City Council - Regular Meeting

Make sure I am. All right, I'm going to open up our workshop. Um, for this evening, we have a budget amendment workshop. And so for here this evening, we'll have Mr. Bob Ford as our guide. Welcome, Mr. Ford.

Good evening. Thank you. Bob Ford, uh, chief financial officer. So, tonight we'll spend some time talking about the first fiscal uh, year 2026 amended budget. Um, and within that context, uh, Jake Jones and I will be tag teaming, uh, and giving you a perspective both on the operating and capital side of the of the city. So, to start with, um, I'm going to walk you through the highlights. Specifically, this proposed amended budget will provide a consolidated operating surplus of $6.9 million. Um the capital budget consolidated uh budget surplus which is really a deficit in this case is 1.4 million. Uh specifically we're showing uses of $43.9 million i.e. capex of 43.9 million and sources of cash of 15.4 SRF advances of an additional 21.1 million sales tax revenue of 2.7 million cyst of 1.8 8 and some other sources of 1.5. So if you add up all those sources and compare it to the uses, you'll show a gap of 1.4 million. But that 1.4 million is then offset against the operating surplus of 6.9 yielding a consolidated net surplus for the city for 26 of $5.5 million. So if you'll move on to u uh to we're going to talk about uh a number of things tonight. One is talk a little bit about cash. We'll talk about debt um as well as operating earnings as well as capital budget. Um but just to give you a perspective on a consolidated basis. We'll be we began the year with cash of 31.9 million actually $32 million round numbers. Um, and so what we're going to

show you tonight are operating earnings of about five million, an extraordinary items of an additional $1.9 million. Um, which brings us to our operating surplus that I talked to you about earlier of 6.9. So if you start with 32 31.9 million in cash, you add the operating surplus, that gets you to a point of cash before capex of 38.9 million. At that point, we're going to apply our capital expenditures against our cash um and operating surplus, and that'll get get bring us to a a a deficit of 5.1 million on a consolidated basis. But remember, we have three other sources of cash to fund our capital uh our capital budget. one SRF advances will have fund the remaining part of the wastewater treatment plant budget. Uh city sales taxes that are restricted specifically to capital that's a quarter cent for parks at the and an eighth for fire and um also for the CIST that totals to 2.7 million in revenue and additional sources of an additional 3.3. So, going back to my number above, the number right before below capex, uh, where I said we had a $5.1 million deficit at that point, add up our additional three sources. That brings us to an ending cash balance on a consolidated basis of $22 million for 2026. On the debt side, we're going to begin the year, we began the year with $86.3 million in debt outstanding. Once again, we're going to add to that debt balance 21.1 million um which is the remaining part of our SRF approved loan of 50 million. We have 21.1 million remaining.

Um and then we also have re repayment schedule on a number of loans. The series 22 debt will pay back 1.4 million this year. Brookline utilities 412. You can see what I've identified here. So we've got 2.5 million in repayments. So if you start with 86.3 as your beginning balance, you add an additional 21.1 million to that, repay 2 and a half, you end the year at 105.9. So that's an overview. So from an operating capital, cash and debt perspective, now we're going to start drilling a little deeper, and Jake's going to walk you through uh the operating uh activities for the city. Good evening. Like Bob mentioned, my name is Jake Jones. We'll start here with the operating budget. So cliff notes at the top. Um budget amendment one compared to what was approved previously. Operating budget is $526,000 better off. How we got there? Um as you guys will recall recently, um holding water rates steady at 2025 levels. Um there's the number there on what that means for water revenue. It's almost $2 million less than what was planned. Um luckily we had an offset of some real estate sales that happened this year and those were 204 North Main. So that's across from City Hall, Old City Hall, Oak Court Lots and then one property over on Sawyer Road. So that those two things net together are relatively flat on revenue side. And then expenses, we've got an improvement here. Um, so some things that were negative were new positions and then as Rachel mentioned in the previous workshop, um, wage analysis, there's the impact of that. Um, but the offset in this case is, you know, the original plan for the operating budget was outside legal and consulting for wastewater treatment

plant. A lot of that has been hired in house instead. So we do show a savings there. Next slide. This is the same information just kind of broken out a different way. So the first big red number on the revenue side, that's the water revenue that we talked about. So you can see the original number, the budget amendment number, there's the net change. And then on the expense side, there's a few more things in there. Mainly the the the big positive number on the operating expenses that comes from the savings from the third party legal service and wastewater treatment side. And then the red numbers there for personnel, those are the new positions. And then all that nets together to, you know, $565,000. Um, better off than originally. And then down at the bottom, that 1.9, that is the real estate sales that we also mentioned in the previous slide. So net net, you get to that $525,000 better off than the previous approved budget. And then this slide takes that same number and you can see it by fund. So who who was better off, who was worse off. you get to the same number at the bottom in that middle column. Um, mainly up on the revenue side, you know, obviously water, that's the one that's down the most. The other two positive, that's the breakout for where those real estate sales, you know, who gets to keep the money from those. Um, and then expenses, it's it's more spread out pretty evenly with personnel. Um, and then as Bob will get to in a in a second with capital, you'll see the the changes there that are impacted due to what happened on the revenue side. Um, but there and then next slide Bob will take back over and he'll be talking about the cyst fund specifically. So, I printed this page out for you, put it at your spot on a big ledger sheet because if you're like me, you couldn't even read the numbers on on uh the the screen here. But basically, this is a a

a schedule that you've seen a number of times. So, it's the capital improvement sales tax um activity for the city over the last 10 years. So, we've gone through and shown revenues in and expenses or uses out by year and by function. Um and specifically at the bottom of the page, there's some additional information that that we um haven't shown before. Now, we are we're just breaking it out. And that shows the cash balance. So the important thing to see here is that in 2026, so over on the right hand side, look at the columns, we began the year w with 1 point uh about $1.2 million in cash in the cyst. So that is the net residual amount of cash by taking all the inflows and all the outflows as of the beginning of this year. Um during this year we plan on distributing out of the cyst $1.9 million which is about $778,000 more than we will take in from a revenue perspective. But we have this surplus cash that we've been carrying along of 1.2 million. And so we will end this year currently projected at about $383,000 of surplus cash to take into 2027. So specifically focusing on the CIS for 2026. So if I just highlight the 1.864 million that we identified on the prior page, I've broken out where those funds are going. So the general fund is getting $145,000 of that. Um specifically, $80,000 is going for two vehicles for the community development team. $65,000 is going to the emergency radio system that'll be brought into city hall which allows our

public safety personnel to communicate better with the outside when they're in meetings and activities in this building. U parks and wreck will end up with $642,000 of the cyst money for this year which is about 34% of the total distribution. Police will have additional police call cars and additional capital expenditures for $69,000. Uh as well as streets will pick up $468,000 of additional uh expenditures coming from CIS into the streets fund. And we wanted to spend time talking about the cyst because obviously cyst by its nature funds capital. So it's a source of funding for capital as well as other sources i.e. SRF debt is a source of funding for our capital projects. Cash in the various uh funds is another source of for capital projects. But specifically if we focus now on the capital budget, the uh city of republic's proposed amended capital budget for 26 reflects a $6 million savings in capital expenditures. Now remember, a big chunk of this savings is really a function of timing. Remember, we came to you a couple of it's been a month and a half ago, and we needed to amend the 25 capital budget because we spent about $6 million more on the wastewater treatment plant in 25 than we originally budgeted. That was all we did is we shifted 26 expenditures into 25. The project didn't get any bigger. So by default, the amount that we're spending in 26 on the wastewater treatment plant should go down. And so that's one of the big drivers of the change of the $6 million reduction in capital expenditures. And I've broken this out by fund. And so if

you look at um the wastewater fund, we originally budgeted to spend $33.3 million. Today we're going to spend 28.4 million. We'll spend a little time talking about why that number is showing an an improvement or a decrease of 5 million and not six because there's some incremental projects that are coming onto the ledger for this year. And we'll go through project by project, fund by fund here shortly. Um but suffice it to say, we're sitting here um with about a $6 million um improvement or a decrease in capital expenditures for 426. One of the things I do want to highlight is at the bottom of the page, we're showing inflows or or uh additional uh capital expenditures. So the cyst you can see here is showing for the budget amendment one, we've got 1.864 million. That was the 1.8 million that we've identified in the cyst uh schedule that shows you how we're going to where those monies are going to go. So the cyst will spend those monies the this year. Uh transfers is reflective of specifically one thing. the fire department this year, as you know, and we approved, it's been month and a half, two months ago, the purchase of a new uh property just about a mile south of here for the new fire station 3. That was an expenditure of about 373 392. Um, so there was an expenditure and that number shows up in the fire funds budget amendment capital number of 2.4 4 million above. But at the same time, technically, we did an internal transfer or an internal sale where the three public works departments purchased the property next door that that fire had

originally purchased for fire station 3. And so you'll see a transfer number here of $470,000. That $470,000 is monies transferred from one-third one-ird one-3 streets, wastewater, and water to fire to pay the fire department for the the property next door. So, if you're on the fire side, you spent $392,000 to buy a new property down the road, but you got $470,000 for the property next door. And I'll show you this in a little more detail in a second. So at this this gives you a high-level overview of capital expenditures budget versus budget amendment and where the sources and uses i.e where the incremental or or decrease increase or decrease is in the capital expenditures 426. So moving on to this page. This is the information from the prior page just spread out a little bit and expanded a little bit. So, we're looking at expenditures um on the capital budget side. And so, let's let's look at FIRE for instance. FIRE has $2.4 million of total capex currently budgeted for 26. In that 2.4, 4. The 2382514 number is the $392,000 for the new property down the road for the new fire station number three. It's in that number. But slide down to the funding source and under transfer in, you see $470,000 of transfer in to the fire department, which is a capital funding source, i.e. a source of cash for the fire fund. So

which basically is an offset if you will to the expenditure that we're making for the property down the road. And that 470 is the once again is the transfer from the three public works departments. So if you go back up to the expenditure side and look under streets, water, and wastewater, you'll see $156,000 of outflow from each one of those funds. If you added those three numbers up, guess what? They add up to $470,000. So that shows the inflows and outflows. So for specifically for uh the three waste for the three public works funds, that $470,000 is an expense, if you will. It is a is it's an expenditure that they're making. If they went out and they bought this property on the open market, um they would have spent each fund would have spent 515 $56,000 each. Same thing's happening here. We're just doing it and it's as an internal transfer within the city. So if if you go back up to the top of the page, I brought over the operating surplus that Jake showed you earlier. So we were started out, remember, with the operating surplus on a consolidated basis of $6.9 million. Then you add the capex to that 6.9 less the other funding sources which gets you to a consolidated net surplus of $5.5 million. And then you can look at how that $5.5 million is broking out between general fund parks etc etc. So um the largest contributor to that capital budget surplus at this point is wa is the wastewater fund. Um, and then you can see the other funds throughout the city on a consolidated basis, which gets us back to the 5.5 million.

So now I'm going to spend a little time talking about the capital budget and specifically expenditure, the expenditure side of the capital budget. and we're going to go fund by fund. And the importance of going fund by fund is that you'll recall that when we went through our purchasing policy update, we said that the the capital budget will be the source of truth for the purchasing policy going forward. So if it's in the capital budget, then it's approved as per the purchasing policy. So one of the things we want to do is we want to go through and identify those incremental changes in the budget amendment as compared to the original budget that was approved um back in November of last year. So in the general fund we really have um we really have a couple of changes. One change is that we see an increase in expenditures for city hall of $300,000. Once again this is a timing issue. This is monies that were originally budgeted in to be spent in 25 that actually got spent in 26. And all we did is that we ended 25 spending less than we expected. We're going to we're going to spend monies in 26 that we didn't budget for, but we have the money because we carried that over from 25. The facility maintenance truck back in u November of last year when we did the budget, facility maintenance was budgeted under the general fund. We've moved that activity under parks and wreck and therefore we've moved that parks and wreck uh expenditure or that that uh facility maintenance truck expenditure to parks and wreck. Moving on to parks and wreck. Um the one of the first things we're going to focus on is the facility maintenance truck. We moved that truck from um the general fund over to uh parks and wreck. So you see that we did from a budget

perspective there was nothing budgeted. We're now adding 52.2,000 to the budget amendment and therefore we've got an increase to the parks and recck budget um of that $52,000. The only other change to their capital budget for the 26 is an increase of $550,000 um on the J.R. Martin project. Once again, this is a timing issue. These monies were originally budgeted in 25, but by the time we got started with the project in 25, we didn't spend as much as we thought we were going to spend. The project hasn't gotten any bigger. It's just most of it's happening in 26. Moving on to the police fund. The only thing here is there's been some upgrades in the each individual vehicle on the IT front. So, we've got a new expenditure that was originally unbudgeted uh for an increase of $32,000. The fire fund. Once again, here's that $393,000 for fire station 3 land purchase down the street that we've been talking about. once again, which was offset by the transfer of funds from the three public works department funds to basically repay the fire uh fund for the property next door. Streets fund. Um a couple of things going on here. Uh the large thing is the route MM widening north of of 360. Um, once again, this is a timing issue. It's a basically a project delay. Um, the monies will get spent at some point. They're just not going to get spent in 26. So, we've pushed that out um out out of this budget horizon um into the future planning horizon for the 10-year CIP.

Um, some miscellaneous things here. In total, we're showing um a reduction or a decrease in the capital expenditures for the street fund for 26 of 1.5 million water fund. Once again, as Jake mentioned, when we held water rates constant to the 25 level, what it did to our budget was that it impacted our revenue stream by $2 million. So, we have $2 million less cash coming into the city specifically for the water fund in 26 than originally was expected. And as a result, we've gone through the water fund's capital budget and we've looked at individual projects to identify which ones um can be reduced in this year that they need to happen, but we need to reduce the amount or which ones can be which activities can be pushed out into future periods when we will have funding because we'll talk a little bit about this, but at some point we'll do a bond offering and that bond offering will cover that capital plan for the water fund. You recall from our discussion, I think it's been a couple of months ago, but the expectation would be that in order to in order to basically flatten water rates, it basically said that, hey, we're going to have less revenue coming in. It will take us longer to build cash, but if we need to do certain projects along the way to to bolster and improve our water infrastructure, the only way that we can fund that is through debt. And so once again, we've contemplated that over the next 10 years that we'll spend $45 million in capital improvements for the water fund. 30 million of that in the

fairly near future. Um, and that means in the next five years, which means that we'll need to borrow $30 million. And the expectation is we will plan a bond offering for early next year, a $30 million bond offering, which will provide the cash necessary to do the capital projects. And those components that we've originally budgeted in 26 that we've moved into out years will get captured as part of that basically revised CIP and fall under that 30 million capital plan and that 30 million funding plan from the bond offering. So net net we're showing a decrease because of the reduction in uh revenue generated by holding rates flat. In 26, we show a capital reduction or capital decrease um on expenditures of $1.4 million for the water fund for 26. I'm actually I suddenly realized I'm doing some of your stuff, Jake. Um Jake should have been doing this, by the way, folks. So, um I'll just go ahead and finish. What the heck? Um, so last but not least, the waste wastewater fund. Let me get to the wastewater fund. Um, once again, here's the big significant change at the, you know, the top line is showing wastewater treatment plant um, expansion, we show a reduction of 6.5 million. This is the 6.5 million that all we did is we spent the money last year instead of this year. And so we're reducing what we originally budgeted for this year. But we do have a new project for this year and that is the demolition of the old plant. And the this is a new unbudgeted in the original budget. So

it's being budgeted now in the amendment, but $1.6 million for the demolition of the of the old plant. There's some um increases to there's some uh wastewater treatment plant IT infrastructure and equipment upgrades that were not originally budgeted and that we're now budgeting. Um we double counted some uh uh some budgeting for SCADA. So you see a reduction of $475,000 that basically was an overestimate in the original budget and some miscellaneous other projects that we've reduced. So net net that's why we're showing an improvement obviously a decrease of $4.8 million but that $4.8 million is is made up of additional projects i.e that are increases and then the significant decrease of the wastewater treatment plant timing of 6.5 million. So all of that should have been Jake. So, um, so I'll I'll kind of finish up here and then the two of us can answer questions. But moving on to the capital budget summary by fund. If I take all that information that we just went through and I put it on one page, here are the budgeted numbers on the left hand side that shows that we originally budget budgeted sources of $50.7 million made up of the various funds from above and uses of $50 million um which got us to a capital surplus of $691,000. The changes that we just went through in the various different schedules fund by fund by fund total up to a reduction of changes of of about $2 million. And so if you look at where we were and where we're where we're going, we're showing an amended budget of a capital surplus

of 1.4 million. But specifically that 1.4 4 million is also we've got the the operating surplus that was generated that we talked about earlier as an additional funding source. These are just the third the additional I'll call them additional sources other than the operating surplus that funds our capital plan. And so if we just move on over, well, not going to do it, but once again, I want to go back. I'm going to go back to um let me go back to this page because I think this shows it better. Sorry. Yeah, this this shows it better. So, if you look at this page, it's the same information on the on the capital funding side as we just went through, but it's broking out by function as opposed to by fund. Um, but once again, we're showing that we're going to spend $43.9 million. We've got sources of 42.5 million, which we've identified as, you know, cash. We've got SRF funding, we've got uh grants, etc. Uh so if you look at all those funding sources, there's that negative 1.4 uh capital surplus or deficit in this case. But remember, we have from above, we have $6.9 million of operating surplus that can be allocated against this capital budget, which gets us back to our uh net consolidated net surplus of 5.5 million. So let me go back to where we were. So here's where we were showing the capital surplus capital deficit of 1 4 million. And then if we take that

information both operating and capital and once again we we started out by talking about cash and we talked about cash on a consolidated basis for the city. Now I've taken that information and broken it out by fund. And so once again, the consolidated numbers on the left hand column will tie back to that page like page two or three that we talked about early on in the workshop. But this shows that we've starting and once again we're starting out with $32 million in cash. We're adding to that our operating surplus we've already talked about which is $6.9 million which is made up of operating earnings plus extraordinary items. And then we're going to from that we're going to back out our capex and then we're going to add our additional sources SRF funding, additional city sales taxes as well as other sources to get us to our bottom line consolidated number of 22 million. The interesting thing here I think is to look at how that 22 million is really spread across the various funds of the city. The general fund will end the year with $7.2 million. We began the year with 5.7 million. That makes total sense because the most of the extraordinary items, i.e. the real estate sales will positively benefit the general fund. The um Oak Court Place lots that we closed on last a week ago for 1.2 2 million and 204 main that we closed on this week or on Friday of this last week for uh a net number of 300. That $1.5 million is coming back into the general fund. In the next month, we will close on one of the last properties and that's um a property on on Sawyer Road and that will benefit the wastewater treatment plant or the wastewater fund rather. So those funds will come back into the wastewater

fund. So, if you look at the wastewater fund, you see we started out with $14.3 million in cash. We added operating earnings of 2.1 and an extraordinary item of four $475,000. That's the half a million dollars of of gross sales less the commission to execute the transaction. So, I'm just going to follow through here on wastewater. Um, we're going to spend $28.6 $6 million on capex. Um so cash after capex technically if we stopped at that point we're in the hole 11.7 million. Ah but remember we're advancing the SRF loan of two of 21.1. So if you add that 21.1 million as a source of funding that gets the wastewater fund to an ending cash balance at the end of this year of $9.3 million. That same logic kind of plays through on all of the funds. For instance, the cyst, remember we were talking about we we began the year with 1.2 million and we would end the year with 383. Well, there's the 383 we're going to end the year with, which is based on the beginning balance plus what comes in and what goes out. This is a chart you've seen many times. This is the debt uh summary chart which is um basically looking at debt outstanding and the debt service for 2026. Um you'll remember from the first page we talked about that we were we began the year with $86.3 million of debt outstanding. We're only going to increase that debt because of our SRF funding advances of 21.1 million. So

advances of 20.1 million. We're going to repay various loans on this schedule to the tune of 2.5 million. Therefore, we'll end the year at $104.9 million of debt outstanding. Now, once again, that 104.9 million of debt outstanding is before we go out and do a water fund bond offering sometime in 2027 in order to fund the oper additional debt to this schedule. And then on the right hand side, we're looking at debt service of 2026. So, uh, principal payments, which obviously ties back to the principal payments that we're paying this year, and then the interest for the year of $2.8 million. Um, additional fees on some of the loans, which gets us to our $54 million of total debt service 426. So, speaking of debt service, last but not least is our debt service schedule, which shows all the debt that we have for the city broken out by fund and by year in terms of the obligations that we have in terms of funding. And I want to focus you specifically on 26, 27, and 28. 26, we just talked about the $5.4 million of debt service that we have. And this is how the debt service is broken out across the city. Um in 27 when we have completed when we complete the wastewater treatment plant project and we are fully advanced on the SRF loan of 50 million. At that point DNR will basically hand us an amortization schedule and that amortiza so far we've

just been paying interest only. Beginning in 27, we will begin a a proper repayment schedule and start repaying both interest and principal in 27. And so you'll notice under SRF in 27 that number goes from $660,000 which is interest only in 26 to $2.4 million in 27. So, and all of that incremental in that incremental change is going to impact one fund, the wastewater treatment pl, the wastewater fund, because of the debt that we use to fund the wastewater treatment plant. If you go back and look at the operating earnings for the wastewater treatment plant in 26, the operating earnings for the wastewater treatment, I keep saying plant, it's the fund for the wastewater treatment fund. you'll see that operating earnings is about 2.5 million, but next year we're going to add an additional hundred or we're going to add an additional almost a million dollars in debt service to that number. So, we're going to see the the operating surplus margins get squeezed on the wastewater fund beginning next year because of the debt service that we've got in place. So once again, um, net net, we've got $145 million of debt service to repay over the next 25 years before we add $30 million next year for the water fund. And with that, Jake and I are ready to answer questions. It's a lot of information. Um, and not everything is necessarily germanine specifically to 26, but it's important, I think, that we tie all the various components together. Debt, cash, operating earnings, and

capital needs. Thank you, Mr. Ford. Does city council have any questions for Mr. Ford? Dan. Okay. So, this may be related, may not, but uh what are we going to see on hail damage? How's that going to affect the budget? Do you know? Do you have any inkling or

um at this point? We're just in the beginning process of getting all of the damage assessed and appraised. Um adjusters have been on site starting today. They're looking at vehicles and buildings. Once we have an understanding of what that looks like and how much is damaged and what kind of insurance claims we're and what kind of uh monies we're going to see receive back then we'll identify of those of of the damaged let's take vehicles for instance of the damaged vehicles how many of those vehicles let's say we had a vehicle that was totaled and because of the damage was greater than the value of the vehicle. if the vehicle is still drivable and um we'll still drive it. Um so I I think we have to wait until we understand how much money is coming in, how many of the vehicles u we can continue to use in the in the course of a normal business day. Uh how many vehicles are going to get fixed? What's going to be the cost of new roofs? All of those things. At that point, we can sit down and say what does the gap look like? net net there's going to be some additional cost that's going to happen at some point this year and we'll be back with another budget amendment once we have a better number.

Thank you very much. A long answer to a simple question. It's going to cost us. No, that was great. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Harter. That was a great question. Thank you, Mr. Ford. Do we have any additional questions? Mr. Griggy, thanks for putting all that together. So, just to clarify, so this will have the first reading. We got time obviously to to get with you on Absolutely. And then would it be fair to say, you know, obviously we've seen a lot of cash go down. Cash was up due to we knew that we had uh it earmarked for for projects. So you a lot of that cash we have built up was to be used.

Absolutely. Let's take the $45 million of the series 22 debt offering that we did specifically for building the bills building and executing the wastewater treatment plant project. There was a point where we had $45 million in the bank, but every year those those balances have gone down. Um, so to your point, exactly those monies that even though at one point we had great cash balances and our interest income looked great. It was never intended, nor did we ever expect to hang on to those those dollars because what we're doing, if you think about it, cash on the balance sheet, we just traded one asset, i.e. cash for another asset, a wastewater treatment plant project. The value of the fund didn't change, but the complexion of the asset changed.

Thank you, Mr. Gerky. Mr. Campbell, I should know this, but I don't. So, on the debt service, how many of these line items have a special tax that is paid for that debt service and do they will the balance be paid at the end of that tax or what does that look like?

Yes, great question. So let's take parks for instance. Parks has a quarter cent sales tax that is specifically identified as capital restricted. So it can be used for capital projects. It can also be used to fund debt service that has been used to fund capital projects. So to answer your question specifically for parks and wreck this year they have I think it's $520,000 of debt service specifically on the series 23 debt. the that quarter cent sales tax that's restricted to capital will be which is about $1.1 million in revenue will will be used to offset the $520,000 of debt service for parks and wreck as well as other capital projects. So for instance, the J.R. Martin project cyst won't be able to fund everything. J the parks department's going to have to fund part of that out of their quarter cent sales tax number that's capital restricted. The same logic plays through for fire and and not really plays through for the cyst because the cyst is an unusual animal. It's really just it's a capital restricted uh collector if you will of revenue. monies come in um to the cyst and then the cyst distributes those out to various capital projects across the city. It doesn't have a capital program of its own. It just funds other capital programs.

Thank you, Mr. Ford. Mr. Mayor, did that make sense? Did that answer your question? Sort of. No. No, it did.