City Council - Regular Meeting

Now call this regular workshop meeting of the Jacksonville City Council to order. Council, you have a proposed agenda for tonight's meeting. Entertain motion. Mayor Phillips, I would like to amend the um agenda tonight with another council member's approval to add for the discussion of Henderson Drive, Henderson Extension um North Carolina DOT road to be re um to be visited and renamed the Mr. James XY Brown Avenue. Second Okay. With that with that addition to the agenda.

You've already for number 11 for discussion for number 11. Mhm. And you have a second for Miss Smith. Okay. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All in favor signify by saying I. I. All oppose. Okay. So, we're going to go ahead and move to the adoption of the minutes and consent items. Those minutes are for the February 17th, 2026 regular meeting. We got six consent items. I'll make a motion to adopt the agenda and oh, excuse the consent items and the minutes. Okay, have a motion and a second. Is there any further discussion? Hear none. All in favor signify by saying I.

All opposed. So that's going to bring us down to the uh first item for discussion this evening is the 2026 also county property tax or property re re-evaluation. And Mr. Ray, you're going to present that item.

Thank you, mayor. So the next four items that we have on the agenda tonight are all budgeting and vision items that we're going to present to council. We do not have action items for these four, but we're giving you updates because these will be decisions that the council has to make as you move into the FY27 budget consideration review and hopefully adoption process. So, the first item will be the second presentation that we're giving to council based on the Enso County property revaluation. A couple of the slides are review. So, for for someone that hasn't seen this previously, you just go with us and then we'll get to the meat of the next level. Mayor. So Oslo County is currently in the process completing the property reevaluation for 2026. A lot of people should have received their notices last week at least by last week. That gives you the new valuation for your property. So when those comes when those come in the mail, uh if you don't know what your previous valuation was, then you need to go online and pull that information up and then you can compare because the the notice doesn't tell you what the increase was. that tells you your new value. The process is the state decides that all property has to be valued at market value. That's the the initiative from the state general statute. Since personal val property is valued every year, they say that the county decides how often we would do a reevaluation. And so Enzo County has decided that we'll have that every four years. So this year would be that re-evaluation. And the purpose of the reval is to make sure that we're equalizing the tax burden throughout the community and not having some communities that have higher values and other communities that have lower values that not have not been adjusted over time. Here's the statute that says uh that the counties have an

8-year opportunity to reval. And then as we've previously stated in 2006, Enslo County started with the every four-year process. What the tax assessor's office does is they're collecting data, basically market data based on sales. If you go online and pull up your property, either search your name when you go to Enso County's website or your property address or your property ID, it'll give you the opportunity to pull up comps. So, if they've assessed applied some comps to your property, it'll have those listed on the lefth hand column. If they do not have adequate comps for your property, then you can select some additional properties and put that into the analysis because if you want to appeal your value, you need to provide that information as your documentation. So for all for all taxpayers that received a bill here in Oslo County, we encourage you to review that assessment and then send it back in either saying uh we I validate that amount or I appeal that amount. If you're accepting it, you don't have to send it back to them.

When is the appeal date?

So it's on the calendar. They'll start their their review in May. So you're going to have there's a timeline on here, mayor. I forget the exact date, but we do need to make sure we post that so everybody knows um what the date is to get that in. If you miss that appeal date, you basically miss u the opportunity to say there's any challenge. So I just encourage you to utilize that tool online to find comps and that helps you do the work. If not, you need to look at recent sales. Uh so the process is interesting where the assessor completes the schedule of values. That's a that's a menu of how they do the assessments, not just on the comps. Once they bring in the the comparisons, what they do is they delineate what each property, what the value, what the location is all worth. So, when you're looking at your property, you're trying to get it closest to the actual market value for what it would sell for as of the day they completed the evaluations. The Enso County Tax Assessor's Office is who determines the value for your property. So for citizens that have concerns about that, you do not go to the local governments in terms of the municipalities. You would speak directly to Enslo County. There's a lot of communication online talking about who you would have your dialogue with. It's great if citizens speak to our council members, but I encourage you to send them through the process to talk to the tax assessor's office and to go through Enslo County. property values have increased anywhere between 35 and 40% countywide. Uh that the actual number turns out to be about 36% in Jacksonville. That doesn't mean each of our properties will increase 36%. It means, for example, Miss Smith's property could have increased 42%, my property could have increased 19%. But across the city of Jacksonville, the increases are looking at roughly 36% across the area. The tax assessor's

office has said that growth has been consistent throughout the county over this 4-year period and they feel very confident that the schedule of values is fair. The state reviews that schedule of values to make sure that the metrics they're using is verified. So you don't just have a local set of eyes on it. You also have a state level set of eyes. Their goal is to look at equity and um and to ensure those values. These numbers show what that increase looks like where the median sales ratio says that we're below market by at least 27% but the market increase as you see here roughly 37%. So in 2022 you'd have seen those the median assessed value be at 215. Now if your value is 215 here's your answer. It would be roughly $295,000. Um, and we encourage anyone that has questions on their assessments that they receive, if they have questions, city staff can explain the bill, but we don't explain the schedule of value. So, not to call our utility billing or to come to our finance office. That's not where you're going to get the information, but we can help you look at that and then potentially we can uh either send you towards the county team or show you how to pull that up online.

Mr. Ray, the deadline for um appealing as well as the contact information for where to start is on the notice as well. So on the notice you receive that information is there too. Perfect. If

I had mine handy, mayor, I'd read it out right now. But um after seeing the value, I was in such shock I just left it laying and put it back in the envelope and mailed it back to the county. But the value was an honest value. It was a fair value. It just means since I'm so cheap, that's where I was at. So the property tax bill is different. So you get your assessment from the county and they're giving you this. Now that's not the actual taxable. That's not what you're getting tax for the year. So when you see that value, if your value is $100,000, we're not saying you pay $100,000 in taxes that year. What you do is you take the taxable value, you remove out any exemptions you may have, and then you apply the tax rate based on your location. So if you're in the city of Jacksonville, you would pay a tax rate of 60 cent per $100. So, what I typically do, if it's $100,000, I do $100,000 times 0.0060. Uh, yes, you don't need the last zero, but it does good for making sure you know the rate. That gives you your incity tax bill. Then, if you have a county bill as well, which you do if you live in any municipality in Ozo County, you use their same kind of plan with their tax rate of 65 cents and you get those two numbers together. So, here's the schedule, mayor. So, they mailed out the notices. They try to mail them out by February 1st. They got closer to uh getting them all out by March 1st, which is pretty close in the process. They do the infirmal reviews. The board of equalization review hears the tax appeals. Uh but that has to be by I I'm assuming by the end of of March and the first part of April so that they can complete all of their appeals. And then in June, the county will set their tax rate so that you know what that means for uh for you as a taxpayer. So here's the here's the change, mayor. So you've heard all the other slides and and hopefully people can digest that information and know where we get to this point. Here's the analysis. If we're thinking across the board that the

city has values that increase 30%. On the left hand column, you're looking at five different values representing home property values for citizens in Jacksonville. If your home is $100,000 and your increase is 30%, your new your new valuation is going to be $130,000. So you have an increase of $30,000 in value for your property. And that's a split. That's your land value and your home value put together. And you'll see that on your notice that you received in the mail. If it was 200,000 before and it received a 30% increase, it went up $60,000. These numbers cover the majority of our citizens here in Jacksonville. We do not have many houses that go significantly above the $500,000 value, but we have plenty that are in that realm. Now you'll see the new values if you're at $500,000 with a 30% increase would be $650,000. That's a significant change for where we see where we're seeing our market indicators. So if you go back and and remember some of the concepts that we talked about with DFI and we're looking about values throughout the city, you know, our challenge is making sure that we have housing availability at every level for where people want to have a piece of property in the city in terms of value. So, this is where the increase would look like. These next two slides are going to give you the breakdown of what that would mean with the new value and the current tax rate for the city of Jacksonville. So, let's go to the top of this slide. If your property was valued at 100,000, it increased 30%. These are things we're going to just take into consideration. Tax rate at 60 cents per on the dollar

there. um your annual tax increase would be $180. So if you're like me and you pay an escrow every month in your monthly payment, your monthly increase would be $15. So for the taxpayer with this 30% valuation increase, you're going to have an increase of $15 per month that you can expect. For example, Wells Fargo will send you a notice and say your tax bill has has increased or at the end of next year they'll say you're basically at a deficit and we need to figure out how to rebalance your escrow either by onetime payment or spreading it out over the next 12 months. So that's the increase for a $100,000 property, a monthly increase of $15. If you go to the next one, the $200,000 would go up to $ 260. the annual increase would be $360 for the year. That's a $30 monthly increase. And this is just on the city side. So in theory, if you're dealing with the city and the county with a similar increase, this person would pay $30 a month increase for city taxes, $30 a month increase for their county taxes. We do not have a clue what the county will do with their rate because they're looking at some different opportunities and moving some things around. So, the council only only worries about the Jacksonville side in terms of our tax rate and our tax bill. The last uh the last little breakdown here on the screen is a $300,000 home. That home would increase to $390,000 be an increase of $540 per year on your city tax bill and a monthly increase of $45. Um, if you were looking at at the top and we were going with a $50,000 property, then we would go down from 180 to roughly um $90. So then you would be at $8 a month plus or minus in in that. The last two on this screen are the $400,000 and the $500,000 properties.

Those increases, 400 would go to 520. That would be a $720 per year increase or a $60 per month. And then for a $500,000 $500,000 home, that value goes up to $650 and it's an annual tax increase of $900 with a monthly increase of $75. We encourage you to use these screens when you're talking to citizens so that it goes specific to their property. And we'll run any scenarios that you want us to run for you. So if you were to if you were to email me and say, "Hey, can you give me some scenarios on $75,000 property?" I'll run that just as easily as I'll run $750,000. So, if someone has a question, we can run those scenarios for you based on these assumptions. A general 30% increase, 60 cent tax rate, and those current values. We've just done rough numbers. So, if uh citizens want to go back and watch the slides tonight, they'll see these. They can call you and ask a question based on these slides. You have these as a point of reference. Hopefully, this will be a tool for you uh to review with our citizens. Part of that challenge is to educate our citizens and our taxpayers to understand how the city does business and then why we do business. This next slide is a breakdown. A lot of times people will talk about what it looks like doing business in Jacksonville. So, what we've done is we've listed out six communities in the state of North Carolina. These are all in the top 20 population um size cities in North Carolina. You'll notice Fagatville because it's a fellow military host city. Uh that's the largest population on this breakdown. We did that just for the comparison that it is a military host city. The second one we applied is the city of Wilmington because it's our largest neighbor in the closest vicinity. Greenville is a college town still within about an hour and 15 minutes from us. Gastonia is one

of the closest in comparison. They're the 14th largest municipality in the state of North Carolina. And then Jacksonville, we are the 15th largest. Sometimes Gastonia could be 13, it could be 14. Apex is in between us and they fluctuate a lot. I don't know what their people are doing, but they move out of town, they move back in. It's a little tricky how they do this. Um, and then Hickory, we included Hickory, so you can see a spectrum here. Hickory is roughly uh 20 or 21st in population. So you see they're about 27,000 less than us. So that's the population breakdown and this is where it comes into perspective. The third column shows the property tax base. This is the total valuation inside the city limits for each of these communities. For example, Fagatville has a tax base of 21.8 billion. You run down to the bottom. City of Jacksonville has a tax base of 4.2. 2 billion. So we're $17 billion lower on the tax base. So what that means is one penny on our tax rate gives us an approximate $427,000. One penny on Fatville's tax rate gives them $2.1 million. So we're in the $100,000s, they're in the couple million. That's a perspective. So a lot of times what we look at is how we compare within our defined market. Fateville is not in our defined market. Wilmington not in our defined market. The other four, so us plus three, that's all part of our defined market. That's who we would compete with when we're talking about employees, benefits, rate structure, and other things. The challenge for us is our property tax base is significantly lower than everybody else, including being about half the size of Hickory. Hickory is a is an interesting place because unfortunately they are in four different counties. So if you live in Hickory, you

don't know exactly what your tax rate is. You have their your city tax rate, then you have to pick which county you're in to make yours up. We're fortunate with our citizens. We're all in Onslo County, so we pick their rate and our rate. We put those together. So perspective-wise, this is the battle that the city council considers every year in terms of how do you deliver services to our taxpayers when your tax base is lower. So then we have a breakdown that shows what the tax rates are for each community, but the tax rate is not necessarily the important factor. It's the tax base. Last factor on this slide, mayor, is we are able to tax roughly 46% of our property inside the city because 54% plus or minus is owned by the United States government. That's where the uh United States Marine Corps operates. So, we do not tax that land. Um, so there's a cost to that, but there are multiple benefits and we have to factor that in as we look at overall budgeting.

Interesting there, Mr. If you don't mind that. Yes, ma'am. That we have Hickory has twothirds of our population and we have one half of their tax base. That's just notable. I'm sorry.

It is. And and you look at how Hickory's grown over the years, but they do not have those large institutions that will that they're not taxing and they don't have that land that they're not taxing as well. So, uh we just have to figure out the strategy for how we maximize the utility of what our resources are to make sure we serve our citizens in the most effective way possible. Um it's a simple thing. You guys do that every year. So, we have no worries how you're going to figure it out this year. We just know for our citizens, we want to prepare the information so it's it's online and we can go deeper into that as we move forward. So, when we talk about cost of services, these are just some of the things that the council considers every single year. So, if you go down to the bottom of this, it says fund balance appropriation. For the current fiscal year that we're in, city council allocated roughly $3 million to balance the general fund budget. What that $3 million does is it makes sure that we have budgeted adequate funds to provide for all of those services that we provide inside of the general fund, which would be your police, your fire, your parks, recreation, your uh you name it. All of us that are not water, sewer, TRASH, STORM WATER. BASICALLY, it's the rest of us in this room. So we can have Wall-E step halfway out and the rest of us are all in the general fund. Maybe three four way out Wall-E. But the point there is on the tax rate, if the tax rate is $420,000 is one penny, then if you increase that to $620,000 with a 30% increase, that would be 4.9 on the tax rate. So when you look at the the appropriation for next year, it would take 4.9 new pennies to balance out the general fund budget. This is what that build is. New pennies to get us to a balanced budget where our revenues equal our expenses.

But that's taking into account um what revenue neutral is above revenue neutral. That 17 cents,

it's not. This is taking FY26 budget at this point and this is the operation. So if we went back to the revenue neutral rate which would be plus or minus 46 and you put the 17 you're right it would take us up to roughly 63 cents. So using that concept of how much revenue we bring in versus how many expenses and so this go up one level here and let's look at the fire station number three. Another just a general concept you can look at how to pay for a project like this. This would be to renovate station number three, which would be the last of four stations that has not been renovated or rebuilt. If the general bill to do this was $7 million and you finance that over a 20-year term, it would be roughly $400,000 a year as debt service payment. that would be worth 64 cents on the tax rate. If you go to employee benefits, one of the things that council talks about often is how do we maintain a competitive um market within our defined market for our personnel. That number is roughly $2 million. That would be an increase programmed in for FY27. That would be 3.2 pennies additional on the tax rate. the Enzo County fire tax. I mentioned earlier that we're not sure how Enzo County will uh define their tax rate this year. One of the things they're considering is moving out the fire tax, but if they take that fire tax out of our individual city taxes, then the city will not receive approximately $1.4 million. Last year, we received that from them. So, we would need to offset that in our revenue stream to provide for fire operations. That's roughly 2.26 pennies on the tax rate. Then the top

project is the Uptown Jacksonville project. The debt service payment for that project for that phase is roughly $4 million. So if we move forward on projects, every project will have an equivalent penny, whatever that word is, allocations uh to make it happen. So we can list every project that Wallally's teams presented in the CIP and show you what that means on the tax rate if their general fund allocation. So for this that would be six pennies. So when someone says to the mayor, hey, what's that going to cost annually? Cost six pennies on the tax rate. That's the answer or $4 million to pay that debt service. So that's that money in and this is it. So back to Mr. Uniro's question. If the council looks at the tax rate and lowers it down to the revenue neutral rate of 46 and then you add the 17 back up, then your new tax rate would be 63 cents. So then you have to change all of the scenarios that I showed you on the first couple slides. You change that to show people what their tax bill would be based on a 63 cents.

Going back to the fire the fire tax. All right. So there we have been getting how much from about 1.4 million.4 million. All right. So what they what they're proposing is to not give the city that 1.4 million but to take that out of the tax rate out of out of Jacksonville's residents of Jacksonville's tax rate county rate.

Now tell me how that's going to work. So the interesting part there, mayor, is that you know, county has this ability to to tax inside of city different than outside. And it's it's actually a wonderful discussion because it comes down to are they providing the same level of services inside the city that they are outside the city? And the answer is no. We we provide almost all of police and fire services inside the city. They supplement anything we have, but they don't supplement to the to the same level that they would in the county in an unincorporated area. So for example, if their rate right now mayor is 65 cent in the county and they give Jacksonville citizens a rate of 60 cent, but then external citizens not in a municipality would pay 65 cent still. So you as a taxpayer in Jacksonville would get that lower rate, but then the city wouldn't have that revenue stream reimbursed back from the county.

Getting that that's as far as providing services, it's not a good that's not a good deal. Am I wrong in saying? Well, from the county from the from the council side, you have to provide that revenue source. Either way, from somewhere else. That's right. Either way, you've got to figure it out, mayor. Unless it's unless they just give you a check just because they really like us. That'd be cool, too. I'd lobby for that one. Don't count on that. Right. So,

on the fund balance appropriation, does is Yeah, I know that every year we have that fund balance. Usually we add to it because um so do you expect us to to be $3 million in the whole from the fund balance or is that going to be how much money are we going to be able to

financially? I think two things happen every year for the council that are very important to our operations. The the most important thing that the council does is you order an audit and you receive the audit and you review the actual expenses. That is the number one priority financially for the city. It should be every year for every municipality in this country. The second thing you do is you set a budget. Uh the budget as Miniro said we give a best case for the operations for the year. Most years we're able because of multiple sources whether we can't complete all the projects. We have salary lag which means people leave the organization and we don't fill them immediately and there's some delta in between there. We have some salary lag. We may just not have some expenses in in our in our healthcare. We may not be able to buy some equipment for a year. Maybe we actually just get a good deal once or twice. That doesn't typically happen, but maybe we get a good deal and we have that. Most years we come in really close to the revenues satisfying the expenses. And back to Mr. D's point, some years we go a little bit more. for this last year. When you check page 50 of your audit, you're going to see we actually utilize $7 million from fund balance to balance the the expenses in the general fund side. That's all strategy based on where the fund balance was and the policy that council adopted to utilize some of those fund balance dollars so we're not going over and we're not utilizing. I would hope that this year looking at current expenses and revenues that we would be right at or slightly above. It just depends on what happens for the next few months. So when you look at that number, which is a great analysis, those four cents, you may not need the 4 cents. You may need 1 cent. And that would take your number down uh to 14.4.

Are most of those that you're appropriating, are those mostly capital projects or are they typically yes the employee the benefits and the uh and the Anzo County fire tax not so those two numbers that we use on this scenario it's because it gives us a mix the the challenge with employee benefits is I think the mayor told us three years ago it's going to grow exponentially every year so every action you took two years ago now has an exponent to where it's at this year and anything you do this year to keep to keep that movement happening is a positive gain but it's exponentially impacting the bottom line of what the operations cost

and you you expect that there's going to be some changes in other people's tax rate and that's going to impact us somewhat

in the sales tax for sure and that's one part so you think about the sales tax and this is what a lot of people may not may not be aware of the way that Enso County distributes the sales tax it's not from where you buy your goods from it stays inside of the county but it's distributed Ed unlike some counties which is distributed on ad valorum or a per capita tax base in Ozo County it's on ad valorum and it's not the adalorum tax base it's the levy so it's our tax rate with the tax base and the levy that determines the distribution so for example if our tax base is $4.2 2 billion and North Topppsel Beach is $2.6 billion. Then they're basically half of us and they could take a large portion of the sales tax even though the point of sale may happen in Jacksonville. So if we move our tax rate, you lose the the additional revenue based on that

countywide. Do we know how much uh tax revenue is actually generated in the city compared to the other shopping centers outside the city? We do. And we know what the difference is. I I can't give you that number right off hand, but we know what the difference is between the Adalorum distribution and the per capita distribution. It's it's about $7 million for Jacksonville. That's the difference. We we know the sales tax number, but that's the that's how that works against us. It's it's a system that's designed to make the city chase a higher tax rate with the with the with the rebound.

All right. It it also pits one municipality against another because when they when the county moved from per capita which is by population tax rate distribution when they move from distributing sales tax based on the population that you serve and you know we all know that more people are served in Jacksonville that live in Jacksonville everybody comes here to shop and stuff which we're glad for but when when they move from that per capita population-based tax distribution to the advalorum property tax values basically and what tax you could collect on property. Um, at the time that change was made, it was about $2.6 million that we lost in that equation. 2.7

and now it's up to 7.2. So all that $7.2 million just for Jacksonville residents to understand that $7.2 $2 million that's collected in sales tax inside city limits is going to other communities in the county and they're benefiting from that. But it's also it's costing us benefiting them and pitching us against one another in this who's going to set their rate first and what are you going to do? I don't know because if we lower ours to help our citizens and they raise theirs, we lose twice.

The one thing I don't understand is this. Why why does the statutes of North Carolina say that that they collect a sales tax and they redistribute to the counties on a per capita basis? Why are they not held to that same idea there? I've had this conversation. Sounds like you give us the most difficult question. Mayor,

conversation with our senator and some of our representatives and just as early as this morning, I had a conversation with one of our commissioners who I will not name who's running for re-election basically told me more commissioners that live in the city. But uh yeah, mayor, that's a challenge for us. And that when the state says we're going to do this per capita, you know, that's a decision they made years ago. And right now as the state starts looking at uh property tax rates in municipalities and they look at the rebound periods, the state's trying to consider controlling and placing ceilings on rebounds and property taxes, but that's not looking at other revenue sources. We don't have a hold harmless revenue source that makes us whole with the change on the sales tax distribution. We also are getting half the tax of Hickory because of the 40% we can tax which you know

none of us is sorry we live here or that the base is here. We love our Marines but that's a reality on the budget line that we just can't shake.

Well, when I when I was police chief they when they changed that we did a study and 50% of all the calls for service were people that lived outside the corporate limits including the base. So if they lived on the base we didn't count those. We counted people that came into the city and impacted. They impacted our roads. They impacted our fire services because they're getting crashes and have heart attack. and uh it doesn't just doesn't seem fair that it's being generated here and and we're having to provide those services and yet most of the money is going down towards beach and to people that you know most surf city most most folks don't even live in uh in our county they're renting those houses out and so I mean I think I think they need to really re look at that as uh as we move forward. You

make an excellent point, Michael, because the folks in North Top Sale and Surf City when they go to play and spend their money, most of them are driving south, not north. So, in terms of the return on the investment of the tax dollars being spent in Oslo County, we're spending them at the edge of the county where people are likely to cross the line for recreational spending and tourism and not come this way as often. So, we're we're losing some of the benefit on those. And I realized, you know, those are beach communities and they have tourism needs and there's, you know, sand and things that have to be dealt with, beach reourishment and all that. Some of that was part of the reason behind that change initially, I think, but we're we're sending money from the city to the county, but then it's going from the county out of county in many respects.

I'll tell you something funny. Back when this all started back in 2013, was it 2013? 13. When this happened, the mayor and sir sir city mayor basically said, "Well, we really don't need the money, but we'll put it in the bank." But I mean, that's

maybe we can ask them for a letter that says they just give it to us cuz it is down there to be these these these people are not uh they're property owners that are absent, most of them, and that and that's what's taking a lot of our money out of here. Our challenge at the state level, mayor, is simply our representatives represent not only us, but they represent every citizen in the state of North Carolina. So when they're talking about legislation, they're looking at what helps the majority of the state, 550 municipalities, 100 counties, we're one of those, but we're different. And I know most communities like to say the argument that they're different, but the university host cities are similar in how they operate. No one has a structure like we have. the closest to us. Maybe Havlock, maybe their numbers are are similar to ours in terms of their overall tax base. It's a lot smaller, but maybe that gives them something that's similar. Fagatville, you see, they're they're different in terms of the total tax base. They have some different opportunities to them. Goldsboro has has a different tax base as well, just based on the small portion of land uh that their base is located there. and Elizabeth City also a different layout in terms of geography for the total amount of land that is taxed or not taxed. So I

I don't want to belabor this but what happens as we see Holly Ridge for instance Swansboro their populations are growing rapidly.

How what kind of impact is that going to have on this whole thing? Well, right now, mayor, in terms of the sales tax distribution, uh, four communities are at a deficit and two communities plus the county are they they make money off this type of distribution. So, Holly Ridge, Swansboro, Jacksonville, and Richlands are all at a deficit. North Topppsel, Surf City, and the county all are revenue positive based on this distribution method. So, if we did a simple vote, it would you could you could argue four to three, but the taxing entity that sets that distribution method is the county and they're plus or minus they benefit $4 million off of the other. So, they have a challenge too, mayor, because they have to provide the the services to the county residents. Um, and so that's what we just have to be articulate in how we present it. That's appreciate the tiein because it really matters when you talk about the property tax bills for our citizens. This all impacts us because it has an impact on the sales tax as well. So that's a good point.

Mr. Ray, I had a question for Mr. Raz. So since you're up in the Raleigh area, what is the process um for municipalities such as ourselves? Can we challenge um the general well the general assembly basically is facing the tax distribution on per capita. So is there any legal standings that gives municipalities the ability to um to basically challenge county commissioners and their theories and the way they're allocating funding? Short short answer is um the the scheme for distributing sales tax revenues is statutory. I mean the sales tax is a North Carolina state tax. And I had this explained to me many many many years ago. The counties are the administrative subdivisions of the state. And it just was logical and straightforward to say all right we'll set up a mechanism whereby we allocate the money through from the state through the administrative subdivisions which are the counties and the statute when the statute was enacted back at least in the 70s it's been that that long I'm I'm aware of um the counties had the option because they were the admin administrative agency to funnel the money out. They had the option of choosing the population method or what some call the tax effort method, you know, tax base plus rate. Um, and and that was the choice of the county because the county was the

was the bureaucratic entity that managed that managed the distributions and it's statutory. So, there'd be a lot of vested interests, you know, out there. It would be an uphill battle to that's a pretty entrenched law and a pretty entrenched scheme I would say. So even if the commissioner's decisions were injurous to a municipality where they are, you know, basically 7.2 you're you're hemorrhaging. So and it's an injury to your citizens. there is no challenge in mitigating that decision.

You know, it would be you'd have to do a heck of a lobbying job with your legislators and convince um enough folks to to adjust the scheme. It's been around for a long long time. And I it's interesting for me to hear this because I was not I hadn't really thought through Jacksonville's the interplay between the relatively low tax value because of a June and um the assess value and and how that affects the sales tax take if you will and the combination of those factors definitely it definitely works against Jacksonville's interest. That's a political decision. It is. It is. It is. I think

so. It makes one thinks with the new revaluation and the property taxes going up. Yes. On one hand, your property taxes is going up, but it's generating that additional revenue that's still hemorrhaging.

And there is that move in the legislature. You know, that feeling and particularly is it some of the bigger, more prosperous and high growth municipalities are feeding that. I mean, good gracious, property values in Wake County where I live um is scary and um you know, it sort of feeds that urban rural divide in the state and there's a lot of there's a lot of you know, talk now about in the legislature about um about finding a way to to um restrict cities and counties um in in how they can take advantage edge of these exploding values and keep keeping the lid on because it I mean I understand it's an emotional part and it's a um you know the numbers are scary and everybody's hurting or many people are hurting and uh property tax is a target.

Well, there's there's a study right now in progress. Is it am I correct there? You're correct. Yes. Both the House and the Senate have a have a committee study. But but it's important for people to know as as you talk about, you know, they talk about revenue neutral and keep our tax rate low. As you can move to revenue neutral and people keep it at like if the county keeps it at existing thing, that's going to even put us in a hole because it's going to reduce the amount of sales tax revenue that we get right now. Correct. And and it's some of it going to Pender County. I mean, I I don't understand that, but you know,

this is a good discussion as far as having the public understand the relativity of the property tax and with the relationship with the sales tax. But we'll have this discussion every year.

The mayor said that in his conversation, I think he was told that you need more county commissioners in the living in the city. And then he said it's political. It's purely political. It's not really at the legislature. They said per capita in terms of what they've distributed to the counties. That's what you want. You want that at that end. It's purely political at county commissioners and until it becomes a campaign issue for county commissioners will be here next year having the same discussion because we want to just let them understand that we are in a bind. But um that needs to happen and the public needs to understand and when that becomes a campaign issue, it'll change. The other thing is that we we the reality check is what you've shown us. What do we do? I think that the steps the city has taken with um Jacksonville Town Center, New Town Center, we got to grow the business sector, let them profit, we got to become an attraction and that's why Jacksonville Harbor

that's, you know, we talked about that before, Mingham, in terms of expanding the tax base. Anything that creates new business opportunity and adds to that tax base, just like the annexation that the council considered before and the one you've moved forward now, that gives us potential to expand that. And and the other side of that is, as the county say, the tax values on the water seem to be higher. And so we can look at that inside the city of Jacksonville. We only have so much land on the water that the city has access to. The rest of it's the base. So that might be some of our highest value in terms of land and then the overall utility from developing that. It's a lot undeveloped.

Mayor, the last slide I have is to say the the next step, I appreciate the dialogue. The next step we're going to present again at the April 7th workshop and we will be delivering those books to the council based on some of the input that council's provided on the initiatives for next year. Like Mr. Willingham said. Um that's one project with the harbor project. There's another discussion you're going to hear tonight from Terrell in terms of uh housing efforts for next year. Those are all part of the the priorities that we're including in the FY27 budget. So you'll have that in April. So we'll bring that back. Then we'll have a public hearing for citizen input and then we'll have some more work there in May. That's all we have on that item there.

We'll move on now to number eight. This is the water and sewer rate model. I assume who's going to have I think Sabrina is going to do it. I thought she might have left. Mayor,

I feel like we might actually be looking forward to talking about water and sewer rates after the discussion. But every year we come and we do an annual review of the worm sewer rate model as part of the budget process. Um, just to give a a little bit of history on the rate model, we first contracted with uh a company called Raptellis back in March of 2009 to deliver the first rate model to the city. And this was so that we would have a model that staff could use to help um plan rates and make sure that we have enough coverage um for our operations without having to have large rate studies every you know few years by an outside firm and face some large rate increases. The main goal was to develop a financial planning model that staff could use to project revenue requirements, allocate cost, and determine what the rate should be on a more regular basis. Prior to having the rate model, we had um rates would fluctuate significantly from year to year um by large amounts. In FY7 to oh FY9, have that arrow there. Uh we included rate increases of um 27% to 30% for the average customer. I'm sure many of you remember those. I worked in utility billing at the time. So I I remember that those being a couple of difficult years. Um that was mostly because we we didn't have a rate model, but we did have some large projects. It was a time when we were beginning the uh planning for the wastewater expansion and the water plant. So those were large capital needs that factored into those large increases. And then in FY 2000 in FY19, that is when the city council first committed to doing annual increases of 2.2725%.

Um it was something that everyone agreed we would watch the model run it every year. But generally um as long as the model supported that those would be the increases that we would do to avoid doing those large sporadic increases. There are several um financial and pricing objectives that we're trying to meet with the revenue model or the rate model. We want to of course have revenue sufficiency and revenue stability. So we want to make sure that we have enough revenue to run the system every year, but also that it's a stable source of revenue, that it's not fluctuating from year to year. We'd like to keep the rate stable, which is where the 2.25% comes into play, that you don't have an increase of 17% one year, then zero, and then you're you're back up again. um keep the rates affordable uh for the customer and we'll talk some more about what that means. Uh make sure that the rates are equitable among all of the customers the impacts are equitable. And then con conservation management and this is where the tiered rate system was developed so that the more that you use the more that um the the higher the rate is on the volume side. We identify the revenue requirements. Um we need revenues for the proper operation and maintenance but then we also need revenue from the development and growth of the system. So as you know we need to add uh a sewer line. Um we definitely need to make sure that the rates support that and financial integrity meeting those financial um obligations that we have the revenue bonds um governance that are set by those on your water and sewer bill each month.

You know right now you just see water charge but there are if you look closely at the rate schedule there are two components to that. We have a a fixed rate and then we have the variable rate. So the fixed rate is the part of the water fee that does not vary with the customer usage based on your meter size. It's a charge that's set typically to recover the customer related cost. Those would be the costs that don't fluctuate with usage. So the cost for the billing, the customer service, the meters. Um and it may also include a recovery of a portion of capital and other fixed cost as well. And then the variable or what we call the consumption charges are those fees that are based on what you use. Um that's your your per per 100 gallon rate that you see on the uh fee schedule and those are to recover utility costs that vary with usage. Um more demand means more cost in certain um aspects. So like the chemicals maintenance on the infrastructure more demand um creates greater cost and so that's what that charge is meant to do. And then I I mentioned about conservation but the increased block rate structure that we have is meant to promote um conservation. The base charges promote the revenue being stable but they do impact um affordability. So the customer once you set those base charges the customer doesn't control them with their usage they they stay the same every month but that is the part that gives us stability with our revenues in the water sewer system. Um our monthly bills we we do look at what other utilities are to see if they're comparable although it's not necessarily a determin determining factor of our

rates because all of our systems are different and the needs are different. So, we just want to make sure that Jacksonville is not the highest waters who are ready to bill around. And then we also want to make sure that our annual bills um for the average customers are affordable as and we use a definition by the EPA to do that. But um it basically you want it's you want to be less than like 4.5% is the metric of the median annual household. So, keeping in mind that median annual household does not measure a burden on the lowincome customer, but um we stay we're well below the 4.5% as as pertains to affordability. The rate calculation um in the model, it's impacted by the CIP. We have all of the CIP information in there, the operations and maintenance, the current expenditures, where we think we'll end up by at the end of the year, revenue projections, as well as our budget. It considers our water sewer fund balance where we ended last year and our um rate is approved every year by council. And I spoke of the 2.25% 25% that we have been doing um which has been our current practice. We we do make some assumptions in the model. We um assume that non ratebased revenues will grow at 1% annually. It is conservative um because we don't we don't want to say that we're going to generate a whole bunch of revenue and then not when we're looking at setting rates. Expense escalation. We do ex um escalate those 1 and a half to 5% per year based on the different categories. So like for example salaries

those um we've been increasing the last couple years in line with the budget 5% uh chemicals or contracted services depending on what department whether it be sewer or water those may escalate differently as well. And then for the CIP, we use um the FY27 proposed CIP with the projects through 2036. And I do want to say also um this year there is in addition to the CIP, there is a um land acquisition that I think has previously been discussed that also is in the CIP in the rate model for this year. just so we could kind of make sure that we were tracking that. Which brings us to our rate model panel. This may look familiar, but um every year we do we run two panels. One is the just in time, which shows if we didn't do any increases until we actually had to have them, what would those increases look like? So, if you look at this, you can see that right now we look like um we're in pretty good shape for several years. Once you get out to the out years in 2035 and 2036, this is when you start to spend through some of our fund balance um and you see the big increases that we spoke of earlier at 8.99 and 12.9%. This scenario is set only what this does is just increase the rates just to meet the minimum financial targets. So our minimum debt service coverage of 1.76%. Um our our rate model is set for a minimum days cash on hand of 365 days. That means enough cash to operate the system for at least a year. And when we get out to 2036, our um average customer water bill is

$115.98 if you add those two together. And this is the dashboard. Um this is hopefully not too hard to see, but it's a snapshot of the different financial targets that we are trying to meet. You can see the red line is the target goal. Um most important on the debt service coverage and the days cash on hand uh the debt service coverage is required by the revenue bonds is the rate covenants. So we need to meet those and that's what is that number

um 1.76 is the the minimum under this model. I think I think it's actually one point. It's two uh is the No, that's not it's 1.5 is the minimum that it can be. And this model gets us to 1.76. It meets the 1.76 and the days cash on hand at 365. And um for this year, I know we we talked about the 2.25% 25% annually. Uh we've we've done that every year since 2019 with the exception of one year uh if you'll recall there was a year where ARPA funding was received. And so I think the year after that we did I came and I said I I might not ever be able to say this again but no rate increase this year. And then um so this year when we looked at the rate model we saw uh a similar situation where we we did have some large increases but not until farther out in the out year. So we thought um let's see if we can meet those same financial targets that we were meeting before at a lower rate um because of where the system is right now. In addition to that, we are in the process of completing a water and wastewater system model and master plan. So, um I know that once that is complete, the CIP could change. Um some of the projects could change uh in out years. Uh there they could be higher, they could be lower. I mean, we we just don't know enough to know that. So, um, for that reason, we plugged in a 1% increase for the next 3 years and that and then there's currently right now we're showing no increases after that,

but this still gets us to where we would like to be with our financial targets. Um, and of course, this is not to say that after 3 years we won't need a rate increase. We look at the rate model every year and once that planning mod that water and waste work planning tool get complete then um we'll re-evaluate. But for this year we have the 1%. With these increases we meet the financial targets and every year our debt service coverage is a little bit higher at 1.86 and our minimum cash days cash on hand is a little bit higher as well at 380 days. But I think the most um maybe the biggest factor when we look at this is always where do we end up with the customer's bill in 2036 and doing it this way we are at 9706. So that's a significant difference from the 115. And this is again the same dashboard that indicates um you can see the red line where our debt our debt service coverage is and our days cash on hand meeting those those targets. And that was it. Um I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. uh in the FY27 uh proposed budget, it does have the 1% as part of the budget um part of the water s revenues as well as the fee schedule.

Any questions? I have a couple questions. One is what what is $100 right now in water sewer? Yeah, it is 59 million and what unrestricted in in water sewer and those those projects that that they're taking the money out are very expensive, aren't they? Well, we can speak to the cost of the projects, but I know um the park or I always call it the wrong name, but the Western Regional is combined about a $60 million project

and and we're probably halfway through that project, may maybe a little less. And with with Uptown and and the uh um 400 acres, that's going to that's going to be somewhat significant. We are we are um working with the design engineer now to develop the infrastructure plan. So, water and sewer would fund all of the utility extensions. um as part of that project and that the land acquisition what you're looking for is planning for the future. It is. Yes, sir.

So that uh so that we had the capacity and you know I remember 20 years ago we we had a moratorum on homes and and that stifled our growth for a number of years.

It did. I got the opportunity, I guess that's what I would call it, to live through the special order by consent with the state and the there were, she mentioned the double digit increases that were back to back, but we also had um some 7 8 9% that we didn't talk about um that were also through that time period. So, we've been we've been we we went through a very rough time and I would not not like to see that again. I can binge on this this cuz you're planning for the future and you're making it so that it's not uh you know it it doesn't burden the taxpayers as much as an eight or 10% increase and and uh

that's easier to chip away a little bit at a time than is one big chunk.

And 1%'s better than two and a quarter. It's a good year for that. And that's the beauty of the two models. And that's why it's nice to show the two when you're running the two models and you say you're going to use it down the line because we always want to know where we're going to end up in terms of the impact on on us as a utility bill payer. And so if you can say you do this at the front end and it gives you a better outcome in 9 to 10 years, you're showing that you're committed to not only managing those utility bills now, but you're also managing those utility bills for nine years down the road for the customer. And I think that matters in everything that the council sets in terms of the fee schedules and the rate schedules is you're getting supply like Mr. Janeiro said, ensuring that we're going to have capacity for new development to expand that tax base, but it's not all it's not going to have a significant impact on that bottom line for what somebody pays. So, if you think about the numbers that Sabrina said, uh 1% increase on an $80 bill is going to be less than a than a dollar. You know, those are some of those are some of those numbers that you're looking at. It's kind of crazy to think of it that way, but it's significantly lower than when you say even a 10% increase. It's a relative number to what you're talking about,

Mr. Hansen. Um, the monies that we received from the ARPA funding, didn't some of that go towards that project that you're referencing? 20 $23 million went towards that project. And I think that is I think seeing the benefits of that is what has adjusted our model from the 2.25%. Yes, that's funding we've received through the state. Yes, those are ARPA funds as opposed to the ARPA funds that the city received. That 9 million.

That's correct. That's correct. That did not go towards that project. Anybody else? Thank you. Going to move to fire protection.

Good evening, Mayor Council. I appreciate the opportunity to uh talk with you tonight about this wonderful opportunity that we've been working on for a long time about enhancing the fire service capabilities within the city of Jacksonville and some of our neighboring departments. I'd like to talk about automatic aid and mutual aid and those memorandums of understanding or as you hear them referred to asus. There's one distinct difference between these two types of agreements that are extremely important. When people talk about these agreements, they always lump it in the mutual aid category. What mutual aid means is if I have a problem and I need you and call you, you'll come and help me solve my problem. That's all it is. We have multiple of those agreements already in place that we've had for decades. We have them with Enslo County. We've helped them out as far as Ridgelands. We have them with the state. They're very beneficial to have with the state, too, as well, especially during these severe weather events. The fact that we had that state mutual aid agreement when Helen hit that Thursday night, we were ready to send an engine and four people to Saluda, North Carolina that Friday afternoon. So, but it was based on the efficiency of those mutual aid agreements with the state. We also have them with the college. You know, of course, the fire department, we're always doing a lot of training. They have a lot of props. They have the facilities. We do too as well. So, we've established that mutual aid agreement with the college so we can share those facilities and that equipment so we're not duplicating it. And we also have it with the air station. You know, they have the military version of it. is the crash fire rescue that covers the flight line.

We have a mutual aid agreement with them in place in the unfortunate event that if we ever had a downed aircraft within the city limits of Jacksonville and we would also help them if they had something that happened on the base. The automatic aid agreements, this is something that's extremely important when it comes to these. These actually put those resource requests on the first alarm. That's extremely important. When we get the call and we have Camp Lleune on that automatic aid agreement, they get dispatched along with us on that call. We're not making the decision while we're responding or when we get on scene what extra we may need. They're actually coming when we're dispatched to as well. We've had that agreement with Camp Lune since 2007. Uh they covered parts of the city along 24 New River downtown Binmar and we covered parts of the base. Uh when Chief Rivera got here, we were able to expand that automatic aid agreement where we actually cover a large portion of the base in the air station and the base is actually coming off and helped cover the entire city. So it really has expanded. It's been a great partnership that we've had in place for a long time. And also we've had an automatic aid agreement with Pumpkin Center for the industrial complex. the donut hole or standadine white street MSA where we actually send a truck when they get an alarm there as well. So, but what we want to do is expand on these automatic aid benefits. What are the benefits first of all is the responders. These are for significant events. those large structure fires, structure fires, and those vehicle entrapments when

somebody's actually trapped inside of a car. It gets those extra personnel there that we need to help mitigate those events. Those are extremely labor intensive events that require a lot of coordination. And then also, you're dealing with when you're dealing with those events in July, the extreme temperatures, you have to go through a lot of people. It's very physically demanding in those situations. In the extreme cold, you can switch those people in and out. You can look after their safety while still handling the vent and having the adequate number on scene. And also, it adds resources. It gives us an extra engine on scene. We actually can utilize it for the bypass. We get a lot of vehicle fires out there. We get a lot of grass fires. We get a lot of brush fires. the volunteer departments, we've leaned on them a lot to send tankers out so we could actually have a water supply out on the bypass because there's no hydrants. There's nowhere for us to get water. So, it's been a tremendous partnership to have those mutual aid agreements. There's just a delay and we only have a limited amount of water. As a matter of fact, uh the other night we had a fire in some trailers back there off of Highway 17. The battalion chief on duty that night noticed how far away they were. He went ahead and called for Southwest right away for a tender or excuse me a tanker. They came right away, provided two personnel and certainly helped out with that fire. They were fighting that fire with the snow on the ground. So, it was a tremendous benefit. It also helps out too, and this is something we heard a lot two weeks ago with the annexation is the satellite coverage. We have all of those areas that are being annexed in with the city that are not connected exactly with the city. We can utilize that to help provide that fire protection to that satellite areas

of the city as well. Another great thing is cost. There's none. It's a tremendous financial benefit to the city and it also helps out those volunteers departments too as well with us providing that service to them. We talk about our ISO rating all the time, which it goes from a scale of one to nine. One being the best, nine being the worst. Jacksonville's a one. That also has a lot to do with our communications department, Mr. Hansen's department. So, it's a team effort. It's not just the fire department, but it's extremely important because it sets the insurance rates within the city of Jacksonville. Bless you.

Thanks. Bless you. The thing to remember about your ISO rating, the things that they're worried about when they look at everything is your travel distance and the amount of people that are showing up on scene to handle those structure fires. When you get outside of that 5 mile travel distance and you have no fire coverage, then you could have a rating

as low as a nine. So when it comes to those satellite areas, it's extremely important. And then when those people are coming on that first alarm, they're counted automatically. You actually get credit for the staffing level, too, as well. So that's extremely important. When we look at what was just annexed the other night, you heard a lot of talk about that. Right there to the intersection is 4.7 miles from the apron of station one. That's before you even get into the proposed neighborhood. Southwest Volunteer Fire Department is sitting a half mile down Pony Farm Road. So, it's right down the street. We get these agreements in place that will provide that fire coverage that your ISO rating inspector is looking for. And also accreditation. Accreditation doesn't look at travel distance. They look at time and they also look at personnel levels that are showing up on scene. So this will help too with having those extra personnel on scene and also with the time travel for those satellite areas. What we have talked about and Chief Recopio has worked extremely hard on this with those departments are automatic aid agreements with Pumpkin Center Volunteer Fire Department, which everybody knows is right there on the north side of town going out on Highway 17 and Southwest Volunteer Fire Department. It's on the southwest side of town going out on 53, Highway 17 and 258. The another important thing to remember about this agreement too as well, we will not cover the entire district. We have met with both of these departments and they've given us an area that they would like for us to provide assistance to. So, we are willing to provide assistance to those areas. They are right outside the city limits of

Jacksonville and a limited area into their entire into their district, not the entire district. And also we are not going on first responder calls, alarm calls. This is just for structure fires and vehicle entrapments. So this is when somebody is trapped in a vehicle in a bad wreck and can't get out. So what they are requesting uh or an engine to these incidents and Pumpkin Center is requesting an engine and a ladder to areas of Highland Forest and White Oak High School. what we are requesting from Pumpkin Center and Southwest volunteer to fire department or engine and a ladder. Southwest is willing to come into the city all the way up to the river to help cover those area the satellite areas that we've annexed and any future satellite areas that may be annexed within the city. I've also talked with the base. They're willing to cover any satellite area too as well, but we have to be worried about those travel distances when it comes to the base. We've talked with Pumpkin Center. We've got their area and they're willing to come into the city of Jacksonville all the way up to Western Boulevard and up and down both sides of Western Boulevard. One of our huge commercial areas, large buildings, could be labor intensive. So, it's a tremendous benefit to us and both of those volunteer departments. So with that, I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have. Or

G Tomman, what is our current average response time? Right now, it's at 6 minutes and 2 seconds, but that is our total response time. That includes the time the call taker when they get the call, it's the minute for that. It's our minute turnout time, and then the time for us to travel. So you're looking at about a 4m minute time travel time.

This is going to be this is very beneficial. I I can see that as being um you know thinking about it more regionally as a you know with with the county. I think I think that lowers the cost for all the citizens, not just the city citizens, but all the citizens as you as you work through some of these agreements. And I commend you on getting those things done. And um the automatic aid is going to impact tremendously in getting respon getting a first responder there as quickly as you can. Thanks sir. One thing I one of the biggest parts was that that chemical fire like a couple years ago that was at the water plant. Was that that was a leak? Leak. Okay.

Yes sir. Oh but I mean that brought everybody together though because then you have people come from all over on that one. Yes sir. That was another place that the automatic aid agreement with the base helped out. We were were there within a matter of minutes. They have the technical level hazmat. They were were there within 10 minutes. That's right. With a hazmat team. But that statewide mutual aid agreement got the regional hazmat team from Wilmington that the state staffs there too as well. So the resources were there and uh it's extremely beneficial.

That's that's a smart use of resources like you said. You know, you don't have to duplicate unless it's absolutely needed. Well, and I and I could see us not having to buy certain pieces of equipment, you know, and and uh it really being some cost effective measures because, you know, if you have to buy uh if you have to buy one piece of equipment here and one piece of equipment there and uh you know, with a mutual aid agreement, you can utilize that equipment and not have uh the whole all the taxpayers burden the cost.

Yeah. especially if it doesn't get used. Many times in our area, just like tankers, we don't use tankers that much, but out in the county, tankers are very critical. Maybe we just had to replace some hazmat suits. Level eight. I mean, that's a $5,000 suit.

Chief's working on multiple agreements, whether they're mutual aid and automatic aid. you. We hope to have these two that you've uh that he talked about now at the next meeting uh for your consideration and then we're going to bring additional back so that we can strengthen our response throughout the community. And the second part of that is I've said it before, when a call comes in and someone whether it's mutual or automatic, u Chief Tomman's team's going to respond and we're going to go to the distance we can to make sure that we are protecting life and safety. And I think that's something that's it's above an ISO rating. It's greater than accreditation. It's to the nature of the team that Chief has in the development of we're going to be there to save someone's life. So, back to Dr. Washington's comment, the amount of time it takes him to get there, that is not something that's just a number. It is a passionate uh career move for the last 25 plus years for Chief Tomman. And as long as he's working in this opportunity, we're going to bring more opportunities to the council to consider to say we're going to go as far as we can to save a life.

I teach the CPR classes at Coastal. So, when we're talking about response time and what um bystanders have to do until we have that advanced care for responders arriving on the scene, I can tell them, "Okay, that's amazing how much those sirens about four work from 4 to 6 minutes and hopefully JFD will be there and then there's a little support." But just train them for four to six. Dr. Washington, we'll have somebody there as fast as we can. as long as it's in the city. Outside the city, we can't say it. But

well, the police officers carrying AEDs, too. And I know the fire department does a lot to train them. And um you know, the the gap training that they're doing now. I know that they're doing things to um for those uh for those trauma injuries as well. So, stop and plead. Yeah. So, so I I commend you on on pulling all that stuff together and and making our all of our public safety officers available to to save lives. Yes, sir. Thank you. It's been a team effort. You know, I can't take the credit for it. It's been a team effort, but we talk about it all the time. When the alarm strikes, those are no longer our seconds. Those are the customer seconds.

Anybody else have any comments or questions? Thank you for your leadership. No, ma'am. We'll bring that to you at the next meeting. It's our plan to bring those two agreements to you. Okay. We're going to talk about the housing update and assistant city manager Terrell Blackman.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Uh this presentation is not going to be very lengthy. It's more about information and to just um build upon what you saw just a week ago as it relates to uh our neighborhood services uh department and what they're doing in terms of their annual action plan. Um so I'm not going to go into the weeds about DFI. We we we've seen the presentation. We've heard it. But one of the things I want uh and to be clear, DFI didn't really make recommendations. They just offered tools to us to be able to consider as it relates to uh how we enhance our affordable housing. But the fourth uh bullet down there, it talked about established affordable housing priorities for site identification and collaboration with the city of Jacksonville. And a lot of what I want to talk about in this couple of minutes is going to be about um site identification, how we partner. Uh one of the things that we've been very successful with um in our CDBG program has been um our rehabilitation program, but more importantly our single family housing development. And we're looking to try to identify ways how can we enhance our infield development and why that's important. We have uh I'm going to call them legacy neighborhoods. We have a lot of older neighborhoods in our community uh that still have homes with very good bones in them. We have seniors and people that would like to age in place and stay in their current homes. And so when there are opportunities for us to acquire lots or acquire homes in those communities, I think it's important that we go after those opportunities. uh in addition to um sometimes any

larger tracks that might be available um if it makes sense for the city. Uh I've always believed that if we own the dirt and the general statutes uh kind of gives us that authority. If we own the dirt, we can kind of control what we want to see uh in our community. Uh just as a tiein, uh just had a conversation with our public services director last week and uh I was glad to know that his staff has been keeping an inventory of uh properties that may be able to be utilized somewhere down the road for future housing as well. Uh but community development block grant, that's our primar primary funding that we're utilizing for our housing program. And again, it's to benefit low and moderate income persons, typically serving people that earn 80% or less of the area median income. I've got a slide on that I'm going to show you in just a moment. Uh but also slum and blight removal um and urgent need. But one thing that's getting ready to come down the pipeline, some legislation that uh I'm really excited about that staff is excited about is the Housing for the 21st century act. Um, and it's going to be uh it's also going it's already been passed by the house. Uh, the Senate should be passing this bill uh momentarily for the president's signature. Uh, but one of the key components of this is that it would allow our CDBG program to uh do new construction of affordable housing. That activity hasn't been available to us. We've been doing new construction, but we've been doing it uh as a reconstruction activity on existing lots. But this kind of opens the door to us to be able to expand um and utilize uh current dollars as well as program income uh to build new housing in our

communities. Uh just uh I did a tally this morning um uh with Tracy Jackson and right now we've got about eight lots available. We've got to get our inventory. We've got to get our inventory up. Again, that's whether we're buying scattered site lots or if strategically there's a parcel out there that it makes sense uh for us to acquire. What I like about scattered site is because we can uh it allows us to help families or to get units built uh quickly. When you're talking about large tracks, usually that's um set aside for multifamily housing or if we wanted to do a subdivision. The problem is by the time you get through the ER and you get through all the entitlement process, uh you could buy a nice, you know, 20 30 acres of land, but you may be sitting on it for a couple of years before we have an opportunity to even serve a family. So that doesn't mean that we don't look for those opportunities. I just don't think those opportunities are a priority right now. Uh but I think the single family infield is. But just a couple of key provisions of this act that I just wanted to mention that I thought were kind of interesting was that um it's going to issue guidelines and best practices for local zoning and land use policy. Now Ryan's going to like that because we're going to impact his UDO a little bit, but uh but certainly uh if federal and state legislation is going to give us some flexibility in how we do that, um I think that's going to be important. Which also brings me to one of the other things I thought was interesting was providing grants to local governments for pre-approved housing designs including ADUs, accessory dwellings, uh with at least 10% of funding reserve for rural areas. In essence, basically they're talking about uh uh providing us um

uh with house plans, grants for house plans, uh blueprints, uh other things that would help us with our housing design. Um we're also talking uh when you're talking about housing design, you're also talking not just affordability. Uh but you also want to talk about uh how secure in terms of uh environmentally safe is a home uh and how energy efficient the home. We talk about uh lean and green uh those types of things. Uh the last thing I'll mention about that is that it does talk about some uh reform as it relates to the VA program and uh potentially looking at excluding some disability income from uh the uh total uh household income. Uh you probably think, well, why would you want to exclude it? But for some people, it'll allow them to qualify for programs that they may not currently be able to participate in. As it relates to housing, uh the I would probably say the most uh efficient way uh of creating affordable housing for the city in the last several years has been working with our affordable housing partners. Uh as of right now, we've got 64 units. uh that are going to be going up uh uh very soon in the commons. Uh you've got 12 units uh that um East Carolina Community Development Inc. there 12 supportive units uh uh supportive housing uh plan uh units. Uh so it'll be more uh transitional supportive housing um hopefully helping some of our homeless. And then you've got Tap Development who initially contacted us about utilizing some of our dollars uh but was successful

uh and securing financing uh on their own and they're going to be building 72 more units here in the city. So uh those are opportunities for us to be able to provide um affordable housing here in the community. And I just wanted to I'm not going to go through each activity, but uh this is uh just some of the uh information that was provided to us from Pam Trafton uh when she did uh the caper just a few uh just a week ago, two weeks ago for us. Uh and what I want to do bring your attention to is um residential rehab uh for household four household um housing units. Those are the new construction units or reconstruction units that we're looking at here in the city. Uh potentially right now we're doing about two homes a year. Uh what we're hoping is with the flexibility with the CDBG program is that um we'd like to see that production go up to at least four units a year and hopefully potentially get it up um to as many as six. Uh, and as I move through, I'll I'll explain to you a couple of other ways of how I think that we can do this. This here real quickly, I just want to share with you. So, the median income for a fourperson household family uh in Oslo County is 80,800. That's the median for a fourperson household. HUD tells us that most of our programs, our CDBG, we have to serve people that are at 80% of that. That's the 64650. So, I I was just kind of curious trying to figure out what a family could afford in terms of home ownership. Uh I don't have a rental slide this evening because I I wanted to focus more on home ownership and how we're talking about

stabilizing some of our neighborhoods. Uh but if you look at that uh someone that makes 40% of the median income uh the maximum home price they can uh afford is $107,000. We don't we don't have any housing and anybody that knows this market, we don't have any housing stock in that price range. You go to the very low at 60%. General statutes tells us that to have flexibility to negotiate with the private developer on housing um at least 20% of the units that they if if we uh enter into a transaction 20% of those units have to be at 60% or below 161,600. There very few houses in our community at that point. Uh then you get to our moderate 64 650. This is sort of the plateau or the high point of our CDBG program and it's saying that the maximum home price and let me tell you I'm using the 30% rule. That's what HUD uses 30%. Uh we know a lot of people that their housing expenses are more than 30% of their gross monthly income. Uh, but I'm using HUD's uh uh numbers right now, but $215,500 and that's for a family of four that we're talking about. The reason why I I share that is because uh our next slide. That's where it puts us at right there. Uh that 200 28,650 for our second street on Anhouse that we're currently trying to sell. um at this particular time are we close to we've got interest maybe potential contract on for that

we do have some interest but we also have an open house opportunity um that Pam can share about on Friday yes Friday from 10 to 1

okay uh but I but I just want to go back for go back here for a second so uh it's median 269 333 above Uh, one of the things we're looking at tweaking our program is where we're finding gaps or actually, believe it or not, up to 120%. Because once you exceed 80%, there's no assistance for those families as it relates to helping them get into a home, the market's taking care of itself. You've you've seen the annexations, you've seen uh the subdivisions coming through. we're we're going to have, you know, easily u 1,800 2,000 new homes over the next several years. So, the market's taking care of it still, but we've got to figure out how are we going to take care of of of this population here as it relates to affordable housing. So, one of the tools that we have, and I'm not going to and I'm going to talk about it a little further down the road, is that we do have the economic impact fund uh that you all set aside for both economic development activities and for housing. And one of the things I've been talking with the neighborhood improvement services staff is uh maybe looking at expanding our activities from just land acquisition to should we do a revolving construction fund? uh that could help us actually increase our housing production from two to four if we looked at may potentially utilizing some of those dollars uh for new construction housing rehabilitation u as we've been doing and down payment assistance. Now the interesting thing about this is that this isn't CDBG dollars or program income. uh uh these are dollars that you all set aside uh from our general fund.

Some people don't like like this language, but I I have to share this with you uh as we talk about uh what is we can't and we can't do. This slide might be a little bit difficult to take a look at, but there's a flowchart that the school of government put together. It talks about determining um our statute of authority for engaging in housing development and uh it talks about will it be able to meet the need for LMI? Yes, you keep going. Um in the single undertaken are all the units reserved for LMI 80% or below that 64,000 for four person household I told you about. Um if it's yes, you keep going. If it's no, the next question is, will at least 20% be reserved for low income, 60% AMI or below? Um, if it's no, then the project's not authorized. But if it's yes, the next box, what does it say? Must exercise housing authority powers under general statute 157. And um again, uh not something people want to talk about, but I want you I don't want you to think of housing authority from a uh a physical perspective. I want you to think about it in terms of power or authority in terms of being able to exercise those tools that are there. Uh we're not going out and building housing. We're we're we're sticking to the plan. the plan that our neighborhood invest improvement services staff has put together with CDBG. Uh those powers uh don't require creating another entity. They don't require uh any of those things of council uh beyond just saying, "Hey, we want to be able to

exercise those powers to help build more affordable housing in our community." Um, so I'm going to go back to this here. And the reason why this is important, uh, we've been conveying property to some of those multifamily developers. And as long as we're selling it to them at fair market value, um, uh, we can negotiate with them directly and sell the property. But if for some reason we decide that we want to provide them with some type of subsidy or sell it for less than fair market value, we're actually exercising the power of a housing authority. And um if we haven't given ourselves that authority, we're actually not in compliance with the general statutes. Uh, city of Fyville is doing a lot of work um utilizing their city council has also set aside some dollars that can be used for affordable housing. And let me be clear, we're not talking about we're not talking about doing subsidized housing. Affordable is what someone can afford. We're not doing public housing. We're not doing subsidized housing. But the city of Fville was advised by the school of government uh that they needed to pass a resolution giving them the power to exercise the ability to negotiate with private developers directly. But again, this is a tool primarily that you would utilize for uh any property that we were going to sell or dispose of that was less than market value. But I'll throw another carrot out there. The reason why you see so many low h low-income housing tax credit developments, the multif family developments that we have is that affordable housing, it's hard to pencil. It's hard to get a return on your investment whenever you're doing affordable housing. So, one of the

things that the city of Favville has also decided was we want to use that 20% rule to maybe entice uh developers. The city of Charlotte does it. the city of Raleigh. No, we're not as large as those communities, uh, but this is what I want to share with you. If you put an RFP out there and you give the developer the opportunity that, hey, a request for qualifications and we tell them, we want you to build 10 houses for us. Uh, they say, okay, let we'll negotiate with you directly and, you know, we may even let you let you have the property for less than market value, but guess what? at minimum 20% of those units have to go to families at 60% or below. U I've I've worked in communities where if they're willing to do more than 20% they maybe their proposal is looked at a little bit more favorable because they're giving us more of what we want. But the 8020 at least allows us to talk to developers or builders and it gives them an opportunity to still be able to sell at 80. We we wish that we want the whole development to be 80% or below. But at least they have the ability that they can build units above 80 for incomes above 80% as long as they keep that 20% uh set aside. uh 20% at 60% 8 am AMI. I'm going to go to get to my last slide here. And really, I just wanted to plant some seeds this evening as it relates to uh no no action uh needed to be taken, but for your consideration, um would like for council to think about utilizing uh the economic impact funds that were set aside for housing uh to allow with neighborhood improvement services to

continue to to do land acquisition. They're already doing that to do housing rehabilitation. They're already doing that to do down payment assistance. They're already doing that. The revolving construction fund um don't currently have that. They're using program income or they're using their CDBG allocation. But again, it's re reconstruction and not new construction. What this would at least allow us to do is set aside dollars um as as as we build as we build one and sell it. Um, we're not talking about, you know, uh, we build a house, we sell it, we get the revenue, we revolve it, we can go build the next house. We're not talking about financing all of the houses that we build. We may need to be able to provide some down payment assistance, but the idea is that we will revolve those funds and in addition to what we're already doing on the CDBG side, maybe we can double our housing production. And the last thing uh just for consideration and it might might be comfortable may not be uncomfortable for some people but giving uh giving yourselves the authority to use the powers of a housing authority. You don't become a housing authority. You're still the city council, but you can adopt a resolution giving yourself that power. And our neighborhood improvement services would continue to carry out their same activities, but with a little more flexibility, especially if we use the uh economic fund that we have, utilize some of those dollars for for the program. So, that's all I wanted to leave with you uh this evening. um I can answer uh any questions uh that you may have, but I think we're moving in the right direction. And again, you know, if we own the dirt, um if we're setting the tone for what we'd

like to see in our community, uh we have the opport we have the ability to get the product that we deserve because like I said, the market rate the market's going to take care of itself that that particular housing. Uh but if we want to uh make sure that we've got stable neighborhoods and that we continue to provide affordable housing for our communities, these are just some considerations that you all may want to um uh think about as we move forward with with this year's budget and and forward. I had a question. Yes, sir. On the home that you showed that's for sale. Yeah. Is there a for forgivable second mortgage on that?

There is. How much it's to land value? So, it's going to be the land value. It's the land value. That's correct. Right. Um I want to say is 25 $30,000. And that'll be based off of the appraisal. So, the house could cost only 175 or something like that. Yes. Basically. Right. Because it's deferred, too. Yeah.

Yes. It's Yeah, it's deferred for that. That's deferred forgiven. So, um, you know, it's a creative way. And again, now you got somebody they're but they're also a taxpayer. We're talking about taxes here this evening. You know, now we've, you know, we we've got somebody we've stabilized their home life. We st we're helping stabilize the neighborhood and they're also now a a taxpayer. And if if they were renting in an affordable housing unit, it opens up one of those units for somebody else to move into.

Yeah. Well, I would certainly say that probably all of us sitting here on council um have been just laboring about affordable housing and having affordable housing for our um our citizens, particularly those in the um low moderate income category. And um this is a great presentation in helping the new council um to be able to look at the needs of our community because we know that people are still struggling and we probably are going to have those to struggle. So to be able to have um mechanisms put into place that we can address that that's always going to be within the top three priorities of the council. So, is this something that you need a motion from council to designate as a housing authority or is this something that you're going to delay for further consideration?

Um, I would I would like to delay and bring it back bring that resolution back. But let me be clear that you all gave yourselves that authority, not maybe this group years ago, then gave it to another group and then it just kind of kind of kind kind of kind of disbanded. And again, I think some of the concern was people were thinking that we're trying to create a physical public housing authority. That's not what we're trying to do here. uh we just want to be able to have the statutory powers that it has to allow us to serve more citizens because uh I I'll read one last thing to you and I will uh and I'm going to get out your way, but it says that the general assembly understands that local governments can only facilitate the creation of low and moderate income housing if they possess authority to one choose who buys government-owned property through private negotiation to ensure a capable and experienced affordable housing organization is selected as the buyer and two imposed conditions on the sale to ensure the buyer uses the property for low and moderate income housing. the authority with some important limitations has been granted to North Carolina local governments, but our ability to do it um uh uh in terms of mixed income or as a carrot to a developer to build it requires that we at least give ourselves the powers of a housing authority, but we don't have to be a physical entity in order to do that. Could you go back to that one slide that had the different percentages and I'm I'm just throwing this up for my clarity,

right? Are we basically defining affordable housing as that 60% and below? It's actually for HUD it's 80%. But but the but the other thing just this is just for um uh purposes tonight, but there's an entire chart that shows the the limits for one person all the way to seven. Does it go to seven or eight? Eight. It goes to eight.

And uh and you can look at it. But when HUD But when they're when HUD is pro or the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency is providing examples and they say, "What's the median income for our community?" They're using uh well well what what is the um median income? They're using that 8800 number. But if you're talking about for affordable housing maximum, it's the 64 650. They always they typically use a fourperson household because usually they're considering there's a mom and dad and two kids, you know, your traditional family household, but they do have those limits uh for family sizes 1 through eight because that does come into play in terms of sometimes uh uh whether a family can qualify for the program or not. It also comes into play when you're talking about rents um especially rent rent even more so than uh um home ownership. I will say the the work that that you all did downtown when I came here 20 years ago we had a neighborhood right downtown that caused a lot of challenges and the work that that you all have done that just about eliminated calls for service and and uh made that same community. um applaud your efforts that you had downtown and and even in some of the other places that you you've been working.

There'll be two follow-ups, mayor, that will bring back back to Dr. Washington's comment. The one you're going to see factored into the FY27 budget proposal based on the priorities that council gave us in terms of the increased bills. That goes back to the breakdown that Pamela showed us in the caper. uh shows that column that Terrell also showed tonight what the expected outcome and what the actual is and we want to move that barometer towards the right and then the second thing is bring back the resolution for consideration for council so you'll have those two in upcoming meetings mayor it'll be back to you thank you good presentation number 11 this is the add-on this is a name street Mayor, if you don't mind, I was just going to paraphrase a couple things based on the email that we received earlier today um just asking about amending this item for naming. What we did at the staff level was look into some of the options that council has because we've actually had two requests that have been uh sent around the community for two different people to have some places in the community named uh one for uh Mr. Brown and one for Mr. Hagen. And talked to a couple council members about different requests. And so this the council has some limitations based on council policy that's been adopted over the years in terms of naming streets that the city that are city streets naming parks and naming facilities or buildings. So the council's placed a couple limitations there based on uh the impact of that person and whether or not the person is uh living or deceased. So, that's a council policy that uh that we have and we're going to put all this information together in a in a report and send that

back out to council via email so we give you all the information. The second factor is if the council wants to name a street that's inside of the municipality for a person, then you have two options basically. One is you can if it's a city street and not a a state road, an NC DOT road, then you can vote to determine how to change that street, rename a street, or you can make that a commemorative section of a street. So commemorative, it's very interesting. The other day we went to Wilmington, um Dr. Washington and I were traveling together and we looked at a street downtown and we had the question for uh Major General McNeel McNeel and that's a section of downtown. What the city of Wilmington did is they didn't rename the street, they made it a commemorative way and so when you're in those certain blocks downtown Wilmington, it says commemorative way. uh Major General McNeel is on that sign. The addressing stays the same, but the section of town commemorates his contributions to the community, to the country, uh etc. on the on this uh instance here. So, so that's another option for the section of road which would be Henderson that Dr. Washington referred to earlier. That is a stateowned highway. And so the process for the stateowned highway is the city council would consider a resolution based on merits, based on your own policy. Then we would send that over to the district engineers office and they would then review it based on some of the factors they have. But part of the discussion we had today was is there a requirement for the petition that the property owners would buy into. With the commemorative way, you would not need any type of property owner buyin. That's something you would do on your own. Um, and so on the other side, you do want to consider that section of property

addresses that would change. And that's very important for 911 addressing. We pulled the numbers from Marine to Western there are 389 addresses. from Marine to Gum Branch there are 246 addresses. So when you think about the total number of addresses impacted that's a significant number. But the other option it gives you some flexibility to say if you want to do this here you go. I also talked to Mr. Janeiro about some other opportunities uh that we would like to present to council in terms of community recognition that that we could do. So, um, based on that request, mayor, I would I would appreciate if we're able to pull together these options based on the discussion that that the council will have today and send that back to council and see which direction you want us to go. But even today, even though Anony's not here today, he sent in a lot of this information. And so, we've passed it around. Rose has pulled up some actions that the similar action that we did on the Jacksonville bypass for uh for a segment of that highway for Dr. Martin Luther King and Kretta Scott King. Similar action by the council and I believe we did that in 2006. So we've gone through this process before um and we maintain that as a segment of a larger street, but you do have some some opportunities here.

But it doesn't affect addresses. on that section, it doesn't affect any addressing, mayor, because you're you're coming around that corner. Um, and so I think personally I I believe that Wilmington's plan and places that have used this across the country, they figured something out where there are multiple addresses. And then the only real expense that you have from a city perspective, as Wilmington did, the council actually said, "We will allocate x number of dollars to upfit and change out signage." So they have marketing signage and then they have street signage. I don't think that's something that we would it would be ridiculous on on the certain area of town. The reason Henderson, for anyone that's listening, reason Henderson is important is because that's where um Officer XY was at all those years making sure that the kids are taken care of. And so that's a very important segment of our community. Um, and I think that's a great location to do anything in recognition for his 50 60 years of

65 years of service um to the community. So 68 68 years and I think that's something that's a great opportunity. And as I said earlier, mayor, the the second request was for a section near the commons for for Mr. Hagen. And so that was something that was brought up as well in the community. I think you have two awesome opportunities for council to recognize citizens. I like the mayor's idea too of adding that to the African-American trail and uh having it having that, you know, that place there at the at the school that talks a little bit about services.

Yeah, I think that's an excellent ad to put it onto the heritage. We have an opportunity now based on some of this dialogue that we're working with the chamber to upgrade all of those um placers that we have on on Riverwalk and some other areas. And so if you could extend to here that would be that would just be awesome for the community.

That's a function of the um business diversity council at the chamber of commerce and we can submit an application for that site where he stood every day and he was a fixture there. I still drive by and try not to frown at the officers that are there now cuz they're not the right officer. You know, to have to have a sign on the um heritage trail that would be placed there, the the chamber and the business diversity council would be part of that process and it's actually the sign and stuff usually funded through the county because of that the trail kind of belongs to the their tourism section. But we can submit an application for that for sure. Um and and help facilitate the process along in any way we can to see if that could happen because I think that'd be phenomenal because kids and parents collect there at that crossing place. And so we'd have to get a piece of property either from the school system or from someone else there that we could erect a sign. But it'd be a great place for it to be seen every day by folks who are there. You know, it's great legacy reminder of that location's importance along with the the Navy. And from just as a business owner, you know, there's a lot of commercial properties of Henderson and extension. Uh changing the address of a business is is a an expensive proposition. You've got a lot of pieces that have vendor accounts and checkbooks and checks and cards and you know, all of your accounts. There's a lot involved to that. So, you know, personally, I know we're not there yet, but the idea of it being commemorative and marked, but then not having to expend, you know, there's a lot of businesses on that strip. They would have to spend a lot of money to update everything to a new address. So that would be a a factor to consider when we get to that discussion.

DOT will allow us to do that, won't they? It'll be the same request. So council would take an action through resolution. We would submit it to them. They only have a few requirements based on their state policy. Uh one being that it doesn't have a conflicting name. Two, it says that you can pull it at some point should they have something and then having local support. So, I believe that getting this request over to the district engineers's office, if council gives us the uh go-ahad, we would just have that dialogue now, mayor, and start that with DOT based on this section. Well, with Mr. Higgins, it wouldn't be the same, would it? No, that's a that's all a city

roadway. So, you wouldn't have the restriction to go through the district district office, but you would follow the same concept. And that's what we would propose, mayor, is if council would consider these, we would like to propose an update just like what we're going to send out to council based on today's date, we'd like to propose an update to council on that overall policy that would pull it all in together and we would put it procedure together that said this is what you do in the future and we would name off everything

very similar to how the the state policy is now. Can I get one? Let me get one in. Of the uh 635 homes, our businesses, what's the percentage that we need to have um in order for it to pass? 60%. Well, so initially the the dialogue was and so the whole section, don't combine those two. The whole section is a 389.

Oh, I I condensed the second number just to go to Gwestern. So the DOT standard I do not have a percentage requirement in there. So in theory until we talked to a district engineer I'm not aware of that number still being there. Historically there was a request that you would have a percentage of the property owners having the buyin. The way this is written and what what Rose and and I pulled today. I don't see that requirement. So, I'm saying in theory because I think council could pass the resolution and then the the DOT could say yes, we do that, but I hope it would be after some type of public hearing where we get the community input and we share this with the community so they're aware. One of the things that I was going to mention um in conjunction with the African-American marker trails that we have within the city of Jacksonville, often times some of those are not kept up to date. And it's really an embarrassment of the legacies um of individuals who have given their service and time. um to our communities. Um they're they're just in terrible shape and the upkeep has not been where it needs to be. And although it is a very good idea that a marker could be placed um near Northwoods Elementary School um his final rank was Lieutenant James XY Brown if I'm not mistaken. How many individuals can we honestly say that began serving the city of

Jacksonville as a volunteer and then became a full-time employee. 68 years. Just sit on that for just one minute. 68 years. Lieutenant Brown gave his service not only in uniform as a World War II veteran, but he then served in uniform for the city of Jacksonville. Don't get me wrong, an African-American trail marker is great. naming of a road is the highest accomplishment that we as the city of Jacksonville can honor him as well as any other person that would have that type of legacy, that type of impact in this community. You don't come by a Lieutenant James just by happen stance. That's a rare mold. Yeah, I would say Dr. Washington bas the way that Major General McNeel, they have it in Wilmington is not only the street, but they have the placard and that's where Mr. Yiro had commented before that if you add an additional plaque and then a previous conversation I had with Mr. Willingham, the goal would be for the city or the TDA to request to fund an upfit of all of our inside the city placers. So, we do have that estimate based on Miss Janeiro, Miss Smith's request at the meeting went to to get those upfit. And so, we would have to do that. That would have to come back to the council as well. And we do have a there is like a small well it's not small but there is

like a rectangular um yellow sign that says XY Brown crossing but um again 68 years of service needs to be more than that it and with a retirement just of December of last year he was 98 when his birthday no it was 98 it was November 2nd but okay so this November he will be 99. We owe him that.

What I love about the what's on the table now for the possible street change or even the commemorable is to additionally add that placard there um for the children to come to read. So I I think um having a combination of ways along with Mr. um to honor such citizens. I think it'd be awesome to have and um and it just adds to the culture. I mean, we're pulling people in, right? We're bringing them in. They're coming to visit. And um once those placers are updated, I think all um will appreciate what we've done as a city to recognize our citizens. Um I do have a question though for those signs. Is it is there any type of clause to uh indicate when they should be um changed out or updated?

So those aren't city owned. Okay. So the chamber county owned so they changed the county commissioners funded it through the county tourism. Okay. But they didn't have something in there as far as when they should update them. They've updated them and changed out some of them. But which has not been very consistent. It's been hit and miss. When one gets too deteriorated, it's replaced. It's kind of been um not very well structured. I think there needs to be now that we know the lifespan of one of those and when it's going to fade out and get bad looking, there probably needs to be a schedule. But that's something that we can talk to um the county tourism folks about along with the chamber and get commissioners to help fund some of that because that trail is important and it needs to be, you know, kept up.

And now they're part partnering with 910 signs to do an upfit. And so they've changed the way they do the sign. So based on previously, now they just need to be replaced. Yeah. And so we even have the estimate for the sign based on the email and I I forget the number but we have the estimate. So if we have if we have eight signs that we need to replace then it's a it's can we communicate with them and yes kind of do that. We we have so within 3 weeks we now have the number from 910 signs that says here you go and they have an install plan. And and when I say they, I've talked to Lorettte at the chamber.

H have they updated the the top of that to be more UV resistant because what was happening before is that the clear acrylic that was over it was not UV rated for direct sunlight and they kept fading out really fast and water damage too. So the screwing system. So I think it's a different partnership with 910 now that they've come up with a solution. So I agree with you. No, I don't know if they have a maintenance schedule. I just know they have a new sign sign plan that they've come up with that'll more more reliable or more uh durable do this design

for the um what was it businesses homes what was it 2 or3 389 389 do we know how many of those are businesses we do I just can't tell you that right Now, I apologize.

We can pull all that information. I just think that the I think the process for us when we talk about communicating back to the community and being transparent is we put together if council says this, we put together the reach out. We do a direct mail. We tell people council's going to consider it. We we get their input and then we hold um it doesn't require a public hearing. We post it. We advertise it and we try and get some community input. I think based on your point of anything we do needs to be advertised because of the impact of the individual. Why would we not why would we not promote this just like Lisa popping up X file on the screen?

They come down to crazy little things like now I got to get a new driver's license. Yeah. So, do we need a motion from council to give you um direction to begin the process with um DOT to find out? If you're good with consensus, mayor, you just

that's the direction we want you to go in. We don't we don't need to encode it. I'll do the report getting back what I've got and we'll reach out to DOT directly and then I'll follow up with Lorett on the finalized and we'll put it all together that we bring it back to you. But I'll send that to you in an email now. I'm not going to wait till the next council meeting. I'm just going to send you the report that we pulled together today. Put it in report format, send it to you, and then we can have some dialogue. But we'll go ahead and start talking to DOT about that section. Right. Yes, the report will, but that won't be for DOT cuz it's city. What part of the comments was it for him? Talk about the loop. So,

so that's not affected any two roads off, but that loop what I would say it's the loop around what I call Lake Bitner. Or you could change the spit. That was my loop now. You got there's other there's other conditions we don't want to talk about, man. Not We we like having you here.

Two things. Um the support of the property owners. Um, if there is a requirement for petition and a certain percentage, what I want to know is what can council's role be in that if we're looking at having a public hearing? Um, you know, legislative, adjudicative, that kind of issue. Mhm.

Um what can we do if we support the idea uh that won't that that still leaves a bare and open public hearing? Um the other thing is that in your report I I think you need to put some history on Henderson. I don't know how that name was derived but that might be something that's germanine. Uh, hadn't even thought about that one, but I'll I'll see. Good point. You know what I'm saying? So, that's all I have.

Okay. Do you have one? I do have a one city. Okay.

That leads Yeah. XY will lead right into a few items that I've got on one city moment, mayor. So, uh, thanks for the opportunity here. The city did host the Chamber of Commerce leadership class. They visited the city of Jacksonville. That was last week, I believe. I think everybody that's here had some uh period of time that they spent with them. There's 15 class members, and we have three city staff that are joined in that process this year. Nancy Ortiz, Jennifer Ansel, and Megan Carter are all in the class. Uh so, we were very excited. Uh, a lot of us were able to talk to the students and you see on the bottom we we even had them down to Sturgeon City. In the top left, you're going to see some of the renovated marina park property that we have. They're in the brand new pavilion that that council has pushed forward here in the process. Uh, they found a big dog to take a picture of throughout their day. Um, and we were able to get them to a real dog and to to be able to understand what we do with community oriented policing and how our our community officers are active. Uh, Mr. Massie started talking and she grabbed an axe. I don't know what happened, but I was nowhere close to what was going on.

But I understand. I know. Within four minutes. There's no way there's nobody in this room that doesn't understand why she grabbed a weapon. Mayor,

I think I understand. And then this is them at the station. The point is this is a partnership with the chamber to allow community members to understand what we do in local government and then for our people to go out and to spread that news throughout the community and be a part of of the program. We always want to send people to be a part of the program because having graduates there gives us that connection with the chamber of commerce. For a lot of you, you were there last night. We had our city longevity. We did have to postpone it from before because there was this weather event, but for the people that could make it, we recognized so many different employees last night of of 5 years, uh, 10, 15, 20, 25, and then we also had this fantastic group of of three who had 40 years of service to our uh to our community. I don't know why they're wearing these gloves on their right hand, but it's something they came up with. It's a It's a beautiful process, but they were they were fantastic. Miss Helen did not want to do any moon walking. So, I think she was as nervous as I was last night. But but like Dr. Washington said, anytime you can recognize people for years of service, whether they've made it 5 years with our community, which is twice as long as the national average in a job right now, or they make it 40 years, um Miss Adams, Miss Thompson, Mr. Lewis, fantastic. We did have three council members in the middle, but it looks like only Mr. Yiani and Mr. Willingham were there. I don't know. I don't know who the rest were there. Mayor, let me tell you, whoever was in the middle was the loudest group that I've heard in a really long time. I don't know who's back there, but fantastic opportunity. And then the last thing I have, mayor, 20 years ago today, so 20 years ago,

congratulations. This group of folks came out on the balcony in city hall to watch TV for some reason because G10 television was launched. It serves Jacksonville and also it still serves the city and the county and the surrounding communities today. And as we say, it is public television that continues in an age when public television uh has struggled. And we put a lot of time, energy, and effort into that process, into making sure that we get news out, we get information out. This group here, uh, Mayor Slaggel is here, um, city council members Lazara, um, Mayor Phillips, Mr. Blunt is there, county commissioners Buchanan and Collins, and then also, as we mentioned earlier, city manager at the time, Mr. Hagen. So all of these uh great people just came to watch TV on the balcony, but they did it for a reason. It's because today, 20 years ago, G10 was launched and we're still using it and it's going strong. So that's an excellent, excellent job by the community then and by you now to support this as we try to get information out to our citizens in any way possible.

And Mr. Ray, before you conclude, can you go back to the 340? One more. And 66.66% of your 40 years is related to the police department. That's right. 2/3 those people there serving on the side of Mr. Lewis. And I heard and I heard on the word on the street is a guy on the right of the screen might have served for 41 or two years in public safety. I don't I can't prove that, but um he keeps saying he serves some community in Virginia or Tennessee. So,

and I'm pretty sure they would attest that Lieutenant Brown helped pave the way for them. That's all I have. Thank

I