forward. Don't want you to feel like you weren't heard. So it's very important, appreciate it. All right, item nine, review and acceptance of minutes. I'll ask if the council sees any corrections to the minutes.

It's not so much a correction. I'm just wondering if for the public comments that were made regarding pedestrian safety, if we could just add that that was specifically around the Kenneth Dolores neighborhood for the minutes. I think that's important to note that it was very specifically tied to concerns in that neighborhood.

So noted. With that, then, can I ask for a motion to approve with those recommended amendments?

I'll make a motion to approve the minutes as amended from May 26, 2026. Second.

Second. Can I call for roll call, please?

Council Member Jurgel.

Approved.

Council Member Clark.

Approved.

Chairman Pro Temp, Sean Hellman? Yes. Mayor Lewis?

Yes.

Motion is passed.

All right. We'll move on to Item 10, City Attorney's Report.

Oh, I'm sorry. We didn't approve. Well, I'm realizing that my motion did not include the work session.

All right. Then I'll ask for if there's a motion to approve the work session minutes.

So moved.

And seconded. All right. Can we have a poll, please?

Perfect. Council Member Drigal. Yes. Council Member Clark. Yes. Chairman Pro Tem Pashaun Hallman. Yes. Mayor Lewis.

Yes.

Motion is passed.

Thank you very much. Sorry, I was looking at this script. All righty. City Attorney's Report, please.

A no report this evening, but we will need a very brief closed session pursuant to 610.021, Subsection 1 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri.

Before we moved there and I asked for it, I will just take a final moment on the record to thank Mr. Mann for years of service, quality dedication, great work, and really, really appreciate it. You'll be missed. And please, you know, come back turkey trot and all. You can pick up the keg as well.

You can enjoy the keg.

Thank you again. All right. At this point, do I hear a motion to go into closed session?

I'd like to make a motion to go into a closed section pursuant to which one is it? That's what I was going to say. All right.

Do we have a second? Seconded. Can we please call the council?

Council Member Drago.

Yes.

Council Member Clark.

Yes.

Chairman Pro Temp, Sean Hellman. Yes. Mayor Lewis.

Yes. All right. I'm going to close this regular meeting and we'll go into session.

Yeah, sure.

All right. We are back from close or back in post session. No major decision for made at this point. I'll take a motion for adjournment. Any second second. All right, so adjourned. 907pm.