City Council - Regular Meeting

It's 5.30, I'm calling this meeting to order. And to start off, those that would like to participate can stand for the invocation, and then we will go to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Before we begin, let us reflect on the purpose of public government. May those entrusted with authority remember that public office is not a private privilege, but a public trust. May decisions that affect the community be made in the light of public scrutiny whenever possible and not hidden from the people who must live with their consequences. May courage prevail over convenience, openness over secrecy, and accountability over avoidance. May those who serve the city welcome questions, tolerate disagreement, and recognize that transparency is not a burden, but a duty. Let us remember that democracy functions best when citizens can witness, understand, and participate in the decisions made on their behalf. May tonight's deliberations be conducted with honesty, integrity, and respect for the public's right to know. Thank you.

and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

You may be seated. Thank you. So Sherry, when you're ready, please take the roll.

Council Member Reid.

Here.

Council Member Galloway. Council Member Hoffman.

Here.

Council Member Dupree. Here. Council Member Kavanagh. Here. And Mayor Foote.

Here. First item would be consent agenda part one. Is there a motion to receive consent agenda part one? Move the consent agenda.

Second.

Any questions or comments? Sherry, take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid.

Yes.

Council Member Hoffman. Yes. Council Member Duprey. Yes. Council Member Cavanagh.

Yes. Next is consent agenda part two. Is there a motion to approve?

Move. Part two is consent agenda. Second. I'd like to make a comment if I could. So there's three items here, nine, 10 and 11. Nine and 11, I would vote against, but number 10, I'm not against. I'd vote for that, but I think that it's not worth pulling it out because I'm sure it'll pass as it needs to. So I just want to make that comment that number 10, I wouldn't be opposed to, but I will be voting no against that part two agenda.

Okay. Any other questions or comments? Okay, Sherry, take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid?

No.

Council Member Hoffman? Yes. Council Member Dupre? Yes. Council Member Cavanagh?

Yes. Next, we have a motion to approve the agenda. Move to approve. Second. Sherry, take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid? Yes. Council Member Hoffman? Yes. Council Member Dupre?

Yes.

Council Member Cavanagh?

Yes. And with that, I will turn it over to Administrator Rath.

All right, thank you, Honorable Mayor. We have a few things, different presentations here tonight. Before we get to those, I just wanted to follow up from last meeting. During last week's discussion regarding the city administrator's goals, the question was raised about how the city council might support efforts to improve employee morale. After reflecting on that conversation and considering feedback and observations from staff interactions, I'd like to offer the following suggestions for consideration. Strengthen communication and collaboration. Consider establishing or reestablishing regular opportunities for city council members, the mayor, and city administrator to meet and discuss ongoing initiatives, challenges, and opportunities. These conversations could enhance communication, provide greater context regarding policy decisions and priorities, and create a forum for constructive dialogue. Increased understanding of the rationale behind initiatives may help foster alignment and engagement without allowing for discussion of practical considerations, constraints, and alternative approaches. Maintaining focus on the city's mission and service to the community. Local government plays a unique role in providing essential services that directly affect residents' daily lives. Maintaining a focus on serving the needs and interests of the entire community can help reinforce a shared sense of purpose among elected officials and staff. Recognizing the distinct responsibilities and challenges of local government may also strengthen collaboration and organizational cohesion. Support clear roles and responsibilities. A clear understanding of the respective roles of elected officials and staff contributes to effective governance and operations. The City Council and Mayor provide policy direction through legislation, strategic priorities, and budget decisions, while staff are responsible for implementing those decisions and managing day-to-day operations. Routing operational requests through the City Administrator and encouraging employees to work through established supervisory channels helps promote consistency, accountability, and efficient communication. Four, recognize and support professional expertise. Department heads and staff bring valuable professional knowledge and experience to their respective areas of responsibility. Continued recognition of their expertise, including consideration of competitive compensation, professional input, and technical recommendations can contribute positively to employee engagement and retention. Additionally, addressing concerns constructively and maintaining a respectful tone during public discussions can help foster a culture of mutual respect and professionalism. And last, reinforce the city's core values. The city's core values of teamwork, accountability, continuous improvement, and open communication provide a strong foundation for organizational success. Encouraging collaboration between elected officials and staff during the development of new or revised policies can lead to more effective outcomes and smoother implementation. Open dialogue regarding the objectives and intended impacts of policy changes allow staff to better understand and communicate those changes, helping to build trust and reduce uncertainty throughout the organization. These suggestions are offered in the spirit of supporting a positive workplace culture, strengthening collaboration between elected officials and staff, and advancing the city's mission of serving the community effectively. Thank you. And I'll forward that on to all the council members and the city clerk to be in the packet here. And with that, I'd like to invite representatives from Bridgeview Center Inc. forward. I believe they want to provide us with a check.

Good evening, I'm Rhonda Conrad, and I'm here tonight with Katherine Kerrigan and Diane Haas. I want to thank you for allowing us to participate in tonight's agenda. As many of you are aware, the Bridgeview Center aims to be the leading venue for entertainment, meetings, and special events. in our region, driving growth and enhancing the profile of Ottumwa and Wakala County. During the 2025 fiscal year, the BBC significantly contributed to the local economy with an $11.1 million impact, welcoming nearly 80,000 visitors for 374 distinct events. As members of the Bridgeview Center Incorporated Board, we view this facility as a vital community asset and are grateful for the city's ongoing partnership and support. This evening, we are pleased to present the city with a $150,000 contribution from the BBC Incorporated Endowment, which was created at the time of the facility's construction. This latest gift increases our total support to the city to $2,105,000 since 2009. I also want to highlight the Capital Improvement Fund, which was established in 2019 to support necessary upgrades and replacements for our aging building. Similar to the original endowment, up to 6% of the fund's balance can be used annually for capital improvements to supplement the city's maintenance fund. Thanks to the generosity of donors, $978,000 has been contributed to date, and expenditures began once the invested balance surpassed the $1 million threshold. These resources have already facilitated several key projects. repairs to the movable walls in five conference rooms, maintenance on the loading dock doors and two hoists, creation of a dedicated fund for carpet replacement, matching funds for a grant to modernize the 12-year-old A equipment in the exhibition halls. Once again, I want to thank you for your time this evening and for your support of the Bridgeview Center. And we have the check. Whoever wants it.

Okay. Okay.

That makes a film.

All right, thank you for your contribution. And next I'll invite up, let's see, we've got Iowa Primary Care Associations, Iowa PCA. Is it Sarah, is it Berndt? Did I say that right? Perfect, all right. And here to talk about Behavioral Health Administrative Service Organization and Iowa PCA System Navigation Services. And I see Jim Stevenson's also with you. I am.

Yes, he has a lot of information to share that I think is very important. So thank you very much for letting us come and talk to you about what the work Iowa Primary Care Association is doing and has been doing for the last about a year. I'll go to the next slide. So this is just who represents your local Iowa Primary Care Association staff. And that is myself as the district leader and Jim Stevenson as our senior lead system navigator. We also have three system navigators who take phone calls from the public looking for services and other supports in the community. This is just our senior leadership team. We're not gonna go over them by name, but we wanted to share that with you in the packet. So we just wanted to talk about Iowa Primary Care's role in behavioral health. We want to help you understand the need for system navigation, accessing navigation referral pathways. I want to talk a little bit about the district advisory council, and then we did a recent behavioral health system statewide plan and assessment, and I wanted to go over the key themes that we found for District 6, and if there are any questions.

You can skip that.

So on July 1st, 2025, Iowa Primary Care began their work as the Behavioral Health Administrative Service Organization. The goal was to make it easier for all Iowans to access the help that they need, no matter where they wanted to go for support. We wanted to create consistent pathways for accessing services. We want to build and expand the services across the continuum of care that we work in. And we want to use existing funding more effectively towards outcomes. And then our goal was also to streamline administrative work. So Iowa Primary Care Association is actually a nonprofit organization. It started in 1988 and it was developed or created to support Iowa's community mental health centers. There are 14 of them across the state. The community mental health centers focused on medical services, behavioral health services, prescriptions and dental for folks. And so as I thought about why Iowa Primary Care would bid for a behavioral health administrative service organization, it began to make sense to me. I see the community health centers as being that safety net service for folks in the medical field. And with Iowa Primary Care doing the behavioral health administrative service organization services, it really allows us to look at whole person care and the work that we're doing. Next slide. So under the system, we have a district leader and a senior lead system navigator and then our system navigators. And District 6 starts up in Benton County and it kind of cascades down and it ends in Appanoose and Lee County. So we currently contract with about 128 organizations for sustainability services and then the services that fund our continuum of care. And our continuum of care is in safety net services of prevention, early intervention, treatment, recovery, and crisis. These contracts fund across six program areas. We have some unique services that we fund. Co-responder model, which is where a behavioral health professional will respond with law enforcement to a 911 crisis call. That is not completely throughout the state, but there are areas in the state that have that service. We do have in all of the county jails across the state a service where our primary care through ITP Flow State provide prescriber time to the jails for those folks with behavioral health support needs. And then we also pay for the prescribed psychotropic medications for those individuals. And then we have a school-based behavioral health program where students can meet with a behavioral health counselor via telehealth while they're at school. Hazel Health and Classroom Clinic are the two contracted providers that provide that service. And the nice thing about that service is that it can continue on through the summer as long as the child has access to a computer and internet. And then we support some substance use services. The substance block grant is a substance abuse service block grant that helps with access and sustainability to substance use treatment disorder services. Tobacco community partnerships focuses on people not starting to smoke or helping them cease smoking. There's smoking community mental health centers we support. And then we continue to support crisis services, peer operated services. And then in a few places across the state, there is a program assistance in transition from homelessness called PATH.

Pardon me. Again, this is Jim Stevenson. I'm the senior lead system navigator for system navigation. So basically, it's just a long title to say I'm in charge of the navigators. So the challenge of system navigation is it can be a pretty complex system. I equate it to calling an automated line, and it's push one for this, and two for that, and three for this. And none of the options make sense, and you never seem to get a hold of a person. And so it can be complicated. You don't know who to call. Do I need a mental health provider? Do I need substance use? Do they take my insurance? What hours are they? You know, that kind of fun stuff. Now, you add into that if you're going through a mental health crisis and you need to find that, it makes it even more complicated. If you're in the middle of a substance abuse issue going on, it makes it even more complicated. And so we try to make it less complicated by being that one point of contact that you can get a hold of. Go ahead. So we do that by partnering with an organization called Your Life Iowa. That is a 24-7 service, and they route all the calls from the general public to us. They put them through a screening first to make sure they're not in crisis. So if anyone calls them and they're in a crisis, they will deal with that right then and there and get them the emergency help they need. If they are not in crisis, then they get transferred to a system navigator. Once they get a hold of a navigator, then that client has our number, has our contact information, email, everything. And we are now the person they get a hold of if they have any questions. So we will take their call. We'll find out what they need, mental health, substance use, housing, transportation, whatever it is. And we will find them to get them connected to the services that they're looking for. Okay, go ahead. So I'll read this one, because it's important that people understand what we do and what we don't do. We provide extensive information, education, and guidance. We offer application assistance for services. Because trying to fill out a Medicaid form while you're on your phone with only a few minutes left on your plan and you don't have any other Internet, it can be difficult. And so we do that for them. We identify options to overcome barriers of access. We support during key transitions, like someone getting out of prison and while they were there, they don't have a place to live anymore. You know, or how am I going to get my medication now that I'm leaving prison? Because Florida State doesn't handle that afterwards. So we will find those key transitions. And we provide referrals and warm handoffs to appropriate providers and long-term services. We ourselves are not a long-term service. We connect people to the long-term. So the things we don't do, we do not provide treatment. We do not prescribe medication. We do not provide counseling. And we are not a crisis service. Now, if a call turns into a crisis, we have training to how to get them the services they need, but our primary purpose is not crisis. So to get a hold of Your Life Iowa, if you're part of the general public, supporters, caregivers, you do not have to be the person that's looking for help. You can be someone who knows someone that needs help. You can call the 855 number. You can text them if you want to. If you don't want to do that, you're on the internet, you want to chat, you can go to their website and use the chat function. They'll get you through that screening and get you connected to a system navigator. So providers and partners, so crisis people, hospital people, lawyers, doctors, anybody in the law enforcement has called us. I've had firemen call us. We have a separate number. It's the 8988 number. And here's the irony because of my speech. It does ask you one question. It is automated, but it only asks one question. What district do you want to connect to? And so put in District 6, because that's the district we're in, and it will connect you with a system navigator from 8 a.m. to 4.30 p.m., Monday through Friday, for us. You can leave a voicemail, and then we'll answer that the next day. But that will connect you without having to go through the screening, because we are making the assumption when you call us, you're not in a crisis. Otherwise, hopefully, you know who to call. So go ahead. The other thing we do is all our navigators have an onsite location. So everyone we hire will be in two days in a community that's within a half hour, 45 minutes of their home base, because typically we work from home on the phone, and they will have an onsite location for walk-ins. So if people want to meet someone face-to-face, then we can do that. We offer that for each navigator at one location, two days a week. So currently I just got done with a meeting with CETA in Ottumwa to place another navigator in this town. So hopefully that'll work out. What makes us unique? We hire system experts. We hire people that already have some experience or education, or preferably both, in the Bay Area health field. I myself came from substance abuse counseling before I transitioned over to system navigation. But we hire people from HHS, from the MCOs, so Medicaid people, so they know how that system works. So we have people that know already how to work the system, how to get around it, who to call, what questions to ask. We are a brief, focused intervention. So we're designed for short-term support. We connect people with the long-term. So we also offer a low-barrier, no-cost option because we're entirely free. We don't care what kind of insurance you have or how much you make. If you need help, you call us. We do a broad reach. We can support both individuals seeking services directly, or we can get a hold of professionals, family members, school counselors, anybody. We don't restrict who can contact us for assistance. And we're designed for rural areas. So we bridge the gap in care. Because we're Go Through Your Life Iowa and we're on the phone, you can reach us pretty much any time. And a system navigator will get a hold of you. We also have the on-site locations for anyone. We can't do it in every county, but we try to spread it around to see where we can get them. Here's some data. I'll give you some summaries of that, and you can look at it in more detail. There's three pages of data.

Pardon me.

If you add them up, someone will grab a calculator. This lady over here took pictures, can probably do it. Total, since we've started in July of last year, we have taken 40,643 calls. That's in and out. That's people calling us and us calling for referrals. The number of calls that we've taken is right around 12,000. It's 11,911 that we've taken through April. And the number... Huh?

Directly from the community.

Yes, those are community calls. So those could be people, anybody looking for a referral, anybody looking for assistance. And the outgoing calls, these are us calling for that assistance to find the right person, is 28,732. So our numbers keep getting bigger and bigger and we keep getting busier. Okay. Okay. That gives you a few more. The top three, there's several of the topics up there, but the top three we get are for mental health referrals, housing, and substance use. The mental health one through, again, April is 4,000 calls just for that. I need help with mental health services in some way, shape, or form. And then your role in supporting is kind of doing what you're doing right now. Listen to us. Find out what we do. We have flyers. We have contact information. I have my card.

We have Your Life Iowa cards that if you know someone that needs help, you can just hand them the card.

Call these people, you know, and that will give them the help, and we'll provide that with you as well. But that's how it makes a difference is we can work together to help solve some of these issues, you know, get people connected to the resources that they need. Okay.

Each district has a district advisory council. District six has a fully seated advisory council. You can see where our advisory council members are located across the state. And from Wapolo, Christina Shark with Southern Isle Mental Health Center sits on our district advisory council. Member roles, we have three elected public officials. So we have an elected board of supervisor. We have two elected sheriffs that represent the elected officials. We have three folks with lived behavioral experience. One of those individuals is a parent or a guardian of a child with behavioral health service needs. And then our other lived experience person is a Veterans Affairs Director out of Iowa County. So it's nice to have somebody that represents our veterans on our District Advisory Council. And then we have three individuals with behavioral health expertise or education. Typically that means that they're from the provider array and that is where Christina Sharks seat is on the district advisory council. And then we have one law enforcement member and that law enforcement member specifically is Sheriff Jared Snyder out of Washington County. The responsibilities of the district advisory council really are to advise Iowa primary care and the behavioral health that we're working, and to be a connection to their counterparts in the community and bringing that back to Iowa primary care for us to use this information as we develop our policies and as we address gaps in behavioral health care. Our next District Advisory Council is June 22nd. They are quarterly. It is from 1 to 2.30 in the afternoon on Monday, June 22nd. It is a hybrid meeting, so you can attend that via a Zoom link or you can attend it in person at the Oskaloosa Public Library. And that is the link to our District Advisory Councils with more information.

You can skip that.

So we did our district assessment and the key themes that we came away from that with were the strengths. So we have highly committed providers in general in district six. We have strong community awareness of system gaps and opportunities. And with that, I like to say, it's not just that people are aware of it, but they communicate that with us regularly. So we know exactly where we need to focus our efforts. And then we have providers that are willing to collaborate and adapt and to work side by side with each other to meet the folks that we are serving in the community. Our opportunities, you're gonna see this referenced a lot across the three tabs here. We really need to expand peer support and recovery infrastructure and provide additional support after crisis encounters. We need to clarify roles and improve use of mobile crisis response. And then when I talk about recovery, I like to liken that to most people think when somebody has gone into a residential treatment program, 30, 60, 90 days, when they come out, they have been helped and they are ready to continue on in their communities. And Oftentimes, after you've been through treatment, there are situations where there might be a step back. And so we really need to focus on providing recovery supports for folks with addictions. And that is something that they will address for the rest of their lives. We also need to, again, consistent use and understanding of mobile crisis services. And we do not have any established recovery community centers down in this area of our district. We do have drop-in centers or rural recovery centers for folks with mental illness, but we really don't have a service that focuses on folks with addiction. And then transportation and workforce limitations are, that is pretty much a barrier across the state. That is not something that our primary care can address ourselves, but we can work with transportation providers, the MCOs, HHS, to really take a look at that and see how we improve access to transportation for all of our communities. And then we need to, again, clarify role confusion because there is still role confusion with what our system navigation does, what maybe the mental health centers do, what's the ER supposed to do. So we really need to work a bit harder at helping everybody understand each player's role in this system and how to most effectively access that. So we welcome you to participate in the district advisory councils. We always have 20, excuse me, 15 minutes at the end of each session for public comment. Please reach out to Jim or myself. Our contact information is later in the slide. We definitely believe that as we work together, we're going to be stronger together. Go ahead. And then your feedback is valuable. Jim and I are going to leave our cards. I'm going to leave some cards with more district advisory council information. So please, if anything comes up after this, please reach out to us. We will absolutely be delighted to help you. Some key contacts. The first two probably aren't pertinent here. If you have general questions, there is a general information email, but Jim and I would prefer that you would reach out to us. And then we do have a monthly newsletter that you can sign up for. And then the next slide is just our information again.

All right, thank you for your presentation.

I will now call up Mark Rowe, Executive Director for Greater Tama Partners in Progress, and he is going to provide the quarterly update.

Mayor, Council, good evening.

Am I pointing this way or this way?

Okay, perfect. So I never promised that I would always come here and give good news, but I always try to wrap some good news up in it. Just to start off with, following the same pattern that I usually give with these meetings, I talk about the general economic conditions of the community, then we'll go into the actions that GO-PIP has taken along the way. Starting off with the year-to-date real estate market, we are seeing a little bit of a downward dip as compared to last year. Same time, we're averaging about $135,000 on property sales, and that's down about 8% over the same period last year. There's a few reasons for that, especially when you're looking at the number of days on the market. Those days on the market are starting to extend out just a little bit as well. Primarily, we're looking at, quite honestly, a lagging national economy that is causing people to be a little bit more reserved about purchasing homes going forward. Interest rates are still high. This time last year, our interest rates were somewhere between 6 and 6.6%, depending on the month that you were looking at. This year, those rates have come back down a little bit. They're about 5% right now. We also are seeing about 4% inflation rate year over year as well. So people are just being a little bit more closely guarded with their money right now. And unfortunately for us, that means housing is going, the sale of housing is going to go down just a little bit as well. Looking at the housing inventory in Ottumwa specifically, and I wanna focus in on this a little bit now, and then we'll talk about it a little bit again later. This is the data for the housing inventory in Ottumwa in 2025, and then where we're at 2026. There's a lot of zeros in 2026, but I'm gonna argue right now that that's probably a good thing. We didn't have a lot of new home builds and new apartment builds last year in 2025. However, as you can see, we still were underwater for the year for demolitions and condemnations. That's where I say that having those zeros in 2026 so far is probably a good thing because we're not going backwards yet. And we'll talk a little bit more about this again later. But right now we're sitting roughly, I know that that's a fluid number depending on the day of the week, but as last time I asked Jake, we're sitting at 148 placarded homes. And this is a little piece of information that's just interesting. It's kind of indicative of the housing market in Ottumwa and really plays into the general economic conditions of Ottumwa. I pull a lot of this information, number one, from, again, Jake, but also from Ottumwa Water Works. And I think that the information that we're getting from Ottumwa Water Works is a little bit telling. Looking at the housing in Ottumwa, you can see that number's following trend with the houses that came off of the market last year. But where I'd like to focus in on here just a little bit is the housing units that have idle water meters on it. we see that number starting to creep up. There are several addresses in Ottumwa that have been idle for years. So those aren't really the ones that concern me. The ones that concern me are the ones that are coming on or actually going off, the water is turning off and then not coming back on. So we're starting to see that number creep up just a little bit. So I think that that's something that we probably ought to be cognizant of as we move forward in looking at the general economic welfare of the community. The rest of this information, nothing has changed as far as the median house age in Ottumwa. Looking at workforce, and here's where we start seeing some interesting stuff. Looking at April, which is the most recent data that we have available to us from Iowa Works, we see some good things and some bad things in this. First of all, we see that the unemployment rate is going down year over year. We were at 3.5% in April of 2025. We're at 3.1% in April of 2026. As you can see, we're kind of in line with what the rest of the state is in as far as unemployment number goes and with the country as well. I don't really like to focus on the unemployment rate. That's just what everybody knows. I think that the more important rate that we need to look at is the labor participation rate. Those are the people that are actually working and actually seeking work in the community. And that's more holistic than what just the unemployment rate is. Right now, we're sitting at about 62.7% for a labor participation rate, which is in line with the United States. However, as you can see from this, we're significantly below the state average of 67%. Now, we are up over last year, but The math gets a little bit tricky here because if you look down at the bottom, there are actually less jobs available this year as compared to last year. So that artificially skews that labor participation rate just a little bit. So those job reductions are primarily from layoffs that have happened over the last year in a couple of major manufacturers. I won't bother getting into who those are, but I think everybody pretty much knows at this point. And again, to the point of the labor participation rate, and here's really kind of where the rubber meets the road. This data was pulled from Iowa Works just this last week. So we're looking at the labor shed for the Wapello County market. Right now there are over a thousand job openings in Wapello County. that are registered with Iowa Works. So obviously there's more than that. The interesting piece about that though, the current number of registered job seekers is half. So if we were just looking at that data, If every one of those people got jobs, we would still be short people in Wapello County. Now, obviously, those 500, and here's where we start getting into the muddiness of this, all 525 people can't get jobs in all 1,000 of those jobs because a lot of those jobs require jobs. trade certifications, degrees, things like that, which several of those people probably are high school graduates. And looking at the chart there, that kind of proves that out. We have a considerable amount of people in Wapello County, over 96% of of the people that are going through high school graduate. So we have a great graduation rate and we actually have a fairly strong number of high school graduates in the county. However, once you get past high school to get into those technical degrees, and get into college degrees, then we start to see a skills gap develop. So this is one of the things that our organization, and again, we'll talk about this a little bit later, but this is one of the things that we have decided that is important to the community is what does the next five years look like in the manufacturing environment, in the professional environment, in the trades environments, because there's clearly a gap that's widening every time we look at this data. And then I don't think that this is gonna be any surprise to anybody, but here are the top 10 employers and just note the top five employers are making up a substantial amount of the current city employment. JBS obviously occupying almost 18% of the working population of the city of Ottumwa. There's good news. The good news is we have seen business continue to grow. Every year for the last two years, and this being number three, I've been able to come to the city council and say we have seen positive job growth in the community. And this year is no different. We've seen 1.8% growth, 25 to 26 in business growth. And we are finally at a level now that we can dig down into the data and find out exactly who it is that's starting the businesses, which is something that we haven't been able to do before. So you guys, this is the first time that anybody's seeing this data. But of the 33 new businesses, 76% of those businesses were small business ownership. And I think showing the entrepreneurial spirit of the city of Ottumwa, this is not only important, but it's something that the community really should be proud of, that we're able to grow from within instead of relying on some corporate conglomerate to come to the community and quote unquote save us. And of that, 30% of those businesses were woman owned and 28% of those businesses were minority owned. So just great information and just shows the, again, the entrepreneurial spirit of the community and the growth that we're seeing in the community from a business perspective is almost solely because of small businesses. And then just one thing that I like to throw in here, we get this information annually from retail strategies and these are the areas of opportunity gaps that we have and this is where when we're talking about retail recruitment in the community, this is pretty much the areas where we're going to focus our recruitment efforts. Why is that? Because these are the areas, these specific business areas, these are the areas where we can prove that people are using 52501 credit cards and going somewhere else and spending their money. So these are the millions of dollars of gap that there is between what we have available and what's being spent somewhere else. So obviously, it's no surprise to anybody, food service and restaurants would be at the top of that list. Health and personal care, clothing and accessories, those are right at the top of that list as well. So as we're looking for major retailers to come to the community, these are the areas primarily that we would be focusing on. So to focus on what GO-PIP has been working on over the last few months. Some of the events, this has been arguably one of our busiest years as far as event production goes. We started off our year with an agribusiness summit which really focused on the largest business sector in Wapello County agriculture. We held a summit at Bridgeview Center at the beginning of the year, and we brought in state experts to talk about number one, the economy, number two, the state of agriculture, and number three, which I personally think might be the most important issue, is what that succession planning looks like as some of the older farmers matriculate out and bring in the next generation of farmers so we can preserve that farmland and those family businesses moving forward. Next, right on the heels of it, about a week later, we did our annual Lean In Women in Leadership Conference, which we were happy to host about 200 people at Bridgeview Center. You're going to hear Bridgeview Center a lot here, sorry. And we were really happy to have another successful year of that. We made some incremental changes to it to bring more programming and more education into the event. So next year will be even bigger and better than this one. The biggest bragging success that we have this year is the Ottumwa International Film Festival, which was sanctioned by Iowa Economic Development Authority this year as a state-sanctioned film festival. We were welcoming films from three different nations to participate in the festival. and we saw visitors from across the United States to take part in the event. Ironically, we had, our name was, the city of Ottumwa was put on a map. Somebody in Dubuque actually just happened to walk past the Dubuque Convention Center and saw Ottumwa. They had a film festival, and they just decided to make the drive down here for the weekend to visit Ottumwa because there was a film festival here now, so... We were pretty happy when we heard that story from them. And then my personal favorite, which I think is the culmination and the highlight of the mission of our organization, the spirit of entrepreneurship, Lemonade Day Youth and Entrepreneurship. We completely rearranged how that event works this year because we had grown to the point where we physically couldn't get our judges out to the number of stands that the kiddos were at. This year we front-ended all of the judging. That way we could welcome anybody who wanted to take part in Lemonade Day. We were able to increase the number of community stands. And I'm really happy to say, and this is just a moment of applause for all of the students that take part in lemonade day that just as a reminder to everybody is third through fifth graders so they're just now learning what the spirit of giving back to their community really means uh that those kiddos absolutely crushed the sharing portion of of uh lemonade day and they completely shattered the records of giving back to the community that they had last year so i couldn't be more proud of of the kids that took place and that took part in that this year Oops. Going back to the retail gap, we're talking about retail recruitment. The areas that we are looking at right now, obviously the main focus that we're looking at is 50,000-ish square feet that still needs to be occupied at the old Target Box out on Quincy Avenue. We are looking at those companies that are complementary to Ollie's. That will probably be the main focus of major retail investment in the community over the next 12 to 18 months is trying to fill out that space. And then obviously, securing franchisees has been a topic of conversation, not only locally. Late last year, GoPip held a franchisee seminar here in Ottumwa. Following up on that, we have worked with Retail Strategies and the Legacy Foundation to try to figure out what it's gonna take to get some local franchisees to invest the city of Ottumwa there are some unique challenges with that when we're talking about the national franchisees sometimes they might approve the Ottumwa market but they also want five additional markets so what would be a two hundred thousand dollar investment all of a sudden becomes a million dollar investment because they're wanting other markets as well so but that doesn't mean that we're not going to stop trying in the meantime Looking at commercial and industrial development, I've probably said this a million times, marketing the Helgerson Flats. One of the challenges that we see out in that area is energy. So we have been meeting very regularly with, number one, our state representatives to figure out how we can get energy energy, number one, the production, and number two, the infrastructure out to the site. We have made some gains with Alliant Energy in getting them to the table and talking with us, and there'll be more to come on that. With the development of a new 345 kilovolt line that's coming through with ITC over the next several months, it provides a unique opportunity, especially where this site is strategically located. to bring in an electrical high-end electrical user to the site and then looking forward past that what does what does the future look like going north of the the atomwa industrial park which corresponds coincidentally with the 2040 comprehensive plan for the city of atomwa

Mark, could I ask a question? Absolutely. Is there anyone or any group working on access to Helgerson's flats? Absolutely.

Great question. That is something that actually GO-PIP, OEDC, Atomic Economic Development Corp, prior to GO-PIP, we've been working on since about 2015. We have had multiple conversations with the Iowa Department of Transportation, most recently up until about, Phil, correct me if I'm wrong, the main conversations were going on up to about a year, year and a half ago. The issue with the site specifically is any sort of a ditch creates what the Department of Transportation considers no access, and on either side of there, there's no access. There was a traffic study done at Tomah Industrial Park a few years ago, and basically it said there was no need for any new roads out there. So the original conversations with the Department of Transportation The DOT just basically walked away from it because they said there's really no use for more road access out there. However, there was an opportunity that came up in late 2022, early 2023. with a potential buyer for Helgerson Flats, and it would have been critical to have that access. So we reopened conversations with the Department of Transportation, who at the time were very willing to talk to us because of the nature of who the potential purchaser was. We applied for a RISE grant. The Ottumwa City Council at the time blessed that grant. We had applied for it and we had made it fairly far through that process when the buyer selected another community that was a little bit better positioned at the time than the city of Ottumwa was. Number one, the infrastructure. Number two, availability for labor. So once they walked away from it, then the Department of Transportation came back and said, well, we're going to put the brakes on this for a second because you need another traffic study. And I think that that, and we're like, well, nothing has changed since the original traffic study was completed. That cost between $100,000 and $150,000 to complete. We don't think that we need to do that when nothing's changed. And their response to that was, well, until you do another traffic study, then we're not going to move forward with this grant. So we ultimately just decided, you know, we are not going to spend the money to get the exact same result just to have the DOT say, well, there's no need for the roads out there. So that's a very long winded answer to your question.

Well, the problem with DOT is they don't own that property and they don't have to have access. We do. So we're going to have to get into a pretty tough argument with them. I don't mean you, but the group is going to have to fire some cannons at them and see how many duck and how many don't.

I don't disagree. Okay, so moving on, and this kind of takes us back to the beginning of our conversation here tonight, talking about housing. Just a really quick update here on Vogel Heights. As everybody has probably driven by at this point, As soon as they were given access to the property, they started moving dirt as quickly as humanly possible. They found a few things underground, which is interesting. But nonetheless, they are moving right along. The graphic that you see on your left is the layout of the property. And the Xs that are on that are the properties that have sold to date. So we are over 50% there at this point. And what I'm really happy to say is the most recent transaction, as you all are aware, was a local developer. Looking at workforce, again, I had mentioned opportunities that we were looking at as far as skill gaps and filling that up. We are working very closely with Iowa Works in finding innovative solutions to get people that aren't necessarily interested in going to college that they want to enter the workforce, or maybe they want to train up, uh for the organization that they're at so we're looking at some of those internship opportunities and building some programs i just talked to mayor foot right before the meeting about some opportunities that we might be able to harness here in the near future but one of the things is also getting out and talking to the employers and not just a tumble, but the immediate area and finding out what it is from a human resources perspective that you're finding is the barrier to getting people in the door and number two, keeping them. And how can we as a community help solve that problem for you. So that's something that we'll be doing here at the end of June. And then at the same time, we are working with a local manufacturer specific to maintenance and manufacturing environments. There are some national programs available. that might help a lot of the manufacturers. And again, this is to create an opportunity for those people that want to move up within the organizations that they're in and those people that are looking to go straight into the workforce out of high school. How can we get those folks prepared to enter with the knowledge that they need and they also become marketable in those jobs? And then just some other projects that we're working on, as I'm sure everybody knows, we just had a primary, and as several of you took part in, GO-PIP will be producing candidate debates again this fall. Those invitations will go out very soon to the candidates for the other elected officials for our area, which at this point would include our county supervisors and House of Representatives and Senate seats. Another thing that we're doing this fall, which is not a brand new event, but it's new that we haven't done in a while. It's a state of the economy. I think that especially given the general economic conditions of the country right now, having people that are experts in the field come down and be able to share their knowledge with not only leadership, but with with the companies in the area to give them some insights on what things are going to look like over the next 12 to 24 months, give them a little bit of ammunition to take back to wherever it is that they need to make decisions. And we'll be doing that probably late September, early October this year. And then another thing, I know that Amal had brought this up during one of the prior council meetings. We're starting the process of working through a business disaster master plan, both with the city of Ottumwa and with Wapello County EMA. And the point of this is really pretty simple. The older folks in the room probably remembers what happened the last time a major manufacturer just stopped in Ottumwa. But it really goes farther than just a major manufacturer. What is it that could happen in the community that we're not prepared for right now? And we have seen, because we don't have this, we just literally saw on February 27th what happens when we're not prepared with Mercy Clinic leaving. We had no backup plan. So everybody in the community was kind of left scrambling. This is probably one of the most important things that I think we as a community can be working on over the next few months is to make sure that we never have that happen to us again. So that's one of the things that we'll be focusing very intently on over the next few months. And with that, if anybody has any questions, I know I've rambled on for quite some time now.

Your business disaster master plan, who's going to be involved in that?

It will be the city of Ottumwa. It will be us. It will be Wapolo County EMA. I'm assuming city leadership, county leadership, Legacy Foundation will likely be at the table, and we're probably going to invite several of the businesses to the table as well.

I think that's a great idea.

Is there any activity going on where the store was at? Yes way, I think it was. Out north where they had something started, went in and pulled the fuel tanks and then covered it up again.

Not to this juncture, no.

I didn't hear you.

Not to this point, no.

All right. Some of us need to help.

Need help?

We need to help. Oh, yes. Kick things around and get people knowledgeable. so that it's available. I have no idea who owns it or anything else. But I do know that it's a great piece of property.

It's an absolutely great piece of property. There was conversation right at the beginning of another gas station chain purchasing that property. And because of the property next door, that fell through. The property next door didn't want to sell. So that fell through. So the original company, the leasing company that had it when Yes Way was there, they're still the purveyors of the property.

Now, are you making reference next door to the car wash?

The Mobile One Lube Express that was there.

Okay. All right. Because now the other one on the other side is also vacant.

Yep.

And that whole thing is opening up. It just needs somebody that's interested.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody.

And I did not have anything else tonight. I think that was probably long enough.

Okay. With that, I would remind anyone that is here to speak on anything on the agenda. There are slips, forms that you can fill out. If there's a specific item you'd like to speak about, then that way they can get that up here to me. With that, we will move on to the Board and Commission recommendations. That's all.

Okay, approve agreement for the maintenance and repair of primary roads and municipalities between the City of Ottumwa and Iowa Department of Transportation and authorize the Mayor to sign. Recommendation, approve the agreement and authorize the Mayor to sign.

Is there a motion to approve? Motion to approve. Okay, I'll turn it over to City Engineer Burgmeier.

All right, thank you, Mayor. So this is the standard agreement we have with the DOT on maintenance of their roads through town. It's exactly the same as the one we signed five years ago, outlines who has to plow the snow, who has to maintain the drainage, who repairs the streets, just standard stuff like that. So it's the same agreement they have everywhere.

Okay, with that, is there any questions or comments from council?

So nothing's changed. It's still as it has been.

Yeah, it's exactly the same as the one we signed five years ago.

Okay. Sherry, if you'd take the roll, please.

Council Member Reed?

Yes.

Council Member Huffman? Yes. Council Member Dupre? Yes. Council Member Kavanagh?

Yes. Sherry, could I make a suggestion? I know your voice is very soft, but if you could just bear it. what you're saying, so you can sit over here.

Number two, approve delay in application of sewer-based fee on multifamily and mobile home units. Recommendation, pass motion to delay until January 1, 2027.

Is there a motion to approve?

Motion to approve.

Second.

All right.

So at the April 1st meeting of last year, City Council passed and adopted ordinance 3243-2025, which was setting sewer fees. Language within the ordinance modified the base fee for multifamily dwellings and mobile home parks by imposing a base fee for each unit in the dwelling or lot within a park. At the same meeting, City Council passed a motion delaying the modified language for multifamily dwellings and mobile home parks until January 1, 2026. In the interim, an engineering firm was engaged to conduct a study of the city's sewer fees and rate structure. At the November 4th, 2025 meeting, City Council approved a delayed implementation of the modified base charge in order to consider any recommendations from the rate study July 1, 2026, unless any further modification of the rates and rate structures are approved and adopted by the City Council. We have received that initial data from the study. There were further questions and information requested And until that information is received in a final direction issued by the city council, staff is seeking an extended delay of the implementation until July 1, 2027, or until any further modifications to the rates and rate structures are approved and adopted by the city council.

Okay, is there any questions or comments from council?

I have a question. Does that include the motel and hotel also?

this would be yeah any anything that was currently on hold and not implemented would still remain on hold okay it just wasn't in there so i just wanted to verify that okay thank you administrator rath when do we expect that information that we're waiting for did we get a response to no i i sent a an email to the um financial analyst and did not receive a response in time for the council meeting tonight

So we're hoping that we will receive that in short order here. Even after we receive that and have a chance to review it and go through it and make decision, there'll still be some time on the water billing side for implementation to get it into their system, to build any changes out that might be necessary and then have that implementation. So for the moment, January 1 gives us that additional six month period to buy some of that time there.

So the base rate for the regular accounts that's supposed to go up on July 1, that will continue to go up, right?

The base rate fee will increase by the amount that's in the ordinance, as will the usage fee. It's just that we will not be charging the extra fees upon each rental unit or mobile home park.

That's what I thought. Thank you.

Any other questions? Okay, Sherry, take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid?

Yes.

Council Member Hoffman? Yes. Council Member Dupre? Yes. Council Member Kavanagh?

Yes.

Okay, resolution number 135-2026, accepting the work as final and complete and approving final pay requests for the Tumla Cemetery Maintenance Building and Office Project. Recommendation passed and adopted. Resolution 135-2026. Is there a motion to approve?

Move the recommendation. Second. So, Parks Director Ratchie.

Thank you, Your Honor. This project involved constructing a new maintenance building and office in the southeast corner of Ottumwa Cemetery. There was a one-year warranty included. The original contract amount was $1,520,000. There were 17 change orders for $56,010.22. The final pay application number 15 was for $78,800.51 bringing the total contract amount with RG Construction to $1,654,810.70. There was also $7,440.56 for furniture fixtures and equipment purchased locally by staff. and $103,620 paid to Willett-Hoffman for design engineering and architectural services, bringing the total cost of the project to $1,765,871.20. There was $1,875,000 budgeted for this project in the CIP. Supporting documentation is attached. The contractor, RG Construction of Wetumwa, has completed the project according to plans and specifications, and this will release all retainage and authorized final payment.

Is there any questions for Director Ratchy?

Gene, you blocked it off. You're completely good with it. Everything's good.

Yeah, we inspected it several times. The staff inspected it, the architect inspected it. So it's done and it's good to go.

What would be the date that the one year warranty starts?

After we pay the contract to their final payment.

Okay. Yeah. Do the employees feel a lot better having a new place?

Oh yeah. Everybody likes this place.

And it's safe and you don't have to use no stairs to go to the bathroom downstairs or?

That's correct.

Good, good. I'm glad they're like, I'm glad it's safe. I'm glad they have a good environment to be in.

That was one of our goals, create a better working environment for the employees and a safer working environment. And also build a facility that's ADA handicap accessible that complies with all of the current laws.

That's great.

Gene, do we have any plan to do anything with the original storage area?

The house and the two buildings behind it at 1218 North Court will be sold. Will be sold, but are they advertised for sale now? Not yet. We want to finalize this project and we'll have to move into the new building first before we can put the current building up for sale. The house is vacant, but the employees are still working out of the maintenance buildings.

Okay, thank you.

So I like the fact that it's about $109,000 under what was budgeted for it. So that's good that it came in that way.

We did our homework. We thought through the details and executed the project. So it worked out well.

I only got one last thing. I think this is something the citizens and the staff deserve. So Gene, I just want to thank you for your hard work pushing this. I know you did a lot of work and a lot of people helped you and supported you do the work. So I just want to thank you all for, like I said, I think this was very deserving for citizens and staff. So thank you.

Any other questions? I'm not driving the train. But if we put that property for sale, subject to the fact that when it becomes available, we might have people interested in looking at it.

Yeah, we've already been contacted by people that are interested. My plan is to hire a realtor like we did when we sold those other houses on Park Avenue.

Okay, thank you. Okay, Sherry, if you'd take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid. Yes. Council Member Hoffman.

Yes.

Council Member Dupre. Yes. Council Member Kavanagh.

Yes. Thank you.

Resolution number 137-2026, approving changes and revisions to the hiring policy. Recommendation pass and adopt resolution number 137-2026. Is there a motion to approve?

Second. Second. So I'll turn it over to HR Director Kojo.

Thank you, sir. So when Council approved Ordinance 3257-2026 in April, it prompted the need to update many of our other personnel policies. So during the process of updating those policies, we conducted a broader review of the employee handbook, also known as our personnel policy and procedure. So the next five resolutions that you're gonna see are the result of that review. Each policy includes notes outlining the specific updates being proposed. Drafts of all of these policies were shared with city council and department heads at the end of May and feedback was requested. We did receive input from department heads and they were very, very minor changes, but that has been incorporated into the policies that you see today. Some of the resolutions on here do reflect direct updates to our existing policies, while others involve separating longer sections from our employee handbook into standalone policies. And that is notated on each of the staff summaries that we'll go through. As a general guideline that we are using for our personnel policy, When a section in there exceeds one page, we're moving it to its own policy just to better accommodate the detailed procedures, policies, and everything like that to provide clear guidance. So on this first one, this is the hiring policy. There are four changes that we made to this one. We changed the name from the hiring policy and process just to hiring policy. At the bottom of it, we added a revised and the date, the month and the year. So that way we know when that last one was revised. There were a couple of formatting and grammar errors And then we also added into there the information from that ordinance 3257-2026, stating that a department head appointment shall be subject to the approval of the city council, except as provided by state law under the job offer section.

Your Honor, I would like to recommend that we table item number two under the resolutions.

So there's been a motion to table item number two. Is there any questions or comments to that?

I was gonna say, I would ask for direction then as to where we would like to go with that.

and maybe I'll- It seems like it's a pretty straightforward, just a few little title change and a revision date and a little formatting, grammars, and one statement there that's in quotes. So it seems pretty straightforward to me.

All this is just laid out today. We haven't had a chance to review with you or anyone.

This information was provided to council at the end of May, along with all of our department heads as well.

okay, well, I'm not going to change my mind. I'd still like to move it to table.

It was a lot of information. I know you sent it out in May. I read through it, but I hadn't realized that It was so complicated compared to, you know, looking at what, I mean, as you know, I just asked yesterday for what your current one was. I couldn't find it on the website. And then I did get a copy of it. I don't want to rush through something, and especially with employee morale, making changes that may create a problem. I know you went to your department, hence, but we have to look out for the employees too.

And that was part of sending it to the department heads. They look out for their employees and get feedback from them as well. All of the changes that are being proposed are written on each individual staff summary. I will share that with the personnel policy, if we do not make this change tonight and approve it tonight, it could affect... There's a change that I can get to when we get to that point of it that could affect the... way that pay is calculated and overtime is calculated for our unrepresented employees.

So I think maybe one of the concerns is we have a lot of these and they are all interconnected. And I could see how that could be a concern as a, I'm not a voting member, but as a voting member, it might be a concern of, okay, If we pass this and don't pass that, how does that chain reaction work? Because they all are interconnected to that point. If we table, we're able to move into the other ones, we could bring them all up at the end, like today. We could pull them off the table today and consider them all at one time. So if that's a concern, I guess that's what I'm asking council, if that's where the concern is, is that the direction we need to go?

Do we have to wait till the end? Can we consider them all now or do we have to, is that?

My understanding is we can pull them off the table whenever.

I would just like a little more time to go through it. Yesterday, I spent probably about four hours going through and seeing where you pulled this out and made this separate and how it compared to the policy from last year versus I think all the changes with your policies have started since like about 2020. There has been a lot of changes to the policy, the handbook, I just, are we making it too complicated?

I mean- This is updating based on policies that you have approved previously. Like this hiring policy, we changed the name from hiring policy and process to hiring policy. That's the one change there. At the bottom, we added a revised date There's no actual change to the policy. What that does is it allows our employees as they do pull that up to be able to identify what they have. And then the fixing formatting and grammar errors, that was literally like a comma or a period or something there. And then number four is verbatim from the ordinance that was passed previously is just updating that hiring policy.

That's it, that's the changes that are being made. But did we need to consider residency requirements in the hiring policy?

That is a separate policy. And it is notated within our personnel policy because that was a separate policy that you all had created. Yeah.

So one of the objectives that HR Director Kojo was looking at was, and she discussed with me, was there are some of these policies that, as you see, are several pages. And if you have within the personnel manual and you include all of that language in there, all of a sudden your personnel manual is about yay thick and making it more complicated for individuals to navigate through there. So the hiring policies would be identified in the overall personnel manual, but would then reference back to this policy. It also makes it easier to make those changes on the fly for council members. if there's just a change within the hiring policy but not necessarily the rest of the personnel manual so i think that was just to actually simplify the process and identify any of these particular policies that are several pages long or may not necessarily apply across the board to all employees in some circumstances that way they're not tied up in the the larger personnel manual other than by reference so that's that's the main purpose of this and because there was a change earlier this year in the hiring policy um you wanted to reference that as well and uh and those are really the main changes for all of these policies is pulling them out of the larger document which then would be approved at the end because there are some other changes in that document such as the overtime procedures that was mentioned

And some of them are already standalone policies. The hiring policy itself has already been a standalone policy.

The way I understood it is we're just looking at cosmetic changes here. This isn't really nothing about the policy.

For this one, yes. This one is primarily cosmetic.

And that's the way I kind of read them is just changing. And I understand what they're saying. They want to look through the policies more. And so I get it. but these are just changes of names, correct? That's why I took it changes the name. And then like we added in department head removal shall be it's approval and the different things.

Right. And one of the reasons that they were sent out several weeks ago, so if there were questions, more time, because there are so many, so many pages, not only to department heads, but to city council members as well, to provide more time than three days over a weekend if you got them on Friday, which they were obviously included in the packet, but they were previously provided as well.

And if there's anything that's gonna be a major change to policy, I have called that out. Any of those are called out on the staff summaries.

Do we have any major changes tonight?

The only major thing I believe is maybe with the substance abuse policy, and that was based on recommendation from legal. And then within our personnel policy, it is changing the, and again, I can get to that, it's changing the overtime calculations to match what is in the collective bargaining agreements that was agreed upon. And again, those are called out in there and I can go, when we get to those, I can go over those with you.

Your Honor, I will withdraw my request to table item two. and follow that with tabling three through seven to be tabled.

So right now we're on item two, and there's been a motion to approve in a second. So just looking at item two, is there any other questions or comments by council?

So are we, I don't, I'm a little confused. Where are we at? Are we table two? Or is the request to table two? The table's been removed.

So now we're just considering item number two as a motion and as a resolution, as it stands. Does that make sense? And then once we get to item three, then if we still have a motion to table, then we'll consider that at that time. So right now we're just covering item two, changes and revisions to the hiring policy. And in your packet, it's item I two. No, I got that.

I just want to compare the changes just because.

So for the hiring policy, it's just those four. There are no major changes that are there. You have already approved number four that's listed there by the ordinance. This just places it into our hiring policy from that ordinance. That's all that does.

Then I'm concerned about the overtime pay calculation. What was that?

And we'll look at that's in the personnel policy one. So when we get to that item, I'll go through that.

I know it's a, it's another item, but she had stated that there might be trouble with people getting paid is what I was worried about. Yeah. So my point is, is if we table them all together. then how does that affect that?

That would affect it. If we were to take them all together and table them all, then yeah, that would, could have an immediate effect is what I'm understanding to the overtime part of that.

Right, and that would be delaying.

It could be. Right. Right now, and I'll come back to that.

Okay.

Right now, if we can look at item two, and right now we have a motion and a second. And then we're considering, yeah, voting on the hiring policy alone as its own.

So we're just going to get through two, then let's go to three through seven.

Yep.

Yeah. And these are just cosmetic changes with that one, plus that one statement.

Yes, sir. The biggest change is implementing the ordinance that was passed by council into the handbook.

Correct. And like I said, it's fixing formatting and grammar errors of maybe instead of saying many of, it was changed to several, a simple word like that. But it was nothing that changed the intent of the policy.

Mm-hmm.

Any other questions by council? Okay, Sherry, if you'd take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid?

Yes.

Council Member Hoffman? Yes. Council Member Dupre? Yes. Council Member Cavanis?

Yes.

Resolution number 138, 2026, approving disciplinary practices and procedures policy. Recommendation pass and adopt resolution number 138, 2026. Is there a motion to approve?

Motion to approve. Second.

Okay, so this one was a policy that was held within the personnel policy itself. It was not a standalone policy. Because this was about four pages in the personnel policy, we pulled it out and created its own policy. Essentially, we took the information that was in the personnel policy and copied it and put it into this policy here.

There are four changes that we made to that.

We added the table at the front to give definitions. So all of these items, these terms that were in here, we made definitions of them so that way we all knew what it meant. There is a process, there's a section in here that says documentation and HR review that was added. And that talks about utilizing the proper form that we have, which is also in this policy. And it talks about the employee being provided with all of that information. We also added the employee's rights during the investigations, because again, our employees need to understand what their rights are and make sure that our supervisors are following that. And we have also put in here a supervisor's responsibility and also identified what the appeals process would be. So then we, sorry, I'm sorry.

Go ahead. I thought you were done.

Then the last thing that we added is again, going back to that ordinance 3257-2026, a department head removal shall be subject to the approval of the city council except as provided by state law. Again, that was approved in that original ordinance. This is one of the additional things that it just updates that.

So I was just going to say, it seems to me like these are all things then helpful for the employees, extra information for them, nothing's been taken away from them. It's all helpful rights, you know, here's how it's going to be done and things that ought to be a benefit to them.

Correct.

Can you provide us a copy of the state law that you're referencing?

Where?

where you're reading right here.

The department had removals as- That was the ordinance that was passed back in April by city council.

Yeah.

But you said also by state law.

Where required by state law. That is the civil service code chapter 400, because chapter 400 of the civil service code has special requirements

Chapter 400 doesn't mean anything to me. I've never read it, nor have I ever heard it read.

That would be like fire chief or police chief. Anything that's covered under civil service would be... There would be specific rules that we might not be able to okay or not okay.

So you're saying all of these steps that you've got laid out here were already in the handbook?

Everything except for the documentation and HR review, employee rights during investigations, supervisor responsibilities, and appeals process. That was not part of it originally. It is part of it now.

And where did that information come from?

That came from our labor attorneys reviewing this information and also just basic HR practices and disciplinary practices.

And it helps me, I believe you indicated that this has been passed through legal too, so they can read it and check it and make sure things are proper.

Yes, we do have attorneys that, you know, with Allers and Cooney and we do, they've got people that work specifically on employment law policies and they do take a look at these. Once we've gone through them, make any recommendations or anything like that as well.

So I do have a question with the employee's rights during investigation section.

Yeah.

I know I think it's item four talks about the right to have a union representative present during any investigatory meeting. Is there somewhere in here I couldn't find like a third party for a non-union? non-union worker where someone doesn't have union representation, but can they bring in a third party to be a representative during an investigation?

There's nothing listed specifically in the policy itself on that. No.

Okay. I'm wondering if that's something that needs to be added.

We can look into it. There are certain restrictions regarding some of that just based upon supervisory different things, but it's something we can definitely look at.

Okay. Okay.

And what I can do, if we approve this tonight, what I can do is I can work on that. And if there is something that we can add into there, I can bring that back to council to approve that change in the policy.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. I just wanted to make sure we were covering both union and non-union union with the same opportunity.

Just familiarity, non-union. And we can look into that. I mean, I think these are cosmetic changes we could okay. And when you come to a third party like witness, you get into a big gray area. Yeah, I understand. Legal.

Yeah, I understand.

The union part in here, it's the wine garden rights. It's been Supreme Court case law that's there. And I think that's just whether it's in here or not, that is something that's provided and established.

Any other questions from council? If no other questions, then Sherry, if you'd take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid?

Yes.

Council Member Hoffman?

Yes.

Council Member Dupre? No. Council Member Cavanagh?

No.

So if I could ask, then I would like direction on where we move forward with this.

I just want a little more time to look at it. I'm not comfortable saying yes at this point.

I got a procedural question. So that's technically a no. That's a fail. Correct. So what happens to our policy now? Because now we- It stays the way it's currently written. Okay.

I guess the other question would be, how does that affect the other policies that we haven't talked about yet?

So we could possibly, because this is part of the update to the personnel policy, and it is part of that resolution that's got a number of changes listed in it. We could possibly pull that out and then bring it back.

Or if the policy is staying the same at the current.

I'll have to put it back into the personnel policy as it is. Right. And so then, yeah, that's going to be a lot more work.

Yeah, if the rest of the resolution with the personnel policy is approved, it'd have to be amended to add this back in. Yes. Yeah.

it's like yeah being tabled were still legal right well this is nothing tabled nothing was tabled oh no i mean since it said no i'm sorry i probably yeah yeah i mean now for this policy it's it hasn't changed it's what's in place before today um my question is then if this is affecting other policies that we have yet to vote on um Are there any of these that we need to table until we can get through this one? And I guess that's my question for Mrs. Kojo is. Or can we.

To table that one?

No, like are there any that we haven't talked about yet? that it would be better to table tonight until we get through this resolution that just failed?

I would ask, I think, and Phil, please correct me if I'm wrong here. I would ask that we get through the rest of them so that way I have clear marching orders as to what I need to do to change all of this then.

Sure.

That would be my request, I guess.

This one should only affect Resolution 142-2026 in addition to this one.

Yes. Okay. But 142-2026 is the personnel policy, which does have the overtime as part of it.

I guess so.

And that's where we may need to look at whether we strike that down completely or if we modify what that resolution is. So I- When we get to that one. Yes. Okay.

All right. Number four.

Resolution number 139, 2026, approving changes in combination of their anti-harassment policy and equal opportunity statement into one policy. Recommendation pass and adopt resolution 139, 2026.

So is there a motion to approve? Motion to approve. This is Kojo.

Okay, so this one, let's see. As part of the regular ongoing policy updates and review, staff has reviewed our current harassment policy. So this is a current policy that we have. There have been a number of additional changes in federal law with protected classes when we start thinking about the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity. So what this is doing is this is taking into account those changes with protected legal classes. This policy has been reviewed by staff and legal counsel, and it just provides more clarification. So the things that we added with this, The city, I'm going to skip to number six on the staff summary. The city did have an equal employment opportunity statement that was previously passed back in 1989. It was removed in 2009. and then became a city policy back in 2012. What this does is we are taking the equal employment opportunity policy that we had and we are combining it with the anti-harassment policy because it is essentially one in the same. So that's one of the first things that this does. So we took essentially two policies that were out there and we have now combined them into one. We added a definition table at the front. So again, talking about what the equal employment opportunity is, defining harassment, hostile work environment, microaggressions. These are all definitions that actually come from the EEOC. This is directly from them. We've included information in here regarding a hostile work environment. And again, as defined by our Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, this is a definition completely from them. We've added information in here. We utilize a company by the name of Plain Sight for any type of fraud, or if there are any type of violations of this. So we've added information into here of where our employees can go to report any of this. We have added information in here on bullying, defining what that is, again, going off of EEOC definitions, going off of Title VII definitions. We have added that training is mandatory annually for supervisors. This is something that we currently do, and so this just simply states that we do train our supervisors annually on harassment. And then we have also updated that the overall responsibility for administrative of the affirmative action equal opportunity programs fall to the city's Title VI coordinator, which was passed by resolution last year in 2025, which is a requirement of the Iowa DOT. So essentially this is taking all of those things in different places, putting them together, and then just explaining what the definitions are.

Any questions from council?

Just a comment. I mean, it seems like, again, this is putting some good information all in one place for the workers to be able to get to easily. So it seems like it should be helpful for them.

Yeah, one of the things is to review the policies on a fairly frequent basis, every three to five years, typically, if there are any changes federally or state or local that we have and incorporate those, clean up any language. And that's ideally what this is.

So I have a couple questions on the number three, the plain sight service. Maybe explain kind of what that is, how investigations are made, what that procedure is like.

So Plain Sight is a service that is offered to us by our financial system, our financial software. And what it does is it gives an opportunity to report fraud, to report, like I said, EEOC violations, whether it's our employees, whether it's people out in the public, it's an anonymous site. You do not have to identify yourself through that at all. What it is set up with right now is that when somebody does go in and completes a complaint or a tip, it goes to the city administrator, the HR director, and the finance director. What we do, the three of us, when we get a complaint, we work through what the complaint is. We make the decision on who will do the investigation. If it is something criminal, that would be something we would work with our police department on. If it is something that is HR or employment related, we will decide who would do the investigation, which it would be two of us. That way there is always two people doing an investigation. And we work through that entire process. Once that's done, we then provide, there's a investigation summary. The three of us would sit down and go through that. We update the system as we go, as we're working on things and if there's anything that comes from it.

What's the confidentiality of that process?

So it comes to the three of us and it's done as an investigation. So I mean, it's, we don't even know who it is. Like any complaint that comes through there, we do not know who that is.

Yeah, and then as far as the investigative process, I mean, when you involve people, we advise the individuals that are being interviewed that they're not supposed to be discussing the parties. Like any time there's a criminal investigation or other thing, to protect them, to protect any of the other parties. So if they maintain their confidentiality with that, then that would stay confidential. So beyond that... It would be whoever made the tip would know and then the three of us and anyone that was investigated, but they wouldn't necessarily know what it was other than the question they were asked as part of that investigation.

There's an option in the system. What is there, like four options, I think? It's like founded and addressed, unfounded, not enough information, and there's like four different options that essentially once we complete the investigation, we select in the system, and they're pre-populated. It's not like I can go in and type something in there. What we would do is we just select whichever one fits the best, and then that information is what's reported to the person who made the complaint.

So any of the other ones in the investigation may not know that it's over or what the result was or anything?

Typically we do let them know. Typically what we've done is that the finance director and I will do the investigation simply because if there is any discipline that needs to be given, we don't do that discipline. That's not our level of responsibility. But what we do is then we make a recommendation to the city administrator or even if we need to get legal counsel involved, here's what our recommendation would be. And then it may follow up with the people to say, this has been addressed and leave it at that. But we don't get into, this is exactly what we did and these are the processes that we went through. What we have seen, and I think what we're going to see tonight, if not tonight, it's gonna be the next one. We did have an investigation that we had done And there's some policy changes that are going to come because of that, simply because we need to tighten up our policies and the things that we're doing as a result of that investigation. So things like that may happen. And like I said, I believe if not tonight, it might be. That is one of the results of a tip that we had gotten. And so what we saw when we sat down and said, we need to update our policy. We need to come up with a better process for these things. And so the policy update is a result of that.

Okay. Barb, could I ask who we is?

City administrator, myself and the finance director.

And he'll be gone Friday. So then who? You and the city administrator.

Until the finance director would be replaced, yes.

And if we get something that comes in that is questionable, we will work with our legal counsel on that.

Okay, thank you.

I do like the idea of having three of you and then two of you do the investigation and having the third one. And I'm wondering if Chief of Police would be part of that or someone else.

We've consulted the Chief of Police, I believe, on every investigation that we've done so far.

I mean, as one of the three, since we may be without.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. What I'll tell you is that in the two years we've had it, we've had three reports. And I think we've had two this year and then one last year. So they're not coming in hand over fist.

But all it takes is one wrong one. Yeah. Understood. We don't do it right and now we're in trouble.

Right. Understood. If we get one prior to the placement of the next finance director, we can certainly look to see if a third person would be necessary. I mean, like we said, there's only two individuals of the three of us doing the actual investigation. The third one isn't doing anything. It's just sharing the burden of the investigation. Checks and balances. Yeah.

What would be the process if during the investigation, an employee who was, we'll just say being investigated, felt like the confidentiality of it was broken? What would their process be? Who would they go talk to? What would?

I think it depends on the employee. It depends on their position. It depends on where they feel that that would happen. I mean, I hate to be the typical HR answer, but it depends.

I'm just wondering if we need to look at that as to what that scenario would look like.

We don't have an ombudsman that they could go to.

There's ombudsmans, I mean, in Des Moines, absolutely, they could.

That work for the city? No. So they would have to get their own?

No, there's a state ombudsman that they could call that could be the person to investigate that. Right. Yeah, so that employee.

That's not in your policy that they have that option.

sounds like that only pertains that that only pertains right now to the to the plain sight um uh investigations right okay this is just sharing that that is an option for employees within this um the eeoc and the anti-harassment policy yeah okay i guess right one point of clarification i would like and just ask a question while we're bringing it up

and I'm not saying this, I'm just bringing it up. If Phil, say Phil was the base of the problem. So then who would they go to? That's like, see, it ends with him.

Or any of the investigators.

Well, if it was any of the investigators, then they could go to him. I'm not saying he's done anything wrong.

If it were me, say I were the subject of it, I would completely recuse myself from it. And I would recommend that Phil takes that to legal and I'm completely out of it.

So if it was Phil, would they go to the mayor?

No, if it's any one of us, let's put it this way, if it's any one of us three that get the report, then what it is is we would go to legal and have them complete it.

So the legal would do the, okay.

Correct. We would all three recuse ourselves from that investigation.

Any other questions? Okay, Sherry, if you'd take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid.

Yes.

Council Member Hoffman.

Yes.

Council Member Dupre. Yes. Council Member Cavaness.

Yes.

Resolution number 140-2026, approving the City of Ottumwa dress and appearance policy recommendation passing off resolution number 140-2026. Is there a motion to approve?

Motion to approve. Second. Mrs. Kojo.

So this one is one that was in the personnel policy itself. So we are pulling it out because it was about six pages in the personnel policy. We are pulling it out and creating its own specific policy. I have condensed it. because a lot of what was in the original one was repetitive. It talked about city council meetings, and this is what you can wear, and then average workday, this is what you can wear. There are two, and again, changes to this, We are changing it from the dress code to the dress and appearance policy because we do talk about in here for tattoos and piercings, general standards of just your general appearance. We've condensed information and fixed grammar and spelling errors. And one item that I did not put on here, but this came as feedback from one of our department heads was talking about shorts. And I'm trying to find where I put where it is. Essentially, what it is, is that if a department. If a department can. maybe depending upon the work itself or if they're out in the weather, that they can wear work appropriate shorts. And this came as a suggestion from our landfill. Shorts, it's underneath the, it's on page four, it's right up at the very top. It's under non-city hall, city employees. Shorts may be acceptable based on the job duties and the department's needs. That's the other change that was made. because apparently from what I am being told is that that has been standard practice for many years and it makes sense. We want our people that are out, if the job is okay with it, especially in our heat, they need to be able to wear those shorts.

Barb, the reason I object to number five is that I read what you were telling me I had to wear in order to be appropriate here at City Council because we're being videoized or projected to somebody. So that doesn't make any sense. You know, I don't wear a suit coat, but I do wear a shirt and tie. But I'll be darned if I'm going to let somebody tell me I have to put on a suit coat to satisfy you. Nobody is saying that, sir.

Well, I kind of read it that way. What it says is that appropriate business casual attire includes, does not state that you have to wear that.

Well, what's the word appropriate mean?

Appropriate business casual. Sure.

Shirt and tie would be business casual or a suit coat with a shirt and no tie.

Polo shirt, sweaters, any of that would be okay?

Well, I personally would let this pass through if you pulled number five. If you don't, I'll vote no.

I'm sorry, I don't know what number five is.

What we've been talking about. Appropriate dress and appearance. Number five.

Just for a point of clarification, that's not.

I think it's where it says council means it says formal dress code.

But that's not addressing the council members. That's addressing city employees.

This is no change from our current, it's what's currently in our policy. So even if it is denied tonight, it's still the same thing in our current policy.

Any other questions or comments? Okay, Sherry, if you'd take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid?

Yes.

Council Member Hoffman? Yes. Council Member Dupre?

Yes.

Council Member Cavanagh? Resolution number 141, 2026, approving the city of Ottumwa substance abuse policy. Recommendation pass and adopt resolution number 141, 2026. Is there a motion to approve?

Motion to approve. Second. Mrs. Kojo.

All right, so this is another one that was pulled out of the personnel policy. It was not a standalone policy previously. This was one that within the email that I sent out on May 29th that we were waiting for legal clarification on. So our legal team did review this and came back with just a couple of minor changes to it. We did add the definition of terms, which this is something that we have as we have hired employees and we've talked with them about our potential employees and we have talked with them about like our pre-employment testing and things like that. They have asked for some of these definitions. Well, what are those illegal substances that you are testing for? So those are some of the things that are there in that definition. At the very back of this policy, we added a reasonable suspicion documentation, and this is there as a tool for our supervisors. During our annual training that we do, we go through an entire section on reasonable suspicion and what our supervisors should be doing if they do suspect that an employee is under the influence. What this does is this provides them a fairly structured process and allows them to document that. So that's that reasonable suspicion documentation. And then there is clarification and it is highlighted in the policy under consequences on page six. and this again came from our legal counsel as well, that says applicants who refuse to participate in the required drug testing will be disqualified from employment and will not be eligible to reapply. Applicants who complete the drug test but receive a positive result will not be hired and may reapply after 12 months.

Any questions or comments from counsel?

Is that number six that we're talking about?

Yes.

I-6? Yep. Okay, thank you. Yes.

Barbara, I guess I might have missed it. This includes alcohol as well, right? Yes, correct. I mean, I see it mentioned once, but that, yeah, okay.

Yes, correct.

It just wasn't under the controlled substances, but it is mentioned above.

Yeah, it looks like it's mentioned in the table.

And, like, reasonable suspicion, smell of alcohol, body odor. Yeah. Yep.

Okay. If no more questions, Sherry, take the roll, please.

Councilmember Reed? Yes. Councilmember Hoffman?

Yes.

Councilmember Dupre? Yes. Councilmember McAvinas?

Yes.

Resolution number 142, 2026, adopting the updated personnel policies for the city of Ottumwa. Recommendation passed and adopted resolution number 142, 2026. Is there a motion to approve?

Motion to approve. Second. Okay, Mrs. Cajal.

All right, so this is the big one. This is the change of all of the other policies that you have already approved pending the other one. updating into our personnel policy. So what this is, is the personnel policy. It incorporates all of our changes into our employee handbook. Our goal is to keep our handbook focused on overarching policies rather than getting into the very specifics and workplace expectations while housing more detailed procedures within the standalone policies. Once we go through these changes and if this is approved, what we do with our personnel policy is every year at the end of the year, we create a summary page for all of our employees so that way they know everything that had been changed in the personnel policy for that calendar year. It is sent to all employees and all employees are required to sign off on that personnel policy. What would also happen is after we would get this personnel policy updated and approved by City Council, it goes into the monthly HR update with a brief outline of all of the changes that are made. We will also make a clickable PDF file that is available for all of our employees through UKG, and it also will replace the one that is on our website currently. We always maintain one copy that is on our website. So not only our employees can access it, but our citizens can access it at any time. And again, it's always in our UKG for all of our employees as well. So to the changes on these. So we updated the format. Initially, this was a 56 page employee handbook. And with these changes that we've made, We've got this down to 39. Essentially what this is, is it's taking some of those small snippets of the policies, putting it in the handbook, referring back to that policy so it can give our employees the basic information. And if they want more information, they can go right to that policy. So we added a paragraph to the front page, talks about how that this manual is for information purposes only and does not create a contract of employment. Employment with the City of Ottumwa is at will except where a collective bargaining agreement or written contract approved by the City Council states otherwise. City may modify or terminate policies at its sole discretion and without prior notice, and no employee has authority to alter these terms. Essentially, I cannot make any changes to this policy. Administrator Rath cannot make any changes to these policies. It does have to come to City Council for approval. What we've also done is we've updated the handbook itself. We've reorganized it to provide eight major articles within the document. And these eight major articles are employment related. So we've got general governance, employment practices, compensation and job classification, benefits and leave, workplace conduct and compliance, safety, health and risk management, information security and technology use, and travel and reimbursement. Reason that we did this is it allows us to be able to expand or reduce any of these much easier rather than trying to find a spot where these different policies will fit in. It just helps to organize this a little bit better. With that, we then updated all references to the paragraphs and then updated the table of contents. One of the other changes that we made is instead of saying this has come based on our most recent workers' compensation increases that we have seen and some of the meetings that we have held with IMWCA, which is who holds our workers' comp insurance, instead of calling things accidents, we are referring to them as incidents. So you'll see a update in the entire manual of incident reports, incident investigations, things like that, rather than accidents. I mean, I can go through every single one of these. We'll be here forever, it seems like. A lot of combining some of these things. Number six on here, the residency requirement. This adds it to 2.6 and actually puts it within the handbook itself. And what this does is this refers back to the residency policy that you all had created. And what we've done within these is at the bottom of each section. And if it has a policy that goes with it, it says for more information, please review this policy. And so it talks right to that policy. Number seven, the remote work and telecommuting. We updated it from the recent passing of the updates that you had done to the remote work and telecommuting policy. Performance evaluations, that is a policy that we are currently working with right now with staff. We're getting feedback and that will come eventually. There's a lot of work that we're doing with that performance evaluations. Disciplinary practices and procedures, what this does is it takes the policy that we were looking at passing, pulling it out of the personnel policy, creating that standalone policy and we just reference it in this personnel policy. Under wages section 3.1, we changed one word instead of excluding, we made it as including. I think we just had the wrong word in there. Number 11 is going to be the big one, which is going to affect our employees. So what we are changing on here, and this is added from our recent contract negotiations, is that effective July 1 of 2026, vacation, incentive, holiday and comp time paid hours will be counted as hours worked for the purposes of determining FLSA qualified overtime. So what that means and what we've passed with our public works and our muni contracts, just this past negotiation cycle is currently employees get overtime if they work over 40 hours a week. That is just work. If they take vacation, if they take incentive time, if they take any paid off time right now, They do not, that time does not count toward their 40 hours per week for the FLSA qualified overtime. We made that change. That was one of the things that we bargained with the groups on. And so we have so many supervisors of those groups that are affected by our personnel policy. They would be managing people that would have something very different than what they had. And so what this does is it makes it fair for them because many of those supervisors are working supervisors are out there working right along with those employees. We also have employees that are not supervisors that again, should be getting that same thing. So what this is, is we are making that recommendation that we mirror what our collective bargaining agreement say and that we are going to count vacation, holiday pay, incentive time as hours worked towards that 40 hours per week. The longevity pay, we removed that table since it's incorporated into the compensation handbook. Only our employees covered under police and fire collective bargaining agreements have longevity, and that is outlined within their collective bargaining agreement. Vacation, there is absolutely no change to the accruals. What it was before is it was written out like word for word. What this does is it just puts it into a chart so it's easy to read. With our retirement plans, we updated this that there are two 457B accounts that our city offers to employees. We do not have three. The third one actually stopped offering the 457 account. I believe it was Empower. I think they changed. I think that was the one. So we do have two 457B accounts that we offer to our employees. We do not have anybody on that other one that's been out for a couple of years. We, the employee assistance program, this just pulled the process out of the personnel policy. It's already in our employee wellness documents. It's already in that employee wellness policy. So we didn't need to have the actual process within our personnel policy. Same thing we talked about with equal employment opportunity and anti-harassment policy, our dress and appearance, our substance. Same thing. We pulled those out and we just left a reference within the personnel policy, maybe a paragraph or two to those policies. Incident review, again, going back to, it is a policy right now that our safety committee is working on and it is a health and safety manual that they are working on. That incident review, it's the exact same. There is nothing that has changed, but our safety committee is working on that and we have changed it instead of accident review, it is incident review. Fitness for duty, we did remove, there was a form that was in our personnel policy. We removed that process simply because it is going to be different for every single employee. As we look to be compliant with ADA accommodations and what that interactive process is, each employee is gonna have a different process and there's going to be different forms that we will need to utilize. So what we had within our personnel policy was not actually being used. That is also outlined in our light duty and restricted assignments policy. And then the last one on here is the building and facility security. We added that section based upon the passing of that building and facility security policy. So again, this just adds a paragraph to the end of that, just simply stating this is what it is, here's what we do, and here's where you can find more information. So the majority of this is it's all updates. It's cosmetic updates. It's referring to this other policy. There are a couple of things that are taken out, but again, it does not change anything majorly for our employees.

So before I open it up for questions, I need to ask number nine in this list. Is that affected because we did not pass resolution 138? Yes. Okay. So are there changes that we need to make before we vote on this?

You could pull that out. You could pull out number nine, the change for number nine, and request that it goes back to- No, now I'm in a procedural mess.

So, because we'd have to have a motion to pull it.

Right, so what you do is- Vote on calling it. You have a motion to amend the resolution by removing number nine from the personnel policy. Okay.

Yeah. So if to that point, if you city council would like to pull number nine out as referenced, that would leave the language the same since that did not change from earlier tonight.

And so what I would do then is I would go back and I would update the personnel policy, remove the wording that I have in there now and put the other wording back into that and have a, then this would be, you would approve that.

Can I ask who made the motion and seconded?

Reed and Hoffman.

You could ask Council Member Reed and Council Member Hoffman if they would like to accept that as a friendly amendment, and then you don't have to have a separate vote on it.

No, you don't have to go through the whole, yeah. I like that. I accept that.

I accept that and remove item nine for now.

So Mr. Reid and Mr. Hoffman have accepted an amendment to their motion. All right, so now we understand what we're discussing. So any of our questions, you don't need to worry about section, yeah, section nine. With that, I'll open it up for questions. Okay, having no questions then, Sherry, if you would take the roll, please.

Councilmember Reed?

Yes.

Councilmember Hoffman?

Yes.

Councilmember Dupre? Yes. Councilmember Cavanagh? Yes.

Thank you. Thank you.

Before we go to this next one, I want to double check because we've been here a bit. Are we going to power through or do we need a quick recess? I'm good either way. We're powering through, all right.

Resolution number 143, 2026, adopting surplus property disposal policy for the city of Ottumwa. Recommendation pass and adopt resolution number 143, 2026.

Is there a motion to approve? Motion to approve. Second.

Mr. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. During a review of procedures, it was noted that a deficiency existed in the property disposal policy. Specifically, certain items were not being catalog prior disposal. What we found was, is that when scrap is being taken out to the scrap yard, there isn't an accounting before it goes. generally it's not a problem because it's not usually worth a whole lot but sometimes you can get items in there if there's copper or brass or something like that we want to make sure that that's being cataloged before it goes out so that when it actually gets to the the scrapyard and is properly accounted for out there because you have to pull that out of your load and and have it weighed separately as well. There is a greater value for both of those metals. The updated policy provides for a property disposal request form. The form requires a list of items in approximate quantities and values. The forms need to be approved by supervisors or department heads prior to disposal. The form and final sale information including revenue is then submitted to finance for recording. So again, it's very simple. In section 2B, it just removes including brief description and estimated value to using the property disposal request form here to attach. And then in section 3C, I... It says department representative shall and removes an estimated value of surplus properties sought for sale. It says shall provide property disposal request form to the finance director. Those are the two changes in the policy. Again, this is to have an accounting of or even an approximate accounting of value and what's being disposed of and then reported before it's disposed of.

So I think it's obviously good to keep account of things and know where things are going and what the value was. So that's just tightening down on that idea.

Correct. so do we have an inventory of the property of our you know i know where i've worked before i mean they even cataloged chairs that we were setting on do we have an inventory of all the things the city owns we do not have a catalog of such things as office furniture um uh what we do in finance is anything that is considered a um uh an asset of a certain value We do keep track of that and then use that for depreciation and amortization type of things. But as far as a list of every file cabinet, every desk and things like that, no, we do not have that.

i worked for a government contractor they cataloged everything um finally so when i was reading your policy it said that if they did get rid of a supervisor did get rid of something based on the the dollar amount they were what happens to that money when they if they auctioned it or

sold it for scrap or it's put back into the fund that it came from so if it's uh for example if it's um uh scrap that's being disposed of by the parks department it goes back into the general fund if it's scrap that's being disposed of by um uh public works down at the street department it goes back into fund 110. okay so like when the fleet like when you were talking about getting a new truck

if that had gone to the state and gotten sold, then that money goes back into the fund.

Yeah, it goes back into the fund that the piece of equipment or the property originated from.

Okay, so do we have anything that we've got? I know the computers, when you handed out those, they were assigned by number, right?

Right. Things like the computers are tracked. But again, as far as, like I said, just normal office furniture, no, we don't have a listing of that.

Okay. All right, so it's just things based on dollar value?

Well, what it is is if they want to dispose of something, they have to give an estimate of the value. So if you're looking at an office chair, usually they're going to be pretty worn out. They're not going to go back to anybody.

I know you've got a whole basement full of them.

Right. And so what it is, is if we were to dispose of those, we'd estimate a value. And if they're going to go in the garbage, then the value is zero. Gotcha.

Okay. All right. Thank you.

Any other questions? Okay. Sherry, if you'd take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid.

Yes.

Council Member Hoffman. Yes. Council Member Dupre. Yes. Council Member Cavanaugh. Yes. Okay, resolution number 144-2026, appointing UMB Bank NA of West Des Moines, Iowa to serve as paying agent, note registrar, and transfer agent, approving the paying agent and note registrar and transfer agent agreement and authorizing the execution of the agreement. Pass and adopt resolution number 144-2026. Is there a motion to approve?

Motion to approve.

Second.

Second.

Mr. O'Donnell. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. At the June 2nd, 2026 City Council meeting, the Council adopted Resolution 123-2026, accepting the loan proposal from JPMorgan Chase for the 2027 CIP borrowing. The resolution appoints UMB Bank NA of West Des Moines as our paying agent, registrar, and transfer agents for the notes. UMB serves in this capacity for all other existing debt obligations. Basically what they do is they send a notice to us and says, hey, it's time to make the bond payment or the interest payment. We send the money to UMB. UMB then pays the bonds.

And we use them quite often.

We use them for every debt issuance that we have right now.

Why is that the only one we use?

uh it makes things a whole lot simpler and um we could use somebody else the the the there wouldn't be much difference because um we do have to pay a a paying agent fee um it's either five to six hundred dollars a year so i mean it's it's minimal okay um but if we were to use another another bank or something like that right they're going to charge us five to six hundred dollars so by keeping it all with one it simplifies things a whole lot easier

So that form you gave me that showed all of those bonds, they're all paid through that.

Yeah, all of the principal and interest payments, we transfer to UMB. UMB pays the bonds then.

You read my mind. I was going to ask that question.

Any other questions? Okay, Sherry, take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid. Yes. Council Member Hoffman.

Yes.

Council Member Dupre. Yes. Council Member Cavanagh. Yes. Resolution number 145, 2026, approving and authorizing a form of loan agreement and authorizing and providing for the issuance of 2,760,060.73 general obligation capital loan notes, series 2026, and levying a tax to pay the notes. The approval of the tax exemption certificate. Recommendation pass and adopt resolution number 145, 2026.

Is there a motion to approve?

Motion to approve.

Second. Mr. O'Connell.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. On June 2nd, 2026, the City Council passed Resolution 123-2026, accepting a proposal from J.P. Morgan Chase to purchase the fiscal year 2027 CIP loan notes. The resolution approves the form of loan agreement and authorizes its execution. So you've approved the loan. This is the loan agreement.

Any questions from council? Just as clarification, when we say a tax to pay the note, what tax pays the note?

This would be the debt service levy. Okay.

Any other questions? And Sherry, if you would take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid?

Yes.

Council Member Hoffman? Yes. Council Member Dupre? Yes. Council Member Cavaness?

Yes.

Resolution number 147-2026, accepting the work as final and complete and approving the final pay request for the Allison Avenue Reconstruction Project. Recommendation passed and adopted. Resolution number 147-2026. Is there a motion to approve?

Motion to approve. Second. Mr. Bergmeier.

right thank you mayor uh so this project consists of the full width full depth reconstruction of allison avenue from maury to asbury um change order one increased the contract sum by ten thousand six hundred and twenty four dollars and twenty eight cents um this was for adding geogrid under the rock and also we extended the tie-in on maury to go a little bit farther to take in some uh waterworks patches um so that Change order, the new contract amount was $265,939.28. Less previous payments, the final amount due is $31,080.86. TK Concrete Appellate Iowa has completed this project according to the plans and specifications. This will authorize the change order with final payment releasing all retainage.

Any questions for Mr. Burgmeier?

Just an observation. Looks good. Drove on it today to see what it was like. And I'm sure the neighbors are glad. The people that live there, I should say.

Yeah. Until we get complaints of people driving too fast on it, then I'll... Any other questions?

Okay, Sherry, take the roll, please.

Council Member Reed. Yes. Council Member Hoffman. Yes. Council Member Dupre. Yes. Council Member Kavanagh.

Yes.

Resolution number 148-2026, approving the Iowa DOT TAP application for the Oxbow Lagoon Trail behind Church Street and authorizing the mayor to sign. Recommendation pass and adopt resolution number 148-2026. Is there a motion to approve?

Motion to approve. Second. Second.

Mr. Bergmaier. Thank you, Mayor. So this TAP application is to fund the completion of a trail on the Oxbow Lagoon for the existing trail at Waplow Street. That shouldn't say Church Street. That should say Milner Street. I wasn't here last week to read it, but it's going from Milner to Waplow Street. Um, it's federal money that'll help pay for 80% of the project. Um, area 15 members will use this for, uh, tap programs, usually for trails, the transportation alternatives program. Um, like I said, it's 80, 20 match on the local match will come from Wapolo trails and also from city in kind services from like inspection and design and stuff like that, that we've paid for. Um, The project is under design right now. We're working through some property acquisition, easement type stuff, but the design is pretty far along. We're ready to submit the check plans to the DOT shortly. And this agreement is to release the funds for us and not to release them, but to approve them for us. And we have to have let the contract back to our first 2025, which shouldn't be a problem.

So any questions or comments? Phil, can you tell me why the IDOT is involved in this project?

Yeah, so area 15, the DOT gives each region money every year. They give us a certain amount for streets for like Wapolo County, a certain amount, a certain amount that the counties and cities get some. They also set aside a small amount for transportation alternatives, which is usually trail projects. And those are the Wapolo County Trails Council submitted a proposal to the I can't remember the acronym for the committee, but to the committee in Area 15 that approves projects and that was approved. So the state is funding this trails project as a transportation alternatives program.

You answered my question. Thank you. You're welcome.

So other than design, am I correct on that? Other than design, we have no money. The city has no money in that.

We'll have money in design and inspection. Okay, design and inspection. Yep.

Okay.

The Trails Council comes up with other, they do a lot of the cash. Any cash that needs to go in there, they'll get grants and stuff for that or fundraise for it.

Are you having any problems with landowners getting into that area in the backside?

in this area not so much um trails council has been doing most of the leg work talking to the property owners um we're involved in a property swap because there's an old abandoned um not really abandoned but there's a piece of right away that goes through one of the properties that it's dead ended on both sides it's landlocked no use to us so we're kind of involved in that to rather than trails council paying them for it we're going to swap that on their property for the land along the shore.

Very good, thank you.

Okay, Sherry, if you could take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid? Yes. Council Member Hoffman? Yes. Council Member Dupre? Yes. Council Member Cavanagh?

Yes.

Resolution number 149, 2026, approving an agreement between the City of Ottumwa and Interstate Power and Light Company for facilities, restoration, and planned services. Recommendation pass and adopt resolution number 149, 2026. Is there a motion to approve?

Move to approve. Second.

Mr. Burgmeier.

Thank you, Mayor. So we asked the Alliant to move a pole on Sussex Place for one of our projects. And when the pole is owned by us and we asked the Alliant to move it, they'll charge us for it. We've done this on projects. Anytime they're there to move electric poles and there's one of ours, we'll have them move ours too. Found out when we asked them to move it that our agreement had expired. So- This includes like a generic agreement for the next three years so that when we do ask them to move stuff, we have an agreement to work under. And it also approves a specific amendment to that agreement to move that pole on Sussex out of the cul-de-sac and behind the curb.

Then do we have to pay them something for that service?

Yeah, so the payment for moving the pole in Sussex is $4,708. They grab the pole, pull out of the ground, they'll bore the new hole, put it in there and they'll move all the electric over and everything for that. It's really not something we can do in house. So it helps to have them on call kind of to move stuff like that for us.

So you said this is a three year contract. Will there be any additional fees if we don't use them?

No, no. It just provides a structure that, you know, that we have an insurance that we have insurance with them and, you know, a bond with them. So that way, when they do work for us, we do work for them. We're covered under under that agreement. There's no money changing hands as far as the agreement goes. Thank you. Yeah.

So which of the two lights is it? Is it the one right as you go start into something?

I think there was one right in the middle of the cul-de-sac.

Yeah.

And it provides issues for like, if a fire truck had to turn around in there, we want to get everything out from inside there and put it behind the curb.

So where are they going to move? Yeah. Move it on to one of them.

It's moving for facing up the cul-de-sac to like the right hand side, kind of at the base of the circle.

Okay.

Yeah. i didn't think of it at the time but that would be a problem i think if they had to go through there with a truck or something something yeah any any longer vehicles turn around makes it a makes it an issue and those cul-de-sacs are actually smaller than what is required nowadays um it wouldn't be approved right now if they wanted to make a circle that small

Okay, Sherry, if you would take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid? Yes. Council Member Hoffman? Yes. Council Member Dupre? Yes. Council Member Cavanaugh?

Yes.

Resolution number 152, 2026, approving agreement with GovWell Technologies, Inc. for community development and rental licensing software services for 23,000 a year. Recommendation, pass and adopt resolution number 152, 2026.

Is there a motion to approve? Motion to approve. Second. Second. Ms. Amal.

Thank you, Your Honor. This is part of our process improvement efforts to improve and streamline our processes. Here we're proposing an agreement with a company called GovWell for software solution that we believe meets our current needs. Here, this is a summary of the major processes that we conduct, and we need software to be able to do. We do plan review for building and developments, and then we do permitting, building permitting and inspections processes, and we do have nuisance code. case management processes, and then we do have rental housing licenses. The processes in yellow currently we do manually or have manual permitting inspections and case management. We do have an existing software that has some limitations as far as meeting our needs. When we look at the software, those are the priorities. When we look at our process needs, tracking. We are in need of a solution that can track processes, steps for us, and then integration between the housing licenses and the nuisance cases and the building permitting. Those processes sometimes kind of interact. We like to see some integration in terms of information. If someone is pulling a permit, we'd like to see if that's a rental property or how many nuisance cases associated with that, and sometimes part of the housing license inspection that would trigger a need for a building permit. Having a capability to integrate all those processes would be helpful for our process and for also being able to pull that information and have it readily available. And then the reporting, need for reporting, because we do track a lot in terms of investment in the community and those properties and sometimes managing those cases and tracking those placard properties. we do need to pull those monthly and quarterly reports to see what's going on in the community and report back on the operations we are tasked with. And then the need for documentation. Obviously we do deal with properties and We do enforce the city code. So documentation as far as interacting with those properties through complaints or performance as far as licenses for rental conditions and permitting and inspecting on those permittings. So all those processes will have... that we'll need to make sure we're documenting all those steps. And we a lot of times end up in court defending those decisions or outcomes. And we also need the management capability in order for us to be able to manage those cases for customer services and also for managing those programs. Current limitations we have in the software we use, data capacity. We do a lot of nuisance cases and investigations and documenting those through pictures. And one of the struggles we have is the amount of storage capacity that we need to make sure we have everything documented before and after. We need to produce additional capacity and that comes with cost and we're limited on how many pictures we can upload with each case. The rental property management right now is manual. We are in need of integrating those processes. As mentioned previously, reporting and collaboration, because a lot of the processes were manual limits collaboration or collaboration would be less efficient. Because we need to collaborate on, for example, on the review and permitting, we need to collaborate with engineering and fire operations. Integration also is limited when half of the processes were manual and some of it in spreadsheets and documents. hard copies of documents. Retrieving that information also for record requests is kind of sometimes troubling. What the GovWell solution is providing us, we saw as an advantage is the fact that it's cloud-based. It has the capability of integrating the four processes, major processes we deal with. It has or offered a lower overall cost compared to updating existing because we looked into that as well. And You can see here for just looking at the rental licensing module, the price is $9,000 versus $12,500 if we have to or we went with upgrading existing prices. We're estimating annual saving over 9,000 versus the option of updating existing. The solution also provide unlimited data storage capacity and also unlimited users that would help with collaboration. And we would be able to share with the other city departments. And also the platform is scalable and would be able to accommodate our future needs. Cause we are looking to set up the vacant building registration program. It would be helpful. We can just expand on that without having to buy another module or additional capacity. Budget impact approval will carry an impact of 23,000 annually for three years. Those are the term of the contract. We would be able to renew another three years for 23,000 and potentially having a 5% increase. for that additional term. Fiscal year 27 budget included $34,000 for the anticipated software upgrade and adding the rental module. Here, if we move with this contract now, we would have an overlap between having the existing software and this new software, but I believe that would allow us time to configure all the templates we need to build in the process and also migrate the data and implement the new software. So as far as timeline, if we approve the contract tonight, we will work on phase-out plan for integration and for data migration and rolling out. We would work on implementing and figure out a go-live date when we're ready. Bottom line, action or approving this contract tonight is consistent with the fiscal responsibility goal and continuous improvement value we have as an organization because it will add value while saving compared to what we have today. Streamline our process for efficiency and customer service and also would be saving with additional value.

Any questions?

Any questions?

Mal, $23,000 is for a one-year contract, but it is subject to three years agreement? Correct. True. And then what is the next dollar? $34,000 for an upgrade in what?

In this software solution we have currently.

I'm lost.

So was 34,000 what was budgeted or what we have in the budget, correct?

Budgeted, yes.

And then 23,000 is what this, so we have a savings.

Yes, but we do have an overlap between existing software. Yes, yes. But eventually we'll save around 9,000 every year for the duration. So we end up better off.

So if you were to stay with the current software, the upgrade would cost an additional 9,000. Is that what I heard?

Yes.

Yeah. Which is what we built our budget on. But now we found software that's 9,000 less. So it's really an $18,000 swing. Actually, I think it's 11,000.

No, over three years it would be 27,000.

It would be 27,000. Does this come out of the general fund?

Yes.

Yes.

Does that, which it sounds good, but does it include a little bit of training from the company with the software?

Correct.

Does anybody on staff have experience with this GovWell program?

No, but all staff has seen a demo from the software and all stuff is in agreement.

It sounds like, and I didn't sit in on it, but from the explanation that it's more user-friendly and functional for the staff members, and they can share information better. Currently, we have a limited capacity, plus we're buying extra storage capacity on top of that, and if we added the other package, it just adds up, so... this would be a more efficient, fiscally responsible and get more out of it, including the training.

When I went to their website, the reviews were really good from other cities our size and said that it was real user-friendly and that it helped a lot. It was almost like having another person without having another person. My only question was about the cloud-based storage. How do we protect our information For instance, we go out of business.

We are entitled to our data.

Okay. So we don't have to worry about that. No. Or privacy or anything like that.

I don't think so. So it's designed for our sort of process we do for government. And there are a lot of communities use this software. But for us here, the biggest really seller for me is the unlimited software. data, storage, and unlimited user. We're able to expand and include other departments without having to pay. Right now, if we're modifying our process, creating a new template, we would have to buy that. We have to pay for.

You were talking about security measures, right? Because that was the question. So, Ed, will it have security measures and will you add additional security measures to it?

I'm actually not familiar with this company's security measures. Their current system.

Will you add on to it?

Will you have a line? It depends on the vendor if they allow that. Our current system that building and code is using is also in the cloud. We're pretty good.

We're pretty protected anyway, right? Yeah.

What if it's raining?

Then you get wet.

I will say, being in a profession that's on the other side of this software, working with governments and cities, as I was reviewing it, I feel that this would give us better interaction with the citizens and better services that we could provide this. I was impressed.

Especially if you're, yeah, if you're an architect for the plan review, it's live interaction, basically. The inspector would make the notes and you will get the email right away. It's really slick.

Anything we can do to make that faster is better. Yeah. Well, that's one of the things that clients cannot get done quick enough is the plan review. So because then they're ready to go. No other questions. Sherry, take the roll, please.

Council Member Reid.

Yes.

Council Member Hoffman.

Yes.

Council Member Dupre. Yes. Council Member Cavanis.

Yes. And with this, we come to the section of public forum. So I would open it up to anybody in the audience that would like to speak on any non-agenda items. Seeing none, then I would open it up to Council for any closing comments that they may have.

I'd like to wish my wife a happy anniversary. This is number 64 for us today. Well done. She let me come to council meeting tonight.

You've been married 64 years.