City Council - Regular Meeting

Please rise for our final invocation followed by Pledge of Allegiance. Amen. 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. Thank you very much. Court call and roll. Counselman Foley. I'm sorry. You guys come back up here for just a second. I got ahead of myself and I meant to have the members of the chamber's youth civic leadership was going to lead us in the pledge and I apologize. So we'll certainly try to get you guys but I want to take a moment for you guys to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about you.

Ladies first.

We'll do ladies first, or you can make one of them go first. How about that? There you go.

Well done. Well, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Cameron Holmes. I'm an 11th grader. I'm going into 11th grade at Lincoln High School, and I currently am working on trying to become a juvenile defense attorney. Excellent. Outstanding. Outstanding.

Hi, everyone.

My name is Trish B. I go to Booth Creek, and I'm a live interviewer, and I'm hoping to study from home.

Study what? Neuroscience. Outstanding. How about you?

My name is Michael Snowbrode. I'm a rising senior at Spruce Creek High School, and I'm hoping to become a Knox Renewer.

Outstanding. Well, thank you guys very much, and I do apologize. We will get you guys back and have you meet us at the pledge.

So I jumped the gun on that because this is kind of a new thing we've been enjoying doing. So good to see you guys. Enjoy the rest of your summer break. School's coming soon, right? Yeah. All right. Have fun.

Thank you.

Sorry.

Call the roll. Here. Here. Here.

Here. Item four, public comments on consent agenda items only. Is there anybody wishing for public comments on consent agenda items only? I do believe. Richard Lee, you wanted to speak to a consent agenda item? Now is your chance, my friend.

Good evening, gentlemen. I want to call your attention to the proposed increase in rates for the golf course. I know these are maximum rates that they're talking about, but you may be getting calls, as I'm getting calls, that people are reading these and going, oh, my God, these are 25% higher than the current rates, roughly. I try to assure them that these are not the rates that we hope that we'll see if there's any increase at all. But it is a bit shocking to see that these are so much higher than the current rates that are out there today. We certainly don't want a deterioration of the golf course in terms of quality and conditions, but we also don't want to scare the public away by raising rates to a point that makes it almost unaffordable. A non-resident right now would pay over $100 a round to play at the Cypress Head. Now that's pretty good compared to other courses, but it's still very, very high. The other thing that was just brought to my attention that they're also in here, they've changed the surcharge, which used to be $2 for 18 holes. Now it's going to be double that. Not sure why that took place. There was no justification at our meeting. There was no discussion around a change in the surcharge. And realistically, there was very little factual, there was no factual information presented in terms of why the rates were going to be changing, other than antidotal comments about the need to have the rates increase. So our position really is we accepted the rates, but the real... motivation behind it is confidence in parks and recreation to monitor the activities of the golf course to make sure that they're not proceeding foolishly with rates that are way too high for the area and losing members and people not playing here simply because the rates are too high thank you thank you thank you rick anyone else wish to speak to consent agenda items five through eight

All right. Can I get a motion and a second to approve consent agenda items five through eight from the council?

Get a motion to approve consent agenda items five through eight.

A second?

I'll second that.

I have a motion and a second. And we have a resolution, so I'll have to call the roll.

Councilman Gephardt? Yes. Councilman Green? Yes. Vice Mayor Grubbs? Yes. Mayor still in?

Yes. 4-0. Moving on to item number nine, Parks and Rec. Recreation... month proclamation sign this thing sign this in real time you got a representative there miss lavalo i figured i figured you might i figured you might come on up folks tell us who you are and who you brought with you

Good evening, Mayor and members of the Council. Susan Vollard, Parks and Recreation Director. I have with me tonight Rec Man, and I have our president of our Parks Board, Mr. Bobby Ball.

Outstanding. I will just say, first of all, if Rec Man, he has a tendency to get very long-winded, so if we could just ask him not to speak tonight, that would be great. But thank you for everything that the staff does at Parks and Rec and also our volunteer board for the suggestions and overseeing and being able to to be an extension of the council to bring such a great service and a product to the residents of Coral Orange. And I know everybody's going to say it, but wow, you guys really knock it out of the park for Fort DeGioia. The amount of feedback that I have gotten is absolutely amazing, to the point where I will say I'm a little nervous about how you do that next year because while there was a very special anniversary that led to a lot of that, a lot of the residents were so happy and impressed with what they saw out of that. So thank you guys for everything that you do and it's my honor to read this proclamation for you guys tonight. Whereas parks and recreation programs are an integral part of communities throughout this country, including the city of Port Orange, and whereas our parks and recreations are vitally important to establishing and maintaining the quality of life in our communities, ensuring the health of all citizens, and encourages physical activities by providing space for popular sports, hiking trails, swimming pools, and many other activities designed to promote active lifestyles, and whereas parks recreation programs build healthy active communities that aid in the prevention of chronic disease provide therapeutic recreation services for those who are mentally or physically disabled and also improve the mental and emotional health of our citizens and as leading and as the leading provider of healthy meals nutrition services and education and whereas parks and recreation programs increase a community's economic prosperity through increased property values, expansion of the local tax base, increased tourism, attraction and retention of businesses, and crime reduction. And whereas our parks and natural recreation areas ensure the ecological beauty of our community, and provide a place for children and adults to connect with nature and recreate outdoors. And it's fundamental to the environmental well-being of our community. And now, therefore, I, Scott Stiltman, Mayor of the City of Port Orange, do hereby recognize July as Parks and Recreation Month. and I thought I knew the number off the top of my head, but how many total parks and rec locations do we have in the entire city?

We have 26 parks as of right now. That was close. I said 24. Yeah, with the bond, we will be adding a couple more. Okay, all right.

I just think that that's, you know, most people can name some of the big ones. Obviously, City Center, Riverwalk, Airport Park, George Owens Park, and stuff like that. So you think, you know, they've got five, seven, or eight, but really there's 26. And that's amazing. And there is a park almost for everybody, no matter where you're looking for a place to park. to go do some physical activities or just read a book or sit by the water or what have you so i encourage people to get out and explore those and you guys have done a great job with your part on the website uh that will showcase those parks and tell you where they're at and tell you what's there in those parks but it's really cool when people can get out and about and go check out some of the parks they didn't even know existed yeah appreciate that about 500 acres a little over 500 acres right now of parkland so before i come take a picture with you guys counsel anybody thank you

Thank you for all you do. Fantastic. Fantastic jobs.

all right moving this on to public participation for non-agenda items and i've got how about we start with emma clark tonight what's going on with the chamber

Hi, how are you guys doing?

Good.

My name's Emma Clark. I'm here representing the chamber. I just wanted to give two updates. Right now we have our golf tournament coming up on Saturday, August 8th. It's taking place at the club at Venetian Bay at 8.30. We still have sponsorships available as well, and you can either enter as a team of four or individually as well. The tickets are all sold online, so please sign up if you're interested. And then you got a chance to meet three of our fantastic students from our youth leadership program. Applications are open right now for the adult leadership program that the chamber has. And the applications are due on August 10th. It's an eight week long program that starts on September 8th with an opening reception. So we always love seeing city officials or any city team members that are interested in participating as well. and anyone in here that is interested in signing up for our leadership program. As always, thank you so much for all of the support that you provide to the chamber. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Mr. Robert Reinhagen. Oh, there you are. I looked over there a minute ago. I'm like, where's he at? I didn't see him in the seat. Welcome.

Thank you.

Mayor, council members, Robert Reinhagen, 1425 Dexter Drive, Fort Arles. I wanted to talk about the Community Development Block Grant. I went to two meetings that they had updating the program, the five-year plan, and there was a consensus there that because the money was so little, it's HUD money, and it's like $300,000 each year, and it has to be used within the low-income areas of the city. And it's not enough money to really attempt to try to do anything for an individual homeowner. So the consensus seemed to be, and the survey supported, putting the money towards the infrastructure. My concern is that the survey that was done was an online survey, and the information that they got, collected, you couldn't tell how many people within the low-income districts actually responded to the survey. So what I would like to propose and suggest is that you consider taking the money, because it's not a lot of money, and creating some sort of an ombudsman program. And you could have somebody then that will go out into the communities, these low-income communities, interview these people find out what their needs are what their concerns are and then be a central point of contact for people that they can get directed towards the various community services that are available and I think that would be a good experiment to try to do that thank you thank you what was the program you said Robert the Community Development Block Grant.

Mr. Robert Fleck. And Mr. Fleck, on your topic here, you may want to stick around because I'll get the city manager to, because we could probably give you some information on this.

Oh, okay, thanks. Go right ahead. Yeah, in fact, I've been in contact with Dick Colby, who's in charge of all that for those. Anyway, so yeah, my name's Robert Fleck. I've lived at 835 Ambury Drive for about 40 years now. Thanks for giving me the time to share this with you. So about five years ago, I got this note saying they were going to resurface Banbury Drive. We didn't need resurfacing. I don't know how that happened. So I called, and that's how I got introduced to Dick Colby. And he said he'd take my concerns into consideration with regards to Charles Street. I don't know if you... I've been down Charles Street. It's a street that runs parallel to Herbert Street. It's just one street north between US 1 and I think it's McDonald Road there. I haven't been on every street in the city. I've been on a lot of them, and that's the worst I've been on. It's terrible. I've got some pictures here. I took some photographs, but I was told that I probably wouldn't be able to show the color slides, but okay. But anyway, I was told to bring some so that you had evidence. Anyway, so a few years went by and I called him back and he said that, well, they couldn't consider resurfacing then because that new development there, they were putting a roundabout in and so that made sense, had to wait to get all that done. But actually the roundabout didn't go on Charles Street. It was over, you know where it is before, where I guess it's a McDonald's that comes into, what is it, Madeline and Salt's. Anyway, so I called again I think the third time, and I was told that it might be moved up on the priorities, but I just thought it would be a good idea to come in and let you guys know that there's a bunch of us in the area there. I mean, it's bad enough with a car. I ride a bicycle a lot, and it's almost... I mean, it's really bad on a bicycle. It's like a washboard road. So I'll just leave these with whomever. You can leave right there with the clerk. But anyway, yeah, thanks. And I'll stick around.

Yeah, stick around for a moment. We'll weigh in on that. Maybe I'll speak to it as well. All right, great. Thank you. Thanks very much.

Thank you. Angela LeDuc.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Hello, Angela LeDuc, 674 Herbert Street. under the city's current sign regulations a billboard is a prohibited sign our municipal code discusses non-conforming signs and it reads the intent is to allow non-conforming signs until they are no longer used or become hazardous but not to encourage their survival last year an applicant lamar outdoor advertising was approved to amend the land development code to allow the replacement of static billboard sign faces with digital sign faces on existing structures along with that amendment the approval gave the authority for city council to enter into the agreements with billboard owners to reconstruct existing billboards along i-95 and ridgewood in exchange for permanent removal of other existing billboard sign faces within the city Lamar currently has four sign faces at US 1 and Nova and two sign faces on I-95. I'm up here tonight because I want to know if it was intentional deceit or an honest mistake made by the applicant or maybe the council didn't truly understand what they were approving. The original request to the Planning Commission, along with approval from staff, was to remove all the billboards at the US-1 location and reconstruct two digital spaces on I-95. The Council didn't get to vote on this amendment because Lamar pulled it from the January 21st agenda. Then Lamar went back to the Planning Commission in July to state that they had messed up and one northbound digital sign is intended for Ridgewood and one on 95. Staff did not recommend this revised text amendment because it may not lead to the ultimate removal of billboards specifically within the city. The planning commission approved it anyway. Then council approved it on September 2nd. Then on October 7th, there was a consent agenda item to approve the billboard relocation and reconstruction agreement. There was no public discussion about the agreement and it passed with unanimous roll call vote. The same meeting had a second reading of the land development code amendment text and it also unanimously approved with no discussion. The sleight of hand was made in the agreement because the second reading of the LDC amendment and all the exhibits and texts in the previous stacked reports presented at earlier meetings clearly showed the intended reconstruction would be one digital sign at US 1 and 1 on 95, the US 1 northbound lane. Southbound drivers on US-1 would see a blank rear side of the sign. Even Pete Costanza, the GM for Lamar, stated on record that the four signs on US-1 would reduce to one sign. But when you actually read the agreement, it states two digital LED sign faces will be constructed on US-1 facing both north and southbound lanes and one digital sign face on I-95. why is the agreement different than what was discussed and voted on during the first and second readings of the text amendment why are you all encouraging the survival of prohibited signs specifically within our city thank you adam toby come on welcome

Mayor, council, thank you for giving me the time today. I second everything Angela just said because that is spot on. As far as my time today, I gave everybody on the council a nice little packet. I'm starting to get creative with our arts and crafts. I'm simple today, not going to browbeat, not going to go after anything, just simply overdevelopment. And I've talked about this over and over again. The catchphrase I'm going to try to use today to sink in is suicidal empathy. And it's a very strange phenomenon that's going on in the world right now. But we're so desperate to say yes and be like that before you know it, we say yes to things that shouldn't be approved. Things that should be approved. indigenous Florida heritage, springs and waterways, things that mean something to the community, things that mean something to our kids, our citizens, citrus roots, coastal surf and culture, things that Sean, we were just talking about going surfing down in Sebastian. People talk about coming up and surfing in Ponce Inlet. What they don't talk about is, hey, I can't wait to go see more zero lot line houses with driveways too small for my truck to fit in. Hey, I can't wait for more flooding. Or, Sean, I know you love this one, more traffic. I know we've run out of the majority of land in Port Orange. There's just a few big parts left, but they should be taken very seriously because this is the last little bastion of what we have. There's an old saying, NIMBY, not in my backyard. Ormond Beach is dealing with this right now in the county with the fuel farm up in Ormond and all this stuff. And rightfully so. Well, there's the other side of the story of somebody else is going to take care of it. Somebody else is going to take care of it. Somebody else is going to provide the wetlands. They're going to save our environment. We're going to have places to go hike. We have 22 parks here. That's phenomenal. 26 parks. That's phenomenal. But when you contrast that by... arguments of 50 foot lots being dropped down to 40 foot lots that is insanity um not congressman foley maybe future congressman but councilman foley had mentioned all these uh lake nona comparisons uh the ones in orlando they're all 20 30. i i remember when those developments were built we are 120 140 year old city, we should be treated differently. We have very little land left for our watershed, for our quality of life. It is not rocket scientists, but we don't have to say yes to everything. And I strongly, strongly suggest everybody here, no matter who comes up, because I wish I could stay longer, but I did the double duty of county council and city council. But anybody that comes up here on behalf of a developer please listen to what they're saying and take it for what it is because specifically west of 95 near airport road williamson if that traffic has even 10 more cars it's overwhelming let alone adding whatever thousands of cars are going to be put into the system based off of the proposed development that's in the works right now but on that note thank you for giving me the time have a great night

All right, on to item 10, council member comments. Tracy, we'll start with you tonight.

I don't want to take thunder away from everybody, but 4th of July, wow, you guys did a fantastic job. And I know everybody up here is going to be commenting on that, and it's just a beautiful event that happened down at City Center. Those that missed it at social media did a great job showing it and representing that out there. The other one that I have is police department volunteers, the VIPs, are doing back to the school bash. And it's a great program at the rec center. That's coming up on July 25th, Saturday, from 10 to 1, fingerprinting of kids to try to help. Parents, things of that nature, it's all free. Great event, lots of things going on for that. And then mid-August is going to be great for Port Orange. Mid-August, if weather holds, we'll have the Willow Run extension of the bike trail, walking trail that goes all the way down to Williamson completed. And then the long-awaited Dunlaughton boat ramp. will be open to the public. So a lot of good things coming in mid-August. That's great to see. That's it.

John?

Yeah, I just want to say it's nice to see some of the surface roads being done by the county, Williamson and Taylor Road. I was kind of a little concerned there for a little while because there was a lot of things being left behind. and debris, but today I witnessed them, Massey, going back through there and pulling all that up. I know that wasn't under our jurisdiction, but it's part of our city. We drive that road every day, so it's starting to come together really nice, which is really getting a lot of positive comments about the resurfacing going on. I know gentlemen have brought it up. It's a process that takes a long time and happens different times of the year, but it's really nice to see. Also, got to witness on video the water coming into that new boat ramp. as they were testing it, and that's going to be phenomenal. But I've actually been using the north side, and it's been going pretty smoothly. I haven't witnessed any fist bites down there. It's really nice. I keep that to the ball fields on our park, so it works better there. But good job on the rec department over 4th of July. That was navigating the weather and the lightning and shutting the beer tent down and opening it back up. Just all the people that... ultimately came out as the as the sunset which was a beautiful sunset and the event was really cool i had a lot of good comments about the drone show as the first one i've ever seen in the sky like that it was really cool and i went home with a nauseous stomach because i was one of the judges on the pie contest and that was uh phenomenal so great great participation from our citizens uh all around and thank you parks and rec for all that just uh looking forward to the rest of this meeting oh you know i want to mention one more thing too because we approved something tonight on the consent agenda that uh was to continue working with our basically our lobbyists up in over the past few years have been able to help us get 10 million dollars for our city for our infrastructure and stormwater improvement so i'm really thrilled to have the opportunity to be up in tallahassee and work with our lobbyists his name is sean pittman he's amazing you walk through the halls and everybody knows him and he's just got such a great reputation and he's done such a good job for us so i was pleased that we were going to continue to use the services that's all i got

Yeah, I'm going to echo that. I mean, Sean Pittman, that was an eye-opener in how much that guy knew and who he knew and whose dog he knew and whose horse he knew. I mean, he knew everybody in the building, and that was money well spent. Also, I want to echo, again, Parks and Rec on the 4th of July. Man, the drone show was really cool.

I mean, that was a lot of people talking about it.

The other thing I want to talk about, though, is the Cypress Head thing, Item 7 on the consent. And I do want it to be known that, again, you know, these fees are the parameters, I guess you would say. But I'm going to echo what Rich says, and I don't want to price us out of the market either. We have a good product. And we've got a good thing going. And at the current time, it's making a little bit of money that we're able to reinvest back into the course. But at the same time, I don't want to price us out of contention, and then we've got something where we're going backwards. So hopefully, like we said, it's Park's job, along with our management team and Kemper Sports and these cats, to make sure that We are at the right number all the time, and I think they're doing a good job at that. They've got this revolving price code, and if the book's empty, they'll put you in it. that's going to be their main focus at these rates because as you see everything's going up and the cost of cypress head is going up it is everything manpower you name it fuel fuel fuel so hopefully though we can keep uh keep a good eye on this and keep us a competitive city-owned course so hopefully we don't price ourselves out but that's all i got tonight

I'll lead off with just a follow-up, a couple comments on the golf course. So having been up here on the council the longest, I can tell you that the overwhelming amount of years that Cypress Head Golf Course has been in existence, it has not been able to carry its own weight financially, and this had to be supplemented by the general fund, the taxpayers, many, many, many, many, many, many times over. and so this current management team along with all of the people within that team to include their ground staff and the pro shop folks and everybody else has has been able to tune those things in to where now it has sustained itself in the recent years and that is ideally what we want and and i and i say that because The golf market can rise and fall a little bit as we have seen. And, and we are not the experts in that industry and we need to entrust and them to be able to adjust accordingly as needed to sustain that course so that we don't get into financial distress. You saw, you know, over the last 10 years, you saw golf courses all over the state of Florida closing down. Right in our area.

Gone.

Just like that. And when that happens, it's not just the loss of a golf course. It's the loss of a resource within a community that impacts property rates and the overall quality of life. And so... We could talk about golf courses all night long, and most of us would be talking about stuff we don't actually have the expertise in. But having sat up here, I can tell you that those are real concerns. Additionally, those rates, the resolutions to be able to change those rates accordingly haven't been done in five years. What has happened in the last five years? Well, we saw the minimum wage by voter approval in the state of Florida increase 72%, 72% in 2019. I'm still shocked that people can't grasp why the cost of everything in the state of Florida has gone up. Every service, every product. When you move the needle 72% in such a short amount of time, and I'm not saying it did or didn't need to be done. But the reality of it is when you move the wage needles and the minimum wage, the cost of services, the cost of goods, and on top of that, you've had about a 28 to 35% increase in inflation over that same period of time. You cannot maintain a golf course at that same level of those costs from five, six years ago. So the reality of it is you got to have those fluctuations. They got to do like everybody else. Do their best to look for opportunities to have efficiencies and have savings and still make the course a course that people want to go pay for. And I will tell you that they've done that. I don't play a ton of golf, but I get around enough and I play enough to see that that course is a desirable course. People want to go and play that course. So that's my thoughts on that. On the Charles Street comment, and I'll let the city manager weigh in. You know, we've got some major, huge stormwater mitigation projects. One of the largest in the city that we're working towards will impact Charles Street tremendously because we need to be able, under the current design and engineering plans, run a line about 8,000 linear feet, 36 inches in diameter.

42.

Big. Big. And it's got, yeah. So a lot of Charles Street, as you see it today, will have to be totally tore up. Completely. So it doesn't make sense to go out there today and resurface a street tomorrow. We've got to get that torn all up. And so that final design and final engineering is still kind of going on. But once all that's done, that will be part of that. is to have that street completely repaved and probably more repaving than just resurfacing just the amount of property that we anticipate. So just kind of stay tuned on that and know that that will be coming and that will be part of that larger scale project for sure. In terms of the acquisition of funds in Tallahassee, I appreciate you guys bringing that up. You are right, I have seen what Sean Pittman is capable of doing in Tallahassee and not from a standpoint of bragging, but a lot of cities go to Tallahassee looking for funding and they come back completely empty handed. It is very common too that if you go to Tallahassee and you're fortunate enough to get some dollars to bring back to your community, that you probably aren't going to get anything the following year. It's just kind of how it works up there. It's very political in Tallahassee. Not so much what we do, but up there for sure. I see Robin laughing. She knows what I mean. But, but Sean and our staff together year after year after year, I'm not changing you for next year because I got big expectations, but year after year after year, They put a strategy in place and you have to know you can go up there asking for money for something. And if it's not the interest of the legislature or the Senate, you might as well just go out and talk to those walls. So year after year after year, Sean does a great job of a strategy and helping our staff say, okay, These are where the interests are. This is where we think there will be money available. And then that allows us to acquire that money and move funding around. Because money is money when it comes to trying to get a lot of these projects done. And so they have done a tremendous job. I appreciate you guys bringing that up because we have done very well in getting our return on investment out of having him and his firm up there for sure. And lastly, kind of a sad note, we recently had one of our VIPs, Captain Bruce, would come pass away. Bruce had served for 21 years, served in this community, 21 years. Not just somebody who shows up occasionally, but showed up all the time. I don't know how many thousands and thousands and thousands of hours he put into serving the community, but I can tell you it's that much. It's not a couple of hours or even a couple hundred.

It's in the thousands.

And so I don't have... his obituary tonight, but on the next council meeting, I'd love if one of you would read his obituary into the permit record here in the city of Port Orange. So our thoughts and prayers are with Bruce's family and everybody at the police department, because every time we have a loss like this, it's definitely felt by everybody. All right, and that's enough for me. City Attorney.

Enough reporting tonight.

Was I somewhere on base? I thought Matt was going to go for like 10 minutes.

I had a little more time. You want a filibuster? Yeah. So on the Charles Street, we are going to be working on the east side from the railroad tracks to US-1 in the month of August. We should have that part done. As you mentioned, the west side is affected by Portona, also the other project, the Sugar Park project. So because of those two, that's why we wouldn't be going as fast on that side, which is the area in question. So we will be getting the railroad tracks east to US-1, though, coming up here in the next month. The other stuff I have on the list, so Riverwalk being the first one, We have two letters of intent now from two interested parties who would like to acquire the property and develop it. I haven't had a chance to actually review it yet because I've been spending more time on the budget right now. The intent is to go through them and review them as staff and bring something to you. Hopefully the second meeting in August would be the plan to look at that. So they're both, both of them consistent with what we were hoping to see, mixed use projects. One of them has a parking deck, one of them does not. Both have hotels, multifamily, commercial, that kind of stuff. So they're both valid. Both of them come from parties and I think could could do a successful project. So we'll analyze those two and bring something to you in the next three or four weeks. stormwater projects. So we acquired three properties recently, the property of trailwood and the one in 893 sugar house have now been demo graded and seated. The 798 sugar house is coming up in the next couple weeks, the same thing. Once we have them all cleared like that, You've seen that probably in the newsletter we talked about. We're going to go out between grants and other funding sources and work to landscape them back so that there's more of a native Florida approach so the maintenance costs are lower going forward. Other projects, the Transform 386 projects at Portona and Powers. The county is leading these projects at this point. They've been doing field data collection for a while, looking into what kind of dirt's there, what's underground. property acquisitions supposed to be going on this summer, and with that design and permitting next next year. So we'd start construction about September, October of next year on those two projects going forward. So And then the sugar forest project, the bigger one that you mentioned, we're at that odd 75% plans, which is they've got enough detail now that they're able to go out there and see where that pipe, the pipe you were talking about, and we're in the process of pretty much going down the entire route looking for utility conflicts along the way. So you're mapping it out in detail to see what else is in the ground and how we can put this in with the minimal disruption and cost to going through the existing utilities in that area. Projects are continuing to progress there. You can bet we're going to find stuff in the ground that we didn't know was in the ground. And once we start digging, that's a guarantee. The Parks Bond project, so the city center sports complex, the one back here behind us, has the notice to proceed. Well, they're going to start construction in August. So we're about a month out from construction on the first project going forward. And then we've submitted the ECHO grant for the Willow Run Park as well. So we expect to hear it. about that award in the fall, and then we would start construction. We didn't slow really down that process, so we're ready to start that construction if the grant gets awarded in the fall. If not, we still go forward with the project, but we believe we've got a really good chance of getting that grant going forward. And then you mentioned already the Causeway Park. We have the boat ramp ready to go. We're now two or three weeks out or so from opening that and getting it ready to go. Wow. That's going to be a little bit ahead of schedule then. Mid-August is what we're doing. Good.

What else you got? Anything else? That's it on those topics. All right. Brings us to board appointments, interviews, and reports. Item 13, sticking with a popular theme tonight, Parks and Recreation Board Report.

Welcome, sir. Good evening.

Bobby Ball with the chair. Yeah, you got to remember. Parks and Rec. Yeah, Parks and Rec. It was actually kind of interesting. I'm sitting here listening and everything you guys are talking about is things we've been talking about. And so I don't have a whole lot of really new stuff to tell you, but I'll just simply say that, you know, last year the voters approved the bond and we are coming out of the ground with bond projects and we've got her report from staff with the different projects we've got city center soccer fields we've got willow run park we got white place we got the train depot going we've got crossy north expansion potentially happening for the school board and and across the family we've got across the under drain project redoing the baseball fields in the back we've got Potentially, well, that's going to be maybe later. So it's just really exciting to be part of the board right now because we sort of had these ideas with you to do something, and they're actually coming to fruition. So it's pretty exciting for us. You guys talked about the golf course. I can't tell you as a golfer, you guys know I'm a golfer, if you have a good quality golf course, people come to play. You can look all over the state at the courses that aren't doing well, and there's a reason why they're not doing well. And when you hire Darren, whatever it was, four, five, six years ago, maybe it's more by now, and he came and did a good job, that's what's going to happen. You're seeing the results of a good decision well back. Not to mention Darren was from here, so he's going to take care of it like it's his own. For sure. You mentioned 4th of July. You mentioned the boat ramp. I'm super excited about that. As an engineer, I'm a nerd. I want to see that. I want to see the pictures before they filled it back in. So I don't really have anything else to say. I was quick. I know you got a long night. I will just say one last thing as it relates to the referendum that's in November. We talked about that as a board. We want to know, as you've heard already tonight, everything that we've talked about that makes Port Orange what Port Orange is, is Parks and Rec. And the voters in this city decided to tax ourselves to take care of Parks and Rec. And I think, I don't know how far I can go as a board person, but I know the city has to educate. Perhaps I can advocate. I'd like to find a way that the board can do that process for you and help with that. So as a board, what can we do? You need to tell us and then let us do it. Thank you.

Excellent. thank you thank you bobby thank you under the public hearing portion of the meeting item 14 second reading ordinance number 2026-6

It's an ordinance of the City of Port Orange, Volusia County, Florida, proposing amendments to the City of Port Orange Charter, setting a Charter Amendment Referendum, amending the Charter of the City of Port Orange to change the qualification requirements for City Council members, including the Mayor, amending the residency requirements, providing for authority to resolve disputes related to qualification and election, providing for an election to be held November 3rd, 2026, when qualified electors of the City may vote for or against the Charter Amendments. providing for ballot questions, providing for public notice, providing for severability, discriminatory errors, repeal of conflicting ordinances, and an effective date.

Can I get a motion and a second to approve on second reading ordinance number 2026-6?

Motion to approve ordinance number 2026-6. Second.

Motion to second. Council, any comments? Nope. Second reading. Anybody from the public wish to speak to item 14? Seeing none, back to council. Last chance to comment. We'll call the roll.

Councilman Gaffer. Yes. Councilman Green. Yes. Vice Mayor Graves. Yes. Mayor Stiltner.

Yes. 4-0. Item 15, second reading of ordinance number 2026-8.

That's an ordinance of the City of Perot and Volusia County, Florida amending the land development code chapter 17 zoning district regulations relating to updating the PCA zoning district regulations in response to changing market demands by revising locations of where certain uses are allowed within the PCA district while keeping consistent with the current planned community west side future land use designation. relating to minor revisions for clarity and development standards removing redundancies to improve consistency in the application of the code providing efficiencies in the development review process all in support of future development within the pca district providing for repeal of conflicting ordinances severability and an effective date can i get a motion and a second to approve on second reading ordinance number 2026-8 i move to approve ordinance number 2026-8

I second it.

Motion to second. Council, any comments?

Not yet.

Mayor, just so you know, when this item came through on first reading, it was approved on a 3-2 vote. Councilman Foley was one of the votes in favor, who is not here. So unless one of the council members who voted against is going to change to a yes, a 2-2 would kill it on second reading. And the applicant may want to address that for you as you go forward, unless one of you wants to go ahead and change your vote on second reading and move it forward. Otherwise, the applicant may want to request to wait until we have a full board to do so. I will tell you that what you did ask to do, taking out the 40-foot lots and changing that one exhibit that figure 17-1 where you had the 16 units an acre to 8, they made all the changes council directed, so they were prepared to go forward tonight as directed on the 3-2 vote at first reading.

Okay. That's good. Does the applicant like to come up? Welcome.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the council.

I would just say, having heard that from the city manager, because we ran into this all that not long ago, that if that is your interest, now would definitely be the time to exercise that.

That was going to be our request this evening. We recognize that there was quite a bit of discussion at the last meeting. We wanted to have the benefit of a full board so that we could have the final discussion, see the final changes that were made as a result of the discussion at the last meeting. So if we could ask to table it for the next meeting, that would be our request. Okay.

we need a we need a motion in a second from council to the table i'll make a motion to table Second it. There will be a motion and a second to table item 15 on the second reading of ordinance number 2026-8.

Procedurally, Matt, does it make any difference? Does it matter? Just to make sure we put it on the agenda correctly, should we continue to August 4th specifically?

You can just place it on the table. You can take it off on 4th.

We don't have to have them vote to take it off the table, though. We can just put it on August 4th. You just table it.

It doesn't have to be a specific date, certainly.

But do we have to withdraw the first motion and second it?

So we want to preserve legal notice. And that's that. Okay, so they're looking to preserve legal notice. So that would be for date, sir.

August 4 is fine.

With our request to continue to August. Yes. Sounds good. All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, that's been tabled. And you used to send the motion and the second that's already on the floor well that's short in that meeting can you go ahead and i'll go ahead and i'll go ahead and resend my motion to approve uh ordinance number 2026-8 the second second thank you guys bring this to the regular agenda items for tonight item 16 first reading of ordinance number 2026-11

That's an ordinance of the City of Florence, Bruce County, Florida, amending Chapter 54, Article 4, Fire and Rescue Pension Fund, amending Section 5477 definitions, amending the definition of salary to include certain overtime hours, providing for codification, repeal of conflicting ordinances, severability, and an effective date.

Can I get a motion and a second for the first reading of ordinance number 2026-11?

Move a motion to approve Ordinance 2026-11. Second.

Move a motion and a second. Any comments from council members? Not on this. Wayne, did you want to weigh in? Or anybody on staff want to weigh in on this one? I don't have anything further. No? Okay.

No, I mean, we've had this discussion, and I think it was kind of just clarifying. Clarification.

This is definitely something to clean up here. Yep. Anybody from the public wish to speak to this particular item? and then back to council last chance for comments court call the role councilman yes councilman green yes vice mayor grabs yes yes item number 17 fiscal year 2026 2027 budget discussion

Oh, she's pulling up the PowerPoint. So this is the second half of the budget presentation. We did capital projects back in June. The difference with this one is it focuses more heavily on the general fund. and where the last one we did didn't have any action required. It was really just a discussion. This one does conclude with a follow-up item, which is an action to set the max millage. Our maximum millage has to be submitted by early August, so we have basically two weeks to get that taken care of. Tonight, it doesn't work. We do have a tentative meeting set next Tuesday night, but if we can get it done tonight, we'll submit it from there. There's a lot of complicated information in here. It took a bunch of staff to put it together. I will do my best to answer every question you have as we go through the presentation. If I can't answer it, staff may be able to help. If we can't get it to you tonight, we will get it to you right after the meeting. And if I misspeak on anything going through all this, the staff is out here to help me out making sure that they send me corrections throughout the process.

before you get started if you would um i i would like to ask that as you talk about revenue sources that you slow down just a little bit and give some examples for those that are listening in or will watch these meetings because with discussions uh that we've been having out in the community and with the boat that's looming in november a lot of people really don't understand how ultimately the revenue comes together the strings that are attached to certain revenue streams and things like that so if you could kind of slow down when you get to that part a little bit maybe give some examples and how those things are restricted and all that kind of stuff that would be really helpful and we got here a lot earlier tonight so the audience seems to be more alert than we were back in yeah all right It's better having this discussion at 720 as opposed to 1120.

So you can see the outline here, standard outline with some introduction. The focus really is the general fund part. We do have a section that deals with Amendment 3. I thought that that was a responsible thing to do. We know it's out there and it's a possibility. And as we built this budget, we built it understanding that that was a real possibility. And so just being able to talk about what the impacts might be, we put that in there. We start with this every year. These are our five strategic priorities. We've had these for several years, but the budget focuses on funding into these areas. You've already talked about a couple of them tonight, public safety and parks being two of them. We've also had items talk about paving and infrastructure, which comes up quite a bit. Before we go into talking about requesting money for the future year, I think it's really important that you show the community what they got from the money that we got this year. And so this is just a sample of some of the things that were done this year to help the community be a better place. And it's grouped by those strategic priorities leading with our public safety. And we really have, I think we've done a really good job in recent years turning the corner of investing in our public safety providing them with better equipment to keep them safe while they're out there and help them do the jobs while they're out there so whether it's better vehicles better equipment the axon upgrades for police were really nice having a better swat van we had some pretty aged fire trucks that needed to be replaced i kind of lump information technology in with that too because the cyber security is critical to keep people out of our whether they're in trying to get into our plants or trying to attack our infrastructure in general But we have invested well and need to continue to invest in public safety, and I think the results are there. We remain one of the safest communities to be. If something's going to happen to you, you've seen the presentations that we've had, the Firefighter and Police Officer of the Year, the presentations on the various things that the actions police have taken. We had the lifesaving presentation that what we've done in fire for EMS also. As we continue to work on what makes this community great, one of the things is always, and it seems to be lead, is that it is a safe community to live in. In addition to that, the park stuff, and you've covered a lot of that tonight too, the 4th of July, they continue to do an amazing job at events and activities. So the adult, I still remember, everybody knows our baseball and softball programs and basketball programs, but the adult activity center too, huge participation down there. That place is full all the time. I've probably used two or three of those things. But in addition to events, they are constantly doing things for people in this community at really good value. A lot of these things are free. You just show up because you live here, paid for by your property tax dollars, but it is what you get as a resident in this community that you don't get everywhere else. In addition to that, and we went over this a bunch in the last meeting, the maintenance of what we own, we maybe in the past had not been as strong as that. But we have made a big emphasis on taking care of what we have. So parks has done a really good job of that. It kind of become a running joke because a lot of the projects were bathrooms. So we said really, they're really good at fixing bathrooms. But they do take care of the fields and the lights and other things too. So she appreciates the humor that experts at bathroom repair if you need any assistance. But in addition to that, and Bobby mentioned that in his presentation, The parks bond projects, I've worked in places where we did bonds and it may be three, four, five years out before you see projects really coming close to fruition. They've done so good that we have all five of them in the design stages and ready to go. We got one ready to start construction. We could have started the Willow Run already. except that we held it for an echo grant so that we could then spread the dollars out even further. They've done so well that we have two projects now, Request and the Karasi Park expansion, that we might have to actually hold on to a little bit because of the November vote, but they are The ability to have those projects teed up and ready to go is impressive. And then the rest of the stuff on the list is really getting at infrastructure. So we talked about the legislative appropriations, Pitman's group's ability to consistently get us in the ballpark of about $2 million a year. We have had a bunch of positive impact on improving water sewer lines, improving drainage because of all that money. As we continue to move forward with the major flood projects, and continuing to make sure that the infrastructure is reliable. I think it's sometimes not seen or talked about because it's buried in the ground a lot of times or it doesn't happen until you have a hurricane. But when it does, you want to make sure that that stuff works. So the funding that we have this year in the budget I think has produced results to the community that are visible and that people should be proud of. There's nothing, what we did is very well used the funding that we had to make a difference in this community, focusing on the priorities that we have of keeping it safe, family oriented, great quality of life and very reliable infrastructure. There's some pictures of it because some people are not word oriented, they're more visual oriented. So we put in a series of pictures to see that all the various things that we did this year. There's a couple of you guys at Fourth of July and here too. Everybody had great shirts that day. That was that was, that was nice to see. So, so the environment that we're going into, when we started putting the budget together, it's like there are certain things that affect you that aren't necessarily directly under our control, but some of them do. One of the things that it was, it was brought up by one of the speakers earlier, we're essentially built out, we have a little bit of land down on the south end of Woodhaven at the I 95 interchange that already has everything's got the comprehensive plan, which is the bigger, broader view of the city that they're already planned out. Now they'll come back in like tonight, the item we were hearing with the VCOR Karasi land and work on some of the zoning to get it in specifics. But the land uses are all basically laid out in this area. So we knew that we were seeing limited revenue from new growth. So you'll see some of these cities talking about as we go forward, we were able to keep the millage rate flat because we have 6% growth in our tax base. And so it's easy to do that when you're getting $5 and $6 million of new revenue every year from shopping centers and thousand home subdivisions. And despite occasionally being told that we need to slow our growth, I can show you we don't have any growth to slow. It's so low we barely make money off of new development going forward. So we're at the end of the line when it comes to new. Our focus, and council talked about this before, why code enforcement is so important and maintenance is so important because what we have is what's going to keep our values up because we're not going to see new really added to it. One of the things that really caught us a little off guard this year is the residential property values are decreasing. So when we went to be cardboard host this event where the property appraiser shows up every summer, and I'll show you his graphic, but this was the first year I think I've seen us losing money. And we there's 1716 cities plus the county. And we used to be in the top three or four from revenue from our tax base growing. And as the residential values of the houses are selling for less as houses of debris, appreciated down in value, that revenue went down with it. So we're now 15th of 17 cities in this area when it comes to value our tax values. So that was a hurt that that took away that flexibility that we had to do more with the same amount of money, or without without changing the millage rate. We also have contracted wage and benefit obligations. I think we've been headed down a really good path with our bargaining units and working to get fair pay competitive pay. We had a few years ago we had our general employees were generally below half of the market rate. And so we've made some progress and getting most of the general employees up. We just had a three year contract with fire that's kept kept wages competitive and we're now in an open right now open negotiations with the police department. for their agreement as well. So the wages that come out of that are critical. We are a service organization. We're not selling tennis shoes to people or cars or hamburgers. We provide services to people and those services are provided by the 520 employees that we have. And the better the people are you have, the better the value of the service that they get. We have other contracts, the fireworks, the Boeing, these things that have inflation increases in them as well. And then I've got a slide that shows our debt payments. But just like you have credit cards at home and home mortgage payments and car payments, we have debts we got to pay. And then the last one is a little unique to this year. So we've run our fleet program off of a replacement fund. And then we've switched a little bit to a borrowing debt model and we're switching back. And we also had some we really weren't funding it in a reliable way and so i'll explain that in a second a little more but i didn't want to get off the topic first of the property values so this shows the the 17 governments in the area so this slide popped up a couple weeks ago and we were at that presentation and when i was in community development years ago i used to i used to go to this presentation and watch us we were routinely you know when when we were in that period in the 2010s we were up at the top and it gave us a lot more flexibility with with services we are in this area you can see all the cities around us Ponce Inlet South Daytona the shores we're all we're all experiencing lower values we call we did call them they're they're very helpful property appraisers office and said can you give me an idea of what's driving this because we wanted to be sure is it's not something we control like it's it's not that the homes are losing value that we have you know it's not a code enforcement problem it's not that we're letting the city go down it was that houses went up in value and now the houses are the market is bringing the houses down but as the houses sell for less less revenue comes in as a result of that and i'll show you at the end when we talk about the millage rate because there was a lot of criticism level cities this just through this winter and spring about taking booming property values and then raising taxes and getting out of control. And we didn't do that. We did not take advantage of booming property values to push taxes way high. We've done a pretty good job of having ours stay level with the inflation rate. So this part of the budget deals with the overall. It's the big, big picture of it all. A lot of it doesn't impact the actual millage rate, but I wanted to show you the whole budget so you can see in context how it fits in. So this is the overview of the total budget, and you can see it's in the $220 million range. The total budget is actually a little lower this year than it was last year. The pie over there reflects the total budget that is that's the breakdown of the 220 million. And you can see where the largest components are with personnel, capital and operating. And so the reason it's a little lower, you'll see the capital projects tend to push it up and down. So if you have a big capital project, like the public utilities operating facility, when that project gets funded, once it's done and comes down, the number lowers a little bit. But the importance of those three pieces of the pie, so when When anybody tells you to sharpen your pencils or tighten your belt, those are the biggest pieces of the pie where you get the biggest return. And I'm going to explain why we've already done that in a lot of these cases. And it helps a little bit explaining the value we've provided in these areas before we talk about what we may add or decrease. The general fund budget, you can see, did go up. I've got a little background. We balanced that budget to 67.8 at a 5.1 millage rate, which we'll get to at the end. we transferred some money over from the fund balance at just under six million dollars most of it is for the capital improvements a little bit of it covers that fleet transition so we do cip every year there's a little bit more this year in general fund cip transfer than the past but the fleet issue so when you fund it as a basically you have a pot of money that everybody pays into every year so if you've got a hundred vehicles in the police department They pay a portion of those hundred vehicles every year into this fund so that when the vehicles need to be replaced, the funds are in there and you just buy the new vehicle out of the fleet fund. But it helps to be realistic. If you've got a car that's going to last five or six years, you don't budget it out for an eight to ten year life cycle. And you also have to say if the car costs $60,000 today and you have a six year life, it's not going to be $60,000 to replace it. So you've got to account for inflation. And you also have to account for the things you put on it. So you don't just take a car off the lot and give it to a police officer. You've got to put the lights in it. You've got to put all the equipment in it to make it function. So when you budget for the replacement vehicle there, you've got to account for the full vehicle and the full life. And we hadn't been doing that in the past, so the fleet fund was a little light. So when we started moving forward on doing more realistic replacement, it's going to take a little bit of money, and we're going to take an infusion from the fund balance to help us catch up and refill that fund so that we have the ability to continue to replace vehicles. Because we've been doing about 13 police cars a year in replacement, and you've got to make sure you've got the funds in place to do that and continually do that reliably. And this usually leads to this conversation that comes up every year, where are we at in fund balance? So the policies there, so what we've adopted as a policy is that 14 to 17 million, which is sort of what we would call our hurricane reserve. It's enough money to handle if we got hit by two in a cycle. At the end of the year last year when we did our offer or audit the ACFR is that it's the financial report. So it was the report that was the audit was presented off of back in April. That was the number we had. So we were a little over the top of the range at the audit at the end of last year. Since that time we've spent some money during the course of the year. We've transferred some money out of the general fund You probably remember we have an agenda item occasionally that's a budget transfer where we move money from general fund to do something. A couple of things we did was buy some properties in the central part of the city to help with the stormwater projects. So that money came out of fund balance. At the end of the year, the departments, if they don't spend all the money, that goes back into fund balance. And I can say our departments did a really good job of executing their budgets. If you give them million dollars they're spending 90 to 95 percent of it we don't have large vacancies in the past we've seen major influxes back in the fund balance because police and fire had a lot of vacancies but they have done a really good job of staying staffed to the point where there's not a lot coming back But the number down at the bottom is what we estimate when with the money going out and the money coming back in, we believe we will still have a fund balance at around 16 million. So it's a healthy in the middle of your range. It does allow you a little bit of flexibility if you want to lose move a little bit more for some capital projects over. It doesn't have a whole lot of flexibility of some really great opportunities come up but just but it's it's healthy and it's in your range. So the budget itself is made up of seven major fund categories. And this is the broad overview of where they are in the draft budget right now. General fund at the top. This year, the biggest of those. In the past, the utilities is occasionally larger if it has a big capital project in it. But you can see the two. Those are really the two biggest, general fund and enterprise. And then they get smaller as you go down. One of the challenges, so this is one of those government accounting things where studying this can be confusing because one of the things that we had to do this year a few years back we took some money out of the building fund reserves the building department the building inspectors and we moved them into a fund because we were going to tear down city hall and rebuild it and then a bunch of hurricanes hit and building city hall is not a priority anymore fixing flooding is a priority but we're also no longer by state law allowed to take building fund revenue and use it on office space for building inspectors so we had to give it back to them So it shows up in here as a cost to the fund, giving it back. And it also shows up in the fund as coming back to them. So it looks like $6 million is getting spent when all we're doing is moving money from over here to over here. But that's how you have to do it with government dollars. So other than just seeing the magnitude and the scale, if you have questions on any of the lines, Sue can remind me what's in a lot of them in the detail. But that's not the best way to analyze the budget. It just kind of gives you an idea of the scale of the funds. And then they get smaller as you go along. So you can see the building fund, it won't be that big going forward. That's the that's the influx of all the money coming in this one year, and then he'll be in his reserves and he's already basically lowering the amount of cost in that division because of the slowing of growth. And that reserve will allow him to continue plus the state's changed all the rules on building permits anyway, you don't probably need a building permit for much in the next few years. We have a slide on debt. I put this in here because it's important. It's a required expenditure. The general funds at the top the utility or the enterprise funds are at the bottom. And I forgot should have talked about this when I was talking about the broad budget where the mayor asked me to talk about where funding comes from. So the general fund, when I get into the detail, we do have slides that show where the money comes from. The enterprise funds are like standalone businesses. So like the water sewer fund is an enterprise fund. Water and sewer rate payers are where all that revenue comes from. It is fully funded by its own rate payers. The golf course fund is paid for by the people who play golf. The stormwater fund is paid for by the stormwater fee. So those are not part of the property tax base. The general fund departments like fire, police, parks, those are the ones that are funded from property taxes. But there's some other funding sources I want to show. So the utility, the enterprise funds at the bottom, we had our financial advisors in when we were looking at the revenue and looking at the fee structures a while back. And he indicated that our debt levels are fair. They're successful. They are appropriate. We're not high in debt. We're not too low in debt. We're a little low in the utility. But that's because we're anticipating the $170 million sewer plant rebuild coming up. So we kind of pay it down just in time to go back up for the sewer plant. We may get some forgivable loans for that. That's certainly a very likely possibility. We got some on the early But we will ultimately end up paying a good bit of money out of that fund for the sewer plant upgrade. The general fund ones at the top, and the reason I put them in two different shapes, so the ones that are in a box are different. Those are the ones that are actually, we pay that out of the operating money every year. So that is a general fund impact. So those debts that we have there are a bill we have to pay, just like you have to pay your mortgage. You get your paycheck, and the first thing you do is go in there and go, okay, I've got to pay the mortgage, I've got to pay for the car. You know, those things, you take those off the top. These are debts that are obligations we have to pay off the top. The other three, the ones that are not in a box, are part of bond issues. So they're paid off taxes. They don't affect our general fund every year. So half of that, $3 million immediately every year, $3 million of that $65 million general fund is paying these debts. So the general fund, so this is the bulk of it. This is what really gets us to the millage rate. One of the things we were able to do this year we hadn't done in the past is give you more trends. I know I've talked to a couple council members who really wanted to see some trends. And thanks to the finance staff because they were able to put this all together for us. One of the things that we did here, so this is looking at the budgets, the actual budgets that we have. And blue is the people and pink is the operating supplies. And so there's some examples of it down at the bottom. And so we didn't put all those transfers. So when I was talking about how you move money from the building fund around and it doubles up what it looks like, the same thing happens when you have money, whether you're paying for your cars or something. So what we did is this is just looking at the core operating costs and the core personnel costs. And this is back to when I was showing you the three big pieces of the pie of the budget, operating capital and people. And so capital, we've got more slides to talk about. This one is showing you your operating and your people. So across a four year window, if you look at that, that pink level, this year's proposed budget is actually lower than the prior years, it's lower than anything but the first one, the departments with all the inflation going on the cost of stuff going up have managed to keep the operating budgets flat. So all the stuff it takes to do our jobs, they have not, you don't see that increase in that area. And the benefit of being really good at that. So that's another example of sharpening pencils and tightening belts. is they have done a really good job of sitting on the cost of doing business, which has allowed us to put that money and invest in our people. So the blue going up, that's showing our investment. So whether it's picking up the $15 an hour minimum wage that affected all of us that the state voted to require us to do, or the agreements we have with our bargaining units to pay competitive wages, but that discipline on behalf of the departments is allowing us to invest back into our people. So this is where money comes from for the general fund, taxes being the big one there. We've used this slide a lot. You see this every year to see how we got there. One of the things we did different this year we haven't done in the past is we took the two biggest pieces of pie, the taxes and the intergovernmental, and broke them down separately. And then so you can see underneath it what makes up all that money. So while the property taxes are the largest amount of that 65, there are still a lot of other meaningful amounts. Now, the intergovernmental revenue at the bottom doesn't change as much. You can see it's relatively flat across that trend. So it's not really allowing us a lot of increase to help with wages. But on the top, you can see the millage rate is affected, but we're getting about a million or so more a year in taxes going forward. And then the utility service tax has helped us. But there's some meaningful money. We do have the property appraiser's estimates on the property taxes. What we don't have yet are all those other numbers, which are state state revenues so we tell you this usually every July when we come to you to set max millage we don't really know exactly what those other state revenues are going to be this is the breakdown of them you can see the sales tax there's been some conversation if you do away with property tax or limit it maybe the sales tax picks it up but it's not really reliable you can see it actually went down and we didn't really have a recession that number really is economic dependent so it's not as consistent so it's hard to budget when you're trying to go okay I need to I need to have a wage contract over a couple of years. You need to know consistent revenue streams in order to address that. Same thing if you're going to buy a big fire truck or something like that. It's good to kind of know what your revenue is going to be so you can project out five and 10 years. But we thought that was helpful to go in and break down, as the mayor mentioned, where is this money coming from? What is the source? So this is the critical money that pays for police, fire, parks, road maintenance, and grounds maintenance. And then you get the smaller departments as well. So this is looking at how it's so those were the slides of money coming in. This is the slide of the money going out. This is how it gets spent. And this is by broad category. So this is showing you personnel is the largest expense here. where in the budget as a whole personnel was about a quarter as in the general fund itself it's more like two-thirds and then operating up there at the top I would say that we back again to being really good stewards of public money when it comes to the cost of stuff a 15% the operating number because like small departments that are paper oriented so the office people aren't spending a ton of money on equipment so they're operating costs for HR or for finance or community development aren't as high, but police and fire also have a bunch of stuff. So your bulletproof vests and bullets and guns and everything else that we buy, all the lifesaving apparatus that we have in the fire department, these are all things that they do a pretty good job. So that level of operating is reasonably fair. We're not overspending on the cost to do stuff. I do think the focus on the people as a service organization is critical. And this is it by department. And we showed you this one last year to the public safety departments being the largest followed by parks next. And we grouped together the smaller ones in the bottom. I think one of the things that we did this is different than what we were able to do in the past. So we were able to give you a four year trend of all the departments. So you can see how they've changed over time. The you can see by the way you put it in this form, you can see the towers and how dominant the police and fire are to the rest of the fund when it comes to general fund expenses. So You can kind of see the gradual ups and downs. I think with police, we added some new officers. And so that helped. And we added some new equipment. Fire got some new fire trucks. You'll see that's kind of what, it's not just personnel. There's other things that have added to those numbers. And then the other departments kind of have patterns that follow the overall trend. So that's the general fund breakdown. Switching over to the enterprise and the smaller funds. So this is the enterprise, the breakdown of what they all are. We talked about the utility being the largest one and then stormwater next to it. We also did a trend of that. You'd see a little more spike in these than you do in the general fund departments because as an enterprise, the capital goes with them. So when they have capital projects, it'll spike and it'll go down. One of the council members was talking to me when we put the $170 million sewer plant in there, it'll kind of spike off this page and it'll come back. The stormwater, you can see that's the growing investment in the stormwater projects following the hurricanes that's kicking that up. And then the other departments that are smaller have that same gradual increase. It's really driven by personnel investment. And then the special revenue funds are smaller. The building department is the biggest one. It's a bigger piece of pie this year because that's the money coming back to their reserves. It'll shrink again once he spends the reserves going forward. We didn't do a trend off of those special revenue funds because they're so small. So this isn't over, we did this back in June, but it's still part of the overall budget and important. So I wanted to recap a few things we talked about in June. This is in here just because it's important. Sometimes people always ask that question, why is this project not here? It's not done yet. So a lot of them are multi-year construction timelines. And so these are projects that won't be finished in the current fiscal year but have been funded. So they're not going to show up in the budget. that's in front of you, but they're still ongoing. They're not done yet. And then I also had a little space on this slide, so I did go in and put in the ongoing maintenance. I think our effort, and thanks to the council for helping with this, is We're not doing deferred maintenance anymore. We are trying to do what we can to take care of what we have. One of the, I thought one of the bigger successes we had that I didn't actually mention earlier is when we got Tyler, we got an asset management program. And so the stuff we own had been handled by people with paper spreadsheets. And so we own, we just heard Susan talk about 26 parks and tons of acres of land. They also have a ton of buildings that we talked about last time. We have air conditioners. We have generators. We have a lot of stuff. And asset management now electronically tracks everything we own, tracks its maintenance, tracks its work orders, when people do something with it, what are its warranty requirements, so that if we spend money, $2 million on an air conditioner for the police department, it's going to last, if it's supposed to be 30 years, we're going to get 30 years out of it. So that's being, again, good stewards is, if you don't do this kind of stuff, it costs you way more money down the line. Deferring maintenance means higher cost in capital in the future. So we were able getting here to sustain and maintain the money that we had for maintenance in this proposed budget. So these are when we showed this back in June, All of these had their own pages. They had a page of them with the five-year plan. We had maps of them, all that. I just put them all on one page here. So these are the projects that are still in the budget. We've already talked about the parks bond projects. I do think, and it's a reality to consider with the Amendment 3, that both Rec West and the Karasi Park expansion, while we can build them with the parks bond revenue that's fully covered through a different funding source, they will carry permanent and extensive operating costs going forward. So if council wants to slow the pace and wait on the vote for those, we can do that. But the revenue to build them is in the budget because we just can, if council says don't sign off on building them, until we find out what's going on. We can do that, but we don't have to take it out of the budget because it's in the bond funding cycle.

I'm going to back you up. Explain those options one more time.

So the fund, the parks bond revenue is different from the general fund. So we have a pot of money already allocated. You have $30 million to build these parks. You don't need the property tax change. You've already got approval by the voters, We've borrowed that money. They're paying that debt every year as part of the parks bond. So that money exists. You're not required to spend it either if you don't want to, but it's there. We have that money, but once it's built, it will take employees and electricity and maintenance costs. And so if you go ahead and build rec west and keep it, the one we have here is incredibly heavily used and very popular. And so it will be used a lot. It would be a shame to have such a really nice facility and limit the hours of operation to lower costs. So you have the ability to say you know we're moving forward in the design process but before we actually start with shovels and start construction you might want to wait and see how the vote goes because if we have to take 10 million dollars out of our budget we would probably be struggling to find a way because parks is going to need a third more staff if not a half to maintain everything that we're building when we go forward so those two projects are And the sad thing is they're probably the most important and valuable and best things we have going. The other ones aren't bad, but these two things are very, very good projects for the future of this community. And I'd hate to see them not go forward, but you have to take into account that reality is if we lose $10.5 million, it's going to be hard to operate a lot of the stuff we have. A couple of the other ones we've talked about before, if you have any questions on any of them. We did leave the air conditioner in this building because it is very inconsistent in how it works. We took the AV system out. It's working tonight. Apparently, it didn't work for the planning commission last time, but it's working tonight. And then we left the stormwater projects in there. We're not probably, every presentation I do is going to have something about stormwater, it seems like. But it's still there, the $60 million of projects, $40 million of outside funding already leveraged. We just did get notification, we weren't sure, the federal program called BRIC, which is a building resilient, I forget what all the letters stand for, but it's a stormwater resiliency type funding source. FEMA ran it and it got canceled after a bunch of people applied last year. And then a court ordered him to restart refunding it. And they were letting people who had applied come back. But we just got a notice to submit a notice of intent for new projects. So I mean, it's still not necessarily I think the federal government's top priority, but it's federal money and it's a bigger pile. So we're going to try we're going to take a shot at it between that and a state grant. So we're going to keep trying to take that 20 million we still have left and continue chipping away at it with other revenue sources. And then the next couple of slides get to stuff we're not going to do. So this is a list of the stuff that we deferred from the meeting we had back in June because there's not enough money. The request for the millage rate is really to allow us the flexibility to pay people. It's to let us put it into our employees. And so some of the construction projects got pushed back. You can see the facilities are listed there. Parks took a big hit, so they won't be as good at fixing bathrooms next year as they were last year. So those got pushed down. The golf course one is in there, and I think that was important that that came up in the meeting about the golf course. So that fee that he was mentioning, it went up and not knowing what it was for. So the golf course has a reserve fee like the YMCA and finance has fund names, the 105 and the 228. Nobody knows what that means. but finance people. But basically, like the YMCA, there's a pot of money we set aside. So if the air conditioner breaks at the Y, we have a savings account to get in there and fix it. And the same thing with the golf course. So as it was mentioned by several of you, we have one of the few public golf courses in the entire state of Florida that pays for itself, that our taxpayers aren't paying for this, that it's being paid for the people who play golf out there. But we've spent quite a bit of money out of these reserves in recent years fixing bunkers, doing the tee lines, buying them golf carts, working on the tees themselves and that fund kind of got a little low and so the project here to redo the clubhouse made us nervous that it was going to get a little too low and if something broke bad that we really needed to get out there and fix if we went ahead and did that project before that extra revenue comes in to build the reserve up we could find ourselves in a problem so we thought it was wise to wait a year on the clubhouse renovation and let that fund grow back to a safer level, and then go out there and do it so you don't have to subsidize construction costs at the golf course by the general fund. So that's what that is, and that's what that extra fee was, is that it was not growing that reserve fund at a rate to keep pace with the capital we were investing into the golf course. And this is the other one. So all those service enhancements we talked about a couple weeks back, all gone. We couldn't afford them. So the personnel, the new equipment, we also though just because of the fleet replacement issue and trying to make sure that we smooth out that fleet replacement, we went into the first three boxes over on the left side or vehicles that were due to be replaced and they got pushed out because the funds weren't there. to cover that. So as we said, those were all good ideas. There weren't any of those things that weren't going to make Port Orange a better place to live and a safer place for their community. I think a couple of them were really, really solid, positive things to do. So we've done that. We've pushed out replacing some police vehicles a little longer than I would like to do. We have a fire vehicle that got pushed out. So there's a there's a there's a hit here. But what we did here was was prioritized the funding going into the personnel versus the stuff in this budget. I just summarized them here so you can see the total amount. So again, back to that theme of we've been sharpening pencils and tighten belts for a while. That's seven and a half million dollars of stuff that we talked about in June is not here now. Moving on to the next section on Amendment 3, we just thought it would be it would not be prudent to act like this doesn't exist. It's a real thing whether or not it passes, but the polls are still showing it in a potential that it does. And if it does, it has a pretty big impact. I think every city has one of these things. If you go on the Internet or go watch any news program or anything, every city has some kind of graphic that shows how it hurts. If you do it in our case, it's in the two years out, it's about ten and a half million, which is about a third of our general fund or one sixth of the total general fund, a third of the tax revenue. You can see the departments that it affects over there. Ten and a half million out of that group is it's a pretty big hit. It hurts a lot to lose that. I was trying to put a scale to it so that it makes sense to people because it's really hard. Sometimes you see these things that are put out there and I don't think regular people, people just don't understand what's going on. And so we were trying to find a way just to talk about it in normal terms. And one of the things I did is I knew it was a big hit. So I went back, I was, I was working for the city at the time when we had the recession in 08. And what I thought was, I know we did a lot of cutting of stuff back in 08. So I went back and wanted to know exactly how much did that budget drop in 2008? And so I went back and we dug through budgets. And the reason I show those several years is the 2006 we were still normal, like we thought everything was going to be great. Those early 2000s were booming, the economy was great. You could buy a million dollar house with 50 bucks down. You know, we really thought things were going good back then. And So that was probably the peak of our budget. Then I went and started looking as the recession hit, how did the expenditures that we had drop? And the lowest we got from the high to the low was about an $8 million reduction in expenditures during that period of time between 6 and 11. So we kind of went from 6 to 10 to 8. And we kept going down. And then we came back up. And as we came back up, so it was a relatively short duration. It was a big trough, but it was a short duration. And we've come back up. that $8 million, that's the biggest difference we had from spending in one year to spending in the low year in the 100 year worst recession in the world history in about in about a century. This one is more than that. And it doesn't have the ending where it would come back up like there's not going to suddenly be an end to the recession. If you lose 10 and a half million, you lose 10 and a half million. You got a couple choices you can change revenue sources, or you can reduce expenses. We did a lot of reducing expenses the first time around, put a couple things in there on what the average savings is, I think statewide, some of those numbers were developed when there were still schools that were going to come out of the taxes as well. So ours, this is the savings. What we thought was interesting is if you put a $250,000 a year homestead exemption on our homestead properties, 71% of the people with a homestead won't be paying you any property taxes at all. And almost half of all the properties in the city won't be paying you any property taxes. And I get the term is not a very popular term, but as we've talked about, our city thrives and lives off of being safe, having reliable infrastructure, and having a great quality of life. And those have got to get paid for by something if we want to keep doing them. And I think just based on the Parks Bond vote, the people of Port Orange like what they have. It seems to me that this is a community that appreciates the quality of life and the safety that we provide. So I'm not sure that having half the people paying nothing for what Port Orange really provides is a sustainable future. I put this in here. This is what businesses have done when they lose revenue. You cheapen the products in here. You sell the same thing at the same price, but you're using a lot cheaper product. Sell the pizza, smaller pizza, but at the same price. Or you take away things. So like your ticket used to allow you first come, first serve an aisle seat or an exit window seat and a luggage. Now you've got to pay extra for them. So that's what's going on out there. We're not the only ones that deal with this. If you want to get your hair cut or buy shampoo, buy eggs, fill your car with gas, don't cost you more money. And the people are trying to figure out ways to address it. Alternative cuts are a thing. So we can do that. And I don't want people to think we didn't, that's not an alternate if that's where where we want to go. But there's also alternative revenue sources that you can you can come up with. So the top three here, the fire assessment fee, the pilot franchise fee, all the things that we can do, They're not always popular because it's the same thing as a tax. You're charging people for the cost of services. The fire assessment fee we do not have. I think more than half of every community in Volusia County is in some way or form going down the process of studying and analyzing these at mixed results. So it didn't do well in Deltona last night. There was some pretty good heat at the New Smyrna conversation a while back. I can't say that, they exist in other parts of the state, some people use them. It's an assessment, so it's structured by a cost per structure by the type of structure based on the value that's provided by fire services. And if council gets there, we actually have somebody trained and qualified in fire service fees to bring in front of you to talk to you about exactly what you would have to do and how it would be structured. So I think that's important. The payment lower taxes, so that would be our utility paying us a little bit more. The franchise fee is for Waste Pro and Solid Waste. What generally happens is those costs get passed on to the customers in fees. But when we looked at this, so we do have small amounts of two of them. You could generate, and I'm not being an attorney, but legally, so it was my version of it, not the attorney version of legally. But you can do this and generate the 10 and a half million that we would, you could probably between the three of them cover what's lost under amendment three. You may not want to, you may want to go partially or not, but at least there's an option to generate revenue to allow us to continue the level of service. You just switched the funding source. You've heard that conversation. We're not at the point of having to make that decision yet. Even if the vote is approved in November, it doesn't affect us until the 28 cycle. You don't want to wait till the end. We want to be way ahead of it and be prepared. But I think that having this conversation now at least gets the conversation out in the public. What level of additional fees do we want to do versus what level of reductions would we want to do? So that's there and being discussed with plenty of time to make a decision. So that thanks us to the maximum millage rate. And before we actually go to the item where you have to read and do something, I'll go through the background before we ask you to do it. So we use this slide every year. It shows how we compare to the other cities. Florida is already one of the cheaper states when it comes to property taxes. So it's already relatively cheap to live in Florida. And you can look at this and say it's relatively cheap to live in Port Orange and Volusia County. But I don't think I have ever heard a person once say, Port Orange, it's cheap to live here. We don't brand ourselves with that. We don't push that. what I always hear is Fort Orange is high quality, high quality of life, great events, great facilities, attractive city, a safe city, a city with reliable infrastructure. And when I was trying to figure out a way to talk about how that what that meant, I think to us and the services we provide is, again, we're not a product producer, we're not we're not building stuff, but we do provide services. So I was using a hotel as an example. And Motel 6 and Marriott. So Motel 6, you can get a room at Motel 6 for $100 a night, but you're going to get a whole lot different level of service and quality than you do if you go to Marriott. You may pay $200 in a Marriott. So I know we have done a really good job of keeping our costs low, but it's really hard to produce a value at a low cost. And that's thanks to the department head and the people over here that they have come back and shown you here's how we meticulously add chemicals to lower the cost of production of it, how we have an in-house lab to lower the cost, how we have switched out our breathing apparatus or our CPR units so everybody's trained on the same thing, how we went to electronic building permits so that we don't have to have as many people to process them. We can get them done quicker. We're now going to electronic procurement to get things done cheaper. So we are consistently trying to find ways to create a good value, but it is becoming more and more challenging to provide that value Motel six costing going to get you the same thing. So, so while that's a, it's a valid thing, the people below us, the Barry's got two giant power plants that pay tremendous amount of taxes to them. And the other cities below us are, or have major beachfront properties that are taxed pretty heavily as well. So we do really well at providing a tremendous value to our community. Again, I hear consistently how proud people are to live in the city. I think our people do a great job of being stewards of the tax dollars that we do get, and we would like to continue that through the quality that we can provide. This slide's got a bunch of numbers on it, so I'll try to explain some of them and answer questions if you have them, but we wanted to be straight. This is our history of millage and rollback. But I think when you talk about how much, what is the millage and what's the percent over rollback, I don't know that a lot of people use that term. So I put this third line down at the bottom, which is actual dollars, because I think people understand actual dollars. So what we've really done over the last five years is added about $1.7 million a year to the budget in the general fund to cover the cost of stuff costing more money. And as you look across that over time, there's a couple that are higher, a couple that are lower. But on average across the five years prior to this one, it's a little over 1.7. This year's budget is balanced at a 1.67 increase over that. So it's lower than the average over the course of the last five years. And I also went in and did an analysis because of that criticism to the government that you're taking people's rising property values and taxing them heavily on it. And that 1.7 million looking at the 62 or 60 million or so general fund is less than 3% of the general fund. So the inflation rates are in that three and above. So we've been, well, we have increased it. It has cost more money. We have definitely done that. We had a prior council member who used to always pick on me during budget season, go, you're just going to come ask for $2 million every year, aren't you? And so I would tell him, I was like, yes, sir, because that stuff costs more money and we're investing it back in our people. So So that is that is where we're at. We had a fairly small amount of new revenue. And I tried to summarize this here before we go to our traditional chart of millage to show you and this one I need glasses because I can't read it without them. The four and a half million or so increase in the in the general fund. This is how it's broken down at the very bottom, you see that 678. So if the current millage rate With the no new construction, very little new construction, and the lowering loss of money from property values, we get about $700,000 new dollars. Our obligations to our personnel cost 2.1, and we're still in active right now negotiations with the police department. So that's an estimate based on what we have. We haven't reached a conclusion there. So we don't have enough in the new money to pay payroll. The other stuff, fleet transition, capital projects, You could use the fund balance to cover those because they're one-time cost, but if we don't have a little bit extra revenue coming in from the millage rate, the cost of the people and the cost of the insurance increase are going to be ongoing into the future. They're not going to go down. So we need that extra revenue in order to pay the people. And so that's what we've done with the budget that's in front of you is done the best we can to sustain maintenance, sustain key capital projects in the core areas, and allow us by tightening the belts when it comes to operating costs, to to allow that flexibility to put that back into our payroll as we go forward. And that's the end of the presentation. Before we go, I think we have to actually have you read when we go to the other item, read it. One note of note this year, this is new to us this year, the legislature, one of the things that went into effect immediately is in order to set a max millage above rollback, it requires a supermajority, which is two thirds for us, or two-thirds majority, I guess is the correct term, but two-thirds for us masks out to four of five, and it is four of five of the total membership, so with Councilman Foley not here, we have to have a unanimous vote. All four of you have to pick a number, or we won't. If we don't end up deciding on it, the state will put us at rollback. So tonight or next week, we need a 4-0 vote on whatever you're comfortable with. We think that we have shown through the public that there's enough value to go to that 5-1-5, but Obviously, I need to hear what you think and what other things we should do from here. So with that, I can turn it over to the next item to allow you to start on the maximality discussion.

Before we do that, any questions for the city manager on the budget presentation? Yeah, I do. Okay, sorry.

No, I'm good on questions.

You had mentioned that the money you need is like $2.1 million. Is that correct?

That's just the requirement for personnel costs that exceed. That's how much this year is higher than last year. 2.1 million in personnel costs. We have 700,000 new dollars, we have 2.1 million in obligation to our people. All right, so and again, that's with an unfinished police negotiation.

So the reason why the 5.15 gives you the 1.6 million and then we have the 700 carryover? Correct.

That'll cover the additional personnel cost and the insurance.

So you're like taking us right to the limit with 5.15.

I think it's to a fair number that provides the public with a good range of services. That covers the necessary cost that we have in the budget right now.

Anything else, Ron?

Other than I'd just like to take a five-minute break before we get started.

All right, let's finish up this item then. Lance?

No, I don't have anything for Wayne right now. Okay. Not at this time.

And the only comment I would have is on your slide for... 40 i guess on the adopted draft millage rollback rate history one of the things that the previous council tried to do after 2019 when the um the um the vote was passed to increase minimum minimum wage to 15 an hour over the course of time was to be ahead of that to get that done sooner and we were able to do that so when you see some of those percent numbers percent of a rollback a lot of that was again like the city manager has pointed out the investment in personnel to get that stuff done so all right anything else wayne you want to ask no sir all right we will uh at the request of councilman geppert we'll take a five minute pause and come right back for item 18. i'm going to time you We're back for item number 18, setting the maximum operating millage rate for fiscal year 2026-27. Back to Mr. City Manager.

So we've provided the chart, which we'll get back up here on the screen, similar to what we've done in the past, that just as a range, the existing millage in the lighter orange, the draft that we've got it balanced out at the dark, rollbacks down at the bottom, several columns. One of them shows how much additional revenue it generates. One of them shows off of what was a typical house 185. I remember a couple years back, we went through a very detailed explanation of how we got to that number on an average house because it's the value that gets taxed on not what you sell it for. Right. And it's actually a little lower now because of the reductions, but we went ahead and left the higher number in there. So you can see what it costs per year and what it costs per month for that average house. And with that council usually does you let us know what you'd like us to do if there's any other information you'd like us to provide. Otherwise, I do think we would prefer to get the 5.15. That would help us meet the requirements that we have in the current budget.

Okay. Just a reminder, for council, the objective tonight is to simply set a max knowledge for the staff as they bring a final budget to us later in the fiscal year. Wayne, you had noted earlier that we are still waiting on some funding numbers from other revenue sources. Can you just expand on that, what we're waiting on?

That is correct. I don't know if I can find what slide it was, but it's way back there. people with better memories better memories this monitor right here i know we took the av stuff out of the budget i'm okay with it this thing is horrible looking that's why i try to fire it up on this computer because i can't see anything on this 18. okay so these are these are the breakdowns of the the other funds so ad valorem we already have because we got that from the property prices the other ones in this list are the ones we do not have from the state at this point

which is going to be your utility service tax, insurance premium tax, local business tax. Okay.

And the sales tax and revenue below. So you got about 8 million below and about 10 million on the top.

So you got about 18 million. We are estimating at this point. All right. And when do we project getting those final numbers?

usually about there's a requirement for somewhere in August but they some of them that last year we had almost all of them by the end of July so it's there is a date certain for when they have to have them all sometime in August but okay so just for just for council just to remind you guys of that there are additional funding sources that we do not have those final numbers and so when we tried to be conservative so that we weren't cutting ourselves short but if they go up we'd We have tried to estimate it so that you wouldn't be, we wouldn't affect the max millage. You wouldn't have to go higher, but you can't really.

All right, so the ask from the city manager tonight is a max millage for them to continue the budget process, that we set that at 5.1500 in the bills. So we'll start with that as the discussion. Lance?

Again, this is, This is a tough one, man. This is a tough topic. It's a tough subject. And there's a lot of unknown coming in November. And that's what has me concerned here. And as we move forward, I almost feel like this is just like it's going to be the last budget that we do. It's probably going to be, you know, a full budget if this November thing goes on. Because then there's just something totally different that's going to have to happen if this goes. And I'm not going to lie. I'm really worried about it. Um, but with that being said, um, I, I just feel like everything goes up around us every single thing, every single day on everybody. And I'm at a point where I just, I don't want to raise the millage from where we sit right now. That's just my position. Um, I just, I, I would rather take a little money out of fund balance and make it work this time. or however it goes, and then come November, let's see what happens. I mean, because I think there's going to be different ways of going to have to fund fire and police. I don't know if it's a public safety fee or whatever we're going to call it. I don't know because, you know, we're not going to be able to sustain losing $10 million a year after the second year and every year beyond. So I'm not going to lie. I'm really worried about it. But with that... um i mean we just raised the water rates we just raised you know we raised everything and i just feel like raising the millage at this time is just not good that's just my opinion at this moment sean

Well, this is the absolute most important thing we do as a council and that's provide provide the funding to our citizens. It's their money and it's their city and we have to be good stewards of that money and we don't run the departments. We hire someone to do it, and he does it, and his staff has shown us over the years since I've been here, and actually since I've been following politics in Port Orange, I'm going to call it that, but how this city's been run over the last 20 years. And I have always felt that. the leaders and whether it be the city manager i've always tried to do their best to do what's right for the people that own this city because they own it they pay the taxes and we hire someone to manage it and he's coming to us with the request and and i just by seeing what our departments do with the money they get and the cost savings that they always are out there looking to provide it's never going to be enough because of the cost of things that are going up insurance on the vehicles we own and the buildings we own the liability the insurance everything is going up always and we have Our biggest budget is our personnel that protect this city and why people move here. And we as a team need to give the general managers, the owners or the people, our coach what he needs to manage this city and keep the services there that the people expect. They, in the past, have voted for a new police station, which they got, that they're willing to pay for over a period of time. A lot of those people that approved that aren't even alive or don't live here anymore, but they knew then that it needed to be done so that people can have those services here today for the increased population that's happened since 2004, or at least back to 96 when Port Orange really started growing like crazy. they voted for a parked bond. So they have faith in our leaders. And when I say leaders, the leaders of our departments and the leaders of them, our city manager. And yeah, we do have to face something we have no control over. I'm very disappointed that We're throwing a blanket over the whole state when all of our municipalities are different. None of them are the same, but we want to throw a blanket over every one of them. And we're going to have to live with that on a decision someone from Dade County is going to make for us to run our city here. But there's no control over that, and it hasn't happened yet, and I'm sure we'll deal with that when it happens. There's going to be ways to fund the services, whether it be through fees or additional millage rate, it's going to be unfortunate for non-homesteaded properties commercial properties rental properties i think the less fortunate are going to be hit the hardest if this gets approved but back to this budget we have a city manager we've hired has done a fantastic job he's done amazing things for everything that's been put in front of him we need to give him the tools and what's here tonight what do people think And he's asking for 5.150, and I'm willing to give it to him. And I asked him, are you going right to the limit? He's pretty much, yeah, we're going right there. We're cutting it right to where we're going to be able to provide the funding for the services that the people expect, based on his analysis, after meeting with all those department heads that we talk so highly about every time we're here. So let's give him the tool he needs. And I think that's the right thing to do. I mean, look where we're at compared to the other cities in this county. We're the fourth lowest taxed city. We're fifth. So we're in a good spot. We're not asking too much. I'm looking at it. The average homeowner is going to pay $4.50 more a month. for to live here. So it's not asking much.

That's all I have.

Tracy.

So the question is, it's always brought up to me is millage rates and what it actually comes out to be, how that affects property taxes. But it's also hearing where we are today as barely $700,000 came into our property tax as far as new taxables coming to us. I asked Wayne and the staff earlier yesterday to just give me some figures to show where that is, and everybody's talking about growth, growth, growth. And 10 years ago, yeah, there was a growth boom inside Port Orange of approximately 12% for single family homes. Five years ago, that 12% turned into 5%. This past year, it's 0.3 of a percent. 71 homes. So when we look at this, we are coming to a age of where we are truly built out. This is going to be an ongoing issue. I think everybody needs to understand that as we go forward. That tax base in November affects us drastically also. So we have two fronts that we're going to have to be tackling. I have to give staff credit for the last couple of years. We've had over the last four years on slide 16, you guys can look at this. It's about a $77,000 a year increase in base wages. But from last year to this year was a $500,000 decrease is what we're looking at for operating expenses. Then you get to slide 32, how do we trim this down and everybody's always talking about governments being fat and keep asking, asking, asking. Well, out in Port Orange, and I'll probably get blasted for saying this one, but they just deferred $7.6 million out of the budget. Things that the departments need to go and run, and they're doing that purposely because of what November may hold. That's where this is all leading to. So our budget tonight of what they are asking for is approximately a 6% or 5.15 in millage, equals 6%, which is 1.6 million additional revenue to the general fund. Average general fund over the last five years, it was on slide 40 pointed out, was 1.7 million. it's less than what the five-year average is what we're asking and that's 95 if i'm wrong correct me wayne is to paying our staff taking care of our people that have been taking care of us i i echo with sean we have a phenomenal town that our staff has been taking care of us. We have contractual obligations that are already set in place with two of the entities with police being done right now. The 5.15. It's a hard thing to swallow. I'm not denying that, but it is what takes care of our employees. That's where I'm at. Anything else? That's it?

All right, good. One of the things I think that is always important when we get to this part of the fiscal year is that all you're doing tonight is setting a max, okay? You're just telling the staff and you're telling the taxpayers we're obligated to set a max millage to say no matter what happens in september it will definitely not be higher than this so that's all this is about this doesn't finalize a budget doesn't doesn't factor in all of the other revenue numbers that we still don't have doesn't factor in other opportunities for uh revenue generations and further discussion about what may or may not come out of amendment three so i would just encourage you guys to keep that in mind that that's what this is about tonight so i appreciate the work that the staff goes into that just a couple of just i guess maybe just general comments um you know i i've looked at this and talked about it almost daily now with residents and business owners and people that are interested in it And people are always saying, it's almost just becoming part of casual conversation. Nothing stays the same. Prices always go up. Whether that's gas, whether that's groceries, whether that's your electric bill, your spectrum, cable, internet, buying a pair of shoes, whatever those things are, prices always go up. Municipal and county government services are not immune from those impacts. In fact, we feel them exactly the same as every business and every residence. And our challenge is to try to identify what level of service is each one of the investors in our city willing to pay for. One of the things that's gonna be very unique about this vote in November is we're gonna find out exactly what they're willing to pay for. Because we will be able to see, maybe not what each individual voter votes, but we will be able to see the percentages by precincts in our own city to see what our residents have to say and how they feel about that. I would agree with some of the comments that have been echoed up here that the residents in Port Orange do expect a quality city. They also want you to get the biggest bang for the buck. They want you to stretch the dollar to get that. It is not an endless supply of revenue. We're not the federal government. We cannot print funding. I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said I wasn't concerned about Amendment 3. But in the same aspect, I think our system for generating revenue to provide services is broken. But what they brought forth out of Tallahassee, the fact that it wasn't even vetted city by city, that there was no exercise to say, okay, we're gonna put this on the ballot, but we're not gonna see what the impacts are now. I just think that was the wrong way to do that. I think there were opportunities to do that and that should have been done. And so now we're making decisions tonight and I get we're talking about one year budget. The reality of it is, folks, the city doesn't stop. It keeps going no matter what, right? Whatever the outcome of that vote will be, we will have to adapt and adjust to it. And we will have to listen to what the residents of Port Orange, what they want, and then we'll have to figure it out. I am very concerned about the amount of misinformation that's out there. There seemed like there was this massive hype for something that sounds as too good to be true. And somehow or another the information that you see circulating out there is horribly wrong in a lot of aspects. I keep getting people telling me time and time again, well at least they protected public safety. No, they didn't. That is not part of the bill that will be on the ballot in November. People will say, well the state has a relief fund that they're going to support cities who need that. No, they didn't. That is not part of the bill that ended up being approved. Those were two main things that Governor DeSantis wanted in his initial thing. And if you're following the media, you've seen the governor has even walked back and away from what this bill actually is. So I hope people will thoroughly educate themselves. Listen, the summary of the bill is less than two full pages. It does not take much to read it. It does not take much to reach out to your local elected officials to understand impacts and the what-ifs. We're happy to have those conversations. Vote for it, don't vote for it. That's up to each individual person. But we can certainly have those conversations. And I think a lot of the information the city manager provided tonight helps with people to understand. This is why certain revenue over here can't be spent on this. And there's a lot of moving parts to a budget for municipal government our size. And as we have seen in past studies, overall quality of life, is incredibly important time and time again, it comes back as one of the highest rated things from our residents. So it's easy to say, well, you just get rid of parks and rec or you just get rid of this. That's not why you live in Port Orange. That's not why you decided to buy a home or a business or, or put your kids in schools in our area and all those different things. So it is a big, big picture. Um, that being said, you know, I I'm, I'm okay with starting with this max millage number, giving our staff time. to bring in the additional revenue figures as they come available to us, continue to work on the budget, continue to have these discussions. And to some degree, it'll be a wait and see. I appreciate the city staff and the city manager already looking at certain things and having the mindset to say, let's hold off on that. Because I will tell you guys, for those of you that are up here, And I'll be up here for two more budget cycles after this one. The worst thing in the world is having to take things away from our residents and our city staff. and that can happen i've seen it i've been through that and it's horrible so i think the mindset of let's continue to invest in our people let's not create a bunch of other things that could be highly at risk that we have to now you know go through that process in a very short amount of time so i think that that's a good thing so all that being said i will entertain a motion in a second to put on the floor and then we'll go to the public

Mr. Mayor, I make a motion that we set the max millage at 5.0000. Do we have a second?

Going once, going twice. All right, we don't have a second. I'll need another motion to put on the floor.

I make a motion that we go to 5.150. I'll second it. 1.5, 5.1500. I'll second that.

I have a motion and a second to set the max millage at a rate of 5.1500. Council, any other discussion on this before we go to the public? Anybody from the public wish to speak to it? I'm going to call this guy up first because if he don't stop swaying, I'm going to be nervous. Come on up, Warren. Warren Carman, please.

How are you?

Good, buddy. Good to see you. Good.

Warren Carman. I work at the PD. I'm going to kind of concentrate my comments towards Councilman Green. I think everybody else here, by given what they've said tonight, is good at the 5.15 for a maximum. I understand your trepidation in raising rates. But I think it's really important that we talk about what the city manager said, which is this is nearly 100% your personnel. So if you're not going to go with the 515, then we've got to talk about cutting wages or cutting people or freezing positions. That's the only thing left. They've taken everything else over almost $8 million out of the budget. were a lot of i had words ready for tonight and then i threw them out because there's so much more uh the mayor was talking about a 72 increase in the minimum wage right and inflation at 30 plus percent over the last few years yet city staff has been able to keep your controllables at that same level That means we're not buying what we were. So your guys are already doing more with less, right? They've kept, it's roughly 10 million, I think, if I go back to that slide. That same slide, unfortunately, shows wages and it looks like they're huge, right? But if you actually look at the numbers year over year, last year was 5% with a 30 plus percent inflation rate. And your wages for your people went up 5% overall citywide. I think the rest of the guys are kind of on board with the 515 as a max mill. Nobody's saying that's where you're going to end up, but you've got to give us a chance to get there and let city staff work on it. We are going to get some numbers in in early August, including what's most important for us on the pension board is the same premium tax revenues, right? So we're going to get some numbers in before you need to set the final millage rate. So give staff a chance, give your people a chance at the 515 to get where we need to be. And if we can come down, then I don't think anybody would hold it against anybody on the council, right? But if you kill it now, we're gonna have issues. You're not gonna be able to pay your people and you're gonna end up either cutting jobs or freezing positions or cutting pay, right? When I started here 20 years ago, There was fear about hiring me because I lived in Palm Coast at the time. Everybody at the PD lived in Port Orange. I can tell you that none of the guys left in the back, I'm sorry, I'm fibbing, one of the guys left in the back still lived in the city of Port Orange. We just can't afford it. So that's what's happened to our guys over the last 20 years, right? Don't take it out on them some more. Thank you.

I just want to go on record. I didn't have a fear about you moving to Palm Coast. Chris Rogers.

Welcome, Mayor. Good evening, Mayor, members of the City Council. Councilmember Green, I'm going to speak to you as well. You're my district seat. My name is Christopher Rogers, and I'm a resident here in the city of Port Orange and have been for over 30 years. Tonight, I'm standing before you wearing three distinct hats. First, as a citizen who chooses to live and raise a family in this community. Second, as the vice president representing the IUP union membership. And third, as a Port Orange police supervisor who has taken an oath to protect this city. I am here tonight to voice my strong support for the City Manager's proposal to set max operating millage rate. As a resident and taxpayer, I look at this proposal and I see genuine fiscal responsibility. The City Manager's budget doesn't use growth as an excuse to hike the tax rate on our citizens. Instead, it strikes the exact right balance. It holds the line for the taxpayers while capturing the necessary revenue from our city's natural growth to invest back in our infrastructure and public services. As the mayor stated himself last year, it really does come down to trying to work to a budget together to maintain a quality of life the residents and the business owners in the city of Port Orange have come to expect and want to maintain. I believe this is a minor move on us as citizens to achieve that expected maintenance and to take care of the city that we love. And that brings me to my perspective as a law enforcement officer. I see firsthand every day what those tax dollars actually buy. Public safety isn't passive and it isn't free. As Port Orange continues to grow, the demand on our department grows right along with it. The revenue generated by this budget framework is being generated or directed exactly where it matters most, into the personnel and the essential services. To the men and women on ship, this funding ensures the personnel, equipment and benefits we need to do our jobs in an evolving world of law enforcement. At the time when communities across the nation are struggling to keep pace with public safety needs, Port Orange is making a proactive choice to keep our streets secure. Thank you. Every year we have officers faced with horrific accidents and critical incidents that create lifelong scars on them and even their families. My members carry these burdens and their self of service to our citizens and only ask that we ensure our families are cared for when their service comes to an end. Their medical stipend upon retirement is currently only $200 a month, which would not even cover half of the officer's medical insurance at retirement, let alone any medical expenses or medications due to ailments from this career. Setting the max operating millage of the city manager's recommendation tonight locks in a reasonable ceiling. It gives our city the administrative framework it needs to protect its citizens and maintain the city we care for without overburdening them. I urge the council to vote in favor of the city manager's recommendation. Let's keep Port Orange safe, let's keep it financially stable, and let's give our departments the resources required to maintain and protect the community we love. Thanks, Chris. Thank you all.

Anybody else want to speak to item 18? How's your chance? Anybody else? All right, back to council. Council comments. We'll start on this end. I'm good. Tracy, no comments. Sean?

here again one year later it's my second budget season and once again one of the most important things that we've got to do is to set this millage rate and then approve a budget and once again i don't have one citizen in front of me telling me to reduce taxes not one again we got to do what's right and i'm not wanting to to raise taxes but we've got to run a city and we've got to give him the tools and tonight we're just setting the maximum millage rate we can work on and he can work on it maybe he comes back to us maybe we get revenues from the you know that the funds coming in maybe the citizens see what it could be and they fill the room and say you're crazy but not one person plants. And, and I have talked to so many people and I've welcomed them to come and talk to us and tell me what's your biggest concern. And it's never related to what they pay to live in the city. It's when can we get this fixed? When can I get the lights west of Taylor road fixed? We don't have the money. When can we get that sidewalk fixed? It's on a timeframe. We never have the resources. No one ever complains about us asking too much of them. So there's four of us here tonight. I'm going to ask you to come along with us just to set the maximum millage rate so then our citizens can know what it's going to cost to them and then our staff can do the best they can to maybe work within it to be a little lower.

Please.

No, I appreciate that. And again, I'm not choosing out any one department. I'm not choosing any one thing. All I'm saying is we just keep raising and raising and raising. Everybody feels the pinch. And I'm not picking on any one department. I'm not picking on anything. We do a great job at it. I'm not saying we don't need this. There is absolutely a need. It's just, you know, we just keep Raising and raising and raising and I get it so I'm gonna be on board tonight with setting the max tonight and obviously we've got a little bit of time to massage and see what we can do and get the rest of the numbers and I'm not I'm not trying to be the naysayer here I'm just you know I look at the people on fixed incomes in our community over and over and those are the people who I know I'm from old Port Port Orange and I know a lot of people from poor Port Orange still to this day that the water rate five bucks makes a difference this makes a difference everything makes a difference that's all I'm getting at so I'm not saying that I'm not on board about any one department I'd love to have it all I just want to make sure that you know we're not again pricing ourselves out but I'm on board tonight we're setting this max and then obviously we'll come back to when we we set the budget

I echo a lot of those same concerns, to be quite honest with you, I you know, the profit, the challenge and the frustration that we have is there are so many variables that are so far outside of our ability to control, you know, whether you voted for it, or you didn't vote for the, the increase in minimum wage in 2019. From now 72%, look it up, what it is. So when you go, And by the way, ironically, the city manager has a picture of a pizza budget. But you go and you go to a restaurant and you buy a large pizza. If you think you are paying anywhere close to that price that you paid in 2019, Tell me where that's at because that is not what's happening because the cook now has to make more, the busboy makes more, the waitress makes more, everybody down the line, the person that makes the dough, delivers the dough, so forth and so forth and so on. And so this idea that you're going to pass these types of voter initiatives and it's fine. but but there's going to be a story that comes after that and right and and that's what i think we've seen by and large over the last six years is you're seeing this this change and everything costs more you know and then you add on that the top inflation um you add on health care costs and insurance costs which In my mind, it should have been the two things that state legislature, the Senate, and Governor Falk the hardest at was getting that under control. But nonetheless, I digress. But a lot of those things are so far outside of our control. And so what comes back to us is, again, you find yourself, what can we do without? What can we try to find better efficiencies? And I do applaud, we probably don't talk about them enough, but I do applaud the city staff that has found these efficiencies over the years. They have been very meaningful in a lot of ways. We also are a unique city in such that here in East Volusia County, we don't have any property, any oceanfront. We have very little waterfront. We have very little really quote unquote high dollar property to have that tax base like Ormond, New Smyrna and other places where they have a large percentage of that. And then additional, we don't have a lot of commercial and industrial. So, We are predominantly a bedroom community. I think we're close to homestead exemptions, close to 70%. Yeah, and the state average was like 40. Yeah, so we so far, and that was the problem that I have with Amendment 3, and I'm going to get off that horse because that's not what this is about tonight. But the problem with that is that conceptually, Amendment 3 is going to do and be voted on by the entire state hurts cities like ours that are bedroom communities that have a desire for high quality of life and a certain standard of living. It hurts us bad because so many of us have homestead exemptions in our city. So it's disproportionate. But we'll see what happens. But in any regard, I'm good as well with us starting at this. I will say that, and this is just a feel, that I strongly am going to encourage the city manager and the city staff and everybody in this city to work towards reducing this 5.15 because I think the more we can reduce that, the greater chance we have of our residents saying we don't need Amendment 3 because our city maintains a tight budget and they look after our dollars, they spend them wisely and things like that. So we'll see. That's just my thought. So I think we need to continue to work on that. moving forward. I think we're going to come to you, Amanda. My turn. How about you call the roll on the motion in a second to set the max millage at 5.1500. Councilman Gufford?

Yes. Councilman Green? Yes. Vice Mayor Groves? Yes. Mayor Stiltman?

Yes. 4-0.

Before you move on, I need to announce the public hearing dates for the budget, if that's okay.

Do you want me to announce them? You can if you want, or I will, whatever. Okay. I'll do it. I think I got this. It's written down here for me. How much can I mess this up, right? So per Florida State statute section 200.065, the city council must hold two public hearings as part of the truth and millage known as trim process. staff recommends the public hearing dates and times to be held in the city council chambers at city hall at 1000 city center circle port orange florida as follows tentative hearing will be wednesday september the 16th at 5 30 p.m note the unusual day wednesday and time at 5 30. and the final hearing on monday september the 28th at 5 30 p.m how'd i do that's correct we're good with that yes sir mr city attorney

you with that work good with that okay moving on council committee reports item 19 first step shelter yes i do want to say that first step shelter has a new executive director that will start in early august her name is susan clark and she's got a great background in homeless shelters those services we're very excited to have her she'll be coming to us in the near future to introduce herself so we're excited about that you heard about the chamber today they've got a lot going on they their memberships growing they've got their one of their biggest fundraisers is their golf tournament coming up in August so Everything's going really good. I went to their new member reception today. They had eight new members speaking. The room was full of supporting members. The Chamber's doing really good and doing a lot for our community and businesses, providing good services for them.

Excellent. Tell us about the Port Warren South Daytona Chamber, which I know they spoke tonight. Anything you wanted to add to that? You don't have to.

No, that's what I just did.

There you go. Yeah. I'm just kind of trying to go in. That's okay. Art House.

Art House has had just a fantastic summer. All the classes and events have been full, and I think during 4th of July, the wings mural that they did on the city hall was a big hit. The angel wings that were up there for red, white, and blue. Just fantastic job. For those that were wondering, they literally did that in less than four hours. They had that painted enough for everybody for 4th of July. So our house is doing good.

I went to look out my office window, which I rarely do, and there was a set of wings painted on my office window. So I felt good about that. Lance, tell us about the police pension.

To be honest with you, Mr. Mayor, that meeting was so long ago that none of the numbers matter anymore. And we got another meeting coming up in a couple of weeks. And, yeah, so there you go. That's the report.