City Council - Regular Meeting

We have three agenda items today. The 2027 Supplemental Recommended Operating Budget. And we have the Payment Card Processing Fee Analysis. And then we have the 2026 Mid-Year Action Plan. So we'll start off with the Supplemental Recommended Operating Budget. Ms. Selms.

Thank you, Council President, Council Members, Mayor Norton, members of the public, many of our teammates are also here today. This really is a follow-up to the discussion that you had. This isn't clicking. The discussion that you had on August 24th, and there we go. That is how I knew it was August 24th. Thank you to Deputy Administrator Parrish for having this up on his screen so that I could guess. I did just wanna say, The primary purpose of this is to follow up from the discussion that was on August 24th, but we do generally try to run through the baseline of the budget as well, maybe the first time that someone is tuning in and checking this out. As always, we do try to resource the city surrounding strategic priorities and foundational principles, so how we focus our resources and initiatives and how we approach the actions that we take in delivering service. Um, the supplemental budget timeline, um, for teammates here, they have been working on this since February. Um, and really they started working on it last February because we're in the second year of a two year budget. Um, we've reviewed this a few times, um, and you will have an action on September 21st, which is authorizing the preliminary tax levy. Uh, so that is an important milestone in the process. After that time period, the levy can stay the same or go down, but it cannot be increased in the process. So just a table setting here again, the $799.3 million budget that is inclusive of Rochester Public Utility, so electric and water, that is approximately a $6.8 million increase year over year from the prior year. So the amount of resources necessary to provide the services that are in the budget is a levy increase of that dollar amount. We also have a percentage on the page, but that percentage is not the rate that people's taxes will change. That will really mostly be decided based on their assessed valuation and whether or not they're moving out of the homestead tax credit for those that are in residential property that they own. and live in. For those in commercial property, obviously it will depend on how they change relative to other commercial classes and apartment classes. We are still anticipating a 1% adjustment in sewer rates for 2027, 4% for electric and 9% for water. We do have some cost of service studies coming up for all three of those utilities forthcoming in 27 and 28. That is how the rates are established. You can see that the recommended supplemental tax levy and budget is a levy of $124,901,338, down to the penny there. And that is a decrease from what we were showing in the trend line, primarily related to some changes in health insurance and some other positive development. The recommended supplemental total budget, again, just shy of $800 million, about 16% of the budget comes from tax levy. A lot of other rate paying and other revenue sources go into being able to provide the services. Those numbers don't reflect the different items that came up during the August 24th study session, both any path home funding and a request of what amount of levy reduction would be needed to match the preliminary established market value of 5.21%. But we will discuss that today. As you can see, the estimated market value that we have from Olmstead County is an increase in valuation. A piece of that, about a quarter of that is new construction, and so that means that any property tax levy will first be absorbed by that new construction and then be absorbed by the valuation adjustment, which is all other classes of property increasing in value year over year. Again, the tax rate, though, remains pretty steady. Since 2018, we've vacillated between about 4.7% total net tax capacity rate and about 52%. So here, we're down below 15% for the 2027 recommended. And we have been breaking down the levy increase in a couple of different ways. You'll recall that this was last year was the last year of having holistic budget stability funds available to be able to mitigate the levy adjustment coming out of COVID. We have some capital improvement increase and the equipment revolving stabilization is important for us to be able to continue to invest in the vehicles that help us provide service. We had some other reductions there, 0.64%, and then some decision packages making up the remainder of the levy adjustment. Those are the decision packages for discussion, and I'm gonna hand it over to Mr. Parrish for a focused conversation.

We're gonna cover a few slides here that are more conversation-based. So shared services, we left off with this at a previous meeting

forwarded it to this one. As you recall, when we did our financial policy development, this was an element we said we'd periodically report back to you on. This is also an element within our action plan. And so from that perspective, you'll hear about that later this evening. I would say there's pockets of opportunity and encouragement here, as well as some challenge and some areas where we're not making the kind of progress that we might want to see. So this is really just an itemization of all of our organizational shared services. As you can see, I think we have gone a number of areas where we have done further integration in this space, but we still have many areas where we have and we'll call it redundant directors and supervisory structures. So to the extent that we elect to have, and I'll just use IT as an example because we went through a fairly substantial conversation in that space this year and really couldn't come to any kind of new alignment on that. We'll continue to have two directors there that are both fairly highly compensated employees for both RPU and the city. Each of those directors has supervisors. In some cases, they have supervisees as well. Fairly large departments within both sides, but there's opportunities here. I would say with the ERP project, that is an area where... bringing us into common systems in the future will help. Right now, we don't even use the same chart of accounts for financial reporting. That is something that the team has put a great amount of work into. It's not inexpensive. There's some history things we have to navigate there, but that chart of accounts then will at least be able to forward common financial reporting and create a common framework for that. We likely will have a common team of people that support the ERP project once it's implemented. And right now, that's not the case. We'll give you more of an update on the ERP project with the action plan as well. But I would just say that this is never a static area. So you all approve a two-year budget. In between there and some of the notes, you can see we've had position transition. So GIS is an example. We have two GIS managers or leads. We've had transition in that space, but without a common framework, we're not realigning. In some cases, it doesn't make sense. There are business purposes for having distinct features and functions, but I would argue that we have room and opportunity here to think more about this work. So with that.

Mr. Parrish, a question on the ERP project. When is the implementation completion date?

Yeah, so the team is actively working on the project. The end of 27 is when we'd expect to be fully implemented there, but there's a bunch of, we'll call it micro implementations happening where it will roll out on a phase basis, but our big go live is in fall of 27.

So will we then, a year from now, be in a place to look at more shared services in that space?

I think it's something that you monitor on an ongoing basis, but I think it will help that conversation. And I think like any of these organizational changes, it could be like your first opportunity to see how can this really work? Is there a governance structure that makes sense? So we have accountability across all functions of the city as well. Our charter obviously creates some unique governance situations that are important to understand and respect and appreciate, but it's also important to think through and pass some of those two at times.

Mr. Keene.

Yeah.

I do want to comment on this. I know we're to the budget thing now, and I think this is a good update for the council, but it's probably not going to affect the 2027 supplemental budget. I think it is a point where I think this council has probably given input before to say this is something we do want to be looking at, but I think what the report back from the staff is, we're not making much headway with it. So I kind of want to weigh in a little bit just, I like the examples you give of like the duplicate supervisors. That's an area of potential savings. But I want to be careful that shared service isn't just a matter of aligning them in one group and having the other group then come and ask for services. I think we need to have a good method of organizing there. The GIS example is a hard one on me because I know what the city uses GIS for in the county and it's sort of like this higher level than use different groups. It is my understanding that the RP use there is much more internal and probably not something that's a shared service, but again, I'm not close enough to it. The fleet one does bother me because that looks, now with all the vehicles out on, or most of them being out on East River Road, I think that is something that's a potential savings, especially the supervisor and the four things. The trucks, I believe, are much the same. So I want to weigh in a little bit just to say I want to try to... take this, but I also want to be careful, as an example, the IT stuff. I really don't know if those IT jobs in RPU are dramatically different because of the protecting of the utility and the electric and the water, and maybe they're not, but it does, just the idea that they're both IT doesn't convince me they should be in the same group, but the idea that if we can get some savings to the levy or to the rates based on these things being combined. I also want to make sure, I've been involved in this before in industry, and there's always a problem that when you combine stuff, the group that gives them up then has to go begging for services. I think the onus really should be on the groups that have the skills. Like if all the IT end up in shared services, I think it's their responsibility to make sure the groups that are paying for this through rates or other ways get the services they need.

I think those are all amazing points, and we could talk about this for quite some time, right, honestly, and each one of these has a story and conversation, and sometimes it is. There's a business imperative behind why you would make sure there's a distinct faction. I would say in general, when we hire for a lot of these positions, I'll say finance, for example, generally a lot of the finance teams aren't coming in with amazing or significant results Yeah, experience in either area. There's a finance principles or finance principles across many industries and sectors. Now, is it helpful to understand certain things? Yeah, it certainly is. And we screen for that when we when we hire facilities in terms of taking care of a building or whatever. That's one thing. But taking care of a building that's designed to generate electricity, that's a different thing. And so we have to make those. distinctions where they make sense. Again, each one of these is a story. I think governance, accountability, service agreements are all relevant here. I think for you all, the point in this is there is opportunity. I think we have not yet hit the end of the road on where we could be more efficient here. And you all have the power of expectations, ultimately, as the people that approve the overall budgets, as well as the RPU budget and rates. And we do enterprise work on the city side as well. I mean, we have WRP. Clearly, they're an enterprise of the city. So this stuff, I mean, we have multiple different lines of business. We try to bring them all into alignment. But a lot of thought required, for sure.

Good, and I know the ERP was a good way to start working through and seeing what different groups have. Two points I wanna make just at the end here. On the finance side, the one thing there is I believe the big driver in RPU is that they have the billing system, and the billing system is for utility, but utilities also include public works for stormwater and public works for sewer, so that, Ownership there, that to me is more of a good discussion to have on where that should be in the right place in the city. But the last point I'll make is I'm bringing this up, I get close to this because I have the RPU side and get exposed to it, I get exposed on the city side, but I also think the council needs to figure out our role in this. Do we want to push this or just leave the staff to see what they can find out? And if you do, I think these are the discussions where we need to speak up.

Council Member Palmer.

It would be helpful to know the dollar amount that we're talking about that you think is savings because like the GIS, I don't know why they're not combined. It doesn't make any sense that they're not. But if you got rid of a manager at one of them, are we talking $100,000? Are we talking $300,000? It'd be nice to know kind of an idea of what you would be trying to to do and i guess to go with mr keen i mean when it comes to the budget if we decide that rpu should should not have somebody we just cut the budget by that amount and say you do your budgeting the way you want but we're not going to fund this if you want to go ahead um because there's quite a few things and the fleet is is it probably a huge one because now we've got park and rec out there we've got rpu out there we've got public works out there they're half similar vehicles and and and machines i don't know why they would not want to be all together And is it a union issue, Mr. Parrish, or is it just a lack of a will or is it the lack of that we've always done it this way and I don't want to share?

I mean, there's all those considerations when we make these evaluations. So, you know, I mean, clearly there's a facilities element to this and, you know, there's labor and bargaining issues to navigate, but we have navigated those on transitions. I mean, it wasn't terribly long ago in the fleet space where we had two mechanics assigned to the PD. We currently have a mechanic assigned to fire. We had mechanics assigned to parks. We had mechanics assigned to public works. We have a lot of contract mechanical work that was happening. So it just requires thoughtful evaluation, and each one of these is its own evaluation. There are points of alignment and points of divergence that'll make a lot of sense. And I think you just have to, go through the exercise. Clearly it's easiest to do these things when there's people transitions but you have to be ready because when the people transition happens you're within a budget so you can't necessarily deal with the budget issues and it's usually kind of urgent because we're busy around here and so I think like forecasting where you want to go with this is important and each one of these I think is an area where we could have more conversation but But again, I think we need some more leadership here in order to create an expectation. I don't think there's anybody's fault here. I think it's just, I don't know that we've been given the fact that this is a priority issue from your perspective that you feel like is important to deal with. Go ahead.

good stewards of the taxpayer dollars or rate payer dollars is priority of most everybody here. I don't know who wouldn't want that. But I think that waiting for people to retire isn't a good model for us to follow. I understand that you might be taking some people. We have over 950 employees. in how you work together. And if you don't want to work together, well, maybe you need to find a different job. And I think that that's what people need to know is that this shall work and we shall do this. And if you're looking for the city council to say, you know, to move ahead with this, I'm all in favor of, you know, consolidating and making things more efficient for the taxpayer.

Council Member Miller.

Yeah, I guess to build off both of those, but to what Mr. Keene was saying, I think we can take a more active leadership role. What I would hope for from the staff is to help sequence these into the right study session order, right? What is the most emergent issue that we could take a deeper dive into? Obviously there are budget cycles. We're forecasting the preliminary levy for our next meeting and we'll adopt it in December. So there are many of these that are likely not able to be addressed for the 2027 budget. But I would hope that by the point that we are next year going through a new two year budget cycle, that we can take a deeper look at several of these and give the leadership that you're asking for right on direction. I don't feel equipped to make a comment today to say that GIS is the most emergent area, but I would like the staff to help us, as I'm hearing from Mr. Keene and Mr. Palmer, help us make those decisions. And I think it is then incumbent on administration to bring us this in the right sequence to help us understand the more nuanced areas and where there is missing guidance. I think we're ready to give it.

Mr. Keene.

And again, I just want to reemphasize, this isn't a simple sort of like, okay, we'll just move things over here and there. It is complicated. And there is a thing that if you're in public works and you have the responsibility of getting your communication out and your person doesn't work for you, you feel at a disadvantage. I want to put that onus on the staff to make sure those things are organized such that if we do do these alignments for efficiency, we also address that idea that they're still responsive. Because again, in my experience, when things are aligned into functional versus line responsibilities, there is a tendency for a breakdown in responsibility.

Council Member Fredericks.

I think it goes without saying, I'll always err on the side of efficiency. And I do understand, though, that the easiest time is in between hires because you run into union issues, you run into a lot of things, you can't just start firing people and making changes like that. I do understand that it's easier in between. And I guess, obviously, I would just lean on each department head and ask them, hey, where are you seeing inefficiencies, where are you seeing needs maybe even or where are you seeing places we can merge and then obviously trust in their judgment that's what we have them there for.

yeah i would i i would agree with all of my colleagues and and both the uh it's nuanced as well as really pushing it to staff to bring things forward to you for to their leadership because it would be nice for us to see that you know this is 300 000 or this one is uh 25 000 But you don't want us to look to those shiny objects and say this is where we can make the biggest impact. So you need to really prioritize those for us and knowing the detail and nuance of those. But I would agree that it's something I think I want to see more of and earlier too. Mayor Norton.

Thank you. One of the items there is one we haven't talked about. Sorry, go back for just a sec. Which is under communications, which is the police. And that's been discussed off and on over the last couple years. And I think in talking with the chief and watching for the last year the types of communications that they put out, it really is a different and separate skill. I don't think it can be something that can have a K box and hope you get the right language. I really do think that has some nuances that require it to perhaps not be one of the shared services. So I sat on this one for a while because I know administration had suggested it in having hung around now for eight years and looked at the types of communication they have, and also the types of services that I get, you know, as mayor, and how that works, that they do have some specialty considerations that just shouldn't be, you shouldn't think of them maybe as, it's just as simple as putting in a K-box and, you know, communications will get to it. They have many, many things in their K-boxes and they do try to prioritize. But police responses often are nuanced and often are in the moment and not something that can be slowed down, so that's one I would just say my experiences caused me to kind of pull back on thinking that's a great shared service topic, but just wanted to throw that in.

All right, let's continue.

All right, the next focus conversation really is just following up on the council's previous study session where you wanted a few additional things looked at. So, again, we're coming in with a recommended tax levy of 5.59%. Now, remember, that's not going to feel that way to the, we'll call it the average, because we have new construction, we have growth in market valuation, et cetera. But from just a dollar's perspective, it's a 5.59% increase. There was a question, is there an opportunity to reduce that down to 5.21%? That'd be about $454,000. So to the extent the council wants to have that conversation, I think we would put the question out there. What areas would you want us to focus on in that space? There was the question.

Council, are you done with that piece? Council Member Palmer.

Can I speak to it? Yeah. The suggestion that I'm making is you're all talking is a huge issue. And the TIF projects are expiring next year, and we've got a lot of growth going on. It's kind of a payback for growth. But if we can get down to that 5.21%, you can tell people that, hey, we're growing by the rate that actually our income is growing. And so my suggestion is not, I don't think, a bad one, is to take our contingency fund and drop it to $500,000, leave that and that at for that because right now we have a 37% reserve. We haven't really used our contingency in the last eight years that I know of. And if that $500,000 knocks us down to 5.21, I think that shows a good example of good budgeting. It doesn't hurt the staff who looked at the budget and made their suggestions. And it just means next year we'll have to make sure that we keep our contingency down to that $500,000 mark. I don't know how the other council members feel, but that is where I'm comfortable doing, is coming up with that $500,000 out of knocking the kids' agency down to $500,000.

I'll get back to that in a moment just to cover these and then go from there also request on the path home funding. That would be an additional 100,000 dollars to fund some of the specific outreach in the area. I think that was brought up at the previous meeting just advancing. We did some quick research. You know, that's an active area. That the any path home community is talking about that not that request has not been made of the Olmstead county board at this point. So it's maybe a little bit early. And however, and maybe just also to add Olmstead county is having a bit more of a holistic evaluation of where they're at in some of the space in terms of. supporting folks experiencing homelessness. And then there is this block by block position template that people can review. However, if this does come up as a recommendation from AnyPath Homes, there is a, we'll call it a non-tax levy supported funding option for you to consider. Um, so if you recall, we have the statewide affordable housing funding. We're definitely projected to receive that in this year and it has not been prioritized for this year. Just a little over 250,000 dollars or 52,000 dollars. And then in 27, we're expecting 249,000 dollars and you can see the investments you've made with that in the past. But if you'd like to redirect that, you certainly could. However, the only thing I would say is this is a newer funding source from the state. Whether that's funded in the future, we aren't 100% sure, so we've focused it primarily on more one-time investments. But to the dollar levels you're talking about here, this would be a likely recommendation you would see from us if that was a request that was made.

Council Member Fredericks.

Yeah, if we can just go back one. We're just about through 2026. Why does it still say anticipating?

Yeah, I think that's just a receipt kind of issue, a timing issue, but we'd expect to receive that amount. Okay, got you. All right, just backing up then. Overall, I'd say recommendation for you, certainly can talk about the 5.21% conversation. Maybe just provide a little more clarity on the contingency suggestion. You know, certainly... We've had some level of conversation about what should contingency be allocated for? Is it emergent? Is it things that come up during the year that are good, one-time ideas? There's a variety of different things we've talked about there. I would say contingency in our budget is a bit of a hedge against keeping that fund balance in the right spot. So we're 47% of fund balance coming out of last audit, if you recall, or at least you know coming out of there by the end of this year with the way our budget has grown if we met budget entirely we'd be at about forty two percent uh... and then that's our guideline we really want to hang out at that forty two percent of expenditures for contingency so we hope not to use it all because we need to have a little bit of growth and a little bit of money added to the fund balance every year just so we don't drop below that forty two percent so that's why it swings around a little bit now Great years, the DSI team, if the permits continue to produce and expenditures are, we try to budget them conservatively, we try to create margin in a few spaces, but I just don't want you to, I just want you to understand that there's some of that contingency as part of our margin to keep that fund balance where it is. If we didn't do anything to add, we would continue to erode and we'd have to start budgeting for fund balance.

Council Member Wall.

I've asked this question and probably have not received an answer that is definitive to me, and it would change year by year since about 80% of our budget is consumed by personnel. Would that be about right?

I could definitely look into that, but that doesn't sound off off base. Yeah.

It would seem to me that whatever goes into the reserve at the end of the year. Is likely to be the balloon is going to be much larger in. Personnel changes through the year, especially vacancies that take some time to be to be filled, then contingency could offer to us. That just seems logical to me in a group of 960 or 70 employees.

I mean, I think it's true that our levy supported activity, because again, if you take the whole budget, it's not going to be 80% personnel, probably it's going to be more capital. But yeah, I mean, a lot of our operation really is for the levy supported activity really is people focused and the things people need to do the job, right? So yeah. I'm not sure exactly what your question was.

I suppose another way of asking that is if we anticipate on January 1 that we will spend X number of dollars on personnel, what is the actual X minus? What is that that essentially would be put into reserves?

Yeah, so just to say that we don't always have consistently 100% staffing. We have some vacancy embedded. If you authorize a new position, they may not start until April. So there is some variability. I think that changes year to year. We have the same thing when we project out the health insurance people take. We have our best guess on that. But again, that's where we do budget it a little bit conservatively. We assume 100% staffing in those budgets. So we could definitely get back to you in terms. It's not 80%, I don't believe. I think it's...

Council member Wall, for the general fund budget, it's about 76% of the entire general fund. For the municipal recreation fund, which has some offsetting revenue, it's about a little over 50%. For the library, it's about 72%. And for the total, if you take all employee services against the entire budget, which has a lot of capital in it, it's 22%. But if you really look at that, I mean, general fund has a lot of day-to-day operations in it. It's 76%. And the general fund is the primary source of the levy between the general fund library and Parks and Recreation. Those are primarily levy-funded services. We do have offsetting revenues in those funds, but they really rely pretty heavily on the levy. If you think about public safety, we aren't charging people anything. to show up to their home. That is an expectation of being a property taxpayer in Rochester.

So I would maybe just say, yes, we have some buffer there because we budgeted 100%. However, there's a however. The other piece we have is a lot of times when our employees separate, there's fairly substantial payouts associated with that for their employment or their PTO or vacation or sick in terms of what their separation pay represents. Sometimes there's interim positions that are created in order to cover gaps or special project pay. So there is something there, but I don't know that it's something we'd necessarily want to count on or budget less for, if that helps.

Council Member Doering.

I'm gonna invite Ms. Edens to come up to assist with the argument for any path home funding here in the budget. And I'll let Ms. Edens present first and then I'll follow up.

Sure thing, good afternoon. Taryn Edens, Community Development. So really just the additional context I would make here is to point out that this ask is not fully baked, right? So these are some ideas that we have discussed collectively and how these funds could be used. A reminder that the initiative has pretty much been fully funded by the county primarily, so they have some funding in about $300,000, I believe, which has been primarily used for staffing. I think about over $100,000 is left. So these were just some ideas that have been discussed or considered of how that funding might be used. Just a little more context, one, we have been talking about strategic planning and prioritization of next steps for any Path Homes, so that's one option. The other, just to give a little bit more context, is the block-by-block So I would describe this as Block by Block is a parent organization essentially. For example, they host the Clean and Safe Ambassadors that the RDA hosts. That same parent organization offers an outreach sort of position that specifically contacts or connects with businesses. So part of the city's role so far has been facilitating a public space solutions group. that talks about mitigating neighborhood or community impacts of unsheltered folks, and this is a way to directly support both of those things. So that's sort of the pitch and how it could benefit city resources and what else has been done as far as contributions to AnyPathHome.

Thank you. Miss Eaton's has been present at a couple any path of meetings that I've missed because of traveling. I would like to say that the county has added at least another full time position for the any path home implementation in 2026. I know the argument has been made from the dice previously. that this is a county issue and not a city issue, but hundreds of US cities actually support initiatives to fight homelessness and or programs that support those experiencing homelessness. I'm gonna give you four Midwestern examples. Madison, Wisconsin committed $1.7 million last year towards construction of a new homeless shelter. And then $3.5 million in combined city and federal funds for seven nonprofits providing supports. Fort Wayne, Indiana, $2.1 million in local income tax revenue towards the construction of a homeless resource center. Akron, Ohio, $500,000 for homeless shelter allocation. And then Boise, Idaho, has a program called Our Path Home, which is very close to the Any Path Home initiative. Boise... supports that program with $120,000 yearly. And their goal is to make homelessness a rare, brief, and singular occurrence by ensuring safe and stable housing for all residents to increase the health and resiliency of our community at large, which is almost the exact language that we're using for our initiative for Any Path Home. So many midsize American cities routinely contribute municipal resources to homelessness response if you look at a F charts that you can get out on the internet about this you'll see that Rochester is at the lower end of funding for this across the board Funding this initiative at this hundred thousand dollars level also uh fits with our um foundational principles of compassion public safety safety and social equity so i realize that our idea is not fully baked at this point i would encourage this council to include this hundred thousand dollars gift in in the vote that we take here WITH THE IDEA THAT WE WILL COME BACK WITH A MORE FULLY BAKED PROPOSAL BEFORE OUR DECEMBER LEVY VOTE. WE CAN ALWAYS TAKE IT OUT. WE CAN'T ADD IT AT A LATER TIME.

JUST A COUPLE POINTS OF CLARIFICATION AND BRING IT BACK TO THIS SLIDE. You certainly can put the AnyPass home item in at $100,000. I think the question that we're dealing with here really is next meeting you'll be asked to consider the preliminary levy adoption. Do you want this to come from the levy at $100,000? If you do, we need to adjust that number. If you want it to come from the statewide affordable housing or homelessness aid, I think we can do that about any time if we don't designate it otherwise. If we don't designate it otherwise, you all have to approve that expenditure however we want to use that aid. So we could do that at any time. You could earmark $100,000 of that homelessness aid toward this initiative if you want to pre-do that in this budget as well. So I guess the main thing tonight is we need to know, do you want that in the levy? Do you want that in the other funding source? And we can find a path there. And likewise, if you want to make the adjustment of a reduced contingency, understanding that tonight. So when we bring you the preliminary levy resolution next week, that'd be helpful so we can have it as close to what your expectations are as possible.

Mayor Norton.

While we're on this subject, I would say I guess I'm to the point where it feels like we need to have more skin in the game as part of Any Path Home. The one thing I worry about is I don't want the money to just be administrative and more people I would like us to see if we can't get more people housed. I've been really pleased with the dashboard and the information that's being gathered. It's doing what it's supposed to, not letting people fall through the cracks, identifying who they are, what their needs are. That part seems to be going really well, but we're low on the places to put people once we've identified them and to get them off the streets. And into some place dry and warm. Um, and safe, and so I'm hoping as you're thinking about this, that that's the, the. Ultimate place some of this money can go. I do think to Aaron's point, that's where the state money should probably go. Um, but I just wanted to set that out there and and say that. Finally, we're at a place where I feel like this was supposed to be. I'm sorry it took so long to get there, but I feel like you guys are doing a really good job moving this along at last, so I would support that. Thanks.

Council Member Fredericks.

Thank you. I believe the state aid money, if we need a year market, you asked for clarity on that. I think that would be a great spot to use it.

Council Member Wall.

I would agree with Mr Frederick so that for an idea not fully baked to use a 1 time money is probably a good idea rather than adding it to the budget. So I would support the state aid funding.

On to my bird keen.

Yeah, I'll comment just on any path home is a newer thing. The language that's been presented and talked about with Homestead County that it is like we're using the word half-baked here, but there really isn't a request and makes it difficult for me to want to put it into the budget. I think right now from my perspective where we're sitting in September of 26 would be that if this does come to pass, I think that idea of using the, what is it, position or the... Number two, funding for financial support for nonprofits is the better way to go. I think longer term though, this is, I believe I would, in my mind's eye, I'm picturing that chart that we have when we say, what does the city do to fund our, the things that are our mission that are being done by nonprofits? and I think I could see it fitting there better than as a separate discussion like this. Similar that we do RDA funding or we used to do diversity council, things like that. I could see it fitting there better than a separate initiative. Any Path Home to me is still this idea of these, everybody coming with their expertise and we come there with law enforcement and parks and other things like that and again, maybe some funding, but I wouldn't think that's gonna be our main responsibility as far as Any Path Home.

For clarity, that would mean that it would be sitting in the outside agencies, and we do review the... That's right.

But again, I don't believe we're doing that with the supplementary budget right now. If it was ongoing. Yes. Yeah. I'm sorry, as long as I can. I also want to respond on the, going back to the other one on the match 5.12. I really like Council Member Palmer's suggestion of trying to simplify the discussion, but the overall thing, I don't want to support it tonight because that idea of contingency, if we don't spend the contingency, it goes into the general fund. So there's really no real savings here. And I guess I do look back in the last eight years, and I think at least two years where we spent the contingency, one during COVID and the other to fund a lawsuit. So that idea of having contingency to me is a good budgeting technique. And to use it here, and then, because remember, that's not one-time funding. That's going forward, then you would always have that. And I would rather keep that sort of on a $120 million levy to have a hundred, having a... $100,000 set aside I think makes good sense.

One million.

I'm sorry, to make the one million set aside is a good way to go into a year with the unknowns that come up.

I want to get back to Any Path Home. So I've got a few more questions on the state aid. You said you anticipated in 2026. So that didn't sound like a definite. And then is it earmarked for something already for the 2026 funds?

It is a guaranteed committed amount. It was just a receding timing issue, as Aaron had alluded to. And no, nothing has been earmarked for that amount.

Well, I would strongly support that we do designate $100,000 of that fund to the AnyPath Home project.

anyone else on any path home council member miller sure a question about the state funding is that uh anticipated beyond 2027 what is the funding source or what is the authorization of that funding

So the funding sources from the state specifically is legislation that was passed previously with the budget surplus. So essentially you'd be asking if I could predict if it would stay there and I don't know that with certainty, right? So we've seen it and it's not guaranteed.

If I may, it is something though that if you started here with this funding, you could then consider it either in your 28-29 budget as a levy, like an important thing to support with levy if you're seeing that it's got ongoing need and value.

Councilmember Doering, he was gonna respond to.

Yeah, no, I wasn't gonna respond to this. Okay, go ahead.

So with that clarification for the state funding, I would be comfortable for the 2027 budget of using state funds. I do think that we have to build a more reliable funding source into this, and if that's property tax levy, I appreciate Councilmember Doering bringing comparable cities, either from our region or size, looking at their investment. And I'll just acknowledge, as we've already acknowledged, we spend city resources on this area. It just looks like police or parks or other department. So I'd also love to see a comparison of what this block by block position could be and what the cost and services provided would be there versus what we're providing now. to understand how we're investing our city resources and understand which department or outside resource is the best use of the city resources to get the impact we're looking for, to help connect people, to keep the city public space clean and safe. So I think that that makes sense. I'm not in favor at the moment of reducing our contingency funding to $500,000 for 2027. I would instead like us to really dive in on this staffing issue and see where we can find efficiencies to build in a more sustainable approach to controlling the levy increase, because I think that reducing it to half of our current level is just a budget trick and not a real savings. And I think it's gonna catch up to us in some year, even if it's not next.

Council Member Doering.

I realize that I'm in the minority with my colleagues saying I would prefer to add that $100,000 to the tax levy, but I appreciate your thoughts about using one-time funding. I would ask that that is expressed in the documents that we are going to vote on so that the AnyPath Home Initiative can plan for those dollars as they come forward. I would also not be in favor of reducing any contingency budget for this next calendar year. Council Member Fredericks.

We received this state funding for five years. Is there any reason it would go away?

Yeah, I can, a couple points. As Taryn said, it's hard to really predict that it will roll forward in the next biennial budget at the state level. So we would have a better sense of that next June.

So we can make a decision at that time.

Yeah, I think we'd have a better understanding of what our 2829 allocation might be there. It's like local government aid. We have history, but we don't have, you know, future. Uh, perspective on that the 1 thing I would say, and Terry, maybe you can help me with this as well is just. Yeah, we're good. We're. projected and in the current state budget appropriated the 252 and the 249. I don't believe we're obligated to spend that within those years so you could spread that out over a number of years if you wanted to meter out the anytime any path home contribution but maybe it's a four-year time horizon so for example the 2023 funds if you read the fine print there all not all of it has been spent and must be spent by the end of 27 so that could also be used.

Very nice, okay, so I'm hearing there's some money there. So I don't wanna jump on and have it in our budget right away until we know if it works. I mean, I'd like to see results, see what it does. Just to throw money at something and hope for the best, I'm never down for that. So I just wanna make sure we're seeing measurable results and then obviously budget for it and keep it rolling.

Council Member Wall. And I think that we have danced a little bit through the years. It looks like we haven't spent 2025 either.

Correct, correct.

So, I mean, there's quite a bit of money banked for this.

That's a yes.

I think we have good direction for how we will proceed with preparing the resolutions for preliminary budget and levy approval in this particular space. With that, I think I'll invite Jenna up to talk about council communications.

Thank you, Erin. Mayor, council president, council members, back with you today to pick up the conversation in regards to, started an email communication and just kind of covers a variety of things, but this slide on why policy covers some of the conversation that has been had. Really the goal through a potential policy is not to create barriers for the council, rather it's to give the mayor and council more tools and opportunities to connect with our residents. but also a policy allows us to establish those expectations upfront rather than making decisions communication by communication, right? So that clarity through a potential policy. So I think it's also important to note, this was a question that came up the last time and I didn't have the opportunity to address it. We are currently in a contract that is to come due near the end of November this year, so it is a great time to be having this conversation in addition to interest by some of you just in terms of a tool or opportunity in this space. Interestingly, this is not always the case, but the email tool is actually, the technology is actually the easier part. I think as we talk about this, it's more pieces of the policy and ultimately moving this forward. So within, you know, why policy and I won't read each of these bullets but really gets into some definition of how you all as an elected body communicate and connect with our residents individually and collectively as well as how this policy kind of sets direction also for staff in a collective way, ensuring that there's flexibility within that framework because we know both community interests and desires change as well as emerging technology is constantly out there, which I think is part of the conversation you all had the last go around as well. And then just looking at how any tool that we were to use adds and builds to what you're doing and doesn't intend to take away. So with that, and this is not meant to be exhaustive, but just in terms of what potentially this policy could address, lists and contact information, so we know that that is an important piece to consider, especially if we're talking about the opt-in versus acquisition of voter information. Roles and approval processes, again, clarity for you all as well as for city teammates and the community, right? Because we know many times you were asked, well, why not this or why not that or why this? And being able to answer to that. Privacy data practices and record retention. A little offshoot there is as we were prepping for the rescheduled fireworks, and asking community members for their phone numbers. We specifically didn't ask for names. Not fully sure if we would end up getting a records request and not wanting to unintentionally disclose those, as well as just the overall use of city resources. So again, while not a completely exhaustive list, these are potential areas that could be addressed within a specific policy. And then there was a request in the last meeting about what the staff recommendation was or would be. Our recommendation at this point is to move forward with Mailchimp as the tool as shared in the last meeting. That expense would be approximately $9,300. That tool does not have a set up fee by the provider. It would then allow, based on our current investment, up to around $5,700 to use to promote that opt-in email or could be used to promote a variety of things, whether it's your council community forums, other engagement initiatives, etc., The tool could be used for a year or two years. At any point, we could look at changing the tool, essentially just providing a longer runway in which to have community conversations and to allow you all to have conversations around the policy and just mechanics. I will share, we talked to our colleagues in Burnsville. Using IndiGov, one of the tools we've talked about, they were previously a Granicus user, which of the same tool we're using right now. So IndiGov was acquired by Granicus, so they did make that shift. Notable is they are only using their opt-in emails right now. They have not made the decision to use the voter information. That's something that they're currently having conversations on. So that was a helpful conversation just as far as how they've been walking forward with it, but knowing that they have the options. And again, potentially having a wider, longer runway to have community conversations in regards to that opt-in piece versus the acquisition. And also, if we have the opportunity to build in our, build that opt in list, recognizing not everyone is currently registered to vote. So whether that's our under 18 population, um, or those who are currently unregistered residents, um, who are eligible to be registered, uh, and historically, um, those being in some of our underrepresented populations. So, I think you might have seen it just as a point of reference and it's not meant to be the end-all be-all with a short runway that we did have to encourage community members to sign up for the opt-in text messaging. We had over 400 for the fireworks. I thought that was a positive level of response in terms of trying that. Ultimately, as I think indicated by City Administrator Zelms and Deputy City Administrator Parrish, in terms of what we're looking at with budget, any of these things are possible. So intended just to come back with this information and conversation both around the potential policy piece to this as well as more specifics on potential tool and recommendation.

Mayor Norton.

Yeah, needless to say, I'm disappointed in the recommendation. I've used Mailchimp for years with other organizations. It does require people to sign up, and that's been our problem. I also think it's, I personally feel, it's inappropriate to create a policy for elected officials on how they use their own email. I get it if they're using you for communication, and that's where I think the division has happened in our discussion. My need as a mayor to communicate with people isn't necessarily to give it to you. It's to be able to do it myself. And we don't have a tool that allows me to be able to communicate with my constituency, which is what Indiegob was offering. And they have many different ways you can use their tool. It's not a one size fits all thing. It has many different options with input and output and all sorts of stuff. Mailchimp is not that way. And I don't ever expect you to send out emails to my constituents when I'm going to hold a town hall or when we're holding an event. I can do that myself if I have access. I don't have access. We have done an opt-in for my newsletter. We have done an opt-in for many things. I have about 8,000 people on my Facebook account. The algorithms don't get to those 8,000 people. We have put it out there for years. We have a very small N when you have 126 or 7,000 people live in this community reaching a couple hundred isn't helpful and for Anyone who wanted to participate in the other type of option rather than trying to collect emails and put them in a little database to communicate with people it allows them to reach people in their own ward and And it can be limited to people in just their own ward. And it doesn't include having to communicate with you to do it. And if they don't want to use it, they don't have to, right? But MailChimp is a very clumsy way to communicate with a small number of people. That's the problem. You communicate with 400 really excited people about getting 4th of July information. Not every council member is able to offer that. And I think it will not allow us the broad depth and breadth of conversation with our constituents we need. ads in the paper don't work any longer, the algorithms on social media make it difficult to reach anyone, and again, just the other day after the event we held the other night, I had people saying I had no idea that was going on, and you did help push things out, I pushed things out, people aren't seeing it, because social media just doesn't work anymore in a way that is terribly useful. So I'm disappointed in this, and I don't think it'll be the answer to what we've been looking for.

Council Member Miller.

Yeah, I'll just agree with some of the themes that Mayor Norton is talking about of a more robust modern communications tool. I think that there are many ways to do that. I'm curious about the Mailchimp option. What sort of granularity could we expect from that? Is it going to be that somebody could sign up for what part of the city they live in, what ward they're in? or is it just, I'm interested in this topic and I have to sign up by topic, whether that's a council member's newsletter, the mayor's newsletter, some other city theme of service, events, how would that work?

Councilmember, thank you for the question. I think we can set it up in a variety of ways. I think some of it still comes back to the policy conversation. That includes if folks are signing up for their specific elected official, their ward representative that is really driven by you as this decision-making body. I think we know general city emails will not do very well. There's So back to that question, there's a variety of different ways that we can approach that and I think some of it as well as learning and learning from how the community engages with the information that we have, monitoring the clicks that happen. I do think it's important to note we have not done and I don't say this in opposition to anything that the mayor has said, neglected to mention, I mean, we put around $100 to boost the information around the text messaging. That's not to say that's what drove us to the 400. I can tell you early in my tenure, we were putting money behind ads to encourage folks to like the city Facebook page. We haven't done that in a long time. So I will also say there, We have not fully optimized our ability to do targeted outreach, whether opt-in or through events. So that's where I mention of that $5,700 budget, if you all wanted to commit to promoting by way of boosted social media ads, any of your counselor community forums, that has not been a, typical practice we have done in the past so um i would say that is also probably part of the opt-in is identifying what types of emails we would like to send and doing some targeted marketing with investment behind it okay so speaking of opt-in a question related to the text message for fireworks what happens to that list now that the event has happened it will be discarded and folks could also opt in. We probably are opt out. We had probably 15 folks that after, even though we said we won't use it again or provide it to a third party that has sunsetted. Partly we said that because we did not have a longterm strategy. We wanted to test the tool and try it. We also with emergency management are seeing if our code rest code red system could do something similar. We weren't able to get to that point ahead of the rescheduled fireworks. That text tool was the same that the Rochester Downtown Alliance uses for Thursdays. That said, if we wanted to develop a text message strategy in addition to this email strategy, it is something that we could explore.

Well, I guess that brings up a concern of mine of like how many times do people have to opt in if they're indicating they're interested in real time updates? I mean, there may very well be people who opted into the text messages and now thinks they're going to hear about other important community events, right? So I just I don't want us to create this other system that's so fragmented that every new topic or new area, somebody has to opt in again to receive communications from the city and that there's one system for text messages and a different system for email. I feel like we need a robust, integrated approach, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it at the policy level. I'll say what I find appealing about IndieGov is that it feels like a thoughtful product already developed, not a fragmented MailChimp and text messaging that RDA uses and a mail strategy, right? Those feel quite fragmented. And I worry that that doesn't allow us to, I guess, reach people in the ways that they want to be reached every time there's a new format of email, text, physical mail, type of project or event, there's gonna be a am I opted in or not kind of question and it feels a bit disjointed at least as far as I'm understanding it right now. And I would be worried about a communication tool like MailChimp where it's just you're either on this list or not and it feels too broad, right? What I heard about IndiGov was that geographic context is important. We hear from people that either wanted to be included in a neighborhood information meeting and were outside of that boundary that's set by resource limits of mailing physical postcards. We hear about it in assessments. People are not getting information that they want to receive at the time that feels contextual and it's often in a geographic area that people want to hear about things that are going on. I'm just not convinced at this point that MailChimp offers us either that at outset or gets us to a better version of that.

I'm going to agree with the themes that both Councilmember Miller and Mayor Norton have brought up. And what it feels like to me is we're talking tactics. We're talking Mailchimp versus Indigov. And what I want to see is a robust overall social media strategy. This is the world we live in. I don't know it. I expect our city communication team to really dig in. I suspect in between Mailchimp, which I think is somewhat antiquated as well, and Indigov, there are a lot of other tools and strategies that we can look at. But it is, we need to reach out, we need to have the ability to target, The mayor's event the other day, amazing event, and four of us, four of us right here were there in attendance and it, if we would have gotten the word out to people that were interested, that auditorium would have been filled. So I think we're missing something, and our communication, it's not about press releases anymore, it's not about managing the news media, it's about being up on the place where people get their information, which is, For me, Facebook, but apparently Facebook is for over 65. But all of those other platforms out there. And so I'm looking for a really robust plan to respond to that may have some of these tactics and some of these products in them. Council Member Keene.

Yeah, I appreciate you coming with some different ideas. Obviously some people would want more, but I'm glad we're having more of a policy discussion. We're having it in the framework of a budget, because there is spending behind this, and we don't want to have spending going on without any sort of policy or anything behind this. um i think when i hear mayor norton saying like you can't have a policy that constrains me as an elected official i agree with that but i think what we're talking about here is spending and how we're going to support those things um this whole terminology opt-in opt-out without getting too close to it i i really do understand this there's people who get upset when they want to know something about emergency management and we start telling them about a bunch of other things i think people want to protect their privacy that way So I think it's good to have this discussion. I think in some ways, I think some sort of pilot in the future might be the way to address some of these things and see it. But I also see that this isn't a matter of how the city communicates it. It's the city communication, but it's also then how elected officials communicate and how they choose to do it. And everybody chooses to do an elected job differently. So I want to be careful that there doesn't become this sort of like, I don't think you're gonna create expectations, but this idea that two people do their job one way, so everybody else should do it that way too. And I do worry about that when I'm listening to these discussions. I'm much more comfortable than some of my peers saying, I can tell you something about something's going on, but I'm gonna refer you to communications with the city pretty quickly and not try to become the clearing house for information.

Council Member Miller.

Yeah, I appreciate that point. I would just build on it in the way that anchoring it to our travel and training budget. We all have equal access to an amount of money whether we use it or not, if I go to two conferences, it doesn't mean anybody else has to, right? But it is a resource that's equally available to us. And I think that this is a modern version of that too, how we're communicating and what sort of equal access we have to resources to make sure we're communicating should we choose to do with constituents within a set of boundaries or guidelines.

Council Member Palmer.

RPU sends out a monthly newsletter. Do they know how many people open it?

The digital version?

No, the mail one. I mean, I've had people say, I didn't read it until I got elected, and now I've suddenly started to read it. And so, I mean, how many people get this newsletter, which is expensive to send out? But to me, that's the most effective way of communicating with people is still through mail that they get something personalized to them.

Mr. McCullough?

We send out about 62,000. It matches up our number of unique customers minus those who have subscribed to receive it digitally, which is sent out by email, which is, last I checked, around 1,000 people. The majority of the every other month publication goes out by direct mail six times a year.

Do you know how effective that is?

It's a good question. We do get considerable feedback on that that comes back through our customer service. We also know that some people put it right in the O file and don't look at it at all. So I'd be guessing to answer how many people actually crack open that publication, but it does have a good reach. I would argue the city's publication that goes out once a year has a good reach as well in the same way.

Well, that brings the other questions. What in June, how do you, when we sent out the summer fund or whatever you do, do we have any response that, boy, we have coupon in there or something that people are responding to?

Council member, thanks for the question. We have had different surveys over the course of the last three years that we've put it out. Unfortunately, maybe fortunately, we've had this last year, it was about 150 respondents. To me, in some ways, it's potentially a small number because folks are happy with it and they don't necessarily have Other feedback on it, we do anecdotally know Accessible Rec had highlighted one of their adaptable bikes and numbers went through the roof in terms of requests. We've heard that across other departments as well of an uptick in response that they've gotten after that has gone out. I think you're all aware due to, thanks in large part to the contingency funding approved for Park and Rec, we are now doing a fall winter. About eight of those pages will be park and rec and that will also provide an opportunity for other city departments to get timely information in there. So we're eager to hear the feedback on having a secondary publication yet this year. So overall I would say there's been positive response but I can't say it's been 1,000 survey responses that have cemented that for us.

And how many of those do you send out approximately?

It's to every residential home, so it's like around 44 to 46,000 mailboxes. That's not business, it's just residential.

In the survey coming up, Ms. Elms, did we ask on the survey how would you like to get your information from the city?

COUNCILMEMBER, COUNCIL PRESIDENT, YES, WE DID ASK SOME QUESTIONS AND I DON'T REMEMBER THEM OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD BUT THERE WERE ALSO, WE UTILIZED THE EXTRA QUESTIONS THAT WE HAD TO ASK PEOPLE WHAT DO THEY WANT TO, LIKE WHAT ARE THE THINGS THAT THEY WANT TO TALK TO THEIR COUNCILMEMBER ABOUT, THOSE KINDS OF THINGS. SO WE DID TRY TO DELVE INTO THIS A LITTLE BIT IN THE COMMUNITY SURVEY. I CAN'T REMEMBER THE EXACT QUESTIONS. NO ONE CAN REMEMBER. But we did ask more about what do they want to hear about? What are the ways that they want to be engaged with etc? And I would just point out from a staff perspective This is really a question of when we hear should should city taxpayer dollars be paying for constituency work I think is the real question that I have and that I need to have policy discussion with the City Council about because that's a very significant change from how we've been doing business as the city of Rochester and if If one person wants to use dollars one way versus another way, we do need some guardrails around that. And that's something that I've talked to the city attorney about, not because we want to control what the council does, but because we want to protect the city of Rochester from any inadvertent thing. And I would say the secondary question of if folks don't like to get the emergency management email when they want the fun summer event email, and we're opting everyone in through buying voter data, that becomes a question of the strategy for how we're communicating as a city as well. just like when someone sees a government truck, they think it's the city, even if it's the county or it's the state, but also if someone sees a truck with a logo on it, they think that's the city, whether that's RPU, sewer, parks, et cetera, they associate that with the city of Rochester. So it is a very important policy conversation to have if we're gonna make a significant change like that, because it impacts all of you.

I would say it sounds like we're having like three or four conversations here. There is, you know, the overall communications from the city and whether it is social media focused or or Paper and and publication focus, I would suspect that you will be looking at that and continuing to look at the balance there. And I know a lot of a lot of departments are moving more to social media, looking at your overall budget. Should we be looking at a. increase in social media communications and a decrease in the traditional types of communication. So that's one discussion. Administrator Zelms, of course, the constituent and the guardrails and and legal requirements that we should, legal and ethical guidelines that we should have, I think is another conversation. And it seemed there was a third one in there that we seem to be discussing.

Council President, I mean just to the timing, both budget as well as where we're at with our current contract, it would be helpful to know if the collective council, even if we were to potentially diverge, the city does need to identify a tool that we will use moving forward. So if there was a strong feeling by the elected body to move forward with one tool or another, specifically if we might be looking at One or two tools that would be helpful at this point given that impending Deadline date in November and I've heard a mix of some Wanting to move forward if it was specific elected officials who chose to opt in to the IndyGov platform and I haven't gotten a clear sense of Direction from the collective Councilmember Doering you look like you're ready to say something.

Go ahead. I

I would prefer to go with the IndieGov platform. I agree with the sentiments that the MailChimp is too limited in scope. That's based off other professional experiences I've had. I would also argue about the opt-in component of it rather than sending larger amounts of email. I talk with many constituents who will never opt in, but also then complain that they don't know the information. So it's a puzzling strategy for me to wrap my head around. I am kind of curious. So we do have a number of opt-in communications. And if you can give me the numbers about what people are opting into. So the mayor's newsletter is one. I would love to know how many people are opting into that. uh board and commission agenda updates how many people are opting into uh city council updates how many people are opting into the uh permit updates i mean there's so many different opt-in categories that it's overwhelming if you want to if you want to stay on top of everything i think there's just way too many things to have to opt into to get information so kind of agreeing with council member miller's point there

Your Honor, just without going through each question, I did send you an email with the community survey questions in this space, and that will be presented to you in November.

I think we're ready to move on.

I don't think she got the directions.

No direction sometimes is direction.

It's direction that we're gonna keep moving forward. And that future is the future and there's plenty of time to keep talking about this forever. So I just was missing a little bit of clarity last time. I wanted to provide another opportunity to understand if I don't think there was general support to move forward with doing something with the first set of discussions, but I wanted to understand if I'm supposed to be doing something there. Now there's also, again, not any reason you can't have this discussion in the future when you have a different who maybe doesn't have eight years of experience with the budget, but did just want to sort of succinctly put what was discussed on August 24th. I believe those four things were generally discussed, and I didn't feel like we were making any changes, but I... Mayor Norton.

Thank you. I did put together a PowerPoint presentation that I'm modifying to try to help you out. I presented to the Golden K Qantas about what my initiatives have been kind of over the last eight years, and then I focused in on this year, where my money has been spent that might be Easier to understand, you can always find out from finance, but it's a little hard to figure out what the focus was when you just look at line items. So I'm happy to share that with you this next week in your box. It might help you understand where the mayor's budget goes. So I'll provide that. You didn't ask for a presentation, so I don't have it done yet, but I can put the slide presentation that's updated in your boxes.

I'll say there are two, maybe three of the items that are separated currently that I'm interested and wonder if there is a mayor council budget, it would be easier and more flexible. And one of them is Training and travel as a council member Miller mentioned earlier that if if we have 1 training and travel budget, we don't necessarily if 1 council member goes over their limit, there's the, there is the, the overall budget. Um, the other 1 is staffing. Uh, we've had some. Interest, including myself of, uh. Council staffing, and so if there is joint staffing, if if staff can can, uh. can facilitate that better. And then the other one is the mayor's initiatives. And I do believe that we as a council, regardless of who the mayor is, that we should have some oversight on what those initiatives are and what the 30,000 that are spent on those initiatives that just as As the mayor appoints boards and commissioners, the council then approves those appointments. And so it's, on that one, it's a checks and balances piece for me. Other thoughts?

I'll just comment on the, I understand the simplicity of having the one council travel budget or the one, we went through a thing of the pendulum swings back and forth here that we wanted to get control so that we didn't have certain member spending, double the allotment and all that stuff, but I have no big problem with switching it back to being one budget for the seven council members for travel and things like that. I think we have in the past seen potentially misuse of that, but I think if there's any expense or problem with doing it, it would be just as easy to take it apart. You'd get away from then those times when you have someone come in with a request to council to spend $200 OVER TO GO TO A DIFFERENT THING SO IT MIGHT BE HELPFUL THAT WAY BUT I DON'T KNOW IF THERE'S A BIG PROBLEM THAT WE'RE SOLVING THROUGH THAT. BUT I WOULD SUPPORT IT.

I DON'T SEE A PROBLEM.

I DON'T SEE A PROBLEM WITH THAT EITHER. ON THE MAYOR'S INITIATIVES I THINK WHAT I WOULD LOOK TO IS TO SEE HOW WE MIGHT BETTER COLLABORATE ON THESE INITIATIVES. and make sure they're in alignment with the Council, because I even think of the past, the Rochester Vision 2050 project that required additional funding that the Council came to approve for that project. So I hear the spirit of what Council President Shubring is saying of how we make these initiatives more integral to the city operation, to the elected body, and help people see us as working together. which I appreciate how the mayor shows up at every event, reads every proclamation, is the face of the city. And yet sometimes people don't know that there are other roles within the elected body and how initiatives get carried forward. And I think bringing council in earlier could actually help those initiatives be even more successful in the future. So that's where I would be supportive of a change to process to just collaboration, perhaps. I mean, I think the way that boards and commissions are recommended membership by the mayor and then deliberated if necessary and authorized and approved by the council, I think it would take a little more work to figure out what that process is. But I would love to see how the council and the mayor's office better collaborate. And on the staffing point, I mean, I think it goes back to the question of communications of the mayor's role has long been the elevated face of the city needs additional communication. And I think the roles are evolving and expectations are different in a modern society of social media and other communications forms. And I feel a lack of support from the staffing level and being able to communicate as effectively as I think we could. And when I see other cities and how their council members are supported by staff resources for communications, for policy development, name the issue. It is a problem that I wrestle with in this role is how to be more effective in the role. And I think that the staffing shared equally and equitably can be a way of elevating the office of the council and making us more effective.

Mayor Norton.

Yeah, thank you. I always find this interesting, and this started, so let me just give you a tiny bit of history. When I took the job as mayor, there was about $17,000, $18,000 that was given to the former mayor, and it went into his personal funds. It went into his pocket. And then he could spend it any way he wanted. When I became mayor, I very much objected to that, having been an elected official for as long as I had, that that is not good use of government money. And I talked to Dale, and we put a stop to that immediately. And within a year or so, we increased the amount. It hadn't gone up for a long time, and we also combined some funding. Early on, well, when a mayor runs, I ran on like five goals. And so when I started, that's where I spent my money on those five goals, whether the council wanted them or not. They were my goals. The community voted 70% in support of that. So they supported the five goals that I ran on. So I felt very comfortable in spending that. The amount went up, I think, in the third year, maybe to roughly $30,000 at that time. And I tried involving, in those first years, the council. What happened was... I actually spent $5,000 on someone videotaping each council member on a move with the mayor initiative. Only two took me up on it. They didn't want to do that. So my initiative isn't necessarily, I don't think it should be stopped by a council who doesn't want to participate. I would say I agree with you that having partnerships is very positive, but if a council doesn't want to participate, that doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to do a citywide initiative on healthy living in America's city for health, which has been my focus for eight years. I'm happy to share more of those, but I just want to be careful that we don't start. And this happened when we upped it from, I don't know, 17 or 20,000 up to 30. We literally spent more time speaking about $30,000 in the mayor's budget than we spent on any other item in the budget. And I feel like we're going down that path again. It's $30,000 and, and. A mayor has to do things by the law. It has to be spent in very specific ways by the law. So it's not, I'm not giving money to nonprofits like used to happen. I'm not, you know, and that's all stopped. So I just want to put that in perspective. It's changed a lot since I became mayor. I think it's more accountable. It goes through, everything goes through finance. And I'm happy to, and I think it's a great idea to share initiatives because that's how you move people. HEALTHY COMMUNITY OUT FURTHER THAN JUST ONE PERSON STRUGGLING TO TRY TO DO IT BY THEMSELVES. BUT IF THE COMMUNITY, IF THE COUNCIL DOESN'T ALL WANT TO PARTICIPATE BECAUSE THEY HAVE OTHER JOBS OR THEY'RE BUSY, I DON'T THINK THAT SHOULD LIMIT THE MAYOR EITHER. SO I JUST PUT THAT OUT THERE.

COUNCIL MEMBER PALMER.

WELL, FROM MY PERSPECTIVE, THE MAYOR'S JOB IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THAN THE CITY COUNCIL MEMBER'S JOB. AND EVERY DOLLAR SHE SPENDS SHOWS UP IN OUR BUDGET OR THE FIRST MEDIUM OF EVERY MONTH WE FIND OUT WHAT SHE'S SPENDING IT ON. I mean, it's raining right now, and some people are blaming the mayor for that. They're not blaming the city council for that, and it's embarrassing that people put all that blame on her. She gets very little credit, unbelievable as it sounds. But I think that that job is a completely different job. I think that the budget's completely different. She's going to represent the city of Rochester at a lot of different events that she goes to. That traveling is not fun and she does it because she believes in doing that for us. And so I would prefer to say those things be separated. I don't know staffing what you're looking for. I've not needed to have staffing, but maybe other people do. And so that's just my watching the mayor for eight years and watching other mayors. I don't think Ardell did anything wrong and I don't think Dewey Day did anything wrong. It's just the way that things were done when they were done.

Am I up, Mr. President?

Go ahead, Councilmember.

I like to be called on.

Councilmember Fredericks, go ahead.

Thank you. You're elected as a elected official for who you are and what you do, and I don't like to see us kind of all become one. I like to see the individuality within the laws and the rules and all that, of course. And, you know, you're trusted by the community to do a job. You should be allowed to do it in the way that you presented you're going to do it. And I think you've done a good job of that the last eight years. and it should continue that way. I like having that face that stands on their own two feet. It's good. I don't like to get into anything that looks anything like micromanaging. I don't like that. I like everybody that's elected to be able to do their job freely, and I like our city staff that are hired to do their jobs to be able to do it as well.

I'm just gonna say, and this is certainly not about our current mayor. All of the initiatives that she has promoted and done are wonderful and great initiatives. But if you put it into context, and I agree, 30K is not a lot of funds, but if any of us have an initiative that we wanna bring forward, There has to be two of us, which I don't disagree with, but we bring it to this body, and it could be $2,000, it could be $5,000, and we debate it. So it's not micromanaging to have some oversight, and I don't think... I agree that we can look back and see where those initiatives are. And I have looked at them. I think they're all great initiatives. I have no concerns about a future mayor's initiatives. But just as when we have the boards and commissions on our consent agenda, mayor's initiatives should be on our agenda for us to have some oversight to that. Any other thoughts on this one? Go ahead, Council Member Keene.

Again, we're having a different, I mean, this is kind of the closing out the budget stuff here as far as any changes to Mayor's Council budget. I'd see these going forward. I don't know if staff has any concern with combining Council travel and training budgets. Like I said, I think I'm comfortable with it. As far as the changes coming with new Mayor, I think right now it would be inappropriate for us to be making big changes with that, but I think that's something that could be something discussed into the future.

So just for clarity, what I'm hearing is a future discussion about or us bringing something about the current travel policy where it's apportioned divided by seven, taking that away and maybe having it be just to just, you know, we give you updates on how much has been spent or maybe if you'd we could create a process where you have the discussion about things you're interested in going to and we could come back with, we think that would be within budget if everybody went to those things. It's not really a budget, it's really more of a policy conversation.

And on that note.

And you could have that about mayor's initiatives too.

Yeah, and on that note, Administrator Zelms, and maybe this is a kind of combined future study session discussion, the boards and commissions have come up and kind of what what do we expect from boards and commissions and then also I think about the boards and commissions that we all serve on come this January I will make some recommendations this council will make some appointments to boards and commissions and so what is the what is the process for that there is some requirements on some commissions. For example, the council president is required to serve on the airports commission. Is that something that we can have other council members serve on so that we have some more flexibility in those appointments? So I think a discussion, council boards and commissions, boards and commissions, and maybe continuing on This discussion might be a good. Topic if others agree.

Council member Miller just briefly, I would support that additional conversation.

I would also support additional conversation. I, I do like the idea of the training and travel combined. Um, I am not at all concerned about mayor initiatives and seeing more oversight on that at this point, but further confirmation conversation is great. Um, the staffing question, I don't know if that's an appropriate conversation to have for the supplemental budget. So, uh, it'd be interesting to see if there's things that we can implement to see if that staffing is is, uh.

is necessary and whether that's through policy or or whatever at this point so there's my input okay anything else on supplemental but just quickly i did want to point out because last year we came to not the 11th hour but maybe the ninth hour and um pulled off uh the fourth of july beyond the fireworks and then we pulled off not very much fireworks, and then we breeded fireworks. So the fireworks are funded in the budget. They've always been funded in the budget. We did not reduce the $20,000 of public music, but again, fireworks and entertainment activities isn't really public music per se. Are you okay if we use the process that we had identified for looking at community experience, et cetera, to understand how do we put... Do we want to just have fireworks? It seemed like it went pretty well on last Friday. But then again, last Friday isn't the 4th of July. So there could be additional discussion about whether or not there's any ability to adjust dates for other events, combine events. But I don't think we're necessarily ready to have that with some different amount of funding. Council Member Doering.

Yeah, can you remind me what the... what the deal was made with the vendor because of the postponed, uh, 4th of July.

So the fireworks vendor provided the replacement fireworks show for over the labor day weekend on that Friday and, um, which included additional fireworks and were able to do next year's fireworks, I believe. And I'm hoping Jenna is still here with an additional, um, I believe they also offered us either a discount or additional fireworks next year, a larger show, if you will.

Council Member, City Administrator Zelms is correct. It was approximately $10,000 or 500 shells of folks and other fireworks that were added to the September 9th show and the offer from the vendor if we were to move forward with them next year is that we could either reduce the city's expense and still provide a $36,000 show for essentially 26 or we can experience what we did on September 9th of getting an additional 10,000 on top of our current investment.

Okay, thank you. That's helpful for me as I think about this item. I would love to see the additional 20,000 for a limited program remain in the budget for the 4th of July celebration.

And it is in the current budget. I just want to be clear. I just don't know who will provide that and I don't know that we can determine that before September 21st or even necessarily the end of the year.

Council Member Wall.

I also support that and would parrot council member Palmer's enthusiasm for what we did on July 4th, even though the fireworks didn't quite come off that the experience Rochester did a very fine job. And I would love to see that we have a community event festival that we can come together and would also encourage. Further conversation with another entity that we might draw closer and use combined funds to do something even better. Since they're so close to 1 another in timing council member Miller.

Yeah, I'd support keeping the fireworks in and taking advantage of the opportunities that we're still in a place where the vendor feels a need to maintain the relationship. So I think we can take advantage of that definitely in 2027. I would love further discussion about other events that we're supporting and how they are happening in time with each other and also the experience Rochester conversation about potential events and festivals department and programming and activation that they're thinking about. I mean, I think some of our funding that has long gone to single entities could be better addressed through an RFP, imagining what is an expression of celebrating Rochester and when that happens in the summer. So I think additional conversation would be appropriate in that.

Council Member Palmer.

I agree that Experience Rochester did a phenomenally good job on the 4th of July, especially a short period of time. What I'm disappointed in, though, is the failure of the fireworks. I mean, we're getting free fireworks, we're getting discount. I don't know if that's worthy to do because I don't know we did a really good job of figuring out what went wrong and who was responsible, but I don't think anybody in the city of Rochester said, yeah, we were responsible and we should have had the fireworks be better. I don't know if it was the fire department, the police department, the music department, Who is in charge of the fireworks and why did they not go off?

Are you asking me that question or is that a statement? We have done a deep dive on that and there is a reason that they used a different firing device for the makeup fireworks and that type of thing. We had a very long conversation with the fireworks vendor and clarified what the issue was. Ultimately, they should... They should have made the call earlier in the day. They continued to tell us that they would be able to put the fireworks off, and they weren't able to put the fireworks off. Now, should we have made that call for them? This was a very different experience than what we've had with this vendor in the past. And ultimately, the weather also didn't do us any favors in how the weather came in at the time that it did after it was dark, et cetera. But yeah, in the past when we've made the call to move forward with the fireworks and they've said that they can do that, they've been able to deliver. So I think it was really like a comedy of errors, not very comedic in the end, but ultimately we will make the decision if we don't think that they can deliver in the future, we will make the decision to not move forward and to use the rain date.

Council Member Miller.

Yeah, I think we can give them another chance. And I would just note as well, I think the staff have done a good job in bringing a text message solution even for a specific event that people can sign up for to get distributed communication if something changes. That was clearly a missing element of this year's experience. And I think we learned the lesson and are making improvements. Whether that's exactly the same solution for 2027 or not, I think that that is a good addition TO A PUBLIC EVENT THAT CAN BE CHANGED BY WEATHER AND SHORT NOTICE.

ANYTHING ELSE ON THE SUPPLEMENTAL BUDGET?

NOT UNLESS YOU HAVE ANYTHING.

COUNCIL MEMBERS, I SEE NOTHING. WE WILL TAKE A SIX-MINUTE BREAK. Fee analysis.

Thank you, Council President, Council Member, Mayor Norton.

Yes, this evening I put together some payment card processing fee analysis over the last several months, and I wanted to share the insights that I found out. The insights that I found out with you. Sounds like the council has some interest in moving forward. Just let you know what that would look like going forward at the same time. I do have about 17 slides. Several of them kind of connect, so I'll be going through it relatively quick. I'm not going to read this verbatim, but I just wanted to say I think the city's unique in that we do offer a lot of services and we touch a lot of things. Everything between golf, parks and rec, transit heavily in the parking, several areas and stuff too. So as we go through this and kind of look at some of the complexities of this, that's something to keep in mind. And then you add on the technology side of things on what's convenient for people to be able to purchase those items. You just had a kind of a... quick discussion on technology and how it can be used and how quickly it changes at the same time too. So with that, Just wanted to give you kind of a quick look at the current payment card acceptance structure that we have. So right now we have 21 merchant IDs through six different financial institutions. I'll show you kind of a spreadsheet on how my mind works after. But anyway, so the 21 merchant IDs, basically those are the locations at which you can go purchase a service or a product the city is offering. Now, there might be more than one terminal there, so there might be several, but that's still considered one merchant ID. The MIDs are a unique number. They're not governed by federal government or anything like that. So it's depending on the payment processor that you go through. And the MIDs identify, again, the city, the payment network that is used to track, route, and settle payment transactions. And then again, there's a list of those number of different services within the city that currently accept payment cards. So with that too, there's a number of different ones. Credit card, charge cards, debit, PayPal, microtransgen, fare, all those up there you can see. And then we also have, in addition to those currently non-charged ones, we have cash, check, money orders. We have ACH, but we don't, use that very often for the sake that we receive a lot of banking information that comes into us. And so if we really open that up without somebody telling us where the money's coming from or who it is for, it would take a lot of time and effort on our part to figure out why did so-and-so send me $50 along with so many other people without us knowing that it's coming in ahead of time. And then I did put down there to maybe with our new ERP system That might be something that we can visit We'll work with both Fargo as we go ahead and do our new ERP system in certain areas and stuff, too so we're gonna see if there's the opportunity there to take a look at and then the last one too is the auto pay with checking our savings account and Unlike our friends at our PU. We only have one set up like that. So it's not like A lot of our bills might be auto pay because you know it's coming out and we know who you are and so on and so forth. However, we only have Minnesota Energy at this time taking out of that one. So that's just kind of gives you a lot of people either use the top one for whatever service or cash or check are still highly used. Now, didn't expect everybody to take a look and read this, but I just wanted to kind of take you down on what this looks like. So you can see the 21 merchant IDs on the left-hand side, all listed out. And then a couple of different things here. If you move from left to right, you go up to, that location in the city, purchase whatever it is you're going to buy at that time. And then you go through a payment gateway. It might be Clover. It might be one of those others that's listed there in the third column. And then you can see that the payment processor is kind of a little bit of the brains behind that portion of it that talk to the acquiring bank, the acquiring bank. is who my predecessor set some of these up with at the time too. And a lot of these have changed since his time. And I can say it's not easy trying to get his name off of these at the same time too. It's been a lot of my time spent. But anyways, we go through like associated bank and that's where we get our statements from a lot of times too. So it seems like it would be a quick and easy one-stop shop, but we'll get that. And then goes onto the payment network. And as I mentioned in there, see later on, too. There's a lot of, obviously, laws and regulations and everything that the payment networks have to go through. And then you have the issuing bank. We can accept it or decline it. There's a big relationship between the... And so the issuing banks are those large banks, you know, the multi-billion dollar banks that you see, Citibank and others that actually distribute the credit card. So there's a lot of... Relationship between the the network and the bank off on the two far right columns so If you take a look obviously you're gonna see that the first 15 are in dark gray so we can get a consolidated statement on that The next one is a single statement basically and then the third section I will say is with parks and rec and golf and The fourth one you can see is Logis. And really what that is, is if somebody's paying for an assessment, that's the only thing that they can buy through that particular merchant ID right there. And then the fifth one would be the payment for bus passes, the GenPay. And then the last one is Stripe. Stripe is something new and I think that it just got implemented this year over at the library. And so when you add up, you go down like the payment gateway, or the payment processor and then the issuing bank, there's like over 18 different kind of combinations in there on who controls what. And that's really what we're finding out as I go through this to untangle it, to say, hey, what are our options if we wanted to do a surcharge or convenience fee or processing fee or what is it? So that's kind of been the challenge going forward. So I listed them, as you can see, one through five, kind of going back as I categorized them before. and if you go on the far right hand side of these and this is just for the first six months of 2026 you can see what the average is for each of those so associated bank that has the largest transactional volume in there that's like at 4.9 percent and again some of these i pulled were at 5.2 every month it changes and you'll see why in a second but you'll be might be at 5.2 or you might be at 4.8 so this is what the average was And then you can take a look at further down at the 4.86%. That's the overall average of the processing fee that the city is paying once we receive those credit card statements, if that makes sense. That the city is paying, yes. So one of those credit card statements, take a look at the number one, if you will, that had the 15 merchant IDs on it. So that was about $600,000 in transactions submitted. With that, there were $29,000 in fees that we paid, that the city paid. So the total process amount was $565,000. This is where it gets interesting because there's a little over 31,000 transactions that took place just with those 15 merchant IDs. Within there, if you go through the statement that we get, 122 different interchange, Fees 63 different fees is what they call them then there's a service fees and those four other program fees so of that there's 254 different fees that we get charged depending on the credit card debit card type of card and that customers use. And so we don't have any control over the fees. It's all done, like I said, on that far right-hand side between the big banks and the network and stuff like that. But those are the fees that get charged to the city, so a convenience fee, if you will, so people can buy their product that way. And then on the bottom, there's always a page full of stuff that, oh, by the way, we're having promotional things and stuff that, again, doesn't really mean a whole lot to us. So taking a look at this there are two state statutes that we've been focusing on and I'm not going to go into detail about these but you can see one talks about the first one credit card debit card or all other forms of electronic or wire fund transfers known as a service charge and then there's a second one down there too that talks about a surcharge and that it shall not exceed 5% and this isn't just true for cities as a lot of merchants that you'll see and

If you hold a minute, Mr. Anderson. Council Member Doering.

Yeah, I was going to wait to the end, but I decided to jump in here. On slide six, so the acquiring bank's average processing rate, why are there two different rates being charged by merchant bank? Why is the parking almost two percentage points higher?

That's just the way that it was set up, and I could not tell you why it's different. Some of it sometimes has to do with the volume, but I'm not sure why it was, to be honest with you.

All right, thanks. Yep.

So those are the again the two statues that we're focusing on on how we can either deflect or pass along the fees to the customer So in talking with Still am but like so if you took number one with the 15 merchant IDs The first thought well shouldn't say the first time but one of the first times I talked to them They said well we can do a two point nine five credit card on credit cards, we call it a surcharge, and it's 1.75, so you're kind of basically playing by their rules. They're telling us what they would allow, what they can do, and what they call it. And one thing I noticed too, she was like, okay, well, you're in Minnesota, so Minnesota allows this. So they're familiar with our statutes and stuff like that. Not that we don't wanna double check, but pretty familiar with that. And so then you can go down to like IPS, which would be the second singular one. Basically when I talked to them, they said, well, we can do, you know, it might be easier if you just add on 25 cents. So instead of $3, it's gonna be $3 and 25 cents after taking a look at our transactions that we had. So that's what they were suggesting. Number three is still in review simply because after several phone calls and a few wrong forms they sent me, I'm still trying to get my predecessor's name off and my name on there, but we're getting close. Number four is the largest one that I was talking about too and what they said with that one. So they have very, it's a very low transactional amount on there, not that it necessarily matters, but they said we allow up to 4.25% and they call it a, A service fee so sounds like there's some wiggle room in there, however, if you go back and take a look to see what their average fee is, I think that was the one that was about 2.72%. So, as we move forward, if we do might want to be just a little careful on where we set that because I don't want to go over something that we know. isn't at 3%. And then the last one, too, was that Gen Fair mobile app. Again, they said, well, we could do, they called it a processing fee, so here, again, you see processing fee, surcharge, various names being used. And they could do up to 6% with a $0.05 fee per transaction. So I just wanted to show you that it's different on who you talk to across the board. It's not a, let's pick up your phone and take care of these first 15 MIDs. One of the things that I noticed too, I'll probably get into it, is like one of the phone calls I had was, so you can go ahead and you can do a surcharge on these. Yes, we can. Okay, after a few more phone calls, can you send that language to me so I can read it? well, okay, it was 2.95, it wasn't three. And then it was only for those that had the Clover device. So, okay, there's a step backwards. So now I gotta go figure out what I can do for all these other ones. The other eight, I guess, basically in there. And then by the way, your Clover devices are old and they need to be updated. So, you know, kind of another step backwards and another thing that we're learning along the way as well. So just wanna let you know that there's a lot of moving parts, I guess, trying to make this consistent across the board, which is our, I would think our goal if we're gonna go down this road.

Mr. Anderson, can you hold? Council Member Miller.

Hearing about the complexity of this process, is there an opportunity to simplify the processing banks that we're working with in this? I mean, I see you're enumerating all these different merchant IDs with at least five acquiring banks. Is there an opportunity to simplify this process around one that's working better or not?

You know, there's probably an opportunity in there to take a look at it. I think there's probably a story behind each one, like PayPal, you know, so they're the ones that... can offer you to do it, to use your card a certain way versus going up to a counter or something like that. That's one thing I considered and am taking a look at, especially when you see what other cities Are able are able to charge, I guess. So if we have to buy something new anyway, might as well dig a little deeper to see if there's something more we can do. That's sure. And that's a conversation. I mean, I've had with myself basically is might as well, because, you know, associated bank is listed for, like, the 1st, 15, but yet they don't cover. everything either that I thought they would. So that's one of the things that turned over.

I think if we can simplify this and get some efficiencies of least making sure it's a consistent experience for if nobody else, the residents who are interfacing with these services and potentially a fee should we choose to implement one. A uniform experience seems like an opportunity here. appreciate the the depth of research you've done and this seems quite complicated and probably just whichever department or time point in time these processors were needed I'm guessing we didn't have a policy probably not and again yeah even the last five years things have changed right

So just quickly throw in a few dollars at this. You've seen this before in a different format before digital accessibility. So you can see, if you can see the cursor going down here, 2025 actuals to the $640,000. That's what was shown to you before during one of our previous budget meetings. And so what I ended up finding out too is everything was stated correctly, however, about 130,000 of that was actually passed through money. So we receded it right into the expense, but we also received it as a revenue that we pay out to Park Mobile. So I took that off there, because we're not gonna double charge or go after money that we already, put out. So the new number would be down in the corner basically is what I kind of wanted to show you with this slide is $511,000. When you take away that the amount for ParkMobile that was a processing one. So taking a look and you can see over here on the bottom to the bank fees account for close to 97%. And then you have a little bit for PayPal and telecheck and things like that as you go across the bottom. So the budget analysis going forward, so this is the same number you can see down here, $511,000, but it's basically broken out with the top part for tax impact and the bottom part for non-tax impact. So the 2025 processing fee will start at the top, $247,000 that you can see for what was actual for the processing fees for the tax impact categories. And then if you take, say you take off 3%, because if you implement a policy that is a 3% surcharge, we'll call it, that would reduce that by 148,000, leaving you with the city paying 99,000. But if like in 2027, we already have 81,000 budgeted, then the shortfall is really only $17,000. and then going down to the non-tax one, doing the same logic, going across, we would actually be above by 35,000, simply because we are budgeting more. It's not that the 3% is over and above what we're receiving, because it's not, we're still leaving about 2% on the table, if you will. but due to what we have in the budget, it would be $35,000 to the good. And so the grand total underneath would still be 17,900. So really instead of the delta going higher because the fees that we were receiving is going higher and then what we're budgeting is staying static, this would bring it down to where we're budgeting more in line. Not to say that we wouldn't want to make a few minor tweaks. We'll probably monitor it next year, but when we go through the 28-29 budget, we might want to take a look again at building inspection services. That might be the same number that they use for a while, but maybe it is something that we have to take a look at. Parking and other ones. I know some of you maybe were involved in this during COVID. They did raise the fee, I think $3 just to cover parking. some of those fees for permits and citations. So I just wanted to, this is aside and above and beyond um anything that we're talking about that's already been taken care of um and then the other question i know that two other questions that were out there too were rogers armored car uh what do we pay them on an annual basis so in 2025 we paid them 17 755 dollars you can see the breakout down there for the three different areas and then the telecheck uh processing fee that we paid to wells fargo gets broken out into three areas and that's uh $1,306, so that's like a quarter of a percent of all of this if you were to add it in there and take a look at it. And then the reason, so that is with Wells Fargo, there's basically a little machine that sits on a person's desk up front. They take the little pile of checks that we have and instead of running them to the bank, they process them through and basically we're done. So those are those two for 2025. And so Bloomington, I do have a copy of their policy that they have along with Duluth. I kinda like Bloomington's, they don't list out the fees because they basically say in their statement too, because of the number of departments that we have, the fees may vary, even though they may try to be consistent, but they may vary. And as you go to pay for something, as they will tell you, if you pay for it with your credit card, you're gonna pay a processing fee and there's gonna be a sign next to it, that's by state law that you have to have Both of those items on there and the person has a chance to say, no, I don't want to use my card before the transaction ever occurs. So they will be notified of it. So I think to Bloomington's point there in their right. But they don't want to put out a, like a 3 and a half where you can see some of these others that are a finite 3%. And I think that goes to. A comment that was made where some of these don't offer all the services that. Rochester has to offer. So maybe they were focusing on a smaller sector, maybe they only offer a smaller sector, or maybe they have one bank that only can take care of the five services that they have. That would be great. So therefore, they're tied in. They can really list it out there easily. And then there's some others down there. I would say the average is around 3%. But you can see some that go up to 3.25. One of them was at 3.5. So... With that, I did talk to the communications team and there's a communications plan that we would do if we were interested in moving forward. A lot of notifications and things of that nature going out there and probably some pre-posting by the areas that you can go ahead and pay for, use your credit card and charge cards at, just to alert people that this would be coming. And then if we did, obviously we would wanna come before the city council with a policy, get that adopted, and then we can start moving on some of these other things. And again, I would suggest that it doesn't have to be an overly technical or burdensome policy. Duluth was probably a half a page. Again, Bloomington's was more of a page, but... just kind of how we got here or why we got here was a lot of it in there as well. But I would say I would want to be specific enough to define the charges, but broad enough to have the latitude where it doesn't define the specific amounts or department. As services may vary, and again, we might get to an area where we feel more comfortable, again, about putting them in there, we could. The finance director has the ability to go ahead and set and adjust as my predecessor did when he negotiated with these banks before, and now I know we're looking at doing a surcharge, but to adjust the fees through the microcontract process based on the council's intent and applicable laws, payment card, network requirements, and processor service agreements. And then still list out there if we're interested in having, okay, how could people pay that would not get a charge? So list out there as far as cash check money order or ACH as options. And then the implementation, there'd obviously be more in the policy than this, but these would be kind of some of the areas, I guess, that seem to make sense. Because if something does move or get tweaked, we did list it in the fee schedule, then that would be a two month process to take it back through the fee schedule and so on and so forth. which could be, I don't want to say burdensome, but you'd be seeing a lot of the fee schedule, I think. With that, questions, comments, direction?

Council Member Palmer.

I just want to clarify, I think what I'm trying to hear is, Are you gonna have one fee for all credit cards, or are we gonna do, for each credit card that we're gonna get, we're gonna charge a different fee for each department? It would be one, so say there's a- Pull 3% for everything, or 3 1⁄2, whatever you- As close as I can get.

Now, some of them, they might be a flat amount. So like that one example that I had was, let's do 25 cents under the $3 thing. That's what they have, and that's what that one would be. What I would try to do with all of them is if we can get the 3% and work with the different things, then that would be 3% is what my... And basically our goal is just to cover the cost of, it's not a moneymaker for the city. Oh, absolutely not a moneymaker for the city. It would just cover the cost. And even at 3%, we're still not covering the cost. So part of my question, if the city's looking to move forward, we could start out with 3% or you could say, 3% sounds good, but 3.5% sounds better if there's an option out there with that. Because you're still leaving over a percent that the city's paying for.

Council Member Wall.

uh... in preparation for this i looked up by and it's about ninety two percent of all credit card usage is for reward cards and so people are earning rewards on using their credit cards and then expecting the whole populace to pay for their use of the credit card so i i would be very much in favor of Charging people for the convenience of using the card if that's what they choose especially since some of them are earning something back and It looks like even Minneapolis going with that two point three five or whatever They're only recovering about half their fees if it's close to the five percent for them as it appears to be for us So I'd be all in favor of this Councilmember Fredericks, why are we not just setting it at the average to cover it?

I?

because there's like that first example I gave you, they're telling me what they can do. They're not giving me like an option. So that 2.95, if I understand your correction correctly.

We can't just have a convenience fee on our bills that covers that. It's just a raw percentage.

It's just a raw percentage if we go through like the surcharge thing that I was showing you. Otherwise, it's just a matter of raising our fees for everything.

My business experience is we took credit cards, lots of them, and we just had a fee that would cover the average of what came through our business a year, and that was just on the bill if they wanted to use a credit card.

Is that wrong? So I think basically, and I don't know who you used or what you used, but did you just raise the rate of the product that you were selling?

If you use a credit card, there's a 4% fee. Ms. Elms, do you want to get closer to your mic?

I think what's getting asked is can we just apply the 3% and we know that we're not going to get the exact same amount from every single customer because if you use a different kind of credit card, they may keep a portion.

I guess I haven't come across where we have the ability just to add it on the bottom.

Let me try to simplify this again. No, I understand. You're saying it's 4.1% across the board or 3.96%, whatever you said in the presentation here. So if you use a credit card, any credit card, period, if it's 3.96%, it covers the average and we're even. Is that not okay? It doesn't seem like that's an option for us. Okay. That's the direct answer I'm looking for.

Just so I'm clear, so we're looking at more the Bloomington model than the Duluth model, right? Where there is a, the fees aren't always the same according to the department, and then you will negotiate those, but the cap is 3%, or that's what you're looking at around 3%. From that standpoint, that seems like a reasonable, uh. Approach to take, and I would be in favor of it. Uh, council member keen.

Um, I think what you communicated to me with all the complexity is that there's going to be outliers and there's going to be if you do the 3% flat, someone's going to say.

Yeah, there's complexity in there, I would say, but I also think that the city is allowed to use kind of the aggregate, so, you know, and I can, I mean.

I know one of the problems that RPU ran into is they tried to simplify down to most bills were in that $100, instead of 3%, they did $3, and the unintended consequence was the really small bills are paying a much higher percent.

So most of these, if you are able to use a percent, then it's simply a percent. Yeah. And they can't.

I mean, when you go through and say, this one uses this, there is a, the reason these things are happening, the reason the library uses one and Parkland uses a different one is because there's a convenience factor here that they're going for. And I'm worried, I wanna make sure we're not making it much more cumbersome to do business with the city.

Right, and that's one thing I noticed here. And if there's other ways to mitigate that, I guess I would take a look at those and see what we can do during this process.

But as an example, I know one of the big ones is parking. I'm not sure if these are repeat regular customers who we really don't want to get 3% from them. We want them to change how they pay so there's no fee. Is that kind of one of our goals? Do we have another payment method that we can offer them that has no fee? Like an RPU, you can do your regular monthly thing. You can do a different direct access to accounts.

Right.

There's no capability like that.

No, for the parking one, I may have been working with Sam on that one, I guess, to be honest with you. He's not here tonight. I wasn't able to make it. Did he just walk through the room? Oh, yes, he is here. I know I can let him give him a microphone, I guess, and let him address that one question. Thanks. Thank you.

So all of our parking meters do accept coins as well. But then we have the fees with Rochester Armored Car, so coins processing for us is not free either.

But what I'm trying to get before we kind of do policy-wise, this is a good thing to do, this is a more fair thing. Are we walking into some unintended consequence of someone going like, this is much more difficult for me to do business with you? Or is it just my $2 charge is now $2.10?

Yeah, it would just tack on the extra $0.10. And actually, if you pay a parking meter today, it would already tack on $0.13. So you'd be paying $2.13. If you pay with ParkMobile, there's actually a $0.40 transaction fee, which he alluded to earlier as a pass-through fee. So that's $2.40 if you pay with ParkMobile.

So maybe I'm not going to get this right, but you feel like we're not going to create this sort of customer frustration, because that's what I'm worried about. It's more difficult to do business with the city.

No, I think it would be, especially if you mentioned earlier, if it's just a 25 cent fee that we tack on, it would be pretty straightforward.

And we are communicating that we're tacking on 25%? Or are we showing our prices somewhere, and then when you get your bill, you see the extra 25?

Well, I can tell you when you walk up to a parking meter today, it will say on there that there's a 13 cent transaction fee.

ramp going in and out of, and they use your credit card to get in and out of there. Is that in the same parking, or is that a different, is that showing up somewhere different?

That is, so yeah, when you say parking, there's like five different parking ones. No, the ramps do not charge that fee. It's just $2.

And that would be new now if we do this. But my question is, is there something coming back saying, you know, when you put your card in and it says what the fee is, does it say $4 and then it becomes $4.20? Or does it say... we're gonna have charges feed you and then you get your card back. I just wanna, I'm looking for the, like someone's going to be surprised by it. And I'm just checking to, I mean, I like the idea of like this not being absorbed into the different organizations, but the reason these things work and why everyone's using them is the convenience factor. and we're getting the benefit of that. People aren't trying to load dollars into machines, and what I'm hearing from this discussion is we're not trying to get them to go there, where RPU really was trying to get them to go away from the credit cards, as opposed to if you continue to use them, you'd pay the fee, but they had better options, where in this case, we're not expecting better options.

I don't want to oversimplify this, but I think that you would end up for almost all transactions other than the parking because it's a different situation, a 3% convenience fee that is very common anywhere you go to use your credit card. And they show you up front, they explain it up front, and that's what the policy would help. happen like people expect to see these things generally when they pay with a credit card these days so I don't I appreciate the complexity of this presentation but I think a lot of the complexity is going to happen behind the scenes with the banking arrangements and this the actual policy will be fairly simple across I think you said five different lines of business so five not twenty different things for the customer

And just to get to Council Member Keene's point, at every site of transaction, there will be signage that say this, if you use these methods.

If it's a hard service where they have to come into, but yeah, they will be notified of the fee. I mean, it's a state statute. Prior to making, yes.

Okay. One last thing. There are three council members.

You did a lot of the big number of transactions, and that's where a lot of these are. Are there any that cover even five or ten? Are there any large, large customers? I can't think of them in parking, but is there anybody that's going to, that this is a bigger part, like building permits, there's going to be, this is a bigger fee. Some people are going to be paying big fees.

Council Member, most of the accounts that have very large fees their regular users of the building department already have customer accounts.

Again, my questions are trying to head off any of these sort of like, oh, I hope we're covering that. So I do like the policy idea of going forward. I like the simplification, but again, I've dealt with some of the things with RPU where the smaller customers and some things like that, that we did get some surprises, but mainly we drove people not so much to pay the fees, but to change how they were paying. So that's it.

so we have uh council member miller fredericks and doering so council member miller go ahead thanks i'll just say i'm generally in favor of having the user pay the fee that they're generating for the city especially in those transactions where there is an alternative I think parking is more challenging and I think the bus fare is more challenging because I just pulled up the RPT mobile app to add a fare. There's currently no other option than a credit card if I use the mobile app. I think in these services where people are interacting on a regular basis, Yes, I think these fees are expected, but I would like to see how we get to alternatives, and I know that people can go to physical locations and buy bus passes. I don't know that that's true in parking. I think the building permits and those kind of large transactions, no question. Let's move people and make it clear that if they want to use a credit card, They can do that, but they're covering the cost of of that use for the city And I would also love to see if this is an opportunity to simplify our banking arrangements because it The research seems to show that it's quite complex Councilmember Fredericks Just want to add for our five people listening today.

They can still use a check, or they can have ACH, and that has no fee.

Like I said, we usually don't use ACH, but cash and check. If they communicate with the finance department first, then we know it's coming.

Council Member Doering. Yeah, I'm 90% there to supporting this, but I agree with Councilmember Miller's thought process about if we don't provide an option for someone to use an alternative payment method, it seems punitive to charge them the service fee for our convenience. And that's how I view taking only credit cards at a parking ramp. That's more convenient for us, so I have a problem charging someone a fee for that.

Okay, thank you. Yep, thank you. We're gonna move on to our mid-year action plan, and that is Mr. Parrish.

mayor president members of council i'm just here to give you an action plan update on behalf of an entire team who really puts a lot of work into this year in and year out we really give you this update twice a year as a special added focus here we're going to just give you a brief update on where the erp project's at we do try to highlight sort of one of the key and significant initiatives. Again, this is all grounded in your strategic priorities that you've adopted. And so we try to align the action it will take in order to advance those priorities. As we mentioned before, we are working on updating our strategic priorities at the turn of next year. There'll be a very robust process. We'll bring a recommendation on a partner to use for that. at a council meeting this fall, but we do have a request for proposals out in that space. So again, we're just mid-year here. A lot of our KPIs will come to you next February. They tend to be annualized, so you'll get better information at that point. Overall, I would say the action plan is progressing well. We have most of our items that are really in that healthy, on track, some are complete. We have a few off track, and being off track is okay. We had a previous council member that would say if we don't have some red, we weren't bold enough when we thought about it, and I think that's on point, and so we do obviously strive to be on track here, but it's okay being red at times. Economic resilience and that strategic priority. And again, you've heard about many of these. There's a whole document included in your packet that summarizes the state of every single action plan item. So those are just a few. But economic development strategy, you've heard from the economic mobility team and economic development team just talking about this and some of the areas of focus in that space and how we can talk about and continue to advance a citywide economic development strategy. You all previous, and again, this is a little dated because the presentation's to your leg, but gave some great direction on the Chateau Theater at the previous meeting, and so that'll continue to advance through the process with the upcoming DMCC board meeting. Uh, about business center, uh, occupancy is there is good if you don't know what the bio business center is, the city does own that. Um, in the downtown, uh, we have a significant number of the floors are rented to mail clinic with leases expiring. I believe in that 2029 ish area. But we have a number of other tenants in that building as well. So it's something that we continue to monitor. And then our last TIF payments have been made in this space. So this is one of the big TIF district decertifications that we have this year, which will now add a significant amount of property tax base back into the system. Economic Vitality Fund. And so again, there's still work continuing in that space. Housing access, RPU continues to do great work in the lead service line replacement with planning underway for 27, so 36 service lines were replaced. You, through a very robust investment of sales tax, in that economic vitality fund space, have encouraged 702 housing units to be supported. And then, again, public safety and housing stability. You've heard about some of those updates from the police department, from the housing team. And seeing some of that reflected in your budget, right? So you wanna see the action that's being taken, You did have a decision package that was funded for the 27 budget for a social worker-focused resource in the PD as well as an officer to work. You obviously had this conversation around any path home investment today. So the goal of these action plans, too, is to operationalize them through the budget, and you can see that. We also have some modifications forthcoming to the TIF. uh... uh... policy uh... you'll see that this fall as well as well as some of the worker in the prevailing wage space inclusive growth management highlights uh... very successful thirteen point two million dollars of funding for east umbro infrastructure so the team is beginning the work in that space uh... but again really aligning those infrastructure investments to encourage housing You receive the urban three analysis, which really also gives you some insights into how to think about investments in that infrastructure utilities, transportation, et cetera. And what has positive return from a tax based perspective and. And what types of development sort of pays its own way and what requires some subsidies. Travel demand management and transportation planning and transit ridership, just a lot of continued work in developing that right transportation strategy. I know our mode shift coordinator is doing a lot of active work in this space. I'd be remiss to remind you in the first part of October, you'll have the opportunity to miss a few vehicle trips and opt into that system as part of the efforts happening there. And then transit ridership, you've had a lot of conversation about that. But 10% growth, I mean, certainly we're not at pre-pandemic levels by any stretch of the imagination, but 10% growth compared to last year, that's positive. And you gotta be encouraged by that. And we're in kind of a transition point too with the state of BRT and how that might come and what we might see transition there. Responsible environmental stewardship. I think we can be proud of the work happening here. So again, advanced metering is rolling out throughout the community. Um, a lot of those meters installed some of that piloting happening. Uh, the 2030 transition points, uh, I think you, I was encouraged to hear in the original budget update back in August that the team is. Substantially reduce the capital outlay necessary in order to bring forward the 2030 renewable transition. So. I think with good stewardship, good advanced planning, highlights for Council Member Wall to bring up when we have our agenda items ahead of estimate, which is really good. And then we have small-scale stuff. On 20 public buildings right now, you received an update in a recent council update that we are rolling out updates on individual buildings, 20 city buildings that will have solar. And in 2030, that'll be... More relevant, smaller scale, fleet electrification, still charging infrastructure is the name of the game here. We need to continue to focus on that. We'll look at that at the 28, 29 budget when we look at our equipment revolving fund. But we have the PD coming out with a pilot in the EV space. And so there's some PD vehicles in that. And so I know that that's an area where we buy, that's probably our most significant fleet investment we go through, that and the heavy equipment and public works. The PD vehicles are a little more aligned than buying an electric backhoe right now. So good to be piloting in that space. Thermal energy network is coming online. Again, we'll have our first, I think, full winter and full season here. But if you think about all the downtown campuses, significant buildings in the downtown, those are all now in that. And then You all also approve the comprehensive surface water management plan, and then we can start to think and roll that forward into future CIP investments. Transformational Capital Project highlights, again, Link Bus Rapid Transit, halfway there on the march to 2027. So a long way to go yet, but still signature investment, largest capital improvement project in the history of Rochester to be delivered, and the team is doing their absolute best to bring that forward. Public Realm Improvements, so we have the $38 million in additional infrastructure investment that will be coming. in and around Bold Forward Unbound. Strong encouragement between the efforts of Heather Corcoran, Cindy, the mayor, Allison, many others, Steve Sampson Brown, Dylan. We were able to work with our congressional delegation to get that agreement finalized. And so I know there's some people sleeping a little bit easier these days. And we're on track to be bidding that here this fall. So that's something we can all be excited about. Silverlake Dam, you'll hear more about it at a future city council meeting, but we did receive the bids. Obviously, those are being evaluated as you consider that at an upcoming meeting here, I believe next week, but a little bit higher than anticipated, but the team's really trying to sort of understand, assess, and determine what design decisions and some of the permitting requirements, quite frankly, that might have led to those adjustments. Airport runway, that's been a multi-year significant federal investment in Rochester. That's been worked on since 2018, 19. But that is all coming together, whether it be the CAT 2 lighting, the cross runway, et cetera. A little bit behind. But right now, but again, nothing to be overly concerned about and still on track toward that late 27, 28 completion. And kind of a quiet project that we're starting to celebrate right now, but $42.8 million in the maintenance center. The public works and parks team are moving in or they have moved in. We're going to have the opportunity to celebrate that in October. And so really encourage you to see what the team came up with there. I think a lot of our maintenance efforts will be closer together. I think they'll be closer aligned. I think they're going to find synergies in how they can work together. And certainly a well-deserved transition out of the parks maintenance facility. Also paving way for redevelopment opportunities. Now we have the TOB site in the downtown. We have the parks maintenance facility in the downtown. So the next phase of this effort and sort of the fruit that will be bore there is moving forward with what can those key downtown sites be in the future. Looking ahead, excuse me, we will be moving forward strategic priorities. We will get you updated with how we did in 26, early in 27, and then we'll start working on a new action plan based on whatever your evolved priorities are. So we're always working action plan, priorities, budget, trying to make sure those all inform each other. Then I just want to give you a brief close on the ERP project. That's our Enterprise Resource Planning software. Very collaborative effort between all city departments, particularly all city departments, and then anchoring in with RPU here, but the It's kind of a dishwasher example that Tim has, you know, kind of brought to the project and is a good one in terms of just, you know, bringing things together, trying to find the right way for us to collectively put our dishes together. And there is a right way to put dishes in the dishwasher, by the way. I mean, that's an important thing. And just think about how we... share processes, and we've moved to One Go Live. At one point we were breaking that up, you know, phase one rollout at RPU because they're on SAP, which is the software we've selected for this project, but to really just streamline it is move to One Go Live. We've got, again, moving from SAP on the RPU side to JDE on the city side, and You know, I was really encouraged at the pinning ceremony for the police officers and the promotion ceremony last Thursday night. But I also recognize the fact that many of the people that were sworn in as officers were not alive when we implemented JDE. And so we are moving ahead. And we're hiring police officers that predated that software transition. So we are trying to give context for that and obviously a lot of opportunity. One kind of quiet thing, mentioned it in the budget presentation, but the finance teams really put a lot of work into getting one to one chart of accounts. And that'll make our information in terms of how we do financial reporting much more streamlined. Right now there's a lot of behind the scenes action that is required to bring that together the right way. And we have a lot of other great examples that are going to come forward on how we unify people and process. So again, sharing services. And I do think just harkening back to your shared services conversation with the budget, this is the gateway for a lot of that. I think it can be a shining example of how we can work together collectively and potentially set the table for encouraging future conversations. Again, delivering this at the end of next year. And a lot of people working on this. I'm not going to go through the remainder of these slides in any great detail. Acknowledge Carl Hunter, who is with us in the room. He's the project manager. If you have any real technical questions on the ERP project, he is your person. But Carl is on the city IT team. Jeff Shuler is also working on the project and has done the lion's share of the work on getting this action plan update work for you here as well. And so I want to acknowledge her work on bringing this forward to you. With that, we're happy to answer any questions that you have.

Great report. Council Member Fredericks, go ahead.

I just want to compliment the set the table was a nice word with the dishwasher. That's very good. Very good.

Council Member Wall.

I will note, however, that the dishwasher, the cups and the glasses were sitting straight up and water will collect in the cup that they got to be tilted. Mr parish went over very quickly the good work that the staff did in securing that last 2.1Million. I think it was of dollars for this federal grant for the 6th street bridge. There are so many there are some in the community that are quick to pounce on. money difficulties uh i think this needs to be heard just as clearly that that was one that was resolved in the city's favor and i am very grateful to the staff for that

Thank you. Council member Miller counts. Go ahead.

Sorry. I don't want to skip in line. It's okay. Go ahead. Okay. Uh, some specific questions I appreciate and the tactic two dot two dot B for short term rentals that there are updates on the number of single family homes that are short term or longer term rentals. Is there any progress on trending that over time? Like what should we know about? Is that increasing, decreasing, staying pretty steady?

Yeah, I think that's certainly something we could look into, and if Irene has anything there. If I remember right, the short-term rentals represent about 5% of our rental universe, and there's another statistic in the report that highlights about 11% are, I believe, non-locally owned or corporately owned.

Yeah, 37% under corporate ownership, 11.9% of single-family rentals owned by a non-local company.

Yeah, and so to the extent we can...

we are doing a study session at the end of September and we'll have additional data and including those items that were identified. So we pulled out some of that information in the short term rentals data does shift. So it kind of, those numbers fluctuate a little bit.

Okay. Thank you. Uh, question about lead service line replacement. I know that, um, funding has been not as available. Are we considering alternatives to get those lines, uh, identified and especially in the unknown surface line?

Mr. McCullough.

Yeah, we are continuing to pursue available funding through the state and ultimately the federal dollars that were put into the funds there. They are expected to be exhausted by the end of 27. I think we discussed that at an earlier study session. I think our next phase would need to shift into legislative advocacy for funding or finding another source that's not public funds since this is all private infrastructure.

I guess a follow up on that is now that we've worked with contractors to do the exploration for these unknowns, are there any efficiencies that those contractors have gained in quickly identifying what the material is or closing some of those knowledge gaps?

Yes, we're both able to close the knowledge gaps with our own research back office research by finding available records. And then there's some efficiencies even with our advanced metering project as we touch all the water meters, being able to understand material going into the house. But you have to daylight them. You have to excavate down with the hydro excavator to really determine that. And that does have a direct cost to it. We're trying to focus our investment towards the daylighting efforts and investigating the unknowns so we can get a full picture of what work remains.

OK, thank you. On infill development and transit-oriented development, I believe on infill we're only defining that measure as R2X zoning. Is there any progress towards refining that measure for the KPI?

Your Honor, I defer to Ryan or...

think we've been mostly looking at r2x we're also kind of evaluating and trying to map where different development has happened so that as part of our housing access presentation we can kind of show where some of that is happening and tracking that over time okay so i'll just reiterate that i think with the urban 3 presentation and i know it's come up with the kpi update before that r2x seems to be too limited in area to really capture what we're hoping for there and i i think any progress on updating the metrics definition will help us better understand and prioritize some of those redevelopment opportunities to really take advantage of the infrastructure that's already there. Active transportation question, are we planning an update, will there be an opportunity for Lime to update the council on three years of, or three seasons of Lime usage of their five year contract and give us opportunities to Address this is an area of frequent concern that I hear about and I appreciate the PBAC has Had the opportunity to engage with Lyme. I I personally would love to see them come to Council As we consider how the contract is working and not and some potential changes In advance of them asking for an extension of that contract We can put that on the list of follow-ups for sure And then air quality, I see that it's on target. I know in the past we've talked about potentially making it more public facing. I know it's available on a website, but thinking about our public spaces, Peace Plaza, parks, other ways that it can be proactively served either as a color indicator matching air quality levels or a number as part of a way that we add visibility to health. It's also come up with events. There was a public music concert during some of the wildfire smoke, and you could see visible haze. But to my remembrance, there was an email that went out to us noting that staff were monitoring that, but not publicly communicating to potential attendees what the air quality levels were and how to think about that as a potential health impact of spending time outside.

Yeah, we can note that. I don't know, Aaron, if you have any preliminary reactions to that.

Mr. Lockstein.

Yeah, thank you for that feedback. So just a couple things. One, yes, the dashboard is on the website. We've made updates to include that indicator, so it's very clear to log in to be able to see the air quality. That update has also, we really emphasize to make sure it's mobile friendly, recognizing that there is a gap in the public realm. funding is the the big gap uh making it more visible uh at stations things like that so we've been relying on the website and then having it be mobile friendly and then our current approach emphasis has been on getting the data out so that people can make informed decisions we can talk with homestead public health about if there's additional communication and direction that can be provided but really, again, showing the data so people can make their own informed decisions is the current approach right now.

Okay, great. I know we'll have some linked BRT screens coming online, so if that's an opportunity to provide additional information, current weather, temperature, rains in the forecast, and the air quality, I mean, I think those are useful pieces of information for people in the public. That's my last question.

Council Member Keene. Yeah, again, I want to kind of show my appreciation for the staff. We start out with these strategic things, then break them down to the goals, and then action plans underneath there. And obviously, it takes a lot of work to do this. I think there's over 100 different action plans. Is it helpful? Is this something you do to report to us, or is this a good way to manage the business? I would say yes, and opportunities for continuous improvement there.

Good, good. So I think going forward when we update strategic priorities in the future, are there sort of those keystone goals and tactics that really are going to drive your outcomes, 80-20, however you want to characterize that, so we can even focus it down from 100 to the next level? I mean, we did have one of these at 300 at one point.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think that continued refinement, we're still learning our way through the KPIs. I think that's the next piece is, are these the right ones? Is the data updated frequently enough? And so I think those are things we'll definitely look at. And then maybe what I'll call dispersal. So a lot of our stuff and your priorities, right? But they do concentrate in the enterprise in a few departments. And so what else for all 14 departments do we want to consider moving forward?

I guess my concern would be is that we, because I was part of the council that were asking to put these together and that explosion of different actions in support of goals and goals in support of strategic initiatives. But coming a couple years later, do we need to adjust? Is this a good way to be managing the business, or this is something we do for these twice a year updates, and we manage the business in a separate way. I'm hoping they're closer to merger, but I think what you point out, maybe there's a bunch of things that don't make it this way that we should sort of find a way to say, you know, operational things that are not like new initiatives that we really need to have it as part of this reporting or we don't want to do that. I guess I'm bringing up the opening up of the idea of like, is this a good way to go forward or does it need tweaks? And we get into setting our goals in 2027. We should also look at saying this method is helpful, but we're going to change it a lot or this method needs to be adjusted. And I'm open to that.

I mean, partially you're the customer here. Right. And I'm bringing it up. It would be like, you know, what do we, do you feel it's helpful? Like not to put the question back to you, but I do think that it's a nice way to bridge your strategic priorities and, you know, those key goals and what are the metrics that we're trying to drive those strategic priorities. If you all are thinking most distinctly about that, but we do need to transfer that in and operationalize it, and that's what the action plan is really here to do. And so I do think it's a good bridge, but like everything you build, I think there's constant improvement, and I think there's things we could do better.

Yeah, and I really like this because I like the idea of being able to look at the different goals that are underneath the things. And there might be a stretch sometimes to say this fits under there, but I still think it's a good method. I'm really more asking the staff and the operational level if you're saying like, It's a good way to report back to you guys, but that's all we're getting out of this. This really isn't how we're doing this. And I'm hoping for a better alignment. And again, I'm bringing this up in case there's different ways to do it. This is how I'm looking at it.

If I may, from a staff perspective, I think it's helpful. I mean, it takes time to merge the two things, right? And I think it's also helpful to remember this is all happening on top of every day-to-day operation that people are doing. So you probably recall it was a fairly small document, but you maybe didn't realize, like in 2018, there was a 30 page action plan, like way too long. Um, that was, uh, my mind was boggled. Um, but we've continued to hone the action plan, which I think is important because if you want, you can't boil the ocean and accomplish anything. So I do think that it's helpful over time if you come together and narrow your focus so that we can make progress. arguably every two years is maybe faster than many cities would do. So I think not completely changing everything every two years is helpful because we won't have accomplished everything in the strategic priorities.

Thank you.

Now, I appreciate Council Member Keene's focus on making sure that we're getting what we need, but that we're not having you folks spin your wheels on something. And looking at it, I mean, And I really appreciated the Rochester public transit dashboard a few weeks ago. And I look at the action plan progress. And that's a very helpful snapshot. more on kind of then is there a is there a graphics behind that that can say, okay, why are these off target? Or is it and then then we can then say, well, those are still very high priorities or where they are. So but overall, I very much appreciate it. I very much appreciate just all of the hearing about all of the projects as well. So thank you very much. With that, I think we are at our next study session preview.

Thank you, council members. Council President, your next study session is the 28th of September. We have housing access update. You heard a little bit about that today, which should be exciting. Mode shift and transportation demand management overview. Possibly we could get some Lime Scooter information in there. My friends at Public Works are listening and community development and then stormwater water quality credit transfer policy update. So that will be your second visit with the stormwater quality credit transfer policy. That is quite a mouthful and we can't make an acronym out of it. And then the following study session on October 12th, you'll see that we do have the history of the Red Owl and the Time Theater there, update on the Youth Council's trip to Germany, and Parks and Recreation awareness and marketing updates. That's all I have.

All right. We are adjourned.