City Council - workshop

Good afternoon. Welcome to the Pflugerville City Council work session at calling to order at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, August 11, 2026. Our first item on the agenda is public comment. I've received two requests for public comment. They are on a specific item. If you would prefer, Les and Jim, if we wait until that item so you can speak particularly to that item, in which case we will move directly into item three on our agenda, our regular agenda. 3A is to conduct a presentation on the fiscal year 2027 proposed budget for the city of Pflugerville, Texas. We have Finance Director Tracy Waldron. Give us all the news.

Yes. Good evening So this budget process started back in January with a council retreat where we per we received Council's priorities on the fiscal 27 budget process We also seek community support through open houses the master plans We do a biennial Resident survey there will be two public hearings one on the August 25th for the budget another one on September 8th for the tax rate So I did want to point out some document upgrades that we outlined in your email when you were receiving the proposed budget and the overall layout is grouped a little bit different so we are grouping everything by fund type. And so it flows a little bit better instead of having to kind of jump around. So all general fund is in the same section. The personnel summary chart includes a change column. We felt like that would be helpful as a recommendation from our budget and finance committee. We provided a more detailed all-fund summary, so it has a lot more detail that ties back to the summary pages that fall within the different funds. And there are some new funds this year. The Monarch is a new fund. It's under the enterprise section. We do have a utility debt service fund that is new, and the Tourism Public Improvement District. I did want to go over this property tax notice because I can understand that if you just look at this notice, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But it is the legal language of the notice.

Let's be clear, Tracy, that's not your fault. This is what the legislators are requiring us to say.

I understand, but that's why I wanted to call it out, because if our budget is only changing by $385,000, but we could actually gain $1.7 in new properties, sometimes I'm just trying to connect the dots for people. So if you just look at our M&O and INS budget from one budget year to the next budget year, we're only gaining $385,000. But if you calculate our new property values based on the proposed rate that we are using in the budget, we would be gaining 1.7. The biggest difference in this is the fact that we are not taking all of the calculation that we could for the debt service. We're using $4,850,000 of fund balance to keep that rate close to what it was last year. If we did not do that, the rate would be $3,245 instead of $2,826, which we will go over the rates a little bit later.

Let's be clear, Tracy. What you're saying is that... Y'all, in trying to help out the citizens, particularly during this time of financial need, you've utilized partial funds to go ahead and cover that aspect to make sure that we can keep the rate where it could be affordable for everybody.

What was the amount, again, that was out of fund balance? $4,850,000. $4,850,000 out of fund balance.

So just wanted to talk about that notice.

That's funds that we have available that have been taxed.

And we will go over that particular debt service fund a little bit later, but just wanting to kind of highlight what this notice actually means and why it may not make a lot of sense when you first look at it. So the appraised taxable value is certified. We did receive the certified values. We did have new property value of 321 million. This is over the 172 million in the previous tax year. The increases that the TERS captured was about 20 million. And we did have loss of some property through the property exemption. There was a new law this year of about 74 million. You can see from the chart that this is the first year. I think if we go back many, many years, we have not seen a valuation actually go down, even with $321 million in new valuation. So we are a little bit of a new territory. So we had total reduction in taxable values of about $65 million.

Is that including TERS or excluding TERS? This is total. It does include the terse. Yes. Yes.

just to talk about the different tax rates since we're going to be going over all of them in future slides. We do have two different tax rates, maintenance and operations, which we refer to as our general fund, and the interest in seeking tax rate, which is our debt service fund. There's also the no new revenue rate, which is required to produce the same amount of tax revenue from the current fiscal year as the previous fiscal year on the same properties. And then the voter approval rate is the maximum rate allowed without voter approval. And it is 3.5% over the no new revenue M&O rate. This is just a calculation of how you get to it. We are not using any unused increments, so it's just the voter approval M&O rate plus the debt service that gets you to the voter approval tax rate. So we did receive the certified rolls, and Travis County Truth and Taxation Department did do the rate calculation on our behalf. And these are the rates that have been calculated. So the proposed tax rate is the $54.36. This is the voter approval tax rate. of 54.36. The voter approval M&O rate is 26.10, up from the 2,500 last year. And the debt rate was 28.50 last year. It's being calculated at 28.26. The no new revenue rate is 54.07. And the no new revenue rate, just the M&O portion, is 25.23. And as I stated, we did use some fund balance to keep that debt rate close to what it was. If we had not have been able to do that, it would have been at 32.45. The proposed tax revenue just for the MNO, which is the general fund, last year we budgeted $29 million. We're projecting $28 million. The difference can be a lot of things, but we do see a lot of adjustments throughout the year. So when we set the budget, we have an estimated under review value. And so we usually use the recommendation provided by the appraisal district. But if those adjustments actually go below that estimated amount, then we see that variance between the two. So the proposed fiscal 27 PROPERTY TEXT REVENUE FOR THE GENERAL FUND IS 30.2 MILLION. SO THAT IS A 1.3 MILLION INCREASE OVER THE FISCAL 26 PROPOSED BUDGET.

AND IF WE WENT WITH THE NO NEW REVENUE RATE, WE'D BE LOOKING AT ROUGHLY 29,800,000 Which would be an increase of about a million over the previous year.

Yeah, there's a million right around a million difference. Yeah So another thing that changed was when you look at the average taxable and the median taxable Both amounts have gone down since last year so when applied to the proposed tax rates of each of those years, we're actually seeing about a $54 decrease in the average taxable property tax. This is just a snapshot of a comparison between the average homestead and the actual tax rate. So with the fiscal 27 average homestead value going down, the rate is going to tear up. I mean, it's math at the end of the day. And so as the valuations have gone down, we've seen the rate head up again. This was just a comparison. We did look at commercial and residential separately to see. We knew that the residential had decreased in value. It's about 2%. But the commercial actually increased about 5%. So we're seeing a little bit of a difference between commercial and residential.

And that's net of the decrease in the business personal property? It's already factored in. It's already factored in. Yes. So if that hadn't happened, it would have gone up.

Even more. What do we attribute that to?

The exemption?

No, no, no. Just like you said, commercial going up, how it is.

Yeah, it's all in the values and how the appraisal district assesses the values. Residential saw a decrease overall.

The values in the commercial was both the increase in values of existing commercial plus the addition of new commercial.

There is new, yes. We do have new value. I don't know the breakout between the new value. I can get that, but between residential and commercial.

You anticipated my follow-up question.

Yeah, I don't have that in my back pocket, but we can definitely get that. This is a benchmark. We were not able to pull a lot of new rates from some of these jurisdictions. One thing we did add this year, though, was which jurisdictions use sales tax to reduce their property tax, so we kind of added that as a additional information on this slide. So Georgetown, Round Rock, Hutto, and Taylor all use some form of sales tax to break down their property tax.

How is that different than our sales tax being in our budget and therefore can reduce property taxes because it's in the same fund?

They assign there's a step you have to take to actually assign sales tax to property tax.

So it's part of the calculation. It's type B sales tax that they use to buy down, right?

I don't know that.

So you can go through a sales tax election that designates a specific sales tax.

Right. I mean, you have to literally, like, have it designated that. I think some of them stated, like, so much percentage of their sales tax was dedicated to property tax.

Just like what the mayor said, yes, but specific, what category. Yeah.

We don't have any capacity left in our sales tax rate. Right. Thanks to our other entities.

But it's interesting to see.

No comment.

So key budget assumptions, this looks at all, this is an overall, all funds overlook Fund balance targets, 25%. We did use the voter approval rate in all of our assumptions and projections. We did use a conservative sales tax projection. and we'll go over that a little bit later to what we used. The utility revenue is based on the study recommendations and recreational increase based on estimated memberships and proposed fees. On the expenditure side, the general fund had a reduction in 17 positions. Excuse me. The utility fund had a reduction in 10 positions. We did add the Monarch Fund, which added quite a few new positions, 123 new positions. We do have an annual COLA increase, so cost of living 3%, and health insurance increase of 8%. And we also have all of the occupancy costs for all of the new facilities that'll be opening in fiscal 27. So those are all new costs this year.

Tracy, let's talk. Oh, I'm so sorry. Go ahead.

I was just going to ask. I think I saw in there that you've also updated the cost allocations for occupancy right across the department. So those increased costs. are reflected in the departmental.

Right. So we've included the Monarch as part of that allocation as well because we will support that enterprise fund. On the debt service side, the general fund debt service.

I think we had a couple more questions. I'm sorry.

Yeah, I don't know. Did you?

No, go ahead.

I'll go ahead. So by moving the recreation center operations, obviously it's going to be expanded with the Monarch. But how much of the expenses are we moving out of the general fund into the Monarch fund that was just related to operations of our recreation center without the associated increase?

I'm going to phone a friend and he'll get that for you. piece in the audience. It wasn't a ton of expenditures. We did have 14 full-time employees, though, so that number, I don't even want to try to pull that out of the air. Your friend has been found. I mean, you're not John. You look very different than John.

John looked at me.

I'll still phone a friend.

Are you asking like current operations of our current facility?

well all things being equal if we if we were not opening up the monarch or having a separate monarch fund and we were still funding the recreation center you know some of those operations would would be in the general fund normally so we've moved those expenses thereby reducing our general fund and putting it in the monarch fund other things obviously are coming in but i just wanted to know how much recurring you know like how much of our expenses this year did we move to you know, basically being the monarch, you know, similar to what we... We can get you a final number.

I wouldn't say the operating costs were super high, but the 14 people...

It's the personnel, right?

Sorry, I mean personnel in that operation. Obviously, you also moved recreation center fees as well. Right. But there's usually I'm assuming there was a net cost after the fees that you removed. Yes. Just for an apple.

And we only did nine months because I mean, it's not going to be opening right at October 1st. So we tried to do a split and kept the cost. We kept about three months of the cost in general fund and moved the rest to the Monarch.

Let me ask a simplified version of Councilwoman Ryan's very complex question about funds. Assuming, for the sake of this hypothetical...

Doesn't sound simple.

We didn't have a Monarch Fund, but it was still part of the Parks and Recreation Department. How many new positions would we have, and what change would that have on the budget, in both cost and revenue?

If we didn't have a Monarch... But we had a new recreation building. You're saying, so it's no different whether we pull it out and make it a separate fund.

Right, but so we have the old rec center, which will be closing down at some point. We have the new rec center. Presumably some of the personnel from the old rec center will go to the new rec center. So my question is, Are we getting 123 new people, or are we getting 123 people who are going to be in the rec center, some of whom are in the old rec center? Are we getting the cost for 123 new people? Yes, we are. So it's 123 new people. It's 123 new people.

If you look at their total on their personnel summary, it's 138.

Okay.

So 14 full-time are being moved from general fund that are current employees, current positions. Then we're adding two full-time, and then we're adding like 121 part-time.

So, Tracy, I've got a question about that. And I think you mentioned, you know, we've got a cost allocation model, right, to distribute cost of certain departments.

Finance, IT, yes.

Yeah. The method or the mechanism for calculating that cost allocation, I feel like there would be a much higher demand on people in culture when it comes to 100 and something part-time employees rather than...

But we have given them a full-time P plus C staff.

So it's one full-time P plus C for the Monarch. I feel like, you know, in general, when we're cost allocating, we're saying we've got all these positions, but they turn over infrequently.

Right.

But when it comes to those part-time, I feel like there should probably be a higher cost allocation.

So because we gave them that person, they're still seeing an allocation from P plus C, but not as much. Because they have that dedicated full-time person at, yes. So that was a little bit different for them. Because they do have all of the part-time positions, you're right. They're going to be in hiring mode all the time.

We try to estimate the time required, factoring in the additional FTE that will be dedicated. Good to know. Thank you for thinking of that.

So there is an allocation, but not as much because they do have the dedicated person.

And that was your idea, Tracy, not Shane's, right? I think it was B plus C. No one takes my recommendation. Quick question on the health insurance. So, you know, I'm always interested in that just because the reality, I mean, it's real, the significance of the portion. How did we compare to last year regarding cost increase and how does this compare to what we're looking at given that there's some people who actually went to the marketplace? but then left the marketplace.

Yes, I think we were right at our 5% last year. We had budgeted 5% and made some adjustments to the plan to keep us at 5%. But every time we meet with them at the beginning of the process, it's like 20, 25%. I put eight in. I think the last email I saw was 12, 14. So we'll probably get it down to close to the 8%, if not a little lower, but I still think it's a reasonable projection. And you know, we're on a calendar year, so I'm not really gonna know about this information until after this budget is adopted. So we just try to do the best estimate that we can with what we have.

That 8% does make me pretty nervous.

I don't know.

Because we also hopefully do not get ourselves in a situation where we have to further cut benefits either.

Well, and remember last year we did Yeoman's work to make sure we keep from that because the reality of the situation is that what's the point of having health insurance if you really can't access your health insurance? And so it's real. But we know all too well January 1st is when we find out what's really going on. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we should know October.

These are all estimates, right? Like you can get major claims over the next few months that totally change that, right? So right now, based on utilization, that's our best guess.

So sorry, going back to the Monarch Fund, can you just remind everyone the reason that we are creating an enterprise fund and separating this from the general fund?

Yes, because we have laid out a five-year plan for the Monarch to be self-supporting of itself through its own revenues. And so because of that plan, we felt like it made sense to make it an enterprise fund.

And therefore, it's not subject to the 25% fund balance reserve, and it's not subject to funding by property taxes, which is limited to the 3.5%.

Correct.

Correct. But the reality of the situation is that if you lay out that plan the way it did, and based on what we put up as the fees, I guess we still have to confirm what the fees will ultimately be with that, will be in the black. This is the second biggest rec center in the state of Texas. And given all the amenities and everything else involved with it, I've already spoken to several other facilities around our city who have already made it clear. I mean, people are going to flock to this. And so I think it's a great idea, and I think it's a good idea to have it as an enterprise fund and then to see where this goes from there as well.

So then my follow-up question is, is that options for other types of recreational activities that have fees associated with it? as being an enterprise activity rather than a governmental activity.

You're never going to get to cost recovery on like soccer programs. Yeah, our park fees are not cost recovery. Pick a ball.

We're anticipating that Monarch is going to run into black the first week?

No, no, no, no. That's the five-year plan. It's a five-year plan. Yeah, you start rubbing your head like, what's that guy's name?

So what y'all are approving as part of this budget was a prior discussion where PCDC is helping to bridge the gap. And that'll tear down as we get better and closer and closer to cost recovery over the next five years.

And by year five, we should be in the black. But we won't be in the black for the five-year period.

Yeah, by that time. Because it's literally building up to that rally. And like I said, there's a lot of people who have no idea what the heck that thing is. And then as soon as, what are we saying, February? As soon as it opens up, I mean, it's... you're going to see a lot of people flock into that. Particularly, I mean, I'll just tell you straight up, we already have a lot of entities talking about basketball, for example. Like, you've had to go to Round Rock and all these areas to actually put on some tournaments. Yeah, exactly.

So was our current recreation center with the similar type activity self-sufficient?

Not even close. Did not have similar activity. It was maybe 25%, 35% cost recovery. It was more of a community center than a rec center. It doesn't have a big gym. It doesn't have the big things that would draw and justify a large... I mean, you had like annual memberships of like 90 bucks or something for a family. It wasn't priced to be cost recovery and didn't have the facilities to justify rates that would make it cost recovery.

I mean, I will support the Cowboys till the day I die, but I will be there day one just given the indoor... not only the basketball courts, but also you have the track, you have the turf field, you have the go-ahead and indoor swimming facility with all the amenities to that. I mean, there's so much there that people have no idea until they're gonna be like, wait, this is what they've been building? And it's like, yeah. Trust me.

The idea of making an enterprise fund is to remove it as a tax burden, like to take that off of the burden of the tax rate. That's the whole point.

Any other questions?

I'm just wondering, over the five-year plan, because the fifth-year plan was to be self-sufficient, but what about the accumulated net fund balance over the other four years? How are we... How's it going to be addressed? Yeah, I guess I just want to understand how you can have negative fund balance for so many years, and then how many years after year five will we actually have, you know, break even on our accumulated fund balance?

You're asking if we'll run it up? a surplus to make up for the first five years, or are we planning to subsidize it for the first five years? You guys have already taken action.

PCVC Board has already taken action to subsidize the deficit.

I thought I saw a negative 500,000 in year one.

There is a negative in our estimates.

There's also a transfer to offset it from PCDC.

Well, no, we have a negative. We're proposing a negative. We realize that. And I think I put some stuff on that page to kind of explain that. But also we're dealing with a lot of unknowns and estimates. And so I feel like the memberships and the fees... are conservative, especially the membership count. And so hopefully, you know, we just don't know what we don't know. We don't know how many people are going to sign up the first year. So we're just trying to be very realistic and very conservative. We will monitor it as it gets up and running. I know they're going to do pre-sales for memberships. So that'll give us a glimpse of kind of how that's going. And we can pivot from that point. But yes, we're trying to do the best we can do with what we know. And we will come back to you if needed at some point.

It sounds like you're anticipating some sort of mid-year budget adjustment.

i'm just anticipating getting going and seeing the reality of what we've put on paper you know because that's the unknown because the rate the rate itself is i mean especially for the family right very competitive like like shockingly competitive for what we're trying to go ahead and get out right there as well which is fair it is competitive with the other the other options in the market but it is also much higher than what we're currently charging And it's given to what you actually provide. I mean, that's the problem right now is that if you ask me the percentage of our citizens who actually utilize the current facility as compared to what's going to be.

Probably less than five percent.

Yeah. And this is going to be something where I have an inkling, and I'm glad that we actually changed the rate for people who are outside the city, that we're going to have a lot of people not from here who are going to be looking at this and saying, how do I get in?

Thank you, Tracy. I appreciate what you're saying. My question was more about what are we going to do if we are having, even with the additional contribution that's from PCDC, if we are going to have a negative balance or if what I'm hearing is at some point we will have to decide what to do with that negative balance and we're not going to just leave it there. Correct. Okay.

Thank you. Maybe I have a better question to your point. When do we ever operate that in the black? You know, when we're talking about facilities and physical usage, because that's just the nature of the beast. It's always been, you operate in the...

I know, but that's part of the general fund that's been funded by property taxes. We're taking it out and we're saying it's not going to be funded.

Exactly. So what I'm saying is that, like, We've never had it. We've never had it in the block. We're working towards it. That's a huge sniffy. That is a game changer.

We're hopeful that the rate should be set at a rate that should provide fund balance because we need to set aside for maintenance. Like the rates need to cover not just the operating of that year. They need to cover projections of maintenance and replacement of equipment. I mean, like we need to plan ahead. In a perfect world, it should carry a fund balance because that fund balance should be there and available for future maintenance and future replacement of equipment.

As we heard at the last meeting, there will be gym equipment that will have to be replaced periodically. That will be an expense starting about year five, but it will continue to increase after that. Right.

So we have to set our fees in order to handle that. Yeah.

And then the general fund or the debt service fund is covering all plus some of PCDC money is covering the cost to build, this is only being in the black, hopefully for the cost to operate. But if you were a standalone gym or recreation center doing this, your cost would be much higher because you'd have to pay for a loan to build the building and all of that. Thank you.

Speaking of debt service. That's right.

Perfect segue.

Existing debt service for general is 43.6 million. Utilities is, I realize these numbers are exactly the same. I did double check them. They are, just happen to be exactly the same. I do want to.

Are you sure you just copy and paste?

I know.

Okay.

That's what I checked because I was like, am I losing my mind? I do want to point out the utility is always an estimate. The WIFIA loans, the amortization on the WIFIA loans constantly change. So every time we do a drawdown, that amortization changes. So that is a moving target. So that's why I put the estimate on there. This budget does not include any proposed payments. New debt, even if the bond election, I think I've referenced this in the book itself, that would start in fiscal 28. So even if that was approved and the voters agreed and y'all put it on the ballot, there would be no debt in fiscal 27.

So for the utility, then that means that the COs that we've borrowed before and the WIFIA loans that we've drawn down, are sufficient to cover the construction costs that we're anticipating this year and we're not going to have to do any more additional drawdowns?

Well, the drawdowns are part of the loan. So the loans are...

Okay, so when you say no new debt, you mean no new authorized debt, but with the WIFIA because it's more like a line of credit?

It's already authorized.

Okay, so we will be drawing down additional debt proceeds. Yes. Just we're not going to authorize new debt.

Correct. Okay. There is no new debt. The WIFIA has already been authorized at the full amount. We have not drawn it all down.

At a great rate.

Mm-hmm.

So this is just a snapshot of all the funds, and it kind of shows you how this is how the funds are set in the document itself. So we do have $236 million in governmental, which includes general fund debt service and general capital. The enterprise now will include everything related to water, wastewater, utilities, solid waste, and the Monarch. Special revenue still consists of the TERS. a hotel, public safety, and the public education government fund. Internal service fund is our vehicle and equipment and replacement fund and the PCDC. so on the general fund just looking at general funds revenue and reoccurring expenditures are balanced at 65.8 there is a capital outlay and one-time expenditures of 2.8 that are coming from available fund balance which leaves us with 16.9 million in fund balance which is right at 26 percent of reoccurring expenditures On the revenue side, we kind of talked about some of these things. We already talked about the assessment values being decreased by 65 million, new property values at 321 million. Just doing backwards math, existing property values decreased by 386 million. Sales tax is... slow and right now i checked the numbers as of july and we're at 1.2 percent fiscal year to date um which is less than what we budgeted and so we are building this budget on a zero percent so whatever we're projecting for Fiscal 26 is what we're proposing for fiscal 27, so we're not adding anything to that. On the other revenue, we do have the 600,000 for EMS services added to the budget. We also have a transfer from Tree Escrow funds of 521,000. And there was a slight increase in the franchise fees. This is just based on historical trends in that revenue line.

Can you explain who we charge franchise fees for? Or to, I'm sorry.

So electric pays franchise fees, solid waste, and telecom companies for right-of-way.

except for them to be able to go ahead yeah peg funds um my my other question cable yeah okay so and then the water and waste water because it's an inner fund with the city of pflugerville they pay franchise fees as well but it's just called something different or it's called a transfer we calculate a four percent and it's a transfer from that fund to the general fund okay but it's not in the franchise fee it is not that was

So even looking at, I mean, this is about as conservative an estimate that you're giving here. So anything we get is a bonus on top of that, particularly when you're looking at the projections for sales tax, just zero without the reality of that.

And why are we doing the three escrow transfer this year in that amount?

We do it every year to a certain extent, but the Parks Department did build in certain things that they wanted to do that they want to use these funds for. So we have the expenses in the budget. I just wanted to make sure that we had the transfer of the revenue in the budget as well to offset the expenditures.

So the free escrow is for the purpose of helping Parks and Rec with forestation and increasing green space? Right. Okay.

For sales tax, I'm curious if you know what's the general sales tax increase for the central Texas area. Are we in line with that?

Absolutely.

I'd have to look.

But I'll tell you, I mean, talking to our compatriots in other cities, absolutely. There's a reason why the city of Austin's coming out for the first time ever with their own economic development plan coming up next year. But it is an issue across the region regarding what's happening with sales tax or lack thereof right there. I don't think anyone has anticipated, like Tracy said already, what would happen with AdVlorm and, you know, property tax values going down from that, which actually hurts from that. You're already capped at 3.5 percent on what you can do from there. So this is where now more than ever we're at a place where PCDC and utilizing it in our economic development are going to have to be a critical tool to actually go ahead and recruit and get things in here for us to be able to go and have that. I'm going to say right now I don't think it's too dissimilar from where we were at in 2008, 2009, 2010.

Tracy, have we seen an estimate from the comptroller's office on the statewide change in sales tax? I have not. I'd be curious if we're trending along with the state or if we're staying ahead of the curve or falling behind.

Usually we're ahead of state average. I'll look at that, though.

Yeah, I expect so. So I just want to make sure that we're not falling behind that curve because that would indicate something to me.

Right, because we're usually ahead of that.

I mean, overall on this graph, we've done very well in increasing our sales tax. It's just that that large increase every year is no longer happening.

But a lot of those were added... sales tax providers.

We're recognizing new developments that brings in national sales tax revenue.

So the last couple of years, like between fiscal 24 and 27, you were just looking at people's spending patterns. Well, that's gone flat.

And that's the key. So if it's gone flat from that aspect, what is it looking at from reality of bringing in other businesses from there? Because obviously you've seen we've benefited from that, and now it's gone to the point where You know, I think during the pandemic, we talked about that. We were like, wait a minute, people are spending more of their money at home now that we've gone back to our, essentially our regular cycle. That's happening all over the place.

Well, there was some changes in the law of the allocation of where the sales tax goes versus the customer home versus the business location.

Are we Round Rock, Texas, counselor?

No, but it means that more of our tax dollars that people were spending were staying with us, you know, in addition to COVID.

We looked at that because, you know, what's the name of the furniture store we got?

Living spaces?

Yeah, that's what we started. That was a good one. Yeah. Tracy, I think you've got 17 more slides while we start making our way through.

I have a handful. So on the general fund expenditure highlights, as I stated before, 17 positions reduced. So the breakdown on that is 15 positions moving to the Monarch. Six reclassed from the Water and Wastewater Fund. So those positions we gained. And then there were eight positions removed. 3% gone over all that occupancy costs for the new facilities. So that includes property insurance, the utilities, all of those things that we're going to see. I know there's like a janitorial service contract. That's pretty substantial. So we, we have tried to estimate and add all of those new costs into this new budget. We do have the increase in the medical services contract in this budget. We have reduced third-party contracts. And we pretty much went, as we went through each of the departments, we really were looking at the third-party contract utilization. So we have a list of contracts that we've reduced. So that was pretty significant. And then we've updated the cost allocation increase. Because we gained the positions from water and wastewater, obviously, in return, they got additional cost allocation. But we've also added the monarch in that allocation as well.

I had a question on the positions that were actually unfunded, I think was the term you used. The eight positions. Swapped out. Were those vacant positions? Yes. So it's no layoffs, just reducing vacant positions. Correct. And what was the reason either those positions were vacant or were no longer determined to be needed?

so as we as we had positions become vacant we paused and we looked at our departments i know i had one in finance and um you know after looking at it and determining how are we doing can we do you know can we do what we need to do without this position and it was determined that we could and so i think that has been the case with

um positions across the city when they become vacant we you know sometimes the position needs to be reclassed and it needs to be something else other than it was all of those um analysis happen at that time so i think this question is for james more than it is for tracy james we swept a lot of positions that's what the term is the term is swept and we know that we're trying to make y'all um make lemonade out of lemons here Are we saying by sweeping those positions that those positions weren't necessary? Are we saying that we're trying at our best to help the citizens at a moment in need regarding budget crunches and what the state of the economy is?

Every time we have a vacancy, the direction is to look at does it still make sense? Does it make sense to refill it? If it does, does it need to look different? Do we need to make any changes to it? Every single time we have a vacancy, that's just the way that we operate. I would say, I would love to have those eight positions back. This isn't something that we can't, while we're not growing in double digits, we are growing still. We are still, you know, we're still doing, we have new houses, new commercial, y'all get reports about the new things that are coming online. All those things require service, right? So we can't continue to cut year over year But this was by far the hardest year. If not for the Monarch Fund, I would have had to cut, I mean, the equivalent of another 14 positions, maybe closer to 20, right? Before you start getting into service level type stuff, right? Y'all got a preview of that last year where we brought a number of things to say, if not for some subsidy from PCDC, these are going to go away. And y'all decided to use those funds to keep that level of service. So that's what we're trying to hedge off. Um, so several of those, so one was in finance, one was in the city manager's office. Um, so I'm not asking other people to cut when I'm not willing to cut. So I'm cutting my staff to, um, several of those were in public works. Um, it's just like, we just got to try to figure it out this year. You know, I'm trying to recruit a new public works director. I trust that person to come in and evaluate, and I might be asking for a couple more positions next year if we can swing it. Um, but yeah, I'd say we look critically at every position every time it opens.

So as people are hurting at home, we're hurting here, and you're trying to band-aid as best we can until we get to a better economy.

I mean, I think if you look at some of our... comparison cities as well. Our staff here in Pflugerville has always been comparatively very lean. So I think we're taking an already pretty thin ship. Luckily for us, we've got a ton of great talent that can make up for that. But we're already pretty lean, I think.

And Jonathan, I'm glad you brought that up. I think it's disingenuous for people to say that this city has not tried to operate at a level of efficiency that others haven't and just given how we are with just looking at the basic FTEs. And so I wanted to make sure when you talked about this that we really made it clear to the citizens that, listen, we're not saying these weren't necessary. We're saying right now at this moment in time, we're trying our best to go ahead and bandage everything, stitch tape, scotch tape, is that the term? You know, get everything together to get things worked. But it doesn't, you know, and we're trying to work with you during this moment.

So I had, on the occupancy cost for the new facilities, is it possible for us to, at some point in the future, get a summary of what are the additional costs to run the city hall versus how we're doing it today? What is the additional cost? Operating I know there's personnel cost for the monarch But what are the additional occupancy costs for the monarch versus our current facility and any other new facilities? Whether that's the public works and all of that because I think it is important to know that Okay, we have these new facilities It does come with these costs and these costs are also dry, you know adding to to the total expenses and like I'd like to know how much that is and

To answer the mayor's question earlier about statewide sales tax collection, I went to the comptroller's website. And the comptroller had originally projected a 3.9% increase in sales tax statewide and has increased that estimate to a 4.7%. sales tax increase statewide and it's just a projection right so might be right might be wrong it's good to know but the comptroller seems to think that the prospects for sales tax are improving they're seeing growth uh that that could be good for for our last few months here at fiscal year 26. so we'll keep an eye on that i have seen an increase the last couple of months

but I wasn't willing to change the bazooka because of a couple of months of increase. Hopefully that trend will continue.

I know, rather be conservative than otherwise. And it does vary by region. It always does. You're saying West Texas doesn't do something we do down here? It's shocking. Tracy, where were we?

So on the capital outlay side, as I mentioned, 2.8 million, the complete list provided in the proposed budget is on page 29. We've also included this in the proposed budget, which just highlights the major events that are funded within this budget.

Any on there you want to highlight? I don't see the 4th of July on that list.

What's third from the bottom, David?

Red, white, and boom? Is that the official name of the Independence Day celebration?

It comes with the parade, so that's cool.

That was a long list. I did not finish reading that whole list.

I was curious, I think you've got Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service. I've also seen a Day of Service associated with September 11th. Do we staff for that or no?

I heard.

That may be more of a volunteer event, but I don't remember the day of service.

I will say these are ones that have funds associated with them.

Okay.

I really feel like we've covered all of these, unless you have a question. We've covered the reductions. Moving on to debt service. So the property tax revenue INS budgeted $33.2 million last year, projecting about $32.8. Our preliminary for fiscal 27 proposed really is the $32.6, utilizing the available fund balance of $4,850,000. Debt service summary revenues 39.6, recurring expenditures of 43.6. So, we have a net change of the 4.1 drawing down that fund balance. So, projected ending fund balance will be at 5.3.

And just a reminder that we do not have a fund balance requirement for this fund, so we can go down to zero.

Yeah, as a matter of fact, if the fund balance is too high, we actually get penalized for arbitrage. So there is a calculation there that we have to watch, and we really actually want it below that arbitrage calculation.

And so is it our long-term plan to then draw down on that 5.3 fund balance in the future years? Yes.

Thank you. I see where you're going.

As we talked about the Monarch earlier, so revenues are projecting at 5.3, broke this down a little bit, so personnel 3.8, operating at 2 million, and then the cost allocation. So we are... projecting a negative, but as I stated in the proposed budget, this is something that we will monitor as we get memberships and Maybe coming back to you, maybe not. We don't know. Hopefully not. Do want to call out that this does include the 2.1 million support from 4B funds from PCDC.

Do we have detail of the level of memberships that is included in the estimate for revenue?

They do, yes.

Okay.

I haven't made it that basic. We have a lunch and learn.

Yeah, I think we're going to cover all that next week. On utility funds, water and wastewater fund summary. So revenue is being projected at 66.9 operating expenditures and debt service. I do want to, Remind you that the debt service is a transfer So it is included I always want to make sure it's above the line because it should be included as our part of our calculation for our fund balance requirement But it is a transfer. So our debt is more than thirty two point five We are using available fund balance in the debt service fund this year specifically to try to keep those costs lower for the rates. And then we have capital outlay and transfers of 2.8. The calculations when I laid this out are below the fund balance requirement. So I just wanted to point out the two things that we have built in to the projections and to the proposed is transfers to the capital fund. those transfers won't fully happen unless we have our final projections and know that we actually have available fund balance like currently our proposed budget in 26 has i believe six million budgeted we've only transferred four we will not transfer the last two unless we know how we're going to fall out one thing that's um going to change a little bit. And I tried to make projections as the revenue because we were in water restrictions for four months, three and a half months. And so even though I can try to make estimates of what that revenue is going to look like, I'm not really going to know until we get through the fiscal year. So all of those things come into play. I just want to say that we will not make the transfers to the capital fund if we are not above the 25% or at the 25%.

Now for the 26 projections, the transfer for the, oh no, that's, what is the rest, if six million is?

So it's all of the money we transferred to start the utility debt service. Okay, so that's a one time. It is. Okay. Yeah. And that I can't change, but I do have some flexibility with the six million because if, you know, we won't transfer it if it's not available. So on the highlights for the Water and Wastewater Fund, we did talk about 10 positions being removed. Six positions were transferred to General Fund. Four positions were actually removed. They also had third-party contracts that were reviewed and certain amounts reduced. And then we have the new expenditures for the wastewater treatment plant at Willbarger that will be opening in fiscal 27 and also the additional expenditures that we have with the expansion of the water treatment plant.

Can I ask real quick, I think at this point we are staffed up for the new facilities, correct?

We actually added, yes, those staff were added in 26 to get them trained and yeah, get them on.

So they are, they've been hired even though our, I mean, because it was the water treatment plant was the one that was going to be, because the wastewater was always going to be in 27, correct?

There were 14 positions added in fiscal 26. I'd have to phone a friend if they're all filled.

Because the opening, excuse me, was delayed six months.

The expectations.

So I don't think, they were not, not all of those positions were funded for a full, they weren't funded for the full fiscal 26. They were tiered depending on what the position was. So some of them might have started at the beginning of the fiscal year. Some of them may not have started until like January in the actual budget.

But that was for a projected opening in April and May. And now that.

it's six months later we still hire people even with the six month delay and opening you still need them trained on that plant they'll start training on that plant before it ever opens did we delay the hiring based on the delayed opening or did we we hire them at the original time even though uh it was delayed really gonna have to like really don't know exactly

Just trying to make sure that we, if we saw the delay coming, we didn't need to hire them straight away, but we still needed to get them hired in advance so that they were trained and familiar with the equipment.

So for the record, Matt Rector, Director of Utilities and Development Engineering. The majority of those positions are actually for the new wastewater treatment plant. And that was, it's a little bit delayed, but it's pretty close to the regular schedule. And they were tiered in, not because of the delay to the opening, but because of just the way that's the way THAT THE BUDGET WAS LAID OUT LAST YEAR IS WE HAD SOME SALARY SAVINGS IN THERE, SO WE BROUGHT PEOPLE ON. AND THEN AS WE START COMMISSIONING THE SYSTEMS AND DOING STARTUP AND WE'VE GOT THE ACTUAL MANUFACTURERS COMING IN TO SHOW US HOW THEY'RE STARTING EVERYTHING UP AND HOW THE GUYS ARE OUT THERE WITH THEM SO THAT THEY'RE SEEING IT FROM THE GROUND UP SO THAT

They know where everything is.

We know where everything is, all the buttons, bells, all that stuff.

Now from a water treatment plant perspective, how many new staff did we have allocated for that?

I also would have to phone a friend on the breakdown of those extra positions.

I don't remember very many on the water side. The majority of them were the wastewater.

Y'all need to start having crib sheets.

there might have been a few on the water side and the majority of the new positions director My memory serves me that there was like 12 for the wastewater treatment plant and like two. And only two for water.

There wasn't as many on the water side. In FY26, we added nine to the central wastewater treatment plant. We added two to wastewater collection, one to water distribution, one to water treatment. So that team fell in a couple different. buckets. They were all filled. Obviously you have turnover throughout the year. People even change positions within the city. So there are a couple of vacancies in those, but we did that initial filling and now we've had people move around.

So those nine that we added to the central plant will not stay at the central plant. We will split up that team of 18 to be between the two plants.

So let's be clear, they're not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs. They're actually getting hands-on and doing stuff.

If they're not actually out there training at the new plant, they are helping us run the existing plant.

Perfect.

Perfect. Good to know. That's all I need.

Thank you.

Solid waste fund is pretty straightforward. We usually try to keep this fund with a net change, so revenue balances with expenditures.

We were able to hold the solid waste contract steady for the next few years, correct?

Right. Yeah, so there's no change in the rates. That was a big win this year. Correct. The VRF Fund, Vehicle Equipment and Replacement Fund, so we do have transfers in, 1.6 from the General Fund and 561 from the Water and Wastewater Fund. The Replacements Breakout General Fund, non-police, there's 10, 15 police, and then on the Water and Wastewater Fund, there's 10 replacements.

What is the criteria for determining when a vehicle is ready for replacement?

So there is a policy. I don't have it memorized, but I know that there's a lot of factors that go into determining whether that vehicle should be on the replacement list. It's the responsibility of the fleet department to review those lists. Not every vehicle that's marked as being replaced that year will be replaced that year. It just depends on the mileage, how much maintenance we have on it. I mean, if you have one that's, it may not even have as much mileage, but it's got a lot of maintenance, then we may determine that it needs to be replaced sooner. Are we still renting? We do have enterprise. We are not adding, so we're letting the ones that we are leasing, you know, go through their lease and expire, but we are, we do still have... good bit of we're turning in the leases when they're done and we are replacing them with if it makes sense to buy them at the time the lease ends like we had one this year that was like four thousand dollars by the vehicle we could keep it another four or five years it just made sense to do so so those are being evaluated by vehicle so just for me to better understand we actually have a policy regarding We do.

The maintenance and usage of vehicles in their end of life as opposed to back in the day when council members would literally go out and give their own assessment whether or not a vehicle was in still good usage or not. Yes, we have a policy. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. I believe I saw...

They actually have a form that they like.

Oh, Doug knows I'm not joking.

Doug knows I'm not joking. I remember door handle repairs done with a 2x4.

One last thing on the vehicles. There's a council member out there who may remember this. Jonathan?

I recall, and just so that we all know this, I saw in there somewhere, I think there is a policy change or some staffing movement to move us to more of a proactive repair for equipment and vehicles, I believe, and more frequent inspections and checks that I saw in there that I thought was really smart of that department.

All right. So on PCDC, this is the budget that was proposed. This budget was approved by their board July 15th. The non-operating expenditures of $2 million, I've got that covered on this slide. So their assumptions are the same on sales tax, of course, 0% growth. We do have the 2.1 built in for the recreation funding. There was a little bit of an increase in economic incentives just based on some new agreements this year. The capital expenditures, I believe it was $1 million for Nexus and then there was $500,000 for each innovation and wet lab opportunities. The budget does include policies, so I just wanted to point out a few changes in the financial management. So the financial management policy, I know last year and the year before, there were some budget statements in the budget book. We've actually created a full management policy, which that full policy is included in this proposed budget. So there's no red line version because it's all new. The purchasing policy has a few red line items in it we added some language on sustainable procurement and We also added Definition for a protest period for betters because we realized our policy didn't include this and we needed to make sure that we had that in the policy the investment policy will come back to you on August 25th for its annual review and

I presume that running past these policy changes, you ran all of those past our new internal legal staff so that they could make sure that we're complying with everything.

I don't think he looked at our financial management policy. It doesn't have a lot of legal language in it. The purchasing policy, we changed only a few things.

I JUST WANT TO REMIND YOU WE'VE GOT MORE ACCESS TO LEGAL SERVICES ON A REGULAR BASIS THAN WE HAD.

HE CAN'T WAIT. HE CAN'T WAIT TO READ THEM.

PLEASE KEEP THAT IN MIND.

JUST LOOKING FORWARD, WHAT WE HAVE LEFT WITH THE PROCESS ON AUGUST 25TH WE WILL HAVE A PUBLIC HEARING ON THE BUDGET AND SEPTEMBER 8TH WE WILL HAVE A PUBLIC HEARING ON THE TAX RATE AND WE WILL HAVE FIRST AND FINAL READING ON THE BUDGET AND THE TAX RATE. That is the end of my budget presentation. Tracy, thank you so much for that.

That was very comprehensive. Lots of slides. I want to ask Council, do you have any other questions that you didn't ask throughout the presentation?

I think I got most of them answered. I did want to also thank you for further improving our already award-winning yearly budget book. Looks like you're probably going after that award again this year. Always. The additional... Summaries and fun breakouts was really useful as I was reviewing it, so appreciate all that.

I think we will always look to improve the document.

A little bit better every time.

Well, I was just going to say that, so I'll just say ditto.

Ditto.

All right. Okay. With that, we will move to item 3B. 3B is discussion regarding water and wastewater rate study recommendations.

Some of these are the same slides. We will try to move quickly and highlight the changes that have been made since the last time this was presented, though it was presented after 1 a.m. that morning. So there was a lot of council objectives that we discussed with the RAE consultants as they went through this process. And so equity, affordability, and preparedness on our side was some of the highlights that they were looking at. They did look at our current structure and I do have some, gleaning some information on what they considered when they decided to go with the structure that they went with. Our base changes on the water charges did not change. The rates will change, and you will see that in a future slide, but the structure itself did not change. What did change was the volume charges. going from a tiered rate based on usage to a tiered rate based on customer class. On the wastewater side was probably the more significant change because the base charge went from a single charge for all meters to a base charge for meter size. The main thing I want to point out on this with step four is develop a rate structure that recovers the allocated costs from each customer class. So the utility rate consultant really dug into how our costs are allocated and made sure that they were being allocated fairly and that then the rates were covering those costs that had been allocated. That being said, I did get an email. I can share with you all in the weekly. They provided quite a bit of information on the different types of rate structures that are out there and why they considered, like why they didn't consider other rate structures and considered the one that they went with. and it would take me a hot minute to read all of this. But they provided me with some great material, and so I can share that in the weekly so that you would have that at your fingertips if that is okay.

Sounds great.

This is a very simplified version of the revenue requirements. There's a lot that goes into how we get to these numbers, but this is what they ended up with to determine the increases that were going to need to happen over the next several years. I want to point out that Even though we always look five years ahead, we are evaluating these every single year because estimates can change, factors can change, growth can change. And so we're always looking back and reevaluating each year before we step out with rate increases.

Tracy, who's our consultant for this?

Baker Tilly.

So I have a question. What revenue growth... are we projecting in those five-year rates? Like, what percentage per year are we projecting for water rates and wastewater rate growth for new revenue?

I would have to look in their model because I don't think what I pulled has that on here. But it's in their study. And actually, once we get past the draft stage and we settle on the rate changes, you will get a complete document that has everything in it.

they were just waiting to issue the final report until we kind of got through any changes that needed to be made up to that point but it'll have those projections she's asking it should yes and then um when is that uh the consultant proposing the rate changes or is that staff giving them this is what we think should is going to be the revenue growth or customer growth over the next five years.

Yeah, no, we did not give them that.

Okay, so they're using, they're calculating that. And then my follow-up question for them would be, what are they using to develop those growth rates and have they cross-referenced them to our actual growth rates over the past few years? Well, yes, so my goal is we have plans that say we have certain rates, and then we have the finance department that's going to actually put what they think we're going to actually collect in the budget, and I want to make sure that those align. Yes.

Yes, we will get that for you. This is something that you all had asked for of the consultant, and one of the things that it does point out, if you kind of look at the distribution, Melody, I believe, or Doug, I can't remember who asked for this, but it does highlight that if you look at the middle, if you're looking at customers that range between the 5,000 and the 8,000, it's pretty consistent over the months. We do have some better slides. we did break out our lower users, average user, and high user. So based on current rates versus the proposed rates, this is kind of how a lower user would lay out. So even though I know we gave you a snapshot of a rate. This is looking at a 12-month actual of consumptions. And the 27 stays below the 26 the whole time. When you get into the average user, you do have a few spikes throughout the year. But then you have other months that are lower. So on average, I think it averages out. And then on the higher user, yes, these new rates are going to be higher for that higher user pretty much all year round.

There's a significant percentage of people in that higher user category. Am I looking at that correctly in the previous slide? About 23%.

So let me get to this because if you look at, like they broke it down by monthly usage, up to 8,000, we have 77% of our residential customers, 8,000 or less.

So I want to make sure we hit on this. This is different from what you saw last time? So part of what we did was we tried to spread the savings further down. into the tiers right so before you saw an 8,000 gallon user would see a pretty significant increase but now you're saying is that 8,000 or less you're going to see either no increase or a significant decrease so that's a big change from last time and Tracy just mentioned if you're in that 8,000 or less that's three quarters of our customers so three quarters of our customers no increase or a decrease residential and commercial or this is residential this is residential

I know, but I'm just concerned about that one quarter that is overused.

When you get over that, it's definitely going to be, yeah. And 7% is encouraging to not.

Yeah, that's your conservation signal.

And let's be real. I mean, part of the conversation, which we've said and what we're doing at, which sucks for the current customers, is that HOAs, some HOAs require for your lawn care to be what it is and you get funded you get fined for that we have no control no longer because the legislature gives them ability to escape yeah and that's what i was going to say zero escaping needs you know it needs to be a new reality for everybody moving forward just because of honestly what our water needs are and we do have rebate programs that encourage people to do that which we've had for a long time.

But if we have too much conservation, then we don't have enough revenue. Yeah, it's a juggling act. I'm just going to say it. I'm just going to say it. So my other question that I've thought before and people ask me average billing you know so like my me personally like electricity and gas i have average billing um so then this the this you know the months that they spike aren't so painful um you know so there's not such that that jump so and i know that i've asked in in the previous years why we're not able to do that um and i'm not sure i don't recall the answer whether it was a software issue or if it was Some other reason but can you enlighten us on that policy and whether that's an option?

That's the first time it's been brought up here.

Okay.

I have done average billing before It's an option. We would need to check and see if our software can do it. I would be surprised if it couldn't It's just an offering So it could be something that we could offer. But I do need to get with my utility billing people that understand the software much more than I do. I would be surprised if it didn't offer that.

Because I think that would, you know, I mean, we have to do some things that we have to do because of our debt requirements and our operating requirements. But if there's a way to, you know, Even out the monthly bill so your summer, it doesn't go to $400 all of a sudden because you get a leak that you didn't know about until the next day or whatever.

We can look into that.

Yeah. So I think that would be a great option for people who wanted to have more consistency in their bills. Right.

Yep. Someone back there is taking notes. Thank you. And we can look into that. So this is just kind of comparing the current bill to the proposed rate structure and just showing for the residents, they're seeing some relief. Apartments, and we have a slide for that that's pretty much doubling. And it's mainly on the wastewater calculation side and commercial. EACH ONE OF OUR AVERAGE FAST FOOD OR BIG BOGS, THEY'RE GOING TO SEE AN INCREASE. AND IT'S MAINLY ON THE ADJUSTMENT TO THE WASTEWATER SIDE.

I REALLY LIKE THE REDUCTION TO THE RESIDENTIAL LOW USERS. THAT'S GOING TO REALLY BE BENEFICIAL, ESPECIALLY FOR OUR FRIENDS WHO ARE ON FIXED INCOMES. YES. AND I DO LIKE THE CHANGE IN THE PROPOSED RATE FOR THE APARTMENTS. they'll still be, apartment dwellers will still be paying less than the average residential low user, but the degree of subsidy will be much less.

Basically, you know, what we're going from, which was a huge variance to getting everybody a little bit more in line, still below a resident, which I think makes sense, but.

If this goes forward, we need to make sure that we have

very good communication about this so that people understand what's happening but so i know that yeah the communication department is already starting to put some information out there but we will target communicate with the commercials in the apartments because those are the ones that they're going to be mostly affected so we will target emails and calls to make sure that they are

paying attention and not surprised when they get that first bill yeah yeah but I mean obviously the people who are gonna have an increase are going to be much more vocal than the people who have a decrease but but this the fact is that our previous rate structure wasn't equitable and wastewater based on usage. Correct. And so I still haven't gotten an answer about why that was, just that a prior rate consultant recommended that. But that, you know, because I always wondered, why is the wastewater so much higher per month when we have more customers to split? And, you know, like the cost that we were adding wasn't more than, you know, and so I guess it was partly because the way that we were slicing up the pie.

And I'll be curious. I'll have questions for you when we get to the wastewater rates. in in three slides but um can you can you take us through this one because this is new this is new that i'm seeing here and and i'm really excited about it because the last time we were presented it was one flat consumption rate and this does take into account that you know our average user doesn't typically exceed that 8 000 gallons and so we're yeah we're focusing on ensuring that our average user comes out ahead. I did the math on the slide a couple slides back where you had all the rates for low average and high users and it does look like low users save and I wanted to add it up over the year, right? Low users save about $450 per year. Average users are pretty much flat and then high users are paying more. So those low users, there's definitely an incentive to be in that category.

Right. Yeah. So we did add a tier to this. We heard you. And this is the change that was made.

And I want to make sure we say this loudly. This is an example of the city council and staff listening to feedback. and coming up with a solution for our citizens from that as well. And I think that some of the things I've been hearing about is the lack of flexibility in hearing from this council. And I think the reality of the situation is that we get it. We understand that, and I think it speaks volumes about the mayor, speaks volumes about the council, speaks volumes, most especially about staff, that we want to get it right. I mean, what, you just said something to me that just popped up in my head and made me think about, you're right, you got the question, like, wait a minute, so a consultant said something, so this is what we did? Yeah, that's probably exactly what happened here, you know, from that, and now we've gotten better information and better advice on that, so consequently, we have a better structure in place. I don't think anyone's ever going to pretend to be perfect, Instead, they're going to try to go ahead and work toward that and try to see what they can do.

Well, and just real quick, that structure works well for a lot of jurisdictions. We are now at the point where it just doesn't work well for us anymore. So I wouldn't, I mean, you do the rate studies in a cadence because we had so much debt and new capital that we have to continue to look at our rate structure and make adjustments as needed. And so what worked five years ago, it probably worked fine five years ago, but it just doesn't work anymore.

Yeah, I think that was important because I have noted that before as our ratio of single family versus multifamily. has changed in 2020. Significantly. From what I have seen, it was 80% and 20% multifamily. And then in just four years, we went from 70% to 30%. So adding that change, not only does it, you know, affect with if it's just one connection and they have one, you know, it was basically a 300 apartment was taking $65 and they were getting charged 22 cents.

So we've moved to the wastewater conversation that you haven't even presented yet. Can you get us there? I am curious how many 12-inch meters we actually have in town for the water rights.

I think it said one. I know we have one.

We have one.

I don't know if there's two. I know there's one.

They're going to see a significant base rate change, but I imagine with a 12-inch meter, they use a lot.

On the water side, they're actually going to see a decrease. But yes, they're going to see an increase on the wastewater side.

So on your next slide, where we get to these wastewater rates, I'm curious, the proposal, obviously taking this down to... a lower base charge, but a higher volumetric charge. On your next slide, you show a couple things here. You show that it's phased based on, or it's rated based on the meter size, and that's the water meter size. We don't have a meter measuring stuff going out of the house.

Right.

But I'm curious, on the wholesale, that's rated on an LUE basis. So I'm curious why we wouldn't rate... our usage instead of on meter size on LUEs? Do we not have that data?

We have the data. We cannot really change that wholesale rate.

Not related to the wholesale rate, but instead of our base rate based on the water meter size, why would we not base that on LUEs?

Because we are under very strict contracts for the wholesale.

I'm not talking about wholesale.

What are you talking about?

I'm asking, so the person with the eight-inch meter, we now have them at a $6,400. Okay. Why wouldn't we calculate that instead of based on the meter size, based on the number of LUEs that they're serving?

I believe that the math, when you figure out what the five-eighths meter is, it is all converted by LUEs. So it is a conversion table that basically says an 8-inch meter is so many LUEs and they multiply it by the... It is actually a conversion table that builds out these rates.

All right. And then going back to your comments about wholesale, we have strict contracts. When are those negotiable?

Many years from now. Do you remember 2036, I think, maybe? The wholesale wastewater, the 4167? It's years from now.

I thought that was contracted in a way that we could increase that based on actual cost.

They will not allow us to put capital in there. Okay.

By may, you mean...

the agreements that we are under.

Which agreements are we talking about? The negotiated agreements with the various MUDs.

Yes. It's the MUD conversation that we had many years ago.

Which was already supposed to be above and beyond, but I don't know. I guess those others. In addition to that, we also have maintenance in the contracts, don't we? Not just usage charges. We did. We did. We should take a look at those. Some of them do.

They're all different. We have so many.

We did have maintenance, and then some people took us up on it, and some people didn't. Some people are complaining about that now.

I still had a question on the wastewater, because I've gotten this question from... Wastewater customers who are not city water customers. You have no usage and So I've heard from some of those that are single-person households that are being charged a much higher rate like the city average So how what sort of policy or opportunity do we have to allow them to submit or or appeal that if they're just given a rate regardless of what their actual usage is?

So we do use the average.

And what is the average rate?

The average is when we do the winter averaging process in March. We actually, yes, we actually calculate a city winter average based on the information we have. The problem with the citizens that are not in our water district is that we don't have their water information. So therefore, we can't try to figure out. It would be very difficult to customize all those people. I mean, our own citizens, we have their water usage, we have their I don't know that you want us to do it on a one-to-one basis for every customer. That would be very difficult. What we do do is use the winter average that we calculate that's across the city.

So I guess when I think about usage, I think a lot of it is determined possibly by the number of people in your household. Obviously, you know, landscaping is, you know. So I'm just wondering if we can have a more equitable

structure where if you know a family of four is at 4500 but a family of one or two is lower but how would we know that i don't know yeah i was about to say that's that's a hard thing to do i think it'd be easier for us to take over retail operations which which would be i i'm assuming the the folks who are in our wastewater ccn but not our water ccn that's going to be manville and aqua Yes. She's talking about me.

We also have a bit of we've requested the data from believe Manville. We're now under a contract with Manville that everything we request comes with a price.

So, I mean, we could have them deliver individual customers.

I don't want to do it on an individual basis. So we either request all the information and run it that way or continues the city average.

that seems like what we're doing is the most fair given the situation.

And then my final question on the wastewater rate schedule. So it does look like we're going down in phase one for 2027, but there are large increases in the base fee in phase two and phase three. So we'll eventually in a couple of years end up similar to the base fee that we had.

But I would say this, and there's no but, and I'd say this. We knew, this was maybe two years ago we talked about that. We were like, okay, y'all, this is the cliff. This is the reality of what's going to have to be paid to go ahead and fund this. What are we looking for that? And we keep pushing it off as best we can to make sure that we compete and consider the economic conditions right now. At some point, yeah, the Piper's going to be paid on that, which I understand. But we had that conversation years ago about, hey, listen, let's see what we can do. And I give staff a lot of credit. It's probably last year to the year before when you came back and you're like, okay, listen, let's see what we can do right now. How do we manage that? How do we help go ahead and prioritize and help our citizens right now? And you continue to work that way, which I think is pretty critical.

Yeah, we'll continue to look at them every year and see if we can make any kind of adjustments.

Which is what you said at the beginning of this whole conversation. You said we look five years, but we always look annually about where rates are.

To your point, we don't know what the impact of changing the rates will do to usage. You might see your lower tiers start to use more. You might see the higher tiers use less. So we have to evaluate these annually to see if we need to make adjustments.

Melody said she wants a lot of people to be penalized.

So I do want to... From this particular presentation, I do want to walk away with some understanding that... that we're generally in agreement with what the rate consultant has recommended. If so, I will have them finalize the reports so that we can provide those to you. They were planning on being here for August 25th meeting, so they would be able to address more specifically some of the technical questions in the rate model.

Yeah, I think that would be great. V2 here, I think, is just night and day from the original proposal. So I think this was great, quick work to come up with something that is substantially more equitable than what we have today and even in the first proposal that we saw.

Much more in line with what I was looking for. I appreciate you taking the effort to get to this point.

We will bring back the final versions now.

Any other tweaks to this before she goes back to the rate consultant? Can you make it lower? That's always the question, but we've got it.

I think with the change in the tiers, which I'm very happy to see that, you know, like your basic water needs of 8,000 gallons and less are at a more reasonable rate. And then those that choose or have needs for higher pay that premium for having higher. perhaps different choices will be made but I think just basic living is is much better captured with the two-tier but then my question then is we just still have the one tier for wastewater so versus having two tiers so I just wondering the the rationale for not also going I mean obviously it makes them more complicated but for not going to two tiers for wastewater for the same reason

I would assume that we do a single tier for wastewater because that's net water that's not being consumed in the house. Right.

Yeah, I would let them address that, but yes.

They're going to be here.

Yes. That'll be good.

It might be that there's an adjustment that could be made for wastewater for apartments.

What was the question?

There might be an adjustment that could be made for wastewater for apartments that doesn't seem to be...

and what we've got uh here currently well that's if we assume that the apartment complex has a meter for usage and a meter for landscaping the entirety right they're not going to be charged the wastewater on the irrigation meter anyway yeah

It's just the household meters.

Is that the standard case where there's a separate meter? Usually, yes.

Especially for commercial.

And the whole purpose of winter averaging is to make sure that you're not charging them for water that's

They're not watering their lawns.

Not unless they've got that irrigation meter. Tracy, I appreciate it. Is that your final slide? That's it.

The only thing I would add, Mayor, is that Mike, can you make sure that you circulate with us the lakeside mud contracts? Because I think some people need to see the interesting terms. We should refresh our memory on those.

Tracy, thank you very much for the excellent course correction. You're welcome.

So we're less than two months from when this could take effect on October 1. I would love to have some confidence to be able to say these are the proposed rates. You all haven't approved the Master fee schedule, which this will be included in that, but I would love to be able to start communicating now and give people close to two months a heads up. So we got criticized for that last time, right? Like we adopted in September and we went boom two weeks later on the new research. Do I have support to start publicizing these new rates?

I would encourage that.

Indeed. Okay. So get it done.

Okay. Thank you. These are proposed.

And also for our amazing marketing communications team also to keep doing what they're doing to make sure this information gets out. This is really fabulous.

All right. Thank you, Tracy. That's going to take us to item 3C. This is discussion regarding bond proposition language. I do have two individuals who have signed up to provide public comment. I'm going to call forward to this time Les Wall. You will have, I think I'm supposed to read this thing. Give me a moment. A member of the public may address City Council regarding an item on the agenda. Comments must be relevant to the agenda item. Citizens wishing to speak during a work session shall submit a completed speaker request form before the work session begins. Each speaker is limited to three minutes. Les, I just wanted to make sure you were aware, and I know you are, that you've got three minutes to speak. I've got three minutes. We'd love to hear from you.

And when the buzzer goes off, I'll stop. All right, thank you. Okay. Well, I know the bond survey that we had for three days from the 6th to the 9th. I hope we get to hear what the results of that were. The first survey got 357 surveys over a span of several weeks. And for three days, I'll be interested to see what we get on that one. I know when it was initially proposed, one of the comments was, well, it's only $15 a month. Let me speak from a perspective of a retiree on a fixed income. It's only $15 a month. And at the end, I do have a feedback for that. I do have a comeback for that. So we get our notice from Medicare, which I only raised $20 a month, my wife and I. Then we get our supplemental insurance. Oh, we're only raising you $25 a month each. Then we get our prescription. Oh, we're only raising you $15 a month. Then we get our cable bill. We're raising you $25 a month. We get our internet bill. We're raising you $10 a month. We're getting our cell phone bill. We're raising you $9.95 a month. Then we get our car insurance. Oh, we're raising you $45 a month because cars are too expensive to repair. Then we get house insurance. Boom, here we go again. So by the time we get done, we've had third parties dip $300 to $400 out of our pocket. Social Security comes along and says, here's $70, be happy. I already know individuals that are struggling. Do I buy my blood pressure medication or do I pay one of these bills? That's a tough situation for retirees to be in. And when it comes to specific bonds, and I have been in downtown Pflugerville at night and during the daytime, and I have never had a problem to find the parking place. Granted, my knees and my hips aren't what they once were, but I can still functionally walk. My wife walks with a cane. can get around downtown pflugerville without needing new parking facilities so bottom line of it is we don't fully understand why we need all of the information or all the bonds that are being presented especially if the new dog kennel center is going to be tear the rec center down that's a problem the seniors are under the impression that that rec center is going to be a senior center Where we got that impression, I cannot tell you because I didn't start it, but that's what I'm hearing from the seniors that we socialize with. So if that is the ultimate plan, that's going to probably create an issue. But as far as the bonds go, and based upon our fixed income and based on whether the projects we think are 100% needed for us and the community, we're voting no. So from that standpoint, I hope you take that from the perspective of a retiree. We don't get our 8% medical covered by our employer. We are our employer now on Medicare. Also, we don't usually get a 3% pay raise. The government's, I can go off on a tangent about inflation, but long story made short, we don't get those kind of raises to cover what these additional fees are and costs are. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Les. And just to address one of the items you mentioned, over 500 responses to that short survey.

Thank you.

So that will hopefully provide some good information. The other person signed up to speak on this item is a Mr. Jim McDonald.

Never heard of him. Never heard of him. Complete stranger.

Doesn't even bother to wear pants.

i dressed up look got a t-shirt mayor council thank you for this opportunity to speak to you on this the upcoming bond discussion uh i went through there and looked at it and if i get the measures out of order please forgive me i believe measure a uh we're looking at about 60 million dollars for parks uh specifically i think it is phase three to the 1849 park uh and a park added to the historic colored edition uh named uh reunion park um i I have a hard time. I'm a big supporter of all three of these bonds, but my big issue right now is timing. I believe that phase two still has, of the 1849 park in terms of, I think phase two is building the football fields and the stands and some games. Baseball. Is the baseball. I don't believe we've completed all of those. We have. Yeah, we just haven't done it. All right. Well, my thought was that we had work to do there. So if we don't, then maybe I'm still for this. But I'm still questioning whether or not now is the time to be putting it out on a bond election. I think that especially getting the new rate utility schedule out there and letting citizens know that we're committed to helping affordability issues in town. rather than throwing out new parks projects. It might be a mistake for this particular bond. Measure B, I believe, is the $5 million for downtown parking. Having a business downtown, I appreciate the focus on parking issues, but I'm not sure that we need it at this time. And the reason I say that isn't because, yes, there are nights when there's no parking, people park in the residences, especially across Pecan Street. we've got a brand new parking garage down there that we don't know if that's going to be filled the capacity especially later into the evening when we might need more downtown parking it seems like what we really need is just a solution a last mile solution to get people to park in the parking garage and convey them across the bridge to the old downtown area and then finally the animal shelter i know the animal shelter is is a huge part of of a lot of the fundraising that I've done over the years for the Friends of the Pflugel Animal Shelter, and I know that we desperately need a new animal shelter. I question this particular bond project in terms of one, the location of the rec center. We had a bond committee that looked at bonds for the new rec center, and part of that, the outcome of that was that we would wait a year after the new rec center had opened to do a gap study to determine what usage we might have missed in the new rec center so that we could retrofit the old rec center for that. If after we completed that gap study that we found there were no gaps, Perhaps maybe the best thing to do is to knock it down and use that property for something else But I still think that there's a lot of usable value I haven't seen any sort of the infestation and whatnot issues like we have at the animal shelter And I'm unconvinced that we need to raise that building again. Thank you for your time.

I appreciate Your counsel Thank You mr. McDonald With that we'll move into our presentation

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and Council. So Trista gets our slides pulled up for this. For the work session, we'll focus on the animal shelter component of the bond. We've been listening hard, and as you all know, we've been putting a lot of Band-Aids on our current animal shelter. And so with me tonight, we had our funner friends join at the table. So I'll lead you through that, but certainly have our experts with me tonight for this. and so um just a brief bit of history as we kind of walked through this with the facilities subcommittee um last week and we we actually met with them twice and so tried to really provide some options because we had we do try really hard to listen to you all into the community about our current facilities and where these could go. And just like you heard from the public comment about is the rec center site the best option for this. And so we've got a couple of options we wanted to share with council as we move forward to looking to your action later this evening for a potential bond election. And so the animal shelter history, as you all know, in 2014, council didn't put it on a bond. In 2015, they did, voted to do that, and that measure failed. Since then, we've been working on some different scenarios out at the animal shelter, which included a dog intake building, which was at the time term phase one, but that was not furthered into phase two in the future. And so you all have visited the animal shelter and know those conditions. need to be improved for our staff as well as the animals that they care for. This is a picture of the current facility. Some locations we'll talk about tonight are at Lake Pflugerville, both east and west sides. We'll show you those locations, the current location, the rec center location, which was our initial proposal, as well as a small tract on Fenwick Lane, which we've identified. All of these are properties that are owned by the city, so there's no land acquisition costs related to them.

What about downtown east?

We did not consider downtown east as we look to the metrics for encouraging revenue streams into the TERS and the financial downtown components for that. It is property we own. If that's something the council would like to consider, we just did not dig into that last week. The first option, which was an option considered several years ago in that early measure in 2015, was a property located the foot of the dam parking at the east side of Lake Pflugerville. It's located on Weiss Lane. It's approximately about five acres. We anticipate that the cost would be about $18 million. That's based on the renderings we have currently estimated for the rec center track that was done through some facility analysis. with Park Hill last year. There are some limitations to this property because it's located next to the dam and some floodplain. Here's some just general pros and cons though. It is proximity to Pflugerville Parkway as well as Weiss. There's a huge benefit and Rhonda can certainly speak more to the benefit of showing off and having the access to parks facilities with the animals being able to walk them on trails and then hopefully getting some people to adopt them. some of the considerations are the North Shore parking can be full for lake activities, for park activities, and so we'll take a look at that.

On that option, I'm curious. You mentioned the restricted future expansion. Do you believe that what you can build out there will satisfy the ultimate needs of the community, or would building here ultimately either have to be moved or an additional expansion? annex built at a different location?

Here we are limited. We think we would have to do potentially a different annex.

We would need additional elsewhere in the future as we continue to grow.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I believe anywhere we build we're being told, or at least the facilities committees were told that we will eventually have to build out again.

Correct. On this particular property.

I just want to know if we can add on to where we build versus have to purchase or find additional land at two separate facilities. I'm not a fan of two separate facilities.

Emily, how far out are we saying then?

So this is all in about a week and a half worth of work, so we don't have a lot of engineering or architecture. As we get towards that, if the council decides that, yes, we know we need a new animal shelter, we'd like it on this site, we will then engage. And assuming it passes the bond, we then engage. that design team to really fit this. What you're seeing here is that schematic that was done for the rec center site. Would this actually fit here? This would fit here. Is it ideal for this location? Probably not. We think that we might be limited in future expansion for the long-term needs of the community at this location. But just to note, we have not done the schematics or design for this location. It's kind of a test fit here.

But we're talking about eventually we're going to need a larger facility. We've also been talking about that with the library. But one of the ideas that we've come up with for the library is we might have a library on the west side of town and a library on the east side of town. Is there any reason why we wouldn't be able to do something similar with an animal shelter, one on the east side of town, one on the west side of town? It's just more expensive.

We could, but I don't see much value. I don't think that's a resource that our citizens are using on a

a regular basis it's a dedicated intentional visit that they're making it's not necessarily a convenience of having multiple locations that would justify the additional expense and the mno that would go with it yeah well i'm thinking about austin's animal shelter which is right down there by austin high by town lake if you live in far south austin or far north austin it is a tremendous pain to go to that that animal shelter. Frankly, I think Austin would get more animals adopted if they had, instead of one central location, if they had one north and one south. I'm not sure that we're that different. Maybe it's just that we're small enough that it doesn't matter.

Could you take us to the next option?

I sure could. And I would just note that the next option also located, this is on the west side of the lake, the location at the lake really does place it in kind of central Pflugerville and build out. If you consider that conversation from 973 to kind of Grand Avenue. So the lake really does fit a central location. So this location is property we own. It was also acquired when we acquired the lake. And so it's located on the Becker Farms. It's approximately six acres of developable property. Again, it's about that approximate cost, around $18.8 million. Some utilities would need to be extended for this location, but there is expansion opportunities here because it is a larger parcel, and then there's also potential for future purchase to the north if desired. Here you see the blue really articulates the floodplain. You kind of saw it on the previous slide with the water, so that rectangle there is the area that's developable here. Animal shelter could easily be incorporated into the parks and trails at this particular location. Again, also great access to Pflugerville Parkway here as well.

You say great access, you do have to cross that street. That street is... To Becker Farms.

To Becker Farms, yes.

The other lake location, no street crossing. To tie the trails. You just have to climb a hill.

Yeah. Here is the existing location. There's about two acres of developable space here. The estimated cost for additional structures on this property was around $16.6 million. We do think that that was a little bit low based on other projects that are under construction in Texas for animal shelters. And so we do think it'd still be around $18.8 million. The $19.75 million, you see there was an estimate if we were to extend a bridge from Pecan South to the animal shelter site. The red line you see on there is an approximate location of floodplain. Everything north of that red line is floodplain. That's what makes, in addition to all the other challenges, makes this property more challenging to construct on. So there is significant floodplain. The access to it, as you all know, is through a neighborhood. We are uncertain of the underground infrastructure because of the history of this property. And it's immediately adjacent to a neighborhood. And you can see Gatlinburg there that wraps it on the west and south side.

So do we have the information about what council's plans were for phase two?

We found nothing. We just found references to phase that it was stated there would be a phase two, but we didn't find documents that said what phase two would have been after that and the animal intake building.

Okay, so then the design done for $175,000 for the quorum back then was just for the one intake building and didn't include anything for the rest of the property? That's my understanding.

Option four was the rec center site, which you have all seen. This is the current facility would, in this proposal, be removed. As the speaker, Mr. McDonald, spoke about earlier, we did have a committee that looked at this facility when we were programming for the Monarch. And so there are other uses that could go here. It was of the right size and connection to the park system that also made it ideal for an animal shelter. We do also think the lake options are really good options for this facility as well, should council choose that.

That looks like the same capacity as the lake location that was future constrained.

We had this schematic done for this location, so we were just seeing if it would fit.

I was going to say, you just uplifted it. Yeah. Dropped it up. Very rough, though, right? Because you'd notice some of it overlapped the slant on the west side. It would have to be reconfigured.

Yeah. So we will definitely need architecture and engineering as we move into that. And that's incorporated in that estimated cost as well.

So what is the... the expected capacity and how long it's going, when would we outgrow this building?

Can we get through the options first? Because I think the options are what we're looking at today, and then we can discuss capacity.

Sure. So the last option, as we were looking around at properties that the city owns for this, is this location, which actually you can see if you step out the front door here. It's just in front of the water tower here on Finning. It is a small parcel. It's about two acres. The benefits of this site are the access is already here. The driveway is already here. So we could put the building here and we'd have some shared parking opportunities with PD with the new parking that was located at the back. And so there were some benefits there. We need a really creative architect. If we were to limit it to this two acres and probably limit that capacity, Council Member Ryan, that kind of long-term growth for this facility. But this is parcel that the city does own that could be a viable option for an animal shelter as well.

And has utilities already? Has utilities.

We would need to extend some wastewater to get to this parcel, but otherwise it's to go. Because parking doesn't need wastewater, so...

So if it's two acres, what's the timeline to we've got to get another one?

Now I think it's appropriate capacity. How big does it need to be? How much space do we need? We had a little over six acres on option two, and that looks like that would facilitate ultimate build-out. but it seemed like each and every one of these, I don't know if there was enough room on the existing site to reach ultimate build-out without dramatic floodplain improvements.

This one gives the opportunity, I mean, it'll cost, but it also gives the opportunity to purchase the land next door on both sides, right up there in the yellow and just in the clear, would be west of the red blocks.

So we'd have future potential of acquiring adjacent properties. Correct. But we don't own that right now. We don't own it right now. That's what we were doing.

You heard your words. We were at 18,600 square feet for a shelter at the rec center location, and that was taking up pretty much all of the two and a half acres there. This is half an acre less. So you may have to do a second story for office space, training room space, exotics upstairs. potentially even a lobby have to be upstairs instead of downstairs at this location. And that would probably get us through 15 to 20 years. After that, you have to have more space to put in. What it might not give us is we need play yards for exercising the dogs, for doing intros outside with the public, walking path space that's safe for our volunteers to be out walking the dogs. I don't think there's any kind of trails through here currently, but they would need those things encompassed around as well.

15 to 20 years?

How do you estimate that? So really estimating on what our numbers have been the last 10 years, how those have fluctuated, and things that we've done to mitigate our numbers increasing. We've run out of those options now. I mean, we've done all kinds of things to stop the inflow of owner surrenders and trying to... make sure we're managing well our space. Now at the end of that, we know that it's going to just be growth with no additional ideas on how to keep animals from having to be housed at the shelter. So yeah, you would be looking at growth per year potentially And basing what your normal inventories have been for the shelter, peak seasons and all of that. Knowing what I already need for adoption kennels, we have 24. We need at least 35 to 38 today to be able to adequately house adoption animals and then knowing what we have for stray intake. Stray intake doesn't tend to be full except it's staying full of adoption animals because we don't have space for them. So I can figure out, I've got a good estimate on what we need for stray space as well. And then... the other animal areas for the cats and the dog, and exotics, which is small pocket pets.

Rhonda, can you tell people what happens when we no longer have capacity for intake? What do we do?

Well, we have two choices, and we've been very, very close. We've been down to one and two kennels multiple times where we're about to have to make the call to management to ask how they want us to handle it. You either have to close your intake for strays where you're not picking up or letting the public turn in strays from our community, or you euthanize for space-healthy animals that are up for adoption that... can be pets and you don't have room for them. Before that, I mean, we make emergency call-outs to rescues, for people for fostering, but at some point, you're beyond that when you're in a time crisis. So, yeah, that makes it difficult.

Emily, we've got two and a half minutes. Do you want to take us through these last two slides, or should I pull the counts already?

Hold on a second. I've got a question. We talked earlier about the idea of a hybrid where you have two different spaces. What is the possibility of taking this space and continuing to use at least part of the space that you've got there? How long does that get us through in the future?

So our intake building is 3,000 to 3,500 square feet. It has 18 stray intake kennels, and then it has six quarantine kennels. It has a small isolation room with two kennels and then a small dog room for incoming small strays. I mean, you could continue to use that, but you're going to have to put staff there. all day, every day, that people are reclaiming pets, that you have court cases that are being released for owners. Somebody's got to be there to take money and deal with those going out. And then is that going to be your intake center? I would say you have to have at least four staff on site that aren't going to be seven days a week that won't be at the other location. That's going to... really eat into any savings on not building. So the operating cost would be greater? It would be cost prohibitive over time. Okay.

Mayor, our last few slides are related to the survey that went out over the weekend. There were 501 respondents for that. And as you can see, there was a lot of concern, and I think we shared the entire survey results with the council. The concerns related to project costs, tax rates, city debt, things that you've heard in a variety of sources. Some concerns related to our 2020 bonds, animal shelter did receive the most support, followed by parks and trail improvements in the downtown parking. Here you can see on the left-hand side the categories you think would be good use of bond funding right now. A new animal shelter is that line in yellow that you see there, followed by parks.

Just below or just right at 50%.

So it's right at 50%. The other side, if it were the bond package that we discussed at your last council meeting or about a month ago, which was the total, it came in unlikely if all projects were included on there. We'll have on your regular agenda the bond package for council consideration.

Well, I think it's really... I really appreciate it, James. You said you would be able to turn around and give us some information on that. I think the information reflects what a lot of us have heard. So I do appreciate you getting that and getting the results out to the public, too.

Good comms team. Great comms team.

Thank you for getting that turned around so quick and getting the word out and getting even more respondents than we had initially. Folks, it's 7 o'clock. I'm going to adjourn our work session. I'm going to give us three or four minutes to come back together. We'll be back to reconvene our regular session momentarily. Members of the public, I want to welcome you to the Pflugerville City Council regular meeting. I'm going to call us to order at 7.10 p.m. I'd like to ask you to join me in the U.S. Pledge, the Texas Pledge, and following that, a moment of silence, if you would rise with me. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Honor the Texas flag. Thank you please take your seats. This brings us to the portion of our agenda where we hear public comment. I'll read this information quickly, and then we will move through those who have signed up for public comment. If you did sign up on a particular issue, you will most likely be called with that issue rather than immediately during this public comment period. In accordance with the Texas Attorney General opinion, any public comment that is made on an item that is not on the published final agenda will only be heard by counsel. No formal action, discussion, deliberation, or comment will be made by the City Council. Each person providing public comment will be limited to three minutes. I have a number of people who have signed up. We will begin with Steve Miller.

Thank you, Mayor, Council. I'd like to bring up the issue. I'm a resident of the Gatlinburg neighborhood. We have been going through a street project, drainage project that started, I believe, in January. Maybe it was even as early as December. had one piece of communication regarding it. And since that point, it continues to go on. Roads are still torn up. There's holes. Safety issues. Kids were trying to ride a bike with their family, trying to go around those holes. The construction crew that's on this project leaves equipment in our yards. They leave street signs, things of that. It's becoming, it's very frustrating to say the least. And, you know, there's no communication. I'd like to find out when this project is looking at getting completed and fixing things up. There's holes in our yard, grass is gone. There's a lot of things. So I'm a little frustrated with this because I'm not hearing anything back. So I'll leave it with that. That's my... two cents on the issue. So I just know that other members of my neighborhood feel some thoughts like I do. So thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Miller. I imagine you may get contacted by someone here very shortly. The next item, or excuse me, the next person signed up. John? Beal? Are we close? John Beal, are we close? Thank you, sir.

Public citizens, fellow volunteers, I'm with the Willbarger Creek Conservation Alliance, We have challenged your permits at the TCEQ for your new sewage treatment plants. We do not challenge the existence of these necessary facilities. The new regional plant on Gregg Lane will fix many problems. We challenge the standards of treatment to which they will be held. A 5521 discharge is too much. Nutrients, especially phosphorus and nitrogen, must be dramatically reduced. 50 years ago, my brother and I pooled our Texas veterans loans and bought a farm in East Travis County. A half mile of Wilbarger Creek runs through it. 50 years ago, there was one sewage treatment plant on Wilbarger in Manor. Today, there are 16 existing and proposed Most developers and bankers want in and out as fast as they can before the market changes. In contrast, as elected officials, you have the more complex and difficult task of looking out for the long-term interests of the citizens and families under your care. included are the environmental impacts of your decisions. The cities of Pflugerville, Manor, and Elgin will grow together over the next five years. Manor and Elgin each propose new small regional sewage plants. They sit only one mile apart. Can this be called regional? If we look at the entire region, we could have a true regional wastewater plan with cleaner discharges and lower cost. Mayor, please call the mayors of Manor and Elgin to see what is possible. If we did not advocate for this, we would be remiss.

Thank you. The next person signed up to speak is Anne Brockenborough.

Hello, my name's Anne Brockenbrough, and I run a working ranch on Wilbarger Creek downstream of Pflugerville. I also co-founded the Wilbarger Creek Conservation with my neighbor, John, to protect the land, water, and wildlife along Wilbarger Creek. For the past 18 years, we've worked with various land trusts, local, state, and federal agencies such as the USDA, NRCS, and Travis County to preserve over 4,000 acres along Wilbarger Creek. The Wilburger Creek Greenway will be a public park run by Travis County. You'll be able to get on a trail at Northeast Metro Park and go all the way down to Manor and then go all the way east along Wilburger Creek to the county line and beyond. There is a spectacular wildlife corridor along Wilburger Creek with big ridges you can climb up and see a vast green valley below, teeming with wildlife, bobcats, mountain lion, and even river otters. But all the permitted wastewater treatment plants along Willbarger are threatening the very existence of that wildlife, the fish in the creek and the animals that depend on them. The huge wastewater treatment plant that the city of Pflugerville is building on Gregg Lane will be the biggest threat because it will double the amount of wastewater in Wilbarnker Creek. We've had multiple experts out to do studies of the creek over the past 18 years. In 2011, LCRA did a fish study in conjunction with the city of Austin, and they found 13 different species of fish, but now all we see are dead fish floating down the creek. In Dr. Lauren Ross's report, which someone will present later, using data compiled over the last 10 years, she found that Woolbarger Creek is already impaired or eutropic, which means it can no longer support fish and aquatic life. This is before the Gregg plant comes online and dumps 16 more million gallons of day into Woolbarger. Woolbarger is already overwhelmed with wastewater and stormwater from Pflugerville. It cannot handle anymore. We are asking for your help with this problem. The creek is already full of toxic neon green algae, and future park goers certainly will not want to swim in there. When I moved here 25 years ago, I used to swim and fish in Wilburger Creek, and we want future park goers, including the citizens of Pflugerville, to be able to do the same. Please raise your standards on all your existing wastewater treatment plants and use the most modern methods and technologies available when building your new plant on Gregg Lane. Why not pump all that treated wastewater into Lake Pflugerville where it can be recycled and reused for drinking water or for people to water their lawns with? We all know that we're going to run out of water one day. Let's not send it down Willbarger and into the Colorado River only to spend an exorbitant amount of money to pump it back into Lake Pflugerville. Why not send it from Greg Lane directly into Lake Pflugerville? They have the technology to clean it and reuse it now. Why not use it? The residents of Pflugerville and Willbarger Creek will thank you for your foresight one day. And we thank you for letting us speak. Thank you.

Thank you. The next person signed up to speak is Hillary McDonald.

Hi, thank you for having us. Thank you for taking the time to listen to our comments. My name is Hilary MacDonald. I am also with the Willbarger Creek Conservation Alliance. And the EPA developed nutrient criteria for streams in the Blackland Prairie, which is, as you know, east of I-35. Based on this data from LCRA and TCEQ sampling, Willbarger Creek is eutrophic. Eutrophic means a lake or stream that is excessively concentrated in nutrients. This results in dense algae and plant populations. And the decomposition and growth of these plant cycles, this excessive plant growth, kills animal life and deprives the water of oxygen. Facts. We have fish kills on our properties. Many miles downstream from the existing sewage plant discharges proven exists. Here is a report from June of 2026 titled Wastewater Discharge Impacts to Wilbarger Creek Water Quality put together by Dr. Lauren Ross. In this compelling report, There's documents and support for the need for adopting stricter criteria to prevent the health degradation of your communities, of our communities, of future generations. So right now you have a choice, all of you elected officials sitting here. You can raise the standards of this discharge plan on Gregg Lane, or you can pollute your communities.

Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker Juan Hernandez.

Hello City Council, my name is Juan Hernandez, I am 16 years old and a student at Maynard New Tech High School. I live on this beautiful ranch on Willbarger Creek and during my whole lifetime of 16 years, the creek has changed for the worse because of the wastewater being dumped there. I am worried about the consequences that this new wastewater treatment plant will bring which will be built on Gregg Lane if I am correct. because it will double the amount of wastewater being dumped into Willbarger Creek and it already has more than it can handle. Over the summer, the Austin Youth River Watch community came to test the water on Willbarger Creek and found very high conductivity and low dissolved oxygen which is deadly to the fish and we already saw dead fish floating on the creek. From what my beliefs tell me, we are supposed to take care of these creatures and not hurt them, and I do my part to protect via cleaning trash at my school, the road, and around the creek, and of course the Maynard community, the Algon community, and hopefully the Pflugerville community. I'm hoping you guys can realize the issue of this treatment plan and decide to help and protect our streams. There's no need to shut down the whole project entirely, just raise the standards and use the most modern technology and methods available to protect our streams. Please do everything in your power to protect Willbarger Creek for us as a generation and future ones to come. Thank you.

Thank you. The next person wishing to speak is Les Wall.

Well, I'm going to talk about the budget for a minute. First off, I'm glad to see that we're not going to add any more debt this year. Thanks, Tracy, for making that so we know that we're not going to have to add any more to our debt obligations. $495 million is quite a change from the $700 plus last year and $800 plus the year before. And I do fully agree. When you look at the property valuations and the taxable valuations, they're actually down supposedly 0.5%. And there must have been some additions made between Friday, Saturday, and today, because some of the numbers I have didn't quite match with hers. But anyway. Going through department by department budget, there's no way I can ask all the questions I've got on all the departments, and that's not why I'm here. I'm going to try and do a summary. And the first thing we're going to start with is full-time employee equivalents or number of positions. Pick one. Currently, we're at 520 positions in the city, going to 631. That's a 21% increase. When you look at full-time equivalents, we're going from 493 to 551. That's an increase of 12% up. But when you look at it, that's 61 new full-time employees. Now, I know that Monarch is supposedly supposed to have 138 total positions and 75 full-time employee equivalents. Yet at the same time, we've got departments that are losing 50% or more of their own staff. Utility services are going from 13 to 9. Utility engineering is going from 9 to 4. Central waste plants going from 18 to 9. Parks and recs going from 52 to 42. And transportation engineering is going from 9 to 4. The question was brought up earlier, which I'm glad was mentioned. Do we even need those other employees all these years, or is this just a reallocation of current positions into a new monarch? As far as the revenue coming in, the recreation revenue is going up 350% by this year's budget. That's a pretty lofty goal. And quite frankly, I really hope you get 20 plus thousand people signing up for the Monarch because you're going to need the money to keep it operating. And as we found out, or if you've read the budget at all, it's going to be five years for it to be a break even. And that could be a pretty optimistic projection. And as far as developmental fees, they're going up 84%. I'm not sure where the developmental fees are coming in because we know construction is getting more expensive and people are flat out not buying. When you look at the $321 million in new quote unquote taxable property, and yet our whole valuations went down 0.5%. So without that increase of $321 million, our property tax revenue would have been down several more million. When we look at the summary of salary and benefits, the overall executive summary shows 14% increase. Again, when you're adding 61 positions, I can see why that would be the case. I do thank you for your time. Thank you, Ms. Walts.

Krista, did I have any additional? All right. The other items I have here are for items that are on the agenda, so you will be called at that time as we move forward. So at this point, I will move over to the podium for a proclamation. Thank you. So tonight we have a mayor's proclamation recognizing Prairie View A&M on their 150th anniversary. I know we have several Prairie View A&M alumni in our community and we have terry knighton i believe is here you can come stand with me if you if you'd so like as i present this proclamation uh prairie view a m university is designated as an institution of first class in the texas constitution and is home to numerous distinguished research centers and institutes For 150 years, the university has educated generations of graduates who have gone on to serve as educators, engineers, entrepreneurs, and public servants. The celebration of Prairie View A&M's 150th anniversary provides an opportunity to honor this rich history and recognize the profound impact the university continues to make. I proclaim August 11th, 2026 as Prairie View A&M University Day in the city of Pflugerville. I have Terry Knighton here to accept this proclamation. Terry, would you like to say anything? Let's go get a photo in front of the flags. Thank you for that. That brings us to item 4B, which is to conduct a presentation on the City of Pflugerville water supply. We have Director of Public Utilities and Engineering, Matt Rector, as well as Assistant Director of Water Operations, Shelby Granger, here to keep us up to date.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. We're here to give you that water supply update. And we are pleased to announce that as of yesterday, we are back to regular conservation stage efforts. That means twice a week watering for all of our customers. And since the last council meeting, we had actually gone into stage one. We watched the flow usage during that time and how it was affecting the treatment plant and made the decision to go ahead and go to conservation stage efforts. been maintaining the lake level consistently above that 635 mark the normal pool 635.5 and then you can just see us kind of maintaining that level throughout as well over the last few months and then this is the usage you'll see here so we didn't when we went to stage one i believe it was the 25th We didn't see this huge spike in usage, and that's when we decided we have the treatment capacity, the ability to meet that demand should we go to conservation stage.

And it shows there that we've got a 12 million gallon per day capacity. Yes. Yeah.

And I'm sorry that we're getting a little higher than that. So it's 12 MGD for daily usage. That means we can hit a peak flow at, say, 4 a.m. when everyone's irrigation is on. We can hit 14, 14.5 MGD. Okay.

All right, so now I'll talk you through the projects like normal. I'll start down at the... river pump station. And so this is what we lovingly refer to as bid package two. You can see the first two images are the guys working on fixing the leaks in the pipe. And these were not leaks that have occurred. These were just leaks due to the construction issues. And I was notified at just before 7 p.m. that they have now passed all the tests. So this yard pipe header pipe It has been installed, and it has now passed all the leak tests. So good progress there. I'll come back to schedule on all these packages here in just a moment. Bid package three, this is the roughly 10 miles of line between the pump station and the last five miles of pipe to get to the lake. This one is... struggling a little bit. There's a lot more pipe. As you know, back in late July, we had a lot of rain. They opened the floodgates on the lakes that created a flooding issue on Boggy Creek, which stopped all the efforts. And that's where we were trying to do all of our work is right there at Boggy Creek. So for about two weeks, we couldn't even get to the pipes because everything was underwater. Since the water has gone back down, you can see the bypass is still in place. You can see all those hoses where we're trying to keep pumping water out and get water out of everything. We have been able to finish the installation of the 42 inch raw water line on the north side of the creek. We have not been able to finish the installation on the south side of the creek. That is due to a couple of things. One is it took us longer to get everything mucked out of the holes to start back building the north side. And then when we moved to the south side, we started not only dealing with groundwater issues, but we found a lot of sand. And as anybody who's ever built a moat on a sandcastle knows, it's not fun because when you scoop out the sand, more just falls in, and you scoop it out, more just falls in. And so contractors have been fighting with that. The other issue that they've encountered is the 42-inch that had been installed under the creek, when all that groundwater came in, it filled up with sediment, and so they've been mucking that out as well. So They are working. You can see the photos. We're pushing them as hard as we can. And again, I'll come back to schedule in just a moment. The final section is what we call bid package four. This is the last five miles of line that dumps into the lake. And you can see all of my photos here are basically them doing restoration above ground. All of the pipe is installed. We are just fixing everything that we tore up to construct that pipe. And so real quickly, I'll go over schedule on this one. So bid package two, this is the pump station. The notice to proceed was November of 24. The contractual required substantial completion is January 14th, 2026. So we're a little behind schedule. The contractual required final completion is March of 2026. Again, behind schedule. What we are anticipating is, the substantial completion to be is October of 26. So that kind of gives you an idea of when we'll have full use of our facilities there. And final completion is anticipated to be December 23rd, 2026. So Merry Christmas. We'll have the pump station done. Bid package three, again, notice... That's a very specific date.

How did they come up with that? Are they trying to make sure they have the holidays off or they work through the holidays or what's that?

It's just the date. It's true. Bid package three, notice and proceed again November of 24. Substantial completion with all the change orders and everything that have happened is actually August 10th of 2026. So a little bit behind schedule. Final completion per contract is September 9th, 2026. What we're anticipating, and this is the one I said that they're having a lot of extra issues, is the anticipated substantial completion is September 3rd, 2026. So that's why we're thinking that in mid-September, we will be able to turn the 42-inch raw water line on and take use of that, even though they won't be final completion done. It'll be similar to what you're seeing on the photos here, where... The pipe is in, we're using the pipe, but they have to restore all the vegetation and everything else that we've destroyed in constructing the pipe. So then bid package four, again, notice to proceed was November of 24. The contractual substantial completion is May of 26. The contractual final completion was June of 26. What we think they're actually going to hit substantial completion is August 31st of 26. So we think that they are basically going to be done waiting for this midsection of pipe to come online and get connected up so that we can start using it. And then final completion is anticipated to be October of 26th. So that gets you all of the water line and the pump station all the way up to the lake. And this is just like I like to show you guys every time because the bypass is always the one that gives me concern. The first picture on the left there is the original photo when we first put the bypass in. The photo in the middle shows the flooding that happened after July. So you can't even see the bypass. You can't see the banks. Everything's flooded. And then the photo on the right is as of last week, the water had receded. The bypass is still in place. And so we're holding our own there. And then the last piece, we get to the treatment plant. I don't want to steal your thunder.

No, I think we pretty much covered it.

So we've increased the capacity. We have an average treatment rate, which is that 12 MGD that you saw there. The peak is that 14 MGD. MGD meaning million gallons per day. And then timeline on the water treatment plant.

I have a question on the peak treatment. What levels of peak usage are you seeing now compared to the peak treatment?

Yeah, so since raising or going into stage one from the modified stage one, we're still seeing spikes around 9-MGD. They're not these large spikes that we're even used to seeing in previous summers. Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

i was going to say my grass is already dead oh we heard you so just a schedule update on the water treatment plant notice to proceed on that one was january of 2023 substantial completion for the contract was april of 26 final completion for the contract was june of 26 we had previously reported a couple different dates on what we assume the substantial completion was going to be originally we were thinking it was going to be october uh then the last time we presented to you had moved to november 3rd they have actually indicated another couple of days of slippage and so now we're looking at November 5th 2026 for substantial completion final completion is also shifted from November to January and now we're looking at January 14th 2027 for final completion but that's November 5th is is when it's operational correct okay and that's that's when you know the timeline for liquidated damages ends correct okay um

Could you go back real quick for me? I want to make sure I understand the dates. The date that matters the most to me is when will the 42 inch pipe be in operation? When will the 30 inch pipe be in operation?

So as it stands right now, I indicated that they were thinking that they would be basically ready for us to turn water on by mid-September on the 42-inch line. And then we are thinking that the 30-inch line would be ready by the end of September. Okay.

And thanks to the construction and the water treatment plant maintenance that we've been through, we're back in a I'm going to call it a more traditional construction scenario. We're back where we are in our regular watering schedules. We're operating at capacities. We're serving the community and we continue to make progress on the construction. We're not anticipating any other any other issues as we wrap up this construction. We are currently operating as if this had never happened. This is back to normal construction progress. That's correct.

But it is still very critical to get one of those pipes, one of those water lines, 42 inch or 30 inch so that we are no longer having a pipe exposed along the creek with blocks.

Or actually get bogged down by freaking flooding.

And boggy creek.

There's a reason it's called boggy creek. And obviously our current bypass line supplies about between 7 and 9 million gallons a day. If we start consuming more than that, then the lake draws down a little bit, but we've got plenty of capacity out there right now that we would easily weather

until these are fully online the bypass also does not reduce the volume we're sending to the lake so it's such a short section of pipe that we're able to push the same amount of water as if the 30 inches online okay thank you thank you all right uh council any any other questions on our water source update just to remind everybody direct director the delays seem to be due primarily to two incidents

One, last September, long before you were on board, where there was a big piece of steel plating that went through the pipe, and then the consequences of repairing that, and then the recent flooding, which is sort of a good news, bad news thing. We've got all the water in the world, but maybe we've got a little bit too much. So those are the two things, really, that that citizens need to focus on in terms of the causation of the delays. Am I wrong?

I wouldn't say you're...

So, Matt, I guess the question, as I heard it, is the contractor asking for and justified for extension days related to those to the date that we are now? Are they legitimately behind schedule on contractual days, even with... extensions from the events that have occurred.

So the contractor has not asked for any days due to the original breaks of the line. So from that perspective, they are where they're supposed to be. They have asked for additional days because of the flooding and other things because those are 100% warranted. As far as is there any contract slippage because of other issues? Possibly. I mean, I've only been here for six months out of this three-year project. And so I can't speak to all the ins and outs of everything that's happened on the project. I can only speak to what's happened in the six months that I've been here, plus the research that I've had to do going back to September. And so I think the contractor has been pretty fair and very responsive every time that a break has happened in trying to respond and help us out and make sure that we can react appropriately. on a timely manner to get water flowing again.

And in your professional experience, based on where we are in the contract, how many unjustified delayed days are there in this project overall?

I'm not sure.

To the best of your knowledge. If we were pursuing liquidated damages, how many days would there be?

Can we circle back with you on that? Maybe an executive session at some point?

I would not answer that question. All right. I mean, I'll just tell you right now, as far as all these contractors are concerned, all of them are in liquidated damages.

I want to make sure they're aware that we are interested in them finishing the project as quickly as possible, but as appropriately and successfully as possible.

And that's the point of liquidated damages is it keeps leverage on them to keep them moving. All right.

Thank you for that. Any other questions, council? Just don't come back here with extra days.

Thank you.

We appreciate that. That brings us to item five on our agenda. That is our consent agenda. Council, do I have any items that you desire to be pulled from the consent agenda?

5C and 5E.

Sounds good. All right. That's it. Let's go. I Jedi mind trick all the time. Yes, I can. Any other items?

all right krista would you read that for us i would love to items 5c and 5e have been pulled from the consent agenda 5a ordinance on first reading with a caption reading an ordinance of the city of pflugerville approving the 2026 annual service and assessment plan update and 2026 assessment rule for public improvements for the martin tract public improvement district in accordance with chapter 372 texas local government code making various findings and provisions related to the subject and providing for an effective date 5b ordinance on first reading with a caption reading an ordinance of the city of pflugerville approving the 2026 annual service and assessment plan update in 2026 assessment rule for public improvements for the meadowlark preserve public improvement district in accordance with chapter 372 texas local government code making various findings and provisions related to the subject and providing for an effective date again 5c and 5e have been pulled from the consent agenda all remaining items may be acted upon in a single motion second i have a motion in uh two or three seconds

Motion passes unanimously. That brings us to item six. Item six is to discuss and consider action regarding appointments to the Board of Adjustments. I believe we have one applicant. Is our applicant in attendance? Said Afar-Khazmi. Come on forward and tell us about yourself and why you want to be on this all-important Board of Adjustments.

So actually I was on the Board of Adjustment before I was last year was appointed and at that time there was a need for the Bonds Committee needed some more people so I was reached out if I wanted to be a part of Bonds Committee so I joined the Bonds Committee now that's over all wrapped up they asked me if I'd like to come back to the Board of Adjustment.

All right.

Thank you for your service. Any questions, council? No, no.

We're coming back.

So, motion approved. Second. I have a motion and a second. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Motion approved unanimously. Thank you for being willing to serve. We look forward to you taking action over there on the Board of Adjustments. This will take us to our supplemental agenda, item number 7. Item 7A is to discuss and consider action to approve an ordinance on second reading with the caption reading, an ordinance of the City of Pflugerville, Texas, ordering a special election on proposed amendments to the Home Rule Charter. As this is a second reading, do we have any questions from council?

I thought we discussed it well. Just want to remind the citizens that all of these proposals came from the board, and the council does not have any discretion on these. So these are all suggestions from your fellow citizens, and they were approved by a majority vote. And as required by the city charter, we will put all of them before the citizens.

All right. And that all those citizens actually live in the city of Pflugerville. have been confirmed. All right. Shots fired.

Did I have a motion? So moved. I've got a motion from Rudy. Second. Second from Jonathan.

And thank you to everyone who served in that commission.

We are very thankful for the citizens that Engage in the process. Motion passes unanimously. That brings us to Item 7B. This is to discuss and consider action to approve a resolution ordering a general election for November 3rd for the election of Council Place 2, Place 4, and Place 6. Mayor, would you entertain a motion? I would.

Motion to approve 7B as presented. Second.

I have a motion from Rudy, a second from David. Motion passes unanimously. And then this brings us to item 7C, discuss and consider action to approve a resolution calling a bond election to be held November 3rd, 2026. I do have a member of the public who has signed up to speak on this item. That is Mr. Jeff Cohen. If you would come forward, you'll have three minutes.

I'd like to thank the council for letting me speak, and I just want to express my complete opposition to the bond proposal other than for the animal shelter. Frankly, it's time for Pflugerville to rein in spending. We spend enough money. Yes, I know we need parks, we need all these luxuries, but times are tough. People can't afford more and more and more taxes. And it's time for the city to acknowledge that fact and maybe put this off for a few years when the economy isn't better and inflation isn't running rampant and people can actually afford to pay higher taxes. Thank you.

Thank you, Jeff. Emily, we did discuss some of this during the work session, but what are you looking for from us now?

We're looking for council action on this item. We have slides on the projects if you'd like to see them, and our staff is prepared to discuss them. We'll take direction from council on how you'd like to proceed.

Make a comment?

I've got David first. No, go ahead, David. On the park bonds, I would... I would respectfully request that we split that up into each individual project so that the voters decide, no, I want that part of the project. I want this one, but this other one I want to delay for a little while so that the citizens can make an informed and specific vote about the park bonds. I think if we put the whole park bond up all at once, it's very likely to fail. And I think that the citizens deserve the right to pick and choose. and to approve those things that they find particularly compelling while putting off those things that they think should be put off.

Emily, do we have a list of the parks projects that we could put on the screen? I wasn't sure if that was a slide, the parks projects.

You might have individual. If you have it, I'm sorry. Melody, did you have? Oh, here we go.

Yep. Not quite yet.

Okay. Rudy? Mayor, it was about to be overall, about the bonds in general. You know, I think all of us, well, first of all, I do want to say that the bond committee did an excellent job and did exactly what we asked. We said, look at the projects, work with staff, see what issues, concerns are out there, what can be addressed, what's necessary and what's needed from there. Great job. We appreciate that. and our job is to come back here and make decisions on the reality of what should or shouldn't go ahead and go on a ballot to the citizens we're not in the business of putting bonds to fail and this is where my concern comes from because you look at what you what you know anecdotally we heard in the community Then we had staff go out into the community, have a survey, as you said, which was a much more robust response than was the initial survey. And we heard back exactly from the citizens that, hey, listen, at this moment in time, we know that these are things that the city needs, but... Not right now, given affordability, given inflation, a variety of things happen from that. For me personally, the hard part for me, and Councilman Rogers brought up about the different projects for the park bond, is Reunion Park. Because let's be frank and let's be blunt here. For generations, not months, not years, not decades, generations, that area of the city was not treated like the rest of the city. And to go ahead and put them off and have a quote and concern about what's happening over there, that causes me concern. At the same time, I've got to deal with the reality of what we're seeing from what we got back from there. Pause. we understand there has to be something done with the animal shelter. But if anything, what was just proposed now, it shows that we have a lot more questions and things that we've got to figure out on how that works and where that goes from. I give staff a lot of credit. Emily said it very quickly, but I want to reiterate, you got back to us alternatives in a week and a half. That's not easy. And that's very much appreciated and speaks again and you hear my voice get a little louder about this, is when I hear people say that the city, the council, and the staff just don't listen to the citizens. That's just not true. The question is that we're trying our best to make decisions on these things and working from that as well. And so, you know, my idea is that we don't go forward with any bonds. And if we were going to go forward with one, I mean, I'm not going to lie, it'd be a reunion park.

So I would, at the beginning of this process, I relayed my thoughts about the timing of bond projects. And I thought that we should wait until 2027 or 2028 because we have over, we have six major projects that are almost $1 billion that are all in process right now. And we have 2020 bond projects that haven't barely even started now, and we're six years into it. And so I think we have a lot of things on our plate. I think we need to finish them. I think we need to demonstrate to the public that we were finishing the projects that they voted on, we're finishing the Downtown East, and then people can start to use it. They can see that we've delivered on promises. The other thing is about the economic times and A lot of things like the water bills, there's other things coming on the ballot. It's a lot of money to ask from people, and I just don't think that this is the right time. I'm not sure that I think all of these projects are needs right now. I do think we need to do something with the animal shelter. But I think to Rudy's point, there's still some exploration we need to do. And I was on the 2015 bond committee when this first was presented. And there was a lot more discussion about different options than I think has occurred on this. So, I think we have a lot more things to look at. I do believe that we need to invest in Reunion Park. My concern is I'm not sure where the land is going to come from and what the scope is going to look like. And I would like to have more stakeholder input of people in the area and people that it's important to them and hear from them about what they want. there are some interest earnings on our unspent bond. And so some of the park projects, we could use some of that interest earnings towards furthering a design or getting concept plans for that. So it doesn't have to stop if we don't put a bond on November. But right now, I think I don't think this is the right time. And I think there's some more work to do for a bond, so I'm not in favor of putting any of the bonds on the ballot this time.

So, Emily, to her point, is that true that we can look and see what funds are available to try to see what we can actually move forward regarding the design of Reunion Park?

As far as the interest income? Yeah, this is what she mentioned. I'd have to check with Tracy on that one. I know that a lot of the transportation projects didn't come on the bond because we utilized a lot of the funds that we had available.

My understanding is interest follows the construction. So if we have bond proceeds and interest, that it could be used for projects that were listed on the ballot, which is parks. So, I mean, for sure, I want you to look into it.

I know that interest typically covers overages because everything always seems to get more expensive, especially for the city.

We also had two park projects that were on the bond that didn't occur because of floodplains. I know some of that has been reallocated, but we actually haven't had a discussion about how to reallocate that. It's been reallocated and it's been put on the CIP in a certain way, but I don't believe that we've had input on how that money is reallocated, and I think that's an important discussion for us to have.

We had input into the CIP. which would be us having input into that decision-making process. What I want to say on these efforts is that I've long been an advocate for ensuring that we've got our planning done ahead of time. I feel like we're not to the point where we've got enough planning done. When we pass one of these, I don't want it to be six or seven years before we get around to building something. That just is never good for our citizens. I don't think anyone should have to wait that long. So I want to make sure we're not putting bonds out in front of people until we have our planning documents in place. I recognize the need for improvements related to the animal shelter. I really like the options that were presented to us in the work session. I think there needs to be some refining to that. At this point in time, I do have a challenge putting anything before the voters at this time until we get more refinement.

Mayor.

And we know exactly where we're going. Kimberly.

I wanted to ask, you know, recently I believe PAWS was shut down a day because of the air conditioner and things like that. And I believe that continues to happen. So do we have a plan in place? Because this does continue to happen if we do not put this on the bond.

Probably, we do not have a plan in place. It's just break fix at this point, that facility. I mean, you all saw a picture of it. It's a glorified shed that they work out of. There's termites falling from the ceiling. It gets infiltrated with water every rain event. AC went out and sent people home because it was 90 degrees in their offices. So probably half of our facility staff is pretty much dedicated when you look at ticket volume to that facility. there's a cost there's an ongoing cost to continue to run that facility um i do think that you know if we were if we were given direction for a dollar amount and two locations to explore that we would have enough time to put together we could whip together some plans for for the voters to put there to say that we have a plan um i would hate to kick this another year that's been kicked for 10 years so somehow rhonda and her staff continue to make it work but it's I wouldn't wish it on anybody to work in that facility.

That's what bothers me. These are all great ideas, but right now, I'll echo the past three sentiments, it's not the time. We have so much on the ballot this coming year. As Melody said, is it a want or a need? Right now, pause breaks my heart. My heart. But, God, what hurts me even more is how much the citizens are hurting right now and how that's just going to put a burden on them that we don't need to do right now. I wish we had a better plan on what we can do within this next year. I would love for this to come back next year after we have more planning and better discussions. But yeah, I just can't in good conscience approve any of these or vote to approve any of these right now.

So I'm in an unusual position here. I want to push back a little bit on the planning as far as the Parks Department is concerned. I do feel like the Parks Department has done a lot of planning. They've presented a lot of information to us over the last several months about what they plan to do, particularly with 1849 Park Place 3. That is very well developed. Now that's the most expensive of the parks projects, but I think that is the one that the parks department has done the most work on. Citywide trail improvements is something that is an ongoing project that they've been working on for a very long time. Now, if you want to tell me that destination play space is not You got a finalized plan and Union Park doesn't have a finalized plan. You know, I'm not going to argue with you about that. The parks and trail land acquisition, citywide trail improvements, 1849 park phase three. Shane, correct me if I'm wrong, but you've got plans for all of those things. I'm calling on Mr. Mize, who is our director of Parks and Recreation, to tell me if he's got plans. I like how you recapped your own question.

Yeah, we've got conceptual plans for it. We will have... We'll take those conceptual plans, verify with public... through public engagement, and then we'll actually start the actual planning documents as far as where a... where an amenity goes but yeah we have conceptual plans on 1849 we're working on conceptual plans right now from phase or from the 2020 bond on destination play and uh that's about it i mean trails are trails and we have our marching order from y'all on trails as far as mobility master plan and parkland uh our master plan from the parkland process reunion park um we would have to either in this bond or a future budget have allocate some sort of funding for, um, either site agnostic, um, design of reunion park or that plus some sort of allocation for us to start that process of reaching out with a homeowner and, and working on first steps of maybe going under contract and working on a, on a plan of some sort.

Cause that's the part for me, Shane, that's, I mean, again, I, I, I feel like I'm coming full circle moment. This is, I mean, the historic colored additions, what got me getting interested in council in the first place with that. And I don't want to stop the momentum on that. You have a whole community who, I mean, who's quite excited about even this council brokering the subject and seeing, trying to move forward on that. So my question is, is that if we don't do it as a bond proposal for the 5.1, what was the 5.1 going to cover? 5.1, well, go ahead.

Yeah. Can I get some help? 5.1 would have been the full design of that park with the public engagement and full design. Land acquisition would have come separate in that separate allocation because you don't want the 5.1 and then the land ultimately cost two and a half or whatever. So then you only have three and a half to finish out that park. um i think normally design is about 20 percent of construction so if the whole thing was going to cost 5.1 there may be something in there where it's a million or a million and a half that you you try to carve out for design it would be site agnostic unless somewhere you're working with a developer or that isd property or something else there's not a lot of options around there so negotiating from the dice makes it more costly but uh Yeah, I think, you know, the public's feeling it, right? We're also hearing from the public that they want more ball fields. And you saw the feasibility study on ball fields. And I can't do both, which is fine. If y'all don't approve this, great. In a year when the residents come up with their torn jerseys and they tell you they need fields, we've already made that decision. I can't make these fields out of air, right? So we're either making fields. or we're not. We're either doing Union Park or we're not. I think I'm okay with, we're doing a lot already and we'll hit y'all's mark whether we do these parks or we don't do these parks, but we've been trying to do what we hear anecdotally and from our master plan process, from the residents when they come up here and talk to y'all and y'all say, hey, go work with them, get these field spaces. We've done a field allocation process. We've done a feasibility study. This is the next step if we want to serve those If we don't, that's okay as well. And I get that maybe you just can't do it right now. But in the meantime, if it takes three years or five years, I won't be able to do anything with those groups that feel underserved in cricket or ball fields or whatever either.

I want to be clear. When I say I want plans further along, I do mean beyond conceptual plans. I mean, we should be looking at potential land acquisition for those ahead of time. One of the things that a lot of folks in the community have heard from me before is that when we look at these projects, when we look at the potential of a bond program, these are things that we know we need to do. When we put it on the ballot, we're not asking, do you want us to build this thing? We're asking, are you ready to pay for it? Absolutely. Are you ready? Is the time right? And because, at least that's the mentality that I've always taken, that, you know, is the time right to build this? The idea of having a plan that we put together, and if we put it on the shelf for a couple years, we know we're going to do it. we just don't quite know when and one of my biggest win concerns is when i look at the animal shelter in particular i know there's there's statute at the state level that says if we put it on a ballot and it does not pass three years we can't do anything about it for three years and i am i'm not from death That's why I'm worried about all of them. I want them all, but yeah. And so I don't want to put us in a position where we need to make some substantial improvements at the animal shelter, and we are prohibited from doing that. We definitely need to make some interim improvements there and get things back in working order and then take a look at our balance, take a look at what's left to do.

And to Doug's point, We've been there before. Like, we've literally been there before with the animal.