City Commission - Regular Meeting

Good idea.

Okay, it is 2 o'clock, and today we will be doing our 2027 budget study session on outside agencies. And it looks like we have an order we're going to go through. I am going to ask each agency to keep their comments to 10 minutes. That way, if there's any questions, we can get those answered. And then if at the end, if we have some extra time and we need to circle back to somebody, we'll do that. But we've had a tendency to have some go a little long and not get to some. So if you hear me say time, then we're going to have to ask you to stop. So we'll go ahead. And I don't know. Yeah, I'll just- In charge?

So first of all, just for the outside agencies, this is the introduction to the city commission of your request. So they're not going to make any decisions today based on these discussions. It'll be at a later date, later in the summer. We'll let you know when those discussions are going to happen, but this is just their introduction to their requests as they come forward. And I'll turn it over to Karina Reiner, our deputy finance director.

Hello.

Before you get started, do we have a clock that you can put up so they can kind of see where they're at? I know we have it. Go ahead.

We're having a little technical difficulty getting the presentations pulled up. Did you get it? That's me. So the presentation and the clock will not run at the same time.

I guess you're going to have to trust me on this one. Looking at you, Leslie.

I have mine right here.

Are we good to go? There we go. So if we start, there's some historical information on the first 15 slides of your handout. We won't go over any of that. We'll just start with the presentations so they can get through all of them this year. And we will start with the chamber.

Hello, good afternoon, Commissioner Hoppeck and commissioners, Mayor Hoppeck and commissioners. It is great to be here today. Thank you for the opportunity to share our Visit Salina program of work. And we also appreciate your continued support of our programs, specifically our Convention and Visitors Program and the new Community Marketing Initiative. Your support allows us to focus on what we do best. which is showcasing the best of Salina by marketing our community to visitors and telling the story of why Salina is a wonderful destination. I'd like to share with you several slides in brief and then give some time for our marketing director, Marcus Petty, to guide you through our tour of our new website. This first slide shows the estimated economic impact of visitors for events that we've tracked and worked with in 2025. And we are currently up in all categories compared to 2024. The total number of events, visitors, and estimated economic impact have all increased. Next slide. And of course, this impact and many of the events we work with would not be possible without our community volunteers. And we are equally grateful for our many partners that we work with on an ongoing basis. We continually work with our partners to better understand our clients and events and accurately measure their impact. But we also look at several tracking systems. This is a screenshot from Placer AI, a digital tracking system that we subscribe to, which we found to correlate very well with our in-house research with our clients and also our more anecdotal data. The screenshot shows Salina averaged more than 99,000 visitors each month from outside a 50 mile radius, generating 1.6 million trips and 1.7 million overnight stays during the year. The next screenshot. shows the top 20 places where our visitors come from. And I'm sharing this data with you because it helps us determine how much we invest in our marketing placements. And also, this type of data also helps us calculate the estimated economic impact for specific events so we can determine how much to invest in services for those events, as well as how much to spend attracting new events. And the next slide. We continue to market Salina through a variety of channels. In 2025, we greatly increased our digital marketing. But of course, we still do print advertising. We do a lot of billboard advertising. We have 13 of those. Social media on several platforms. And we work with several travel writers and share highlights with many news outlets. Digital marketing does provide tremendous analytics and measurable results. Sometimes it's overwhelming. But as we've increased our investment, we've seen visitors take action after engaging with their advertising. And our targeted audiences, such as sports families and event planners, are engaging well above tourism industry averages. Bottom line, digital marketing is one of our most effective tools for sharing Celina's story. This next slide shows some of our new ads, most recently placed in our digital and print advertising. And with our input, these were designed and created by our CMI team. The CMI team has certainly elevated our image, and specifically, we now have photo and video assets. We have new collateral for all of our markets. And at the end of this, for each of you, we have placed some of these materials in a packet, similar to what we would provide to visitors, so that you can view them. And then, as always, we would welcome your feedback on them. We've also included one of our new Celina license plates with our new branding, and we would love for you to put those on your vehicle. In addition, the CMI team has helped us develop a series of five printable, downloadable locator maps. And this has been a long standing request from our hotels, our attractions, and our visitors. And copies are included in your packet as well. And then most importantly, the CMI team has made all of our marketing cohesive so that we're promoting Salina not only as a great place to visit, but also as a great place to live, work, own a business, and invest. And as we elevate our image, we are also updating the face of the Salina Visitor Center. New signage and improved accessibility will help us better serve visitors, and this also helps us achieve our goal of having a front-facing visitor center downtown. And in addition to expanding digital marketing, there are several areas that we hope to expand in our programming. The ultimate goal is to be even more competitive as a destination, and I believe we're well positioned to do that. Visitor growth over the past year has outpaced recent trends. And as you can see by the chart, there was a significant increase in transient guest tax revenues from 2024 to 2025. And based on this growth, we are asking for an increase in funding. Our total request for funding is $1.24 million. $950,000 of that is for the Visit Salina Convention and Visitors Operating Budget. $240,000 is for the Community Marketing Initiative. And then 50,000 goes toward the Cultural Arts Regional Marketing Grant Program. A note here, the CARM grant program remains fully funded at $150,000 annually. But our request includes 50,000 with the balance continuing to come from existing reserves as previously directed. And this 8.77% increase request is reflective of the 9.01% increase in transient guest tax. And based on this growth and the opportunities ahead, we are requesting 1.24 million to help us continue expanding our efforts and maintaining our momentum. And with that, I'd like to introduce our marketing director, Marcus Petty.

He's over here.

Hey, there you go. And he'll provide just a brief tour of our new branding that's on our website. Our website is discoverselena.org. While that comes up, I will just truly say that Marcus and his team have been great to work with. I'm very proud of this team. I think they've accomplished more than we expected them to accomplish. And really, all of that's been done within the last six months. They were hired a year ago. It's been all done within the last year. But it took us a good three or four, five months to get people hired and get our team going.

Tiffany left you about four minutes. Super, okay, that should be plenty. So thank you gentlemen for allowing me to come up here and talk about the website. Any chance I get to speak about the website and just the work that my team and I have put into it over the past six months, I'm very excited and eager to do so because it was certainly a very challenging but also very fun and rewarding project to get to be able to showcase kind of where we live and get to show that to people who aren't necessarily from here. So today I just wanted to go briefly through the homepage and just kind of give you a little bit of a tour of the layout, the functionality that you'll see when you go to the website. Just a little bit of background first. The website went live on May 20th. So anyone now can go to discover.sulline.org and just explore and see what all it has to offer. It is optimized for both desktop, tablet, and mobile, which was very important that the user be able to use all three of those different devices when they're exploring the website. And another thing, too, that was very important was that We built this website not just to be tourism related, but also to include living aspects and working aspects in Salina and Saline County. So what does it look like if you wanted to relocate here to live? So education, healthcare, housing, what is the industries that make up Salina's economic development and workforce? So all those were very important elements that we wanted to include. About 95% of the photos and videos that you see were done by CMI staff, so we took those, edited them, placed them on the website, and then all the branding that you see, so logo, fonts, color, really just the overall design was all done in-house by our CMI team, and then we worked with our developer to kind of build the website that you see here. I will say that what you see now, six weeks, six months from now, it'll look a little different. We're gonna continue to work to kind of beef up the website and add content to it. But for where we're at now, we're certainly super excited. So as you log on, you'll see the image or the video that we show here. We tried to incorporate as many elements as we could. So arts and culture, family entertainment, nightlife, sporting activities. So just to give kind of a overall glimpse of what all Celina has to offer. And as you scroll down a little bit, kind of our introduction to Celina. The images on the right there will swap out to keep the website fresh. There's a plan your visit button that will take the user to just a landing page where they can look at restaurants, hotels, events, attractions, and they can kind of build their itinerary from there. And if you can scroll a little bit more, So those three panels there, the website also does tie in to Visit Salinas work. So we have staff that's wanting to bring conventions and conferences and sporting events to our area. Those organizers of those events can use this website to go and check and see what sports facilities look like here in Salinas, what meeting facilities do we have, and then, of course, what hotels, what things to do when they're not at their sporting event or their convention. So they'll be able to use that and reach out to our staff to kind of begin that process to bring those events here to town. Keep scrolling please, thanks Scott. So that's our events preview, so it'll pull the first four events that are upcoming, which thankfully for us, we've got the River Festival as the next upcoming event. If you click on the view all events button there, it actually brings up the entire events calendar that we have, so you can filter it by date, by activity, by time, and it gets a little bit more thorough, but this is just kind of a preview to kind of give you an idea of what's coming up. And then if you can scroll just a little bit more, I talked about the live and work elements and that's kind of where these panels will take you to those landing pages. So if you were curious about relocating or wanting to work in Salina, that would be where you would want to go to kind of learn a little bit more about that. And then those two panels, again, will tie into the Visit Salina, bringing events and conferences here to the area. And then after that, it's just connecting with our social and then just kind of a basic footer there. There is a more robust menu as you click into it and kind of you can explore and learn about a little bit more in-depth the things that Salina has to offer. So I want to try to stick to my time. Perfect. All right. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll see if everyone else does as well as you guys did, so thank you.

Did you have any questions for the chamber?

I think we'll, any quick question? Quick one, is there any particular segment of the meeting or convention business that we're not able to get now because of facilities or lack thereof?

There are, I think I've given, we've actually given a formal written report submitted to Jacob, because he asked some of those similar questions. There definitely are, we kind of went into it thinking we'd probably be needing capacity, or we'd be meeting capacity of about 300. But because so many groups want that meeting facility under one roof, there is quite a bit of business that we cannot service. So we're looking more at groups that are around 200 for convention and meeting specifically.

Thank you. The search function for Salina, Kansas, because I remember it used to not be desirable what first came up. Is it now showing better?

Yeah, sure. Help us.

So typically... For the SEO to really start kicking in and for when Google starts crawling the internet to look for these new sites, it can take about three to six months for it to really kind of rise to prominence and start being placed on a more consistent basis. We have seen, depending on what prompt you're using, that the new website is starting to show up in the results on the first page. But we anticipate, like I said, within three to six months, you'll really start seeing that results of it being a little bit more elevated, more prominent when you're searching for things to do, events, restaurants, things like that. Thank you.

Okay. Okay. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Next.

Okay. Next on our list is Celina Downtown Inc.

Okay. We'll see if we agree. Good afternoon, Mayor Hoppeck and Commissioners. I'd like to thank you for this opportunity to be here this afternoon. I'm Leslie Bishop, Executive Director of Salina Downtown. Before I begin, I'd like to recognize board members for Salina Downtown and, of course, April and Diane, without whom I could not be standing here today. I'd like to begin. You have our presentation in your packet. And I have a video slide. There we go. While the slide's coming, I would like to point out that we are so proud of the hard work we did in 2025. So a brief 2025 by the numbers. SDI hosted a total of 29 events during 2025 with an addition of two of a brand-new event called Jigsaw Jam. Some of the events were put on hold because of the anticipated construction that is now happening for the shade structure. But in 2026 we will have the movie night back in place and of course the back to school bash where we'll host Kansas Wesleyan students, KU Med, K State Salina to welcome them back to Salina and to their campuses. So without this year, with 25, without the movie night and the back-to-school bash, we were down two events, but those will all be back in 2026. SDI saw a strong increase in approximately 10.6%. income of 10.6% from 2024 to 2025, reflecting the continued momentum in downtown Salinas growth. This gain is largely driven by the significant rise in community improvement district CID revenue, which comes from the additional 1% sales tax collected within the district. And in addition, the downtown Celina gift certificate sales experienced an impressive surge, generating over 23,000 additional dollars that was reinvested directly into local businesses. We also expanded our advanced marketing partnership with Cohort. This has created an opportunity for YouTube advertising, and the ads have an excellent 63% view rate, which is double the industry average. Our Google ad impression also increased by 27% over 2024. And the city's generous investment in facade funds of $85,000 has led to an additional private investment of $61,189 into downtown building revitalization. That was a total of six projects in 2026. While some of these projects were smaller, it was an overall impact to downtown's revitalization. So awnings and doors and windows makes a big impact. While your investment matters, downtown Salina continues to create measurable economic and community impact programming, beautification, and promotion efforts that are expanding. Downtown events and activities bring residents and visitors together year round, and investment supports local businesses, tourism, and community pride. Residents continue to support and participate in downtown events. For example, the average of First Friday attendance in 2025 went up to 7,000 people versus 6,400 in 2024. The Jigsaw Jam events that I previously mentioned, both of the ones we held last year in July and this year in January, both sold out well before the date. And our July Jigsaw Jam coming up next month has nine spots left. Expanded programming reflects strong community demand. Events generate excitement, foot traffic, and economic activity. And we are pleased and proud to announce that our holiday festival and parade of lights was recognized at the event of the year from the Department of Commerce in Kansas Main Street with 18,000 people that evening last year for the holiday parade of lights. Our plans in motion for 2026, we've added a brand new event in honor of America 250, Red, White, and Barbecue, a community-wide celebration of America's 250th birthday. We will also bring back the back-to-school bash, and with any luck, the construction will be done and we'll be able to have movie night under the stars with our beautiful new shade structure. As I mentioned, we added another jigsaw jam to this year's lineup, so we had one in January, and the next one is next month. And year three of the Farm and Art Market downtown, we have 24 vendors, and even with the relocation of the market due to the construction, we are highly anticipating being back into our normal lot after that construction is complete. I want to thank you for approving that shape, structure, It will bring such beauty and utility to that lot, and it will support downtown's programming, not only for SDI, but for other organizations that bring their events downtown. We have added TikTok to our list of marketing tools, and both for the market, the farmer's market, and SDI in our events, and we're continuing to build on the platforms we use to get information out there, utilizing new ways like bloggers and or influencers to promote downtown. Our yearly downtown doe promotion that we run in January, February, and March, the slower months after the holidays, it runs for six weeks. We tracked $127,100 being spent in downtown Salina. That's $25,000 higher than the same time frame last year. We are adding new holiday pole decorations that will be purchased this year at nearly $40,000 investment. And we also have taken to adding lighted garland for the light posts on iron. If you have been downtown in Salina at Christmastime, you know it's really beautiful and it's the place to be. We believe that the budget itself reflects responsible stewardship of funding and demonstrates that resources are being directed toward community impact. More than $35,000 invested in marketing and promotion, over $20,000 dedicated to trash and waste services, Nearly $20,000 spent on holiday lighting decorations, not including the $40,000 that we'll be adding to the new decorations on Santa Fe. Almost $100,000 spent on downtown aesthetics from flowers and plants, staff salary, materials and tools, and the vehicle needs. And nearly $35,000 on event programming to generate foot traffic. These efforts directly support local businesses, tourism, community engagement, sales tax generation, property value growth, and downtown vibrancy and safety. Our 2027 request is $85,000 in facade grant and $100,000 in operational support. The reality is that many of the services SDI provides would otherwise need to be absorbed by city departments and taxpayer resources. Supporting downtown operations through this partnership is an efficient and impactful investment. A fully funded $100,000 request would allow downtown Salina to continue driving measurable economic vitality and activity as seen in this presentation, hosting successful community events, if anyone was downtown last Friday it was amazing, supporting small businesses and their dreams, expanding beautification efforts, promoting Salina as a destination, creating a downtown that residents are proud of. Downtown is the heart of the community and continued investment ensures that the heartbeat of downtown Salina will keep beating. One thing that's not in your packet, we have been encouraged, Line of Downtown Incorporated, by Kansas Main Street and the Department of Commerce for our organization to apply for the GAMSA, Great American Main Street Award, presented by Main Street America. We are actively working on that application, and you're responsible for that. By you allowing us to do the things we do and your support, we are going to apply to be a Great American Main Street Award winner. We will be a semifinalist at the very least. It's a very competitive award, but we're excited to be a part of that. It's time for Celina to be recognized. Celina Downtown is often recognized for the events that we create, but the events are simply an invitation. SDI's work goes far beyond programming. We are a partner in business, recruitment, retention, revitalization, tourism, and investment in the heart of Salina. I want to thank you today for your continued support, and I'll stand for any questions if you have any at this time.

In case you thought she talked fast to get through that, that's just how she talks all the time, so it's not a big deal. I had a quick question on the facade incentives. Has all that been spent from last year?

No, we had one facade allocated and that person, that business did not complete their their improvements in time, so that went back into- Because I know some years we've had more requests and we had dollars.

My question is, do we carry those forward or is it spend or lose it during the year? We carry it forward. You can't carry it forward.

We have been able with, so like I said, we had about $20,000 from 2025, but most of that was because of this one business. However, we've already spent, we've already allocated $60,000 for this year, for 2026.

Any update on the video board downtown?

Yes. I had a really positive conversation with Ms. Driscoll a couple of weeks ago, and I think there's some things that we're going to be able to do that will not conflict with some of the things that are going on right now in Salina. So fingers crossed, but we have the dimensions that we need, and Lauren asked me to send all that to her, so we're really looking forward to the possibility of that getting started.

Great.

Good afternoon and I'm probably downtown at least half a dozen times every week and certainly our downtown looks terrific anymore. I know we talk over and over again about the amount of cars parked along Santa Fe, sometimes I scratch my head and say, where are all these people at? Especially when I will step in like a Jose Peppers or something at 5.36 PM and seems like the entire street is packed and hardly anybody's in there. But all those people are downtown somewhere and I know some of the entities we have downtown. probably went in when real estate, the rentals were probably very inexpensive, and I gotta imagine that with the upgrades, it's just gonna have a snowballing effect, making our downtown more and more dynamic. A quick question. Are we doing anything for the 4th of July or for several weeks with American flags or 250th anniversary flags or anything downtown? That might be a partner type thing, might even be a little bit late. But it seems like if we're going to do it one place in town, it would be along Santa Fe.

Yes, as I mentioned, we're going to be having Red, White, and Barbecue on July 18th. That's in your packet. It's going to be a wonderful event. We're going to have Cash Hollister play or perform, followed by Everyday Light. Seraphim Bread is going to be providing a meal for purchase. There will be two barbecue options and a kid option. We're going to have birthday cupcakes by bibliophiles, face painting for Color Me Crazy, big yard games, and some giveaways. And that will be in Campbell Plaza on the 18th from 5 to 9. And currently the Art Deco overheads on Santa Fe at the crosswalks are illuminated in red, white, and blue now.

Okay. I'll have to take a look.

Yeah, it's going to be a great event. It's a new event, the red, white, and blue, or the red, white, and barbecue. So we're excited for that.

And for better or for worse, we're at a time of year where you only will see those overhead structures probably after 8.30, 9 p.m. or early, early, early.

Well, we do have some red, white, and blue bunting that we're going to put on the fence at Campbell Plaza for that event, and we'll put it up probably the week before. And then we'll have some red, white, and blue pinwheels that we can place, and then kids can take those home. And then I'm imagining, like right now, we can certainly throw out to the downtown merchants to place a red, white, and blue or a flag in their window, but that's what we'll be doing to celebrate America's 250. A lot of downtowns are not doing it necessarily on the 4th because their community, like Sky Fire, will be happening on the 4th here. So we chose to do the 18th of July.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you very much, Leslie.

I had one minute to spare, Mayor Hoppeck.

Save it for next year. Roll it over.

Okay, next up we have Salina Community Economic Development. Mitch.

I'm just worn out from listening to Leslie talk. It's exciting what's going on downtown. It really is. I'm Mitch Robinson. I'm executive director of Salina Community Economic Development Organization. It's hard to believe looking at the budget requests we've had over since 2016 that this will be the 11th year that we stand in cooperation with the request to the city. This year we are going to stick with our $300,000 that we've had for the last, this will be the third year we've had that amount. We feel like we were watching our budget very carefully. We did last two years put money into the CMI program that we're so thankful that the Chamber's leading the effort on that. So that donation will be used into our marketing. We don't have to worry about trying to up our revenue source for the year. We're also talking with, met with the county administrator this past Friday and had a discussion in the budget page we've submitted. We had $35,000, which is what we've gotten from them for the last several years. Matt is thinking about trying to figure out how to be able to up that increase. The last couple of years we've asked for $50,000, and we're not successful in getting that. But they've changed their process a little bit this year. Airport Authority, that will be later in the year, will be asking the same $50,000. And we probably need to add some inflation into what the donation the Chamber makes if they're in kind. We've kept that at $20,000, and that probably could be definitely higher than that. So we were looking at several different things. There was another page we submitted to you all last week. on marketing activities, but really just want to talk about and really take more time to get questions from you all. You know, we had our annual meeting this past February, and I appreciate everybody coming for that. I think that gave us really an insight on some of the things going on in Salina. Joshua Wexler with Pure Imagination was a dynamic speaker. The opportunities that that program is going to be able to work through with K-State, types of students that we'll be able to attract to the community to work and attend classes in that area of interest is going to be, I think, something that's going to really rock the campus out there and add to the already growing and expanding aviation needs which if you follow our Friday brief, and I hope each of you all get that, we had pictures of the hub is slowly, that's the new aviation building, is slowly coming out of it. We can say mud this last week or so because there is water on site. That building is moving forward, and then the Kay Aries Center, which is where peer management will be, that building is coming along and they look like they're going to keep their end of the year opening, be ready for classes probably in January, first semester of 27. So it's been a little long in coming, but it is moving ahead. But overall, I think our efforts for the year, this current year, We're a little over halfway. We've committed to some out of our budget revising our website, which will help coincide with what's going on with the CMI efforts. But a lot of our marketing is going to really continue to be the same. We're trying to expand a lot of the social media aspect of that. Getting that information out to consultants, that's the people that have a lot of projects, but it really comes down to our community partnership with the city, the county, the chamber, the airport authority, plus all the others that don't put money in, being K-State, being Kansas-Westland, being Solana Tech. A lot of other people, and I can't thank enough Jacob and the city's team, very helpful. We've had some projects recently that they've submitted information for applications that we've sent on, and it's very timely, very efficient, right on target. So we're excited about some of the things that are coming down the pike. We feel positive about that. And, you know, obviously can't get into that too much detail now. But the year, the next couple of years, I think it's going to continue to look very good. At this point, I'd really like to answer more questions and ramble on. You heard me in February for way too long. But, Dr. Davis, I'm used to seeing you over on this side, so it's kind of a change for me.

Well, it's strange sitting on this side. Nothing's in the right place. But I do have one question. Do we still have lobbyist activity in Washington, D.C.?

The only one that we have is in Topeka. Topeka? Yes, and that's a joint effort, city, county, chamber, airport, us, and then this past year Kansas Westland. Renee, is Renee? No, she left. So did they put in or not? Okay, they're still not a paying member.

So that comes, you get funding for that from all those sources, not just from your...

Right. Each of those put in, we split it evenly. We split it evenly. And, yeah, this was a new year for a new group we've used. We're evaluating that. We're going to stick with them or look at somebody else. There's some different options we're thinking about, maybe splitting it up into multiple consultants who can work with us, kind of specialize maybe in education, maybe in economic development, maybe in some other areas. That hadn't been decided on yet.

Thank you. Commissioner Ivey, any questions?

I don't have any questions. Comments are just keep up the good work. Thank you.

Well, we appreciate your attendance in our meeting, being the city rep now, so glad to have you there.

I'll kind of echo that comment. The little bit of time I've been involved, I've been amazed at some of the projects that are happening throughout the community. A lot of times I don't think the community is as aware as they should be. I mean, we are in an information day and age where you have it coming at you 24-7. But we have seen a significant uptick in all sorts of areas throughout the community. And having attended some airport authority meetings, I mean, those people out there really seem like they have it together. A lot of great things happening throughout the community and I know you guys play a role and for that, thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, and again, not really any questions as much as comments. I think one of the things that I'm real happy about is the way that the first three presenters, the EDO, the downtown Slane Area Chamber of Commerce, along with the city, the county airport authority, have worked together over the last, I don't know how many years now, um whether it's getting the 25 million dollars for housing out at uh by menards or whatever the cohesiveness has really helped lead us where we are and uh i appreciate that out of all these groups working together for one goal um you know i think we're starting to see the benefits of that you know with through the housing study we have seen the the need for more doors we see the uh increase in population according to the study the sales tax increase so a lot of good things going on i don't think what a lot of people see and i think i think everyone probably but commissioner rimp is set on the edo board and listened and you see that what does happen you don't see the number of projects they look at that we don't get too so there's a lot of work that goes behind the scenes that we you know we're always in the mix but you're not going to get everything and so there's a lot of work that also happens there so On behalf of the community, thanks for all the work that you guys are doing to continue to move us forward.

If you have any questions anytime, you all have my numbers and sell anytime. As you all know, it's a 24-7 type job. All these people here can agree to it. We're all working forward for the best of the city and the county and the people, the residents. That's who's paying for us and paying for this investment you're making in our organization. So thank you.

Thank you, Mitch.

Thanks, Mitch. Thank you.

Next to present, OCCK.

Do we have anybody here from OCCK?

Okay. I guess we don't have anybody here from OCCK. Okay. Celina Tennis is next.

Good afternoon. I'm Clark Renfro, president of Salina Tennis Alliance, and I'm here with Brian VanCuren, who's our executive director. Appreciate allowing us to be in front of you today, city commissioners. Start out with our slide presentation, and I'll keep this brief. Certainly this is our mission and our focus for the city to manage and operate the Salina Tennis Center. That's a picture of a recent youth clinic and camp that we had. Numbers continue to increase, and we'll touch on that here in just a bit.

Next slide, please.

This is a recent aerial photo we took, but The gist of this is just the location of these courts in proximity to the Tony Pizza Event Center, Kenwood Cove, the park, downtown. It's just been a very attractive, favorable location for us and easy access for people that come in both locally, regionally, and statewide. Next slide, please. I guess real quick on that last slide, I will note this past year, the city, we added sidewalks along the perimeter. And you can see that kind of on the lower piece of that that go around the facility. And it's really been nice because we've got parking, certainly from TPAC, area but the perimeter has really been a favorable area for people to come in and park and not have to worry about traffic. They can hop onto that sidewalk and work their way in. There's multiple entrances to the center but we primarily have people going through the main entrance which is next to what we call the tennis building which is the old pool house. So it's been awesome. Our partnership with the city has been great. And as Mayor Hopping mentioned, partnerships are key. We work very deeply with the Chamber of Commerce on bringing events here in town and being involved in that organization. We couldn't do it without them. And certainly proximity to downtown Salina is a huge plus for bringing in events and hosting those events and having restaurants, hotels, shopping in that district is really favorable. So we can go to that next slide. So a couple of highlights from 2025. I will mention this past year in 2024, and we highlighted this last year in our presentation, but we were named the premier outstanding community tennis organization in the state of Kansas by the United States Tennis Association in the Missouri Valley District. That was in 2024, so a nice feather in our cap, basically only two years into this thing. So that's been a nice... A couple things here, Match Point Clinics, Brian and his team have been holding those with the city in June, and we had 30 plus kids there. The STA tennis camp and tournament for middle school and high school athletes, and that's kind of more of an elite type of status venue in July. And then private instruction for both juniors and adults continues to happen. And then we continue to have multiple high school and middle school events there in addition to the college events that we host as well. A couple things, too, at the bottom there. The Keisha, we held five A-state boys this past year, and we also held three 2-1-A girls. That's how Keisha handled it. provides the events. They do 6A, 5A, 4A, and then 3, 2, 1A is all together. So that was a really nice event. And hats off to Brian. Typically, when we host an event for tennis, There's expenses that go in that. KSHIP provides a minimal amount of dollars, but there's expenses that go in. And so we have local partners that pitch in. And you also have a host school that also provides the kind of infrastructure to pull those and coordinate those tournaments. Bryan and the Kansas Westland was the host school, which is somewhat of a nominally. Usually it's a high school that's the host, and they stepped up and did that. And it was a really nice event and turned out well. Part two of the next slide on highlights. Again, ITA, NAI, Central West Regional. It's a huge tournament, and they hold those nationally. And each region hosts that. Actually, close to 250 men and women compete in that over a three-day event. And Brian and his team in Kansas-Westland help host that. So that brings people all over the region to Salina. And then the ITA Summer Series, that's the Intercollegiate Tennis Association. That's a... Those are events that are held throughout the nation, but they select certain sites based upon how they can host an event and the quality of those courts. And then just kind of roughly through the last bullet points there, Kansas Westland hosted over 20 events, both their men and women, and then we regularly held USTA League events. And USTA League events are really quite unique in the fact that USTA has adult leagues, and you can be 21, you can be 91 in playing those. And we have people, both men and women, that compete in that. And we host events here. And then they play throughout the state. And then Missouri Valley, which is Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri, make that USTA section up. So that's a big deal. And we'll host more of those as time goes on. We also partnered with the YMCA this past year. That was at their facility during the winter and fall period, and Brian and his team did a nice job, and we look to do more of that both at the STA courts as well as YMCA. And then Special Olympics, which is the Blue Thunder group, they regularly hold their nightly events. events there on a weekly basis, but it's usually from 5 to roughly 8 p.m. But they're great, and they utilize it, and there's lots of them that participate. Next slide, please. This is just a slide I want to point out. Tennis continues to grow in the US, and as a lot of other racquet sports get attention, they hit an all-time high in 2025. And those numbers kind of reflect kind of the increase in levels of people playing and participating. The high schools are also showing increased numbers of both men and women, boys and girls playing the sport. Tennis continues to flourish. We're a part of that. We want to be an advocate and continue to grow the game in our neck of the woods. Next slide, please. These are just a couple slides that we have on youth programming with Lessons in League. This happens to be the Match Point tennis camp that we put on with the city of Salina, and that's happening here in June. Next slide. And then this is kind of through our website. People can go on and sign up for these clinics and camps and personal instruction. Again, website, the courts are free and one of the things that we wanted to highlight is the courts can be reserved if there's a business or an event that people want to say, hey, I want to get a pod of courts here reserved, they can do it and there's a fee attached to that and they can easily go on our website to do that. But the courts are free of charge. They're open during normal park hours and then the gates are shut in the evening. Next slide, please. And these are just a couple pictures from our YMCA programming that we held with them this past fall. Next slide. And then that's a picture of the Blue Thunder team. And then next slide. Just vision for going forward. Again, we're gonna hold more events. We're really roughly two years into this. We're taking baby steps, but we've exceeded our expectations in terms of the number of events we've held and the scope and size of those events as well. The feedback that we get from people that come into Salina, both what we've done as a community and what these courts have brought is phenomenal. And I think we've certainly made our presence known and a place to be to host tournaments. A couple things, we're looking at adding some windscreens and windscreens kind of on the outlying areas that we're looking to add and additional shade structures for players and fans. We've done some things with the pavilion that we're going to continue to add there to make that more tournament ready. And then signage for the facility. I know a question came up last year about what we're doing with signage. And we've looked at some options there to promote the area. And then a couple of minor things on the gates of the courts. We initially designed those to be 90 degrees where you have to push or pull to open due to wind. And we thought that might be the best option. They tend to get stuck, and people are kind of pushing when they need to pull and pulling when they need to push. So we're looking at ways that we can enhance that. When we built these courts, we worked with the school district, and they also built four courts out at Jerry Ivy, or four additional, eight total. And they have gates that do 180, and those tend to work pretty good. So we may look at ways to enhance that. the ability to get in and out of the form. It's not a huge issue, but certainly from a cosmetics and aesthetics, we're looking to enhance that. And then certainly enhance our programming options, continue to provide adult and youth programming and grow those for all different levels of play. This is our budget. We're somewhat at a budget deficit, but we've done a very good job of managing our funds, and certainly we can carry that difference. But that kind of makes up our revenue and expenses. And our expenses now, we've got two years under our belt that we kind of have an idea of what we're paying for insurance and water and utilities and janitorial. This past year, when the city redid the bathrooms, which are awesome, we – We have a janitorial service that comes out and cleans those weekly and more if needed with events. And so that's worked out really well. And then we take care of the landscaping and the mowing around our area of the courts. And so, again, our request hasn't changed. It's the same from the city at $40,000. Next slide.

Another 30 seconds or so.

Yeah, so I'll open it up. That's kind of the highlight of that. I'll open it up to questions.

Do the events provide any funding in addition to the notoriety that you get?

With all the tournaments and I think I mean indirectly they do commissioner for you know through through town But I mean we do get for a tournament to be held we charge a fee for that So there is revenue from that and part of the budget is to to reflect the income from that So that's that's certainly a revenue stream We have when we have lessons or there's a piece of that that goes back into the pie for STA that goes back into keeping the courts in good shape.

I have to say that it's rare the artist's rendition Well, let me reverse that. It's rare the finished product looks like the artist's rendition, but I think you did a pretty good job of matching them up here.

Yeah, it's been outstanding. And I know this audience has heard this before, but those courts are the same courts as the US Open. The same manufacturer, the same surface, the same color. When you play on those courts, you're playing on the exact same surface that they do at the US Open in New York.

Well, I realize how big this was. The night that I saw you, I actually rode back, flew back to Salina with the K-State Manhattan tennis team. And I was actually aware of an entity. I realized, wow, okay, tennis is big. I mean, they're flying to their tournaments. I think they were down in Florida or New Orleans, somewhere. And it's... Big.

Yeah, tennis continues to grow, and I think it's great for everyone. It's a lifetime sport, and we're glad to be a part of it, and we thank your support, and we thank the support of the city.

Not really a question, but more of a just a- comment and some accolades with your collaboration with the YMCA, Blue Thunder, just exposing more kids to tennis. I mean, it's a lifetime sport. Contrary to that comment, I never was exposed to tennis, and I don't play it. But it's one of those sports where looking back at my age, I wish I had. And I'm glad that there's more kids in the community that have that opportunity. So well done. Thanks.

And I'm going to add on to that a little bit, Clark. When you were going through the budget, I'm not sure the average citizen knows, but you talked about Your alliance is paying for insurance, water, utilities, M&R, janitorial, lawn mowing of that facility. And if you weren't doing that, the city would in all likelihood be taking care of that, or we wouldn't have. that amenity there. So you already mentioned it, but the city's contribution of $40,000 or what it has been, but the total expense is $73,000. So the $33,000 is coming from the alliance?

Yeah, it's coming from the alliance we had up there from tournaments, leagues, lessons.

And there's still a deficit, but you guys are covering that. Yeah, we've got it covered. Yeah, so well done.

So I think that pretty much covered my question. So really, I look at more like Parks and Rec. That's why we've entered into this agreement, because we really have hands off on this facility, is the way I kind of look at it. And so you've kind of stepped into the role of Parks and Rec. So again, appreciate that. Okay, anything else? Thank you, Clark. Thank you, Clark.

Okay, we had OCK is here to make their presentation.

And just since you weren't here, we're giving you 10 minutes and then we'll take some questions after 10 minutes. 10 minutes. So we'll let you know.

Perfect. Sorry, we 100% were confident it was 3 o'clock. It, in fact, was 2 o'clock. So we are here and we're ready to rock and roll. I love to talk, so 10 minutes will be very, very fun. Our OCCK transportation, we have a little bit of how it went last year and what we're looking forward to in the next year. On the next slide is a reminder of why we do what we do. We are driven with commitment and respect. We venture out to ensure the independence of our passengers for all communities we serve. So OCCK serves a very large geographical footprint, but what we focus on here in the city of Salina is our green fixed route buses, Citigo, and the complimentary ADA paratransit buses. Last year we also introduced microtransit, which is kind of an in-between of paratransit and Citigo. Some people really like that personal service that's provided by paratransit where we are curb to curb we can help them in and out of the vehicle with a little bit more passenger assistance than we would on a typical fixed route and so they want that a little bit more opportunity to have that ride directly to where they go and that service has done very very well uh last year we gave thousands of rides this year we are we're busting that number out of the water already but I'm going to hop into some stories that drive us. Our passenger, Alice, is a regular on the Citigo bus. She can board any of three routes near her home, so she lives in a perfect location to get anywhere in the city. She can go straight to her desired locations where before she would have had to make one or two transfers per trip. The new routes have made riding so much easier for her. She is like the all-star OCCK transportation rider. She takes the fixed routes wherever she can, and then she uses our medivan programs to go to appointments or any doctor's visits. And she has also taken a couple rides on microtransit as well. Indigo rides the bus nearly every day. They use Citigo to get to their job at Oakdale Elementary, the grocery store, and other shopping areas, the medical and medical appointments. Without public transportation, they would not be able to be an active member in Salina. On our next slide is our numbers for Celina City Go service. So we have recognized another increase of rides and 2026, we are already seeing thousands of rides come in. So 23 to 24 was a very large jump. We saw that increase in 2025, although we didn't see as large of an increase. due to the fact that we launched our updated routes that significantly reduced the amount that passengers had to transfer. So it made their ride a lot easier, but then it looks like we have a few less passengers. So efficiency definitely took over there and we can see that reflect in those numbers. On our paratransit service in 2025, we saw that number decrease, which that was our goal. We had an eligibility process that was slightly outdated. We have updated that, and even in 2026, it has seen an additional update and become more electronic and user-friendly. Our goal was to have passengers that were using paratransit but were functionally able to use Citigo be transitioned over to that service. So the fact that we've seen our number go down by even if it's just a thousand rides, seeing that number go down each year has definitely been due to that effort on education. On the next slide. We have our ridership and that's broken out by trip purpose. So this takes care of our Salina paratransit rides and our Citigo rides. 23% of all total rides were to employment and that includes work, job coaching, interviews, and skills training. 46% was to a medical appointment. It could also be a medical related job. We don't have data differentiating that, so it's based on location or what the passenger is willing to share with us. And 28%, I know that 28% is quite a large number, but that breaks down nutrition, trips back to their own residence from the location that they were coming from. Maybe they're going out for entertainment. And then 3% was dedicated specifically to education. We are expecting that education to go up with our new stops near the library. And our route changes last year, we saw a 28% increase in ridership on our purple route. So purple route is a huge connector from Central Salina to South Salina. It has high ridership, high usage. So seeing that number increase is gonna lead us into, don't go to the next slide yet, but it is going to lead us to a reason for that. And 29% increase in the yellow route from our changes last fall. Those two things said the efficiency that we leaned into, making the routes talk to our passengers a little bit better, really, really paid off. We saw fewer transfers, but we had better rider experience, so we're seeing that number continue to go up. Imagine if they were transferring that many more times, that ridership would have exploded. And then we're seeing that accessibility for all riders. It's truly meeting them where their needs are and not trying to make assumptions for where they would like to go. Next slide. This next slide will be a large reason for the 5% increase that we have asked for. Purple Route has served Central and South Salina all by itself for a very long time. And for safety and passenger rideability, we are recognizing that it is time for that to be pulled apart. Through efficiencies that we found last fall and through what we are going to be moving into this fall. We will be able to serve the south industrial quarter. We're going to increase the efficiency and on time performance of the purple and it is going to make that north central to south Salina a lot more accessible for our passengers. And our last slide, the 2027 budget considerations. Some things that I'd like you to keep in mind as looking into this. We have a 3% cost of living increase that OCCK gives to all of its employees. We saw an increase last year in our health insurance subsidy. We saw that again this year. We are adding in that new sixth route. I am so excited that we had the efficiencies possible so that only a 5% increase request can take care of all of these things. Our route restructuring, we do have the need for marketing and education and infrastructure. We learned a lot with our last route update. We would like to put a little bit more effort into that education for the public. And then we're really excited about our fuel co-op that we have with the city of Salina. We currently have four vehicles fueling there, and we're gonna bump that up and continue transferring our fleet over there. Our vehicle maintenance, we have, he's not so new anymore, but his work really shined in 2025, Tim. Our vehicle lead mechanic has created a lot of efficiency. Instead of waiting for vehicles to break, he leaned in a little bit more to that preventative maintenance and was able to make our fleet go a lot farther, a lot easier. All right, I can answer any questions.

Okay, we're gonna start to my left this time.

Switching it up.

I haven't looked real hard for a fee schedule. I do have to note, taking a look at the numbers, I see 70,000 total rights in 2025. An annual budget all together with all the different funding sources looks a little north of four million. which is about a cost of $58 per rider. If you look at the 70,000 total rides, I'm not sure how I feel about that number. It seems like a pretty significant number if somebody's paying a $3 fare, but the actual overall cost being 57 or $58. If I request, Not to sound insensitive, but my own personal service where I'm having a driver come pick me up and take me wherever, what is the fee for that?

Absolutely, that is a $2 cost each way. So $2 to your destination and then $2 back to you.

And is that always what that fee has been?

That is what that fee has always been. So if we wanted to look into increasing the fares, that is an option for us. It is... Not as easy as it sounds, oh if we add a dollar to each fare, well then that will make all of our financial curiosities go away. Oftentimes when people take our rides, it is the last option they have and we are oftentimes going out of our way to make sure people are not stranded or left. Typically our ridership is not able to afford an Uber or a Lyft or have the community that has a vehicle to then give them those rides. So OCCK has always leaned into creating Creating the financial opportunity for people to get to work, get to the services that they are needing to live their best life. $2 has worked for us for a long time. Financial outlooks change, of course, so it's not anything that we haven't considered or ran some numbers against. Public transit is expensive for individual rides. Fixed route is where we see a lot of our cost savings. It is very important that as much efficiency as we can find in our fixed routes, we do. The more often we run the larger geographical space in Salina that we provide, the more riders we are going to attract, which then decreases that amount. APTA says that $5 per dollar spent on public transportation, so if we take that $50 per ride, that $50 times five is the money that is being reincorporated into the community. Last year when we did our survey, 50% of the rides we had on Citigo, it is skewed with our paratransit numbers, but 50% of the rides on Citigo were people going to places of employment. They were just getting themselves to work and getting them home. So if we didn't have those routes, if they weren't affordable to people, they would either be walking or they would not be able to be employed and be using some other type of way to make money or have that income supported.

Thank you.

And Trell, in terms of the rates, when you increase your rates, KDOT decreases the amount of money that they give you as well, or there's some calculation in there. So it's not always a – sometimes if she increases her rates, then KDOT's money goes down. So it doesn't really help what the city would be subsidizing, if that makes sense. If I'm saying that correctly.

Correct. Correct. So if we had $100 and we brought in more fares – It lowers the amount that KDOT's sending into us. It doesn't necessarily reduce the amount that OCCK is bringing to the local match or the city of Salina. While it can offset a little bit when we're talking $1, $2 per fare, I don't pay driver wages by the fare income coming through. We would have to do a lot of investigation into an amount that is appropriate to make a difference for KDOT for the city of Salina for OCCK. And I don't think that would be ever an appropriate number for our riders. We'd be looking $15, $20 a day ride. And that's definitely not less than Uber or Lyft. So it would definitely make KDOT happy to be bringing in all that money.

I'm curious, and you guys may not keep track of it, but the demographics, I mean, what percentage would you estimate are retirement age riders?

On our paratransit, that is... It's about 48% retirement age. That service is very much geared towards serving persons with disabilities and the elderly. On our fixed route, it is a wide, wide range of people. So I don't have exact data on that demographic. We have a survey that's about to go out and that will provide a very detailed breakdown. So I'd be happy to send the results. We have... Our get on and go pass has some 13 year olds writing to their summer activities all the way up to Miss Alice, who's well above 60.

Thank you.

Yeah, to be able to have the public transportation in the city of Salina, you know, provided by the CCK, that just takes a lot off the city scene. Not having to mess with that or deal with it. So, yeah, I think it's a good question.

Commissioner, could you move your microphone a little bit?

Thank you. I'm not going to repeat what I said.

I heard it, and I'm definitely putting that in my head, yes. All right.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you.

I would echo Commissioner Ivey's statements. I'm surprised the number of folks who regularly use it. I have two patients with chronic conditions. They're in electric scooters, and I'll see one of these ladies down at Walmart. I'll see her up in Santa Fe. I mean, I've been nowhere in town that I haven't seen her, and you guys get her there and get her home. So she loves it. Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Okay, next to present is Celina Grace.

Good afternoon. I'm Chad Young. I'm the executive director for Celina Grace. I believe you have a slideshow there. All right. So as we start today, I just would like to share a little bit about Celina Grace, who we are, what we do. We provide shelter that improves safety for vulnerable individuals while reducing strain on our emergency systems. Salina Grace started off by providing an emergency winter shelter. That shelter is for men, women, and children. It is a low barrier shelter and we're doing everything we can to help people get off the streets into a safe, warm place to be able to sleep at nights. Helping people to get off the streets is our top priority. And of course in doing so it makes our community safer. This last winter season we sheltered 72 men and 37 women through the winter. We also opened up back in 2022 the Community Resource Center, which is a multi-agency center. We provide both direct services, so if you'll notice on the chart, the yellow inner loop there are services that we provide directly. As soon as someone walks in the door, those services are immediately available to those individuals. and that is, you know, food, day shelter. We help people with their ID. We provide showers, laundry. We have community navigators there to work with them. We have computer and Wi-Fi access. And, of course, we work towards making sure that they get a hot lunch and a shelter. And before we go to the next slide, I'll say this. This model that we're using By partnering together the community resource center as a multi-agency center and emergency shelter is the same thing that Wichita is working hard to get off the ground and going to the tune of 23 million dollars. But we have already gotten it going right here in our own community for a lot less. We are striving to do everything as efficiently as possible for the benefit of our community. If you could go to the next slide. This past year, we served 771 individuals. We served over 17,000 meals. We provided 87 showers a month. We provide 65 loads of laundry that we are helping people to wash per month. And we have our community navigator who is there working one-on-one with individuals to help them find the long-term help that they need. They worked with 472 different individuals this past year. Next. Some of these things that we have worked on, we helped 97 people work on housing. We helped 83 people to establish their ID. Anything that you sign up for, anything that you need to do, whether it's work or anything, you need to have your ID. We helped 83 people get their IDs. We connected 82 people with mental health services. We connected 71 individuals with health care services. We worked with 55 veterans and we helped 35 to become gainfully employed this past year. As we look at the benefits that we provide to Celina, we provide a coordinated system that helps people move towards stability while reducing the burden on public resources. Individuals experiencing homelessness have significantly higher rates of interaction with law enforcement, emergency services, and the judicial system. According to the National Alliance on Ending Homelessness, a chronically homeless individual costs taxpayers anywhere between $30,000 to $50,000 per person per year when relying primarily on jails, emergency rooms, and crisis services. However, communities that implement centralized service centers like our Community Resource Center have seen jail bookings among the homeless decrease significantly. Next. Shortening the length of time an individual spends on the streets and helping them to stabilize reduces law enforcement time interacting with them, resources dedicated to responding to homeless related issues, emergency medical transports and fire services called for non-emergency needs, and it reduces court dockets burdened by minor infractions associated with homelessness. Supporting Celina Grace is an investment that enables Celina to spend less time reacting to crisis and more time ensuring public safety, health, and fiscal responsibility. Some of the benefits that we provide to Salina is not just to the individuals we serve, but it's to the broader community. We help to make the public spaces safer. It reduces pressure on our first responders. It's more efficient use of taxpayer resources. It removes barriers that keep people from getting the help they need and assists with making homelessness brief and hopefully non-recurring. Your continued support matters. Your support fosters a sense of trust from those who do not know us. So when we are applying for grants from foundations outside the area, whether we're asking for state funds or federal funds, when they see the city of Salina and Saline County, supporting our ministry, that gives them a greater sense of trust and confidence that our local people here know us, know what we're doing, and they see the benefit of it. So basically, your support helps us to leverage other opportunities within the community. And so, yes, thank you. I also want to share this. We are very thankful, and we wouldn't be where we are today without your support. But we also want you to know that we don't depend on you alone. We work very hard to diversify our income so that we can help each other as we work on the issues of homelessness and poverty here in our community. You can see that 43% of our income come from private donations. 28% comes from government, that's state, federal, and local. 19% comes from foundations, 6% comes from support of local businesses, and 4% from churches. For every dollar that y'all donate to us, we raise five more dollars from the community to provide these services. We're doing our best to address the issues of homelessness within our community, and not only for those who are homeless, but those who are at risk of homelessness. There are a lot of people who come to the Salina Grace Resource Center who are struggling to make ends meet, and they're struggling to stay in their apartments. And coming into the Resource Center to get a hot meal, to have some conversation, to have some additional support makes all the difference in the world. And so I thank you for your past support, and I'll pause now and allow you to ask any questions you'd like to ask.

I guess my only comment would be it does seem like we still have a problem in the community over at the corner of Broadway and Crawford where they seem to gather there by maybe the bus stop or by the signage in that shopping center. Are those people that maybe they spend the evening with Celina Grace but during the day they're kicking around wherever, or is there anybody that tries to work with those individuals?

So first, I'd like to say we're never going to eliminate homelessness as much as we'd like to be able to. What we can do is we can work with people who are desiring help and desiring change. And we can help those people make a difference and get back on their feet quicker. We do have a street outreach team that goes out every week and visits with people and tries to encourage them to get help. Not everybody that is over there on Broadway and Crawford are homeless. There are some people who are posing as homeless and holding up signs that are, in fact, not homeless. Then there are other people who are homeless who are out there holding up signs. So it's not always as easy to disseminate just by the optics. A couple of years ago, there was a lot of outcry about the homeless at 7th and Walnut. And we moved our facilities over to Broadway and we began working with people over there. And it's greatly reduced the number of homeless within our downtown business area. We can't make people disappear, and we can't make people do exactly what we'd like them to do. All we can do is reach out to them, give them an opportunity, show them a pathway. This is how you can have a better life, but they have to make the choice to want to do it.

I agree.

Not really any questions, just more of an observation. I've watched kind of from afar what your organization evolve and offer more services and just more of a comprehensive overall approach. And I really appreciate the direction you're going and just trying to touch on all those bases and get people the help they need. And like you said, not everybody accepts that help and that's going to be up to them but they have options and thank you for that. Thank you. Am I right?

Do you guys keep data or have any quantifiable data on people that stop coming to you because they've kind of turned around and don't need to anymore?

Yeah. I don't have the numbers right now, but I'll tell you one really brief story. I'll tell you about Jason because Jason told me I could share his story. Jason hung out downtown for many years. He was addicted to meth. He knew about the mission and he knew about other resources, but he wasn't ready to quit using. But he would come by Salina Grace because he knew he could get a hot meal there. And every time he came by Salina Grace, we would talk to him. We'd love him. We'd encourage him. Jason, when are you ready to get off the streets? We've got a place for you over at the rescue mission. They're willing to take you. For the first two years, Jason wasn't ready until one day he was ready. He came in. We asked him, are you ready to go to the rescue mission? He said, yeah, I'm ready. Jason has been sober since. Not only that, he entered the New Life program at the mission. He graduated the New Life program at the mission, and he's back out. He's working full-time in our community now. He's been sober for nearly three years. And not only that, but he's also been reintegrated with his family. And so that's just one person here in our community that has been radically transformed because the help was ready and available for him when he was ready to accept the help.

Okay, I've got one. I think I'm going to have to challenge the churches. We're only giving them 4%. Amen, brother. That's kind of embarrassing. Talk to all the Lutherans out there wherever you are. We've got to step it up.

I don't know if this is really a question. I guess it is. I was glad to see that 82 individuals got mental health services. Is that, and again, we've got to keep moving, but is that still one of your biggest challenges? Yes, mental health and substance abuse. But trying to find a facility for them and stuff, is that still one of your biggest challenges?

That is still a very difficult thing to do. Man, we just don't have enough resources, especially for people with mental health issues.

I was glad to see that 82 received some help, so that was good. So thank you very much for your presentation.

Thank you.

I appreciate it. We're about on time. We've got three left, and we've got 35 minutes.

Do I have Skyfire, somebody from Skyfire here? Oh, okay. Well, you're last on my list. I just was missing her earlier, so I wanted to make sure. We do have three left, and next up is United Way.

By the way, the presenters are doing a good question. Stay with them. They're 10 minutes. It's our questions that are running us over.

We'll see if I can keep up the good work. Thank you for having me today, Mayor Hoppeck and Commissioners. My name is Michelle Groupman. I am the Early Childhood Initiative Director. Talk louder.

Get closer.

Okay. My name is Michelle Groupman. I'm the Early Childhood Initiative Director with Salina Area United Way. On my slides, you'll see our missions to strengthen North Central Kansas by uniting people and resources to build resilient, thriving communities. On the next slide, you'll see our four pillars, so community resiliency, financial security, youth opportunities, and healthy community. Today we're going to be talking about our community resilience pillar, addressing urgent needs today for a better tomorrow. So for our request this year, I wasn't sure if it was going to be up there or not. I believe it was $50,000 for you to be the primary sponsor for the ALICE simulator and for the money to go towards our community resilience pillar that we're growing this year. So first I wanted to talk a little bit about the ALICE population here in the city of Salina. And so what you'll see, the ALICE population, I'm not sure if you're all familiar with ALICE or not. So I wanted to put a little bit up here about ALICE. So in our zip code 67401, we have a 39% ALICE household. So ALICE stands for Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed Households. So that 39% represents the poverty level households and households that sit in the paycheck to paycheck portion of people. So those are the people who maybe aren't eligible for the food stamps, the Medicaid, everything like that. So they are living just paycheck to paycheck and maybe one paycheck away from a crisis and maybe going into that Salina Grace population. So that represents nearly four out of 10 Kansas families. So many of these are essential jobs like teachers, firefighters, people along those lines. So the instability. If you want to go to the next slide for me. So the ALIS simulation is something that we run in local schools here. So in this last school year, about 500 USD 305 students went through it. Tenth graders is normally who we try to go through. So South and Central High School went through it this last year. So the ALIS simulation is a hands-on simulation. that we put on, like I said, for the 10th graders so that they can experience the financial realities that a lot of these households here locally go through. So up here on the slide, I have listed the booths that these teenagers go through that they have to visit, they're required to visit. When they go in to the simulation, they're handed a job, like fake household, if you will. And they have to visit all these booths and essentially spend their money like any household would. And they have to visit the social services booth. So essentially, if they don't make enough money, they would have to visit and get a second job, get help with childcare, things like that. So it helps the students understand the real cost of living, build empathy for local families. connect education to future opportunities things like that so it really is great the comments that come out at the end are very helpful for the students I think to realize what people in our community are truly going through On the next slide, we'll talk a little bit about VITA. So that's our Volunteer Income Tax Program. So it is an IRS-sponsored program. So it assists in tax preparation for the low to moderate income families here in the area. You can make up to $67,000 a year and still be qualified for it. So this year we had 20 dedicated volunteers that did it. It was around 2,000 volunteer hours. So each volunteer did approximately 100 hours without looking at the slide. That's the number I remember off the top of my head. There was about $770,000 that was put back into the community through that program. So that was a really great program. Like I said, completely volunteer run. About 850 returns were prepared. all under this community resilience pillar. On the next slide. So what we're here talking about today, the emergency relief fund. So this is something that's new under our community resilience pillar this year. So it's basically a locally managed crisis response fund. So basically what it's going to do is be the primary contact and coordination point for like any crisis in our community. So a good example would be like when all of the apartments burned down over by like Ross by the mall. A lot of people called us to try and receive funding for clothing and motel stays and things like that. Something that we just weren't well prepared for at that point. So that's why we're trying to grow this fund to be able to help during crisis like that. So we have worked now in coordination with the county of Saline to be the direct contact and receipt for that to be able to coordinate locally here with them. Also, there's a growing need of households facing eviction, shutoff notices, and short-term financial crisis. So through that, we're looking to help with utility assistance, rental assistance, and possibly gas cards. But looking at partnering with local agencies who already do that so we aren't duplicating services. So our goal is to build a sustainable emergency fund that helps families receive timely coordinated support during times of crisis. Something that I did not put in my slides but we're working diligently on is a community resource hub. So listening to everybody else talk about their presentations, I'm very excited to talk about this because I think it fits perfectly between what Salina Grace talked about and what the visit talked about because it's something that you can go you don't have to have a referral or anything you can just go right onto our website we're planning on launching it by the end of the year and you can just type in the type of resource you're looking for or click on the button and It'll pull down all of the resources that you're looking for right in our zip code. So it'll fit nicely for anybody who's looking. You don't have to put in any information about yourself or anything. You can even click somebody's phone number and send them a text. So I think it'll be perfect, exactly what everybody here in our community is looking for. So I have a previous grant that I wrote last year that's gonna pay for it for the first couple years. And I'm really hopeful that it's exactly what our community is going to be looking for. I don't know how much time I have left.

About two minutes.

About two minutes. Okay. So I did put updates on past funding on here in case you were interested on any of the updates from our past funding. ARPA funding and early childcare can kind of go together, but if you want to scroll down, the SNAP contribution, here is kind of, if you want to scroll down just one more, the SNAP Back Against Hunger event that we did. We did 600 meals, bagged meals, a lot of different community Vendors came together. On the bottom right hand corner you'll see even Jeff Hammond was bagging eggs right there. But 600 bag meals, 300 were given out there. We did 300 hot meals as well and gave out dry goods as well. And then if you want to go down a little bit farther, our early child care initiative now has 1.2 million in the ECIF endowment. So that was where the ARPA funds went to. And then our 2026-2027 grant cycle, we're in phase two now. So this cycle is our third grant cycle, and we were able to grant out $350,000 this cycle. Nine in-home providers expanded operating hours. So that's outside of the 7 to 5.30 to incorporate manufacturing hours, which we are really excited about. Some of them as early as 3 in the morning to 11.30 p.m. So we're supporting five child care centers and 18 in-home providers. And with that, thank you so much. Do you have any questions?

Okay, any questions for? I don't.

Craig?

No, we'll keep it short.

What's your current largest source of contributions to the endowment? Just donations and grants, I mean, is there any one large source?

So for every donation that's given to ECIF, 10% of it goes directly into the endowment. So we have a whole list of donors right now that come in. If you go on our website, the list is all right there. But Great Plains Manufacturing is our diamond donor and they give $75,000 a year. So there's a whole list of them underneath of that. But I would say they need to be recognized. They were our first diamond donor.

And real quick, what were the dollars this year? What were you going to apply those to? What part of the year?

The Community Resilience Fund.

The community what?

The Community Resilience Fund.

Resilience Fund is where you're going to put them, okay.

Yes, sir.

Okay, thank you very much.

Next up is Celina Liberty.

We have a full group here.

Good afternoon, Mayor Hoppeck, City Commission. My name is Dan Mendocina. I am the founder and president of the Salina Liberty Ownership Group. To my right here is Tom Perez, who is the co-founder and vice president of the Salina Ownership Group. And to my left here is Francis Flax. Everybody knows Francis in the community. He's been our general manager since day one. and an important partner in how we built the professional football team here in Salina, Kansas. If we go to the next slide, one of the things that I really wanted to spend a little bit of time on is that without a solid mission, vision, and a strategy, what we call our strategic drivers, the average life of an indoor professional football team is less than two years. It's 1.8 years. That's the average life. There's over 14 leagues. with these professional teams. And again, the average life's about 1.8 years. So what we wanted to make sure we did is we treated this as a business and not a hobby because that's the biggest mistake that most professional teams make. So not only from our mission that we want to build a winning football team, but we want to build a football team that contributes back into the community. So one of the things, when you look at our strategic drivers, the community support, and the people development side, on our contracts with our players, they are required to give back to the community. And I'll show you pictures here shortly that each week they are to go out into the community, either in the schools, into the organizations, and be part of the community. And this is something that is probably the toughest thing for our players to do because some of the stories for where some of these young men come from, some very, very tough areas, the only reason they would go out of their door is to go to school and to try to get away from their community. So we're actually reversing that now and saying when you come to Salina and play for Salina, not only are you going to get paid, but you're also going to give pay back to the community, if that makes sense, and that's on the contracts. Next slide, really want to kind of talk a little bit about the history, how Tom and I and Francis got here. On the early morning hours in 2015, I received a call from the city manager at that time, which was Jason Gage and the president of the chamber, Dennis Laver. I guess there was quite some contribution by the city and the chamber to get the Salina Bombers started here in Salina at that time. And in the middle of the night, the team folded, and I was their first call to see if I would be interested, try to get an investment group together to continue the Salina Bombers. Long story short, we decided not to continue. We didn't like the model financially. It didn't make sense with that setup. But Tom and I started the franchise, Salina Liberty, at that time, and Francis Flax was our first call because Francis' history, he's in the Hall of Fame, For coaching and basketball, he's worked with young men in some of the toughest areas, and he really kind of helped us set up our model. So we are starting our 11th year of our franchise now. So remember my comment before that the average life is 1.8 years. We are now starting this year as our 11th year of the franchise. Our 10th season, thanks to COVID, but I think COVID made interruptions to a lot of life back then, but this is our 10th year. We are now one of the most, we are one of the, top successful winning organizations in either the indoor game or the arena game. Different rules, different setups. We've played in both leagues before. One of the things that's key is, if you've ever been to our game before, we actually cater to a lot of demographics. We have the kid activities that happen in between the timeouts, which the kids just love. We have, you know, the men my age that want to go to have a few beers and watch football. But you would be surprised that how, you know, we've really attached to the senior community. I mean, we even have, there's buses that come from some of the nursing homes now, some of our Some of our most avid fans are people that are a little bit even more senior to myself. So it's really a really wide demographic that really caters to the community. And before I get into the financials, the business support here in Salina is amazing. If you've ever been to our game before and see all of our sponsors, We couldn't do it without the business community, it's just not possible. And that helps us give back to our youth and to the other community services in order for us to provide back. Quick update on financials, and I won't go through all this, you have those numbers in front of you. But you can see pretty quickly, our average budget on an annual basis is about $750,000. We cover a big chunk of that cost through business sponsorship. But you can see there's still a gap of about $200,000 to $250,000. We do other things such as our partnership with Tony's Pizza Event Center and through our merchandise. But whatever is not covered by the business sponsorship is covered by our ownership group. And so if you see below there, I think that's important that we were very selective in how we built the ownership group. My wife and I, Tom was our first call. Tom and I have been friends since middle school. But Tom runs a very successful business in Precision Electric. His son Josh is also on the ownership group. Dan Keebors, who owns a very large roofing company, and Ryan Roofing, and then Jimmy Sponder, who won Vision Aviation, and Roy Lawrence. And so you can see it's a very diverse group, however, very successful group of businessmen, and how we actually really drive and, you know, make Salina Liberty successful. So I really wanted to kind of call out there to those numbers and that page. The next slide here is... One of the key fundamentals on that previous page is Tony's Pizza Event Center is our home arena, and it has been since day one. And we average between seven and eight events in that arena on an annual basis. If you look at the number of total events, I think you're well versed here. We are important. customer to Tony's Pizza Event Center and they have a great partnership with us. They've worked with us through the years to make it equitable for us to actually have a professional game there. The cost of having a game on a Saturday night there as far as our game day personnel and to lease the building is right around $20,000. Our payroll for the players is right around $12,000. So you can see for us to put an event on, it takes quite some financial backing to be able to have a professional team here in Salina, Kansas. But again, we see it as an important give back to the community. This is not a semi-pro team, this is a professional team. We deal with agents and these players come from all over the United States and in some cases all over the world. We had as many as six players in the NFL at one particular year. Our quarterback this year comes from the Canadian Football League. He just had a three year run up in the Toronto and he's back in Salina now. So we are blessed. And our coach is actually in the Hall of Fame for indoor and arena football. And he could go to any team he would like to or he would choose to. Probably it makes significantly more money but he chooses to be here in Salina, Kansas because of we've built this franchise together. So I think that's also important to kind of note. Next slide is I kind of have some pictures here This is, you know, the kids, we do a fan tunnel. All of our players go to all of the elementary schools and all of our high schools throughout the year. On Fridays, they go to – they pick a different elementary school. What we do, High Five Friday, and it's to encourage kids to go into school with a positive attitude. You'd be surprised that, you know, the way some of the kids walk in and – To see the encouragement of a professional football player with a high five gives them a chance to be successful. Next slide is just some additional pictures of how our business sponsors are so close to the action. We have what we call a VIP party pit right behind the wall. You literally have to pay attention because players and footballs go over that wall throughout the entire game. And on the next slide, we also really have to work with our players coming from some of these tough communities. The partnership with the police department and the fire department, we have to work with our players because that's not always a positive view from some of the cities that they come from. So for them to get out and go spend time in the community has also made them better. And you'd be surprised to hear them say, that they really appreciated the opportunity to really understand our police department and our fire department. And the next slide is the fire department where they go out in the community and we go to different fire departments. And there's just a couple more pictures as well that we wanted to share with you. In the schools, on the next page, they actually pack lunches. for different organizations. We have them go volunteer for different organizations. And we also partner with AMBUX. This is a picture of AMBUX. We give a trike away every year where we purchase the trike. And this is the trike giveaway that we do at halftime for some young person to be able to have a chance to be mobile. To see them ride that bike for the first time is pretty impactful. Next slide is out in the schools and participating with some of the schools with physical education. And then the next slide, I believe we get into the, this is the one thing I really kind of wanted to highlight. We do a, A military appreciation theme night. We just did it on May 23rd. We've done it every year. We partner with VFW, Salina Legion, and we do a veterans walk at halftime where we really honor the true heroes in our community that are veterans. And they even do a special ceremony for the missing in action where they have the empty table and they do a complete ceremony for that. But that's a really, it's one of our favorite themes as far as the ownership group goes to really give back to our true heroes. heroes. And again, there's some other pictures there, but that's really the basic. And again, we're requesting continued support for the $35,000 in sponsorship from the city.

Any questions for...

Great win.

Yeah, nice win last night. I was just going to say that. So that number on the events this year is at seven, and we have a chance to actually, if we go take care of business down in Pueblo next week, and if Omaha knocks off Southwest Kansas, we'll have the championship game on the weekend of the 19th here at TPAC again this year. This will be our fifth national championship we've played in.

One quick question, and I think you touched on it, but you do pay a lease to TPAC to use it, correct?

Yeah, I mean, we've talked about it through the years where a couple of the leagues that we got into, there's still some obligation and we're handling that through the legal channels. But any shortfall we have in our budget on an annual basis is covered by the ownership group. What we promise to our players and what we commit to, we make sure they get that. That's part of the issue of why the average life's only 1.8 years, because that doesn't always happen in the other professional team.

Thank you, guys. Thank you. I think we have one more. We're going to go out with a bang, aren't we?

Keep it quick. Skyfire.

If you could step, yeah, the microphone tells who you are and who you're with.

I'm Camille Elmore, I'm here representing JRI Hospitality, partner with the city for the Sky Fire event every year. Thank you, first of all, for your continued support, very much appreciate it. We're actually asking for an increase from last year's support, primarily because the cost of the product has gone up. We also have tried to cut some things out of the past couple years. We no longer provide entertainment ahead of time. That cost quite a bit, and we felt like it was not good use of the funds that we were receiving from sponsors. So now we have the live radio broadcast instead that's on the property there at the golf course. Currently it is around $42,000. JRI Hospitality this year is now going to do a lot of the advertising in kind for company, Victory Pyrotechnics out of Wichita that's providing. So their cost to us was around 41,000. We actually have already paid them the 35,000 with the in-kind donation that they took off for the advertising. And then also first time, they gave us a discount for first time user. This is the first year we've used Victory Pyrotechnics. We have three-year contracts that are expiring this year with 11 partners in the community. I've already reached out to all of them to try to encourage them to do another three year contract or sponsorship. I have heard back from one in particular that is questioning whether they will be able to do that or not, which is thus why I'm asking for the increase. The sponsorships are $1,500. I'm asking for a $1,500 increase from the city. The JRI hospitality portion, has gone up and we're just trying to ask you all to meet us halfway. And in anticipation of hopefully no other sponsors deciding not to continue, that would then equal it out. So that's really all I'm doing is asking for that 1500 extra just to help make sure that we can put this event on every year. So that's it, short and sweet.

Questions or comments?

Just a comment. The last few years I've gone up there, it's been an outstanding show. I feel like it's improved a lot.

Great. Thanks.

So I was just double checking. So the 14, it was here. We had over here, it said 15.

I only need 15. Sorry, I'm at 1,500. I need to look at that really quick.

It said over here in the written part, it said 15,000.

Oh, 14 was what? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 2027 request. Thank you for that. Yes. You had 12.5 last year. Sorry, that's a typo there. It should be 14. Okay. You had 12.5 last year, and we're asking for 1,500 more to make it 14.

Okay, I just wanted to make sure we didn't.

I mean, I'd welcome 15 if you'd like to.

That's great. Quick question. Yes. So this shouldn't be confused with Sky Fire?

This is Sky Fire.

This is Sky Fire.

Yes, this is the city fireworks for the community.

Okay, this isn't on the Salina Country Club property, this is- Correct. Hold on, Markley. Salina Country Club pays for their own- Just wanted to make that clear.

Yes, yes, they take care of the rest.

This is what AMBUX used to do, correct?

Correct, correct.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Thank you. Okay, we're going to take a short break. We'll be back here at 4 o'clock for the city commission meeting.

Yeah, okay.

Okay, it is four o'clock. We will call the Monday, June 8th, 2026 line of city commission meeting to order. I will look to staff for confirmation. The Kansas open meeting act required notice has been properly provided.

Yes.

Thank you. With that, may we have a roll call here?

Commissioner Davis here. Commissioner Ivy here. Commissioner Lankowitz here. Commissioner rep here.

Thank you. With those who are able, please stand for a pledge of allegiance and a moment of silence.

the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you.

Okay.

We have no public hearing, so that will move us to the consent agenda.

Item 4.1, consider approval of the June 1st, 2026 regular meeting minutes.

Okay, does anyone have an addition or correction to the minutes? If not, I'll accept a motion to approve. Move to accept the consent agenda.

Second.

We have a motion and a second to accept the consent agenda. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? That item passes 5-0. That will move us to administration.

Item 5.1, consider authorizing the issuance and sale of General Obligation Internal Improvement Bonds Series 2026A in the amount of $12,595,000 via Ordinance No. 26-11285 and Resolution No. 26-8357. Good afternoon, mayors and commissioners. I'm Karina Renner, Deputy Finance Director.

On May 11th, the City Commission gave approval to offer for public sale general obligation bonds. As part of this process, we received a Moody's credit rating, which was received on June 3rd, 2026. The city's rating was confirmed and remains at AA3. And the rating report noted that the city's strengths included our continued status as the regional economic hub of north central Kansas. Conservative budgeting and strong tax revenues contributed to a positive financial performance. It was also noted that a positive economic growth and significant improvement in resident income and full value per capita could lead to an upgrade in rating. The bids were received today and we have Dave Atterbury with the Stiefel and Nicholas here to give the bid report. Mitch Walter with Gilmore and Bell is also here and available to address any questions.

Thank you and good afternoon. Again, David Arteberry with Stiefel Nicholas. In addition to getting the rating for the bonds, some other activity that's been occurring leading up to the sale today involved doing some due diligence work, making sure that we were aware of and that investors were made aware of anything that might be going on with the city that might not be publicly available or might not be readily available information. Additionally, the disclosure documents, the offering documents, the preliminary official statement, and bidding documents were finalized and distributed about a week ago. All that then led up to the actual offering of the sale of the bonds and the receiving of bids today that occurred at 11 o'clock. And just as a reminder, the projects that are being financed six benefit district projects, one involving the road out to the new Amazon facility, and then also five residential subdivision projects, as well as an additional project involved with financing for the new fire station. The bidding went very well today. To give you a little bit of flavor on the bond market, I think you should have a copy of a graph in front of you. Did that get distributed here? Okay, what I wanted to do here is just kind of illustrate to you what has happened to interest rates over the last few years. This is since January of 2022, it's a graph of tax exempt interest rates both for one year, for a 10 year and a 20 year maturity for the different bonds. And then what I did with the vertical lines there is show at what point in time the city in recent years has sold bonds. And down below each of the lines, you'll see what the actual true interest costs for each of those sales was over the last, That's about four or five years. Today the results were a little better than they were last year. And the results are shown on this other page that's got a little box in the middle and says S&P in the upper left hand corner. These are the bids that you received today. There's a total of six bids received. The best bid, the one offering to buy the bonds at the lowest interest rate from the city, was submitted by FHN Financial Capital Markets. They're out of Memphis. And the true interest cost there was 3.863334%. And you can see that is a little bit different, a little bit lower than last year. Not as quite as low as some of the prior years, but that's, again, that's just market conditions. Getting seven bids, or six bids, to me is an indication that you got some very aggressive, interested purchasers for your bonds. The bid submitted by FHN, it was verified, it was mathematically correct, it met all of the other bidding parameters, and they provided the required 2% good faith deposit that was received by the city this afternoon. The issue was resized based on their bid to the number that Nikki mentioned earlier, $12,595,000. So everything went smooth. I welcome any questions you might have about the process, the results. If you've got specific questions about the action items required, I might have to refer you to Mitch with Gilmore and Bell, but I'd be happy to answer any other questions you might have.

We just kind of updated that instead of the $12,660,000, the bonds will be $12,595,000. Is that correct? Yeah. Okay.

And the reason for that? When the bidders structure their bid, they have the opportunity to offer a premium to the city. And the bid provided by FHN, in fact, all of the bids offered a premium to the city. FHN's bid, their premium was a little bit higher than I expected. And that's normal, that occurs. And so that extra premium was used to reduce the size of the bond issue. So you'll still get the net amount of money that you want. It's just that some of it will come to the city in the form of a premium instead of principal amount of bonds. Okay.

Any questions for? Okay, any comments from the public? So we have two actions to take today. We have the ordinance and we also have the resolution. So I will bring it back to the commission for action.

Mayor, I move that we approve ordinance number 26-11285, authorizing the issuance and delivery of not to exceed 12,595,000 principal amount of general obligation internal improvement bond series 2026-A.

Second. We have a motion and a second to approve ordinance number 26-11285, authorizing the issuance and delivery of not to exceed 12,595,000 principal amount of general obligation internal improvement bond series 2026-A. May we have a roll call, please?

Commissioner Davis?

Aye.

Commissioner Ivey?

Aye.

Commissioner Lankowitz?

Aye.

Commissioner Ripp?

Aye.

Mayor Hoppock?

Aye.

Aye. That item passes 5-0. That will bring us to the resolution.

Mayor, I move we approve resolution number 26-8357 prescribing the form and details of and authorizing the delivery of 12,595,000 principal amount of general obligation internal improvement bond series 2026-A. Second.

We have a motion and a second approving resolution number 26-8357, prescribing the form and details of and authorizing the delivery of $12,595,000 principal amount of general obligation internal improvement bonds series 2026-A. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? That item also passes 5-0. Thank you very much. That will bring us to item 5.2.

Item 5.2, review and receive the 2024 audit report from Corvus Mazars LLP.

Hello, Mayor and Commissioners. Karina Reiner, Deputy Finance Director. The city has received our 2024 audit report. The report will be available for public access on our website tomorrow after it's received by the commission. We have Michael Gerber here with Forvis Mazars here to present the review and the audit report.

Thank you, Karina. Mr. Mayor, commissioners, thank you for having me here today. My name is Michael Gerber. I work with Forvis Mazars. I'm a partner there. We do a number of audits for governmental and non-profit entities. Happy to be here today to go over the results of the 2024 financial statement audits. I'd like to, if I could, start by thanking your finance team. Obviously, you have Karina here. We also work with Debbie and Rachel pretty closely. They're our main contacts. You have a number of people behind the scenes. They've all been very professional and helpful in getting us what we need to do our job. So thank you very much. I have four items that I'd like to go over with you here today. I'll talk about the opinion that we have issued on the financials, let you know where you can find some of the results, some of the financial statement information within this report. I'll go over the findings and finally I'll address the compliance audit that you had as a result of some of the federal funds that you received during the year. So first off, with regards to the opinion, we did issue a clean and unmodified opinion. That's the opinion that you want as a result of a financial statement audit, so certainly good news there. You also have two component units, the Salina Housing Authority and the Airport Authority. And you might maybe recall from last year, the Housing Authority issued a qualified opinion with regards to their report. So we couldn't issue an opinion last year, but we were able to get a clean opinion from that this year from the other auditor. So again, that's some of the results for why we can issue a clean opinion on the city here this year. The other component unit, the airport authority, they did issue a clean opinion again this year. However, that report was received, finalized at the end of March, so that's one of the reasons why I'm here today. presenting on the 2024 financial statements just as a result of getting that report in March here of this year. But at the end of the day, we did issue a clean opinion for the city this year. As far as the financial information, I think you all probably have this document. It's a pretty thick document, a little over 100 pages. Certainly wouldn't expect you to read through that entire thing. But if you do just want some highlights, the management discussion and analysis area on pages five through 16, that's probably where you want to focus. That'll give you a sense on what the changes were year over year and what caused some of those changes. What you'll note is net position for the government increased by about $12 million year over year. You'd like to see those increases. mostly related to some of the COVID funding that you received. And then as the gentleman here just previously mentioned, strong, strong revenues throughout the year, which have really helped that bottom line as well. As far as the findings go, as a result of our, you know, within our procedures, your finance team tracks things on a cash basis for budgetary purposes. We make certain adjustments to get this on an accrual basis. So we're recording receivables, payables, capital assets, debt, things like that are what you're going to find within this report. We are engaged to help with some of those entries, so that's certainly not unusual, especially with a city like this. But we did have a few adjustments that were outside of what we would typically adjust for, and the main one being related to the former Schilling Air Force Base. I'm not sure if all of you were around back in 2021, but the city did receive a good sum of money to help remediate the environmental impacts that were left on that Air Force Base. at that point in time when that cash received a liability should have been recorded as well in connection with that 65 million cash inflow so we did make that adjustment here for this year to get that on the books and anytime that you have an adjustment of that magnitude and you're restating financial statements that triggers some other findings and those are towards the end of this report just some written narrative around hey why did it happen what what did the city do to correct it going forward that how does it impact the report so that's that's what you'll see uh towards towards the end of this report here the other items much more uh minimal or a lot more less than than what what i just referred to on on the environmental remediation we did adjust the landfill liability to actual the good news is those two liabilities they're not impacting any current city resources right you don't have any immediate cash outflows these are liabilities that are well into the future we just need to get those recorded here for the financial statement purposes The last item that I'll mention as far as findings, we also looked at some of the transfers that are going from your utility funds into the general funds. I won't go into all the nuances on how this works, those are certainly allowed. But how some of those get reported can change, they can impact how your debt covenants are calculated. And so we just wanna make sure in the city, your finance team is looking into this. Those debt covenants have to do with, can you pay the debt that is due here in the current year with revenues that are coming into the next year as well? The city is looking at either maybe extending some of those maturities or maybe looking at a rate study to see if maybe some of the rates need a change to help supplement that, specifically the water fund, making sure revenue is coming in to cover those current debt payments. The last item that I want to mention is the compliance supplement, the federal awards that you receive. You do still have some COVID funding that was being spent in 2024. That was about $9 million. Anytime you receive federal funding, they want to make sure that it's getting spent in the right areas. And so that's what our testing was around. Good news in that area was we've had no findings as a result of that. It seems like the reporting is adequate. Money's getting spent in the right areas. So certainly good news with respect to that area. That covers my prepared remarks, but I will stand for questions or comments.

Could you explain on the remediation funds, so how did we book that when that came in? Because we set up a separate account for that, so we showed that as a liability account then, or as asset, excuse me?

Correct. Yeah. So when that money was first received, it was set up in its own fund. You're exactly right. You received it as cash and then you had a net position or equity is effectively how it was recorded. It was restricted. So I believe any user who would have looked at these statements in the past would have seen, okay, there's a restriction associated with that. So I don't know that it really misled any users too much, but that should have been a liability on the city's financials. Kind of like a payable account. Exactly. That's exactly right. And it'll be far in the future where that... The ultimate amount is paid, but yes, the liability should have been recorded. Correct.

Then on the landfill post-closure costs, that's not to just close a cell. Is that to close, if we were to close the entire landfill? Correct. So it's really nothing we're going to do or we see doing in the future, but that's a...

Requirement of who, the state, the federal? Yeah, the Government Accounting Standards Board, that's who determines how these numbers get reported. Okay. Yes, maybe not even in our lifetime will we have to see that payment being made, just given the useful life of that landfill. But in theory, the amount that needs to be paid when that's closed gets accrued, and then the amount to operate that or monitor it over the next 30 years gets recorded as well.

So had we been doing that in the past and we just missed?

The amount that it cost to close it was always recorded. It was at how much the 30 years of taking care of it after. Again, if you look at it, just common sense, net present value. it's probably pennies at this point in time, but GASB does require that you determine what that amount is and record it on your book.

So that's set up by the Federalist, the FASB. Exactly. Okay. That was my main question, so I just... And no, I didn't read the whole thing. I wouldn't expect that. Any other questions or comments from... No. Yeah. The good thing is we did get the answer from you that we wanted as far as the statement, so perfect. Yeah, exactly. Okay, are there any comments or questions from the public on this item? Okay, if not, I will bring it back to the commission for action.

Mr. Mayor, I move that this governing body receive the 2024 audit report from Forbes and Mazars LLP.

Second. We have a motion and a second to receive the 2024 audit report. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? That item passes 5-0. Thank you very much for your work. Okay, that will move us to item 5.3.

Item 5.3, consider awarding the bid for construction of the landfill scale house and scales project to vote construction of Newton, Kansas in an amount not to exceed $3,239,888.76. Okay, I am going to recuse myself from this item due to a business with several of the bidders. Thank you.

Go ahead.

Good afternoon, Vice Mayor and Commissioners. Ron Marsh, Director of Public Works. As part of the approved 2026 Capital Improvement Program, new scales and a new scale house at the Salina Solid Waste Municipal Landfill are planned to be constructed this year, 2026. Posting for the bid, project bids went live on May 8th, 2026 on the city web page in Salina Blueprint Plan Room. A pre-bid meeting was held May 19th. Bids were open May 29th at 10 a.m. with five bids received. NF Construction, T&R Construction, JC Builders Incorporated, Votes Construction, Potton Construction. In your packet was a bid tabulation that you should have received. Although pot and construction was the low bid, they did not fill out unit prices on the bid form submitted on the day of letting. They provided a single lump sum amount under item 35, and section 12.2 of the invitation to bid states, in part, all blanks on the bid form must be completed. A bid price shall be indicated for each bid item, alternative, and unit price item listed therein. Ponton Construction did submit a completed bid form with unit prices on Monday, June 1st, three days after the bid opening. When tabulated, their bid form overall bid was different than their originally submitted overall bid. Votes Construction was the next low bid at $3,239,888.76. Votes and the other bidders all submitted correctly filled out bid forms with unit prices at the time of opening. Approving the improper bid from Potton Construction would set a bad precedent for future construction project bids. Unit prices are important in construction bids to accurately track expenditures and for transparency. It allows the city to realize cost savings when applicable as well as justify increases or change orders when necessary. Funding for the project in the CIP was $3 million, $2.7 million of that for construction and $300,000 for design. The engineer's total estimate was $4,148,410.94. That includes the ad alternate bid. We have identified the following options for the city commission to consider. Approve a motion awarding the bid for the landfill scale house project to votes construction in the amount of $3,239,000. $888.76 and authorize the city manager to execute a contract with votes construction upon fulfillment of all prerequisites under the bid documents. Approve a motion awarding the bid for the landfill scale house project to votes construction with amendments as the city commission deems appropriate. Number three, postpone consideration of the award of bid for the landfill scale house project to a specified date and time and provide staff with direction regarding additional information or amendments the city commission would like to see or do not award the project and provide staff with any further direction. Our recommendation is to go with votes construction. I'll stand for any questions.

Any questions for Mr. Marsh?

Ron, I do have a question and We probably have been presented the information, but the landfill does have that money in reserve or budgeted for the new scale house, correct? Yes sir, they do. And 3,200,000 plus seems like an enormous amount of money, but Pointing out one line item from it, and that would just be the concrete. But over a million dollars of that bid is just the concrete work involved with the project. Concrete, I think we all know, very, very expensive in this day and age, and a lot of concrete obviously required for this project. And finally, I mean, I see Archie Ponton. and I certainly wanna listen to what they have to say, but I certainly understand. Archie and his crew, they've done work for me, and I've been very pleased with their work, but I see where it could put the integrity of the bidding process. It just puts a cloud over top of it, but I'll let Archie speak to that.

Well, Commissioner, I appreciate that, but I will say, too, the city has had work done by Ponton, and they've done a very good job for us.

You said there's a discrepancy when you resubmitted with all the line items filled in, but I didn't add it all up, but the total on the total lines is the same, but did you add it up and come up with a different number?

Yes, Commissioner. We didn't put the total you see under Potten's bid at $3,085,274. That was the new bid or what came out when we add all the unit prices.

Hold on. We'll give you guys the opportunity to speak in a moment. I guess we will move on to, or was there any more questions? Then we'll move to citizens' comments and you'll have the opportunity to speak.

I am Archie Ponton, Ponton Construction. This was a weird bid. We don't normally bid this direction. A lot of stuff we had to stick under line items that didn't pertain to that line item. One of the things is we have to do this in about 15 minutes and head out the door with a number that's dead nuts on. They had as long, if longer, And the one number they transposed was to be 983, and they got it 938, which makes us $45,000 difference. One of the things that we run into is our base number is what we're willing to stand behind. We're not changing it. The unit prices, what we tried to use was an Excel program that we didn't realize that it was only rounding to two numbers or two decimals, whether it needed to go to six to equal that. I can give him the numbers. I mean, like one of them, you gotta go to .76619. It was just the computer. We were trying to figure out a new program. But, I mean, we're off $190.10. And we're not off that if he takes his math where we were plus and minus because of rounding up. We're off $190.10. Our bid is still what we bidded at, which is still $65,000 or less. than the other contractor. And I mean, I don't know how they're going to use numbers when we're sticking equipment and all kinds of stuff in line items. And they're going to say, hey, come out and we want to pay you so much for a cubic yard of dirt. And we've had to throw a whole lot of other costs in there to come up with this line item. If they would come to you when you're doing the job and say, hey, what's the cost for an extra 20 cubic yards of dirt? You get the dirt price. You don't get the line item that has a ton of crap in it. That's all I got to say.

Anyone else?

We'll bring it back up. A question maybe for Ron again, for Mr. Marsh. Archie is saying the difference, $180, between what your department added up and what they submitted?

He's correct. We did transpose two numbers on the bid tabulation and still comes out a little bit under. Their second base price still comes out, I think, a little bit underneath.

I think we should, I think Archie wants to respond again. Can we let him respond?

I mean, I guess this is part of the problem when you don't turn in the bid correctly on the front end, then we have to go back and take another look and we're trying to add things up and now we're kind of doing this on the fly. So I do think that there is some, I mean, I think there's a lot of validity to what you said in terms of, you know, we try to do these bids and be above board and do everything, you know, in the open, every bidder had the opportunity to turn a bid in with the line item detail. Um, Ponton didn't do that. And so we have to take that. We did allow them to provide us something after the fact, but at any rate, it is still after the fact. So even if it had added up a hundred percent correctly, and it's the same number, um, I think that the recommendation, at least from staff would have been the same. Um, that is because, um, They had a whole weekend to look at that and kind of massage numbers and do whatever. None of the other bidders had that. So it is unfortunate. Ponton has done great work for the city. They've done a lot of work for us. They're doing that many completed stuff recently. I think we have a bid coming up that the presumptive low bid will probably award in the next month. It's unfortunate, but the bid documents that were turned into the city just weren't complete. It's hard for us as staff to make a recommendation that we go with that, if that makes sense. It does.

My thought is he had the same number, and then you said he looked at it the whole weekend, but he still came up with the same number. He wasn't higher and then came back in with the lower, so I don't necessarily see as anything... You'll have to come up to the podium, please.

What is screwing up is when you take the unit prices, and I'll see if I can find the... You take, like, concrete paving, 8-inch concrete paving is 99,631 square feet. We bid $9.77 a square foot. We should have bid $9.76619. That makes a difference on that one line item with that three more, $378.60. If you look at our total, if he would use our numbers, not worry about the... off 82 cents. That column adds up to what we bid the job at. Our end deal, they're saying when they take 99,000 whatever times $9.77, it don't come out right. No, it's not really, the computer rounded up and we didn't catch that it was rounding up or rounding down. It went either way, whatever. But our number, Well, we bid, put on the line, and like you say, when they went to the pre-bid, we talked about line items. He said, as long as you got a number in the line item. There was numbers in all our line items. It might have been zero, but there was a number. And we had the bottom deal. We filled out the paperwork, and the bottom numbers, the number we're standing by.

Correct me if I'm wrong. The issue here is how many total bids were there? Five. Five, yeah. Four of the five had the lines filled in and in past situations when we've had incomplete bids, they've been automatically tossed out. And obviously, and I would not even begin to try to figure out the cost of a project like this, but four of the people Now, is there enough time in the bidding process ahead of time that if you know you're supposed to have all the lines filled out and they're not filled out, you can call in before the bid due date and say, hey, are you sure you wanted to write this up this way? rather than have all this last-minute drama.

Well, I mean, there's certainly enough time that the four other bidders were able to get it in the line items. So, I mean, everybody has the same amount of time. And the comment that we said that as long as there's something in every line, then you're just okay. I mean, I do think they'd ask a question about whether they could combine lines. And I think if they did that on a couple here and there, that would have been one thing. But to combine all the lines is a totally different thing. So I don't think that's certainly not what we meant. I wasn't at the pre-bid, so I'm not exactly sure what was said. But I don't think we certainly didn't mean that you could just put in a lump sum. If we wanted just a lump sum, we would have asked for that. I mean, that's what you would do.

Commissioner, what was said at the pre-bid was something had to be in the line item, and the line item price is what ruled. And that's stated in the invitation to bid. So if you have $1 in your line item, and the quantity is 10, and you have $9 in that far right column as your total, that's going to get changed to $10 when we go through and do the bid tabulation.

Got you. Okay.

Commissioner Davis also, in part of your question, you asked if we had historically allowed bids that didn't have the subtotals included. I am new enough, I can't say for sure if it's never happened. However, I think one thing you're pointing to is if we do start allowing that practice, then other bidders in the future might attempt to do a similar thing. And we really don't want them to do that because it makes change orders difficult to calculate or justify or consider. And also, sometimes in the bidding, it does identify problems with the way in which we have requested bids that we are able to fix then. So the best practice the city really feels like, everyone involved in this, is to require the subtotals.

There are types of bids or different kinds of projects where we might do a lump sum. It just depends on the type of project, but certainly with a project like this, our request was that you provide the line item detail.

Again, we're kind of in a difficult spot as commissioners. Obviously want to keep the business at home, but how do we, if I were with Voice Construction, I would never bid Celina again any project if I followed all the rules within the timeline and got, I did everything I was supposed to do, and based upon the criteria that I was supposed to operate under, again, I dotted my I's, crossed my T's, I'm sure there was more than I mean, I hate to throw this out Archie, but you mentioned the 15 minutes in trying to get everything correct. I know what projects are like where you got a deadline and you're kind of scrambling at the last minute. But unfortunately, the deadline wasn't met and for that reason, I'm going to recommend or I will make a motion. It is that time, is it not?

I believe so, yeah.

I will make a motion that we approve awarding the bid for the landfill scale house project to voice construction in the amount of 3,239,888.76 and authorize the city manager to execute a contract for voice construction upon fulfillment of all the prereqs under the bid documents.

Second. It's been moved and seconded that we approve a motion awarding the bid for the landfill scale house project to voids construction in the amount of $3,239,888.76 and authorize the city manager to execute a contract with voids construction upon fulfillment. of all prerequisites under the bid documents.

Mr. Vice Mayor, you have not allowed for public comment. Yeah, I did. Did you? Okay.

It's just he came back. Okay, I just want to make sure. Okay, so all in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. Aye. So 3-1. We'll bring the mayor back.

Kind of wanted to make a comment about that particular item. It's frustrating because in the private sector, that would have been a no-brainer. We just go with the lowest bid. And because we're stewards of the taxpayer dollars, we have to follow a protocol. And there's uniformity that we have to be mindful of. And it's frustrating, but that's where we're at. Thank you.

Okay, we have no development business. That will bring us to other businesses. Is there an item the commissioner would like to bring before the group?

It's not earth shattering, but I've run into several, well most of them have been older, but they're all generally home bound folks who watch this meeting. with a lot higher frequency than I would have thought. So it is nice that we offer this service. They do pay attention to what people say. So, as I say, once you've said it and it's on film, you can't unsay it. So you'd be surprised the details that 85-year-old people can give you about a meeting three weeks earlier. I did tell one guy who I saw this morning, I won't mention his name, but I know you're watching. Thank you. He'll know who it is. Commissioner Levy?

One thing I have, and whether it would go to Patrick or Jacob, but Jacob, you, Mr. Wood, you sent out a email to us earlier talking about things that were brought up at the last meeting. And I think some of the people sitting here in the room would probably appreciate a kind of a recap of those findings.

I have mine here if you want to.

Take me a minute.

Do you want this?

Yeah. Actually, I think I've got it here. Yeah, sure. I can just... I won't read this all to you, but I'll just kind of hit the highlights. There were several questions that were asked at the last city commission meeting that we've done a little bit of looking into. So one of the questions was about fraudulent funds, or have we used city funds to fund Andrea Murphy's wedding? So we went back and looked at the purchase orders at the time, and there's nothing to indicate that we spend any money on Andrea's wedding. There's questions about whether the donation funds are being used appropriately. My response here is that all donation funds, their purchases are all tracked and they're logged. I did send that to the city commission so that you can have it. We receive those funds. Some are restricted. Some have specific purposes and some are unrestricted. The funds that are unrestricted are typically used for things, items that are related to care and welfare of the animals. All of the items that you see in that list, you know, you can... have a disagreement on whether you think it's appropriate or not, but those do go through the purchasing policy. We are kind of looking at those at the donation fund to make sure that we're trying to clarify what is appropriate and make sure that we have a clear policy on that. There were questions last week about why are staff allowed to adopt birds and exotic pets without making them available to the public. I did look into that a little bit. When we take in an exotic animal, there is difficulty in finding legitimate and experienced adopters for those because the animal birds typically take a lot more care than just a normal animal. So what we typically do is the staff will foster the animal for a while and they'll try to find a rescue or find somebody that they think can take care of the animal. And some of those circumstances, when they're unable to find anybody to take the animal, animals have been adopted. So we do have one of our employees has adopted several birds. She indicated that she spends $200 to $300 a month caring for those animals. She is still in possession of all of the birds. And then... We have another employee who has adopted a bearded dragon in the same kind of the same circumstance there. There has been a longstanding practice that we've allowed shelter staff to adopt animals without paying adoption fees. You know, we're reviewing that practice to, you know, and we'll be revising, writing or revising a policy so that that's no longer a gray area. I've said in here that it's pretty common for shelter employees to develop a connection with an animal and then decide to adopt it. Usually it's not highly adoptable animals because those animals move pretty quickly. It's an animal or a dog or a cat that's been in our facility for a while. Our consultant will be looking at that topic. Looking at the topic of exotic pets, we kind of need some guidance on whether it's even reasonable for us to take those pets in. If we do continue the practice, we obviously need to have a clear policy about how and when we would make animals available to the public. Typically what happens in those circumstances with a bird or something like that is we've had a mother passed away and her kids have a bird. They don't know what to do with it, so they call us. We take it in and try to find a home for it. There was a question about did the city purchase cat kennels that are being stored at the old pool facility? We did purchase cat kennels. There's been a project on our 10-year CIP to upgrade the cat kennels in the trap and isolation rooms. Those are two separate rooms within the facility. So we were contacted by a veterinarian who was going out of business about the availability of some stainless steel kennels. We did purchase those kennels for $5,750. That included shipping, and so those are being stored at the old pool building until we can complete the installation at the facility. I don't know if you want me to go into the rest of this is kind of just kind of talking about our policies. We do follow the purchasing policy at the animal shelter. So that means that all of the purchases that happen there are put into our system. They're reviewed. We haven't found any evidence that any of the funds have been used inappropriately. I do think that there certainly is some room for better efficiency. I mean, the things that have come forward about how we purchased, you know, dog food at several different locations throughout the community, kind of one bag at a time. That certainly raises some concerns about whether we could be more efficient with those funds. But we haven't found anything that would tell us that there's anything that's inappropriate or not being spent on something that should be spent. And I did list just a couple of things that we're going to have the consultant look at. In terms of wildlife, how and when should we handle wildlife? Is that something we should be a part of at all? What should our spay and neuter program look like? There's been some concerns with area veterinarians that we're competing with them on our spay and neuter program. How can we manage bulk purchases of food and supplies in a different way that would be more efficient? How should we manage the donation funds? And this is just that there's certainly other things that they're going to look at. So I'm not sure I answered Every question that's been brought up in the last couple weeks, I know I didn't, but those were the ones that I just looked into after the last kind of meeting. So happy to answer any questions about that or provide any other details. Or if there's something else you want me to look up, I'm happy to do that as well.

And that's so much a question that when I visited the shelter, one of the employees did say that the reason for some of the smaller purchases is Where that veterinarian had written prescription diets for certain animals.

Yeah, absolutely. That is a thing that you'd be surprised at the number of individual diets that we have for different animals. So when there is an animal that has to have a specific food, that is something that they have gone out to the market to purchase. And I don't know if that can be done differently. I think there probably is a way to do that. We just need to kind of hammer that down a little bit for sure.

I guess I have a couple of comments or questions I'll throw out there and Mr. Wood and I talked about this this morning. But looking at, I looked at a three month time period of the expenses and I was surprised that we spent almost 3,400 in Wichita for emergency vet services and I guess I think there was an expense from Abilene too with vet services over there. And I'm just, I don't know what would happen that causes the Salina Animal Shelter to be needing services out of Wichita. Does anybody have an answer for that? I don't know.

Yeah, I don't have a, I mean, you know, just off the top, I haven't asked any questions about that. So I don't, you know, I don't know what the certain circumstances would be. I mean, I know that there's circumstances where we have a few weeks ago there was a cat that came in that had a broken leg. And we took the cat to Manhattan to K-State and had the cat looked at. So sometimes that sort of stuff happens. If there's not anybody open and available in Salina at the time, then we may end up going off-site. I don't know how often that happens. I mean, we certainly could look at that, but I haven't done any research in terms of how often we do off-site vet care.

I know town and country, they talk about being open 24 hours a day, and we did. During that quarter, we spent 14,000, a little over 14,000 with them. Mr. Wood and I talked about this earlier. Amazon for one quarter, $6,300. And we just talked about, Mr. Wood's already talked about it. But I know in looking through it, there was, I think on one particular day, which really wasn't, Abnormal, abnormal, but I think they bought supplies or whatever from Amazon 12 to 15 times in a single day. And it just seemed, as Mr. Wood already stated, we can do better. To me, that shows a lack of organization at the facility. But a lot of this, I mean, what would a shelter normally spend? I guess maybe that's something the consultant or if you had a neighboring shelter you could talk to, could talk about how much do they spend with Amazon, but we have no comparable and the consultant perhaps can help there.

I think before we start throwing out numbers that are going to provide fodder for sensationalism, you need to know those details. You need to know if those outside vet expenses were during a time that we didn't have 24 hour service here. I mean, come Christmas time, I think a lot of us will hit Amazon four or five times in one day. But to talk in generalities without knowing what's going on is going to create more rumors than If we need to actually have a certified auditor to go through all that, then we need to do that. But for us to talk about the value of what was done or the appropriateness of what was done without really knowing what was done is compounding.

Yeah, I know.

We're creating a problem that might not exist, and we're compounding it. And we're judging it.

And we don't know what we don't know. Right.

Truly, in this case, you have to remember that when you say you don't know what you don't know, to be bound by what you find out. You're not judging it ahead of time. You're just saying, I need to find out. You judge it later. But we have a black box. Nobody has the key to the door. Find out what's in there before you start talking about the box.

Yeah, I think those are good comments and I look at this and that's part of the third party coming in and looking at it. We have additional vet costs. Do we need a vet on site more often? We talk about we don't want to spend money, but we want to take good care of the animals. So what are we going to do? It may cost us some money. So there's a lot of things that have to be weighed here. So that's why we have a third party consultant coming in to help us out. I thank the city manager for sending out the email after the meeting last week. I know we have ladies out here that don't think we listen to them. Maybe I don't always approve of the way you present, but we do listen to what you say and asked him to address some of those items. So we are, you know, we're keeping it... Can I talk? Sue? I don't... No, somebody did. Okay, okay, you. I respect you. I respect you when you talk. I expect you to respect me, okay? Can we have it both ways? Thank you. Okay, thank you. So we are monitoring what's going on at the animal shelter. In fact, one of the things I asked... City manager about is where you know how we're doing on adoptions over there because I've been trying to track that in April and May we adopted out 47 dogs and 39 cats in April and May so we are still open for business we still are seeing animals being adopted as we as we would like to see we still have 19 pit bulls in the shelter Three of those are there for particular reasons, and there's still 16 that need to be adopted out. So if you want to be helpful, we've been looking. We can't find anybody to take those. So if you know of someone that's willing to take pit bulls, we're willing to... to help get them to where they can be adopted out. We cannot adopt them out in the city of Salina because of the ordinance that was voted on by the public. Okay? So if you know of places or know of someone that we should contact, we would like to have that name. On the final note I have is this weekend we have our 50th anniversary of the River Festival. It starts Thursday evening. Hopefully everyone will have a chance to attend, and hopefully the weather may be even cool off a little bit. It looks like typical River Festival weekend weather. Anyway, with that, we will open it up to Citizens Forum.

Rosemary Mai, Salina, Kansas. And I would like to invite everybody to the Granny Brigade June meeting, which is next week, Tuesday, June the 16th at 6.30 PM at the Carver Center. And we will start the meeting off with a recap of our last legislative meeting with our senator and representatives. And following that, we will have a candidate form with our state reps and also our county commission candidates. And so it starts at 6.30 next week, Tuesday, June the 16th, and it is open to the public. And we encourage everybody to come and listen to county government candidates and also state. Time to vote. And Jacob, just a little bit of information. I have a cat that has special diet prescription food. And if you get a veterinarian's prescription, you can order it through Chewy.com cheaper than through a vet. But you have to get the vet's prescription.

Thank you, Rosemary.

Rose Bay Salina. Speaking of pit bulls, I recently learned through public records that Andrea Murphy adopted a pit bull named Rue through the McPherson Animal Shelter on December 3rd, 2025. At the same time, many citizens in Salina have experienced having their own dogs impounded, restricted, or euthanized through actions taken by the Salina Animal Services. That raises legitimate questions about consistency, fairness, and leadership. What message does it send to the public when the individual responsible for enforcing shelter policies personally owns a breed that has often been the center of the shelter and animal control decisions? There is also a separate incident involving Rue, another one of Andrea's dogs, Bella, that is currently the subject of an open records request. Sue Nickel requested and submitted that request on June 2nd and will have it on June 12th. When those records become available, the public will be able to review the facts and draw their own conclusions. What concerns me tonight is not the speculation about that incident. It's about the appearance of a double standard. Citizens are expected to follow the rules. They are expected to accept the decisions of animal services. Yet when questions arise involving shelter leadership, the public is often met with delays, redactions, attorney reviews, inflated costs, and obstacles to obtaining information. Meanwhile, the city manager, Jacob Wood, has repeatedly offended Ms. Murphy as a good person. But being a good person is not the standard. Accountability is the standard. Transparency is the standard. Public trust is the standard. The citizens of Salina deserve answers, not assurances. They deserve facts, not character references. Open records allow the people to review the facts for themselves and provides them the ability to draw their own conclusion based on facts, not what city management portrays as they have proven time and time again not to be trustworthy. Explain this to the BSL and all the people that had to give up their dog. And that's exactly why we continue to request the records, ask questions, and seek transparency. And just so you know, for almost 28 years that I was at the animal shelter, every one of my employees, including myself, paid full price for an adoption of whatever we adopted, whether it was a cat, a dog, an exotic animal, or whatever. We paid full price. The fees was not waived. So I don't know where you come up with that unless that just come about. And also the animal donations, Jacob Wood, you said that they go for the animals, that's what they're supposed to go for. Then what's the animals doing? Are they starting to wear swim goggles and eat donuts and candy and all that stuff and wear the uniforms? Well, supposedly uniforms because I guess they don't really look to me like uniforms. And as far as the vets in Salina, Kansas, why they're all going elsewhere, it's because Salina vets don't want to work with our Salina Animal Shelter. So that's pretty much it. I don't know how Andrea can be allowed to have a pit bull and other people had to get rid of their dogs. And she adopted it from McPherson. We have the paperwork. Thank you.

I'd like to talk, I'm Sue Nickel from Salina here, about the Kansas Open Records Act and how it exists to ensure that the citizens have access to the records of their government. CORA allows agencies to recover reasonable costs associated with producing records. However, the purpose of those fees is to reimburse actual costs, not to create a barrier that prevents citizens from obtaining information about the operation of their government. In this case, I was charged $523 for a 2,502-page production. After requesting an accounting, the city clerk provided the following attorney review and redaction times. She said that Patrick spent eight hours on that request, but I was only charged for six because that's a bargain. I then conducted a forensic audit of the 2,502 page production. That audit found that between 1,812 and 1,871 pages consisted of prior open record attachments, signature only pages, newsletters, advertisements, shipping notices, and blank pages. Approximately 1,569 pages were open record attachments. a material that had already been produced elsewhere. After removing those categories, approximately 631 to 690 pages remained as email records. Using the city standard stated benchmark of 250 pages per hour, would approximate to about two and a half to 2.8 hours of review time yet the accounting provided by the city reflects again eight hours of attorney review and redaction time what i'm questioning is whether the fees charged were reasonable in light of the actual content and production of those records and i want to know if included in the page count you used to justify those fees were the previous records that were already produced to other people? If so, why was the additional review time necessary when those same records were attached again to a later request? When open records fees become so expensive that ordinary citizens cannot realistically afford to request records, public access suffers. Whether intentional or not, Excessive fees can discourage citizens from exercising the rights that CORA was designed to protect. I believe that the public deserves transparency regarding how these fees are calculated and whether the current process is consistent with both the letter and the spirit of the Kansas Open Records Act. Excessive open record fees, conflicting public statements made by city officials, and continuing lack of transparency are precisely why Many citizens have come to refer to this investigation as Sheltergate. Stay tuned, there's much more to come.

Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, if I may?

Okay. I don't generally reply to public comment, but since a lot of that was directed at my own personal integrity and just general questions of transparency, I'd like to maybe make a brief comment about how I come about my work there. So there were 2,500 pages, and it is true that many of them were rehashes of prior open records requests. The problem when you're doing that kind of work is the way our system We do searches and we combine it into one PDF document of 2,500 pages. And the reason why that's the best way to do that is otherwise you'd have 30 or 40 or 100 different separate PDFs and it would be unmanageable to kind of figure out which one you've done and which one you didn't. You'd spend so much time opening a PDF. If you've ever been frustrated with the time it can take to open a PDF and close a PDF, you'd understand how much time that would waste. So the problem is, as you're scrolling through it, you will hit a tranche of previous core requests that have been hit by the new requests. But the only way to go through it, you don't know how... There's no way to know how long that tranche will end except going through it. So I am speed clicking through those parts because I can tell, okay, we've already done this. But then you get into the meat of the actual new information or what is potentially new information and you have to read that carefully. And then the problem when you're doing, I don't do every single core request that comes through here because a lot of them are aimed at things that other staff can more easily identify. When you're going through a supervisor or a department head level person, even a request that is really aimed for the purpose of learning about how the animal shelter works and learning some of the things that these citizens are interested in will catch a large volume of what I call personnel information. In other words, a subordinate says, hey, I'm sick today with the flu. I need to stay home. We redact that because our employees have the right to privacy, and we also redact if an employee was five minutes late to work and received a write-up from their boss on that. That's not an appropriate CORA document. That's allowed to stay between the supervisor and their employee. So my point in saying that is I would not characterize it as a bargain that we only charge six hours. We had told the requester it would be six hours, and we didn't increase the request. I do log my time on these because I anticipated that there would be a question of whether or not it actually took me as long as I said it took. It does take me as long as I said it took to do it right. I'm always tremendously concerned that I'm going to miss something and have some employee or some person from the public's private information become available to the public because I missed something as I was reading through 2,500 pages and didn't and snoozed for a second. So I'm sure that Some people won't be satisfied with that answer, but I did want to take a minute to explain what I'm doing and why that is. I have no problem with core requests. I think I always encourage employees or all my clients to treat every email as a potentially open record. If it's one of the ones that's going to be exceptional, I encourage them to consider identifying it early as having confidential material, but frequently people don't when they're just going through their work day. But anyway, that's my response to that comment. Thank you.

Thank you.

Christy Dixon, Salina, Kansas. Speaking of privacy, as Trent said, all the meetings are recorded, and I believe at the last meeting when we talked about somebody's wedding, we didn't give names, so way to throw your girl under the bus. Good evening, others. Many people have asked why citizens have started referring to the situation as sheltergate. Watergate was not simply a scandal. It became a symbol of government secrecy, missing information, contradicting statements, and citizens demanding answers from public officials. The term Sheltergate did not arise because of one incident. It arose because of a series of events. Three puppies euthanized in a manner that resulted in criminal charges, a failed KDA inspection, statements made publicly that were later contradicted by records, thousands of pages of records obtained through open records requests, price gouging and or padding fees in attempt to deter citizens from obtaining open records, questions about wildlife handling, questions about shelter finances, questions about donation money. questions about free adoptions of animals to employees, and ongoing efforts by citizens to obtain information from their own government. Whether someone agrees with us or not, one fact is undeniable. Citizens have spent months requesting records, reviewing documents, attending meetings, and asking questions because they believe transparency matters. That is why many people now refer to the situation as sheltergate. Not because of politics, not because of personalities, but because citizens believe the public deserves the truth. One final note. Being Transparent is apparently not free, so we have recreated Sheltergate t-shirts for $20 and Sheltergate bracelets for a suggestion donation of $5. Contact us on Facebook if you're interested in approaching someone. All proceeds will be used to fund future records, open record requests, and public information efforts. In obtaining records, They cost hundreds of dollars, then citizens will simply have to work together to make sure those records continue to come to light. If asking questions, requesting public records, and standing up for animals that can't speak for themselves earns us the label of troublemakers, then we will wear that with honor. Because every fact we uncover and every record we obtain is done for one reason. To ensure what happened to those animals is never forgotten and never repeated. And I just want to touch on the part where you said, why are we taking the animals out of town? Rose spoke on that and that is absolutely correct. I am friends with multiple veterinarians and I've asked them personally, why do you guys not do office hours or emergency services? for animal shelter and they said we will not work with the animal shelter. They didn't give me a reason, that's their choice not to give me a reason, but that is the reason. And also the donations of 19, 15, 19 purchases on Amazon, we wouldn't have had to do those purchases if we would used our donated items appropriately from the citizens.

I'm Lucille Sanderson-Salina, and I'm going to bend your ears a little differently. A number of years ago, we had a mayor. His last name was Frank. Surprisingly, all construction jobs that were to be done within the city of Salina, guess who got them? Frank's Construction. So watch out, commissioners, who you give these bids to because people do talk. So just be careful. Now I'm going to come back to my favorite subject, that darn roundabout at Waterwell and 9th Street. Has there been any accidents out there since you put the four-way stop up? Haven't heard of any. But all our major intersections within the city of Salina, we have an accident after accident. You've got other four-way stops here within the city, no accidents. I know you've already awarded that bid to some country, company. Might as well be another country. Those four-way stops out there, they're going through that smoother than they are with the lights that we have in Salina. Have you actually been at some of those intersections, not in the line, but stood to the side and looked at the string of cars that are waiting to go through that light? And many of them can't get through with one change. And some of them are really signaled very confusing, and I'm surprised there's not more accidents at Belmont and Magnolia. One way is green, but cars start coming at you. You don't know you can make a left. Check it out. I did go to General Services, but I don't think they will awake. Just remember, The future's going to come back and hit you, and we're setting down. And as I started to say, when Frank was mayor, many of you were just maybe teenagers. I can almost look up there and know that you're not as old as I am. And it was a number of years. But do we still need to go through that darn roundabout? It's working beautiful with four-way stop. The people have gotten used to it. You got a four-way stop at Elm and Santa Fe. No accidents. Roach and Cloud four-way stop. But no, we have to have a roundabout. And many cities are taking them out. And I spoke to somebody earlier today about the roundabout in Hays, and they said, let's get out of this city. I don't like all these roundabouts, and I won't travel in haze anymore. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your listening to me. And I know it doesn't mean a hill of beans what I've said, because all five of you, six, seven, have made up your mind what you think. But thank you for your time.

Thank you, Lucille.

Good afternoon, Kathy Short, Salina, Kansas. Recently, some citizens who have spoken about the animal shelter have been referred to as troublemakers. I would respectfully disagree. Troublemakers don't spend months filing open record requests, reading thousands of pages of documents, attending meetings, and standing at this podium trying to understand what happened. Troublemakers don't spend their own money obtaining public records, especially knowing said records are provided at overly inflated costs. They don't volunteer hundreds of hours trying to bring facts to light. Citizens do. The people asking questions about the shelter are not asking because it's easy. We're asking because animals cannot speak for themselves. We asked questions when three puppies were euthanized in a manner that resulted in criminal charges. We asked questions when a state inspection found serious deficiencies. We asked questions when records showing missing euthanasia documentation. We asked questions when public statements did not match what later appeared in emails and official records. And we continue to ask questions because transparency is not a nuisance. It is a requirement of good government. The truth is that asking difficult questions is often uncomfortable. Public records can be uncomfortable. Investigations can be uncomfortable. Accountability can be uncomfortable. But none of those things make citizens troublemakers. In America, citizens have the right to question their government. We have the right to attend meetings. We have the right to request public records. We have the right to speak at this podium. Those rights do not exist to protect popular opinions. They exist to protect the voices of citizens when government would rather not hear them. It brings to mind a famous line from the movie A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson says, You can't handle the truth. I can tell you citizens of Salina can handle it, and for that reason and for the well-being of the animals, we'll keep pushing forward. If standing up for shelter animals, seeking transparency, and holding public officials accountable, Earns us the title of troublemakers and we will wear the title with honor. Because at the end of the day, we are not standing up for ourselves. We are standing up for the animals that had no voice of their own. Thank you.

I have a quick question. Did one of us call you guys troublemakers?

They called themselves that.

No, we heard it was you.

You heard it was me, okay. I just didn't remember us addressing you in that direction.

The need to verify before you repeat something.

Yeah. Okay. I just was curious as to where that came from.

Lori Hall, Salina. Last week, Mayor Hoppe, you stated after the public forum that Greg Salisbury wasn't here and that we don't know wildlife. So I've been thinking about that and sadly it's true that Greg is no longer alive and he passed away spring of 2023. But upon Greg's retirement from Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, a new game warden was hired. However, this officer didn't remain in this position long. And a new game warden by the name of Coulter Sillam was sworn in January 2023. And he was assigned to Saline and Ottawa counties. And he does know wildlife and he knows the laws that are attached to wildlife. And my point today is Monique Hawley was being paid $82,000 plus. I think she should know her job, I really do. An important part of her job was to know all the laws and regulations pertaining to domestic and wild animals. And her direct supervisor, Mr. Hammond, should have been more involved in the operation at the shelter, which meant knowing her job too. Monique worked under Rose and Vanessa, and during that time the animal shelter did not take in healthy, live wildlife to be euthanized or to be rehabilitated. If any wildlife was to be handled, Greg was on duty to handle the wildlife issues. The shelter intake and outcome records during the time Greg Salisbury was the game warden, and then when Rose and Vanessa were supervisors, the intake was minimal. A dramatic increase in wildlife intakes and euthanasia was directly proportional to the promotion of Andrea Murphy from pool manager to operations superintendent. Also new to this scenario was the new game warden. Knowing that she had no wildlife permits, Andrea Murphy directed the entire animal shelter to follow her lead, taking in wildlife without regards to law and regulations. What involvement our game warden played in this scenario is unclear. However, in an email to Coulter, Andrea Murphy tells the game warden she is qualified to handle wildlife. Coulter responded with certain regulations, even though the shelter had no permits. These regulations would have served wildlife better if they would have been proactive instead of reactive. Should Andrea and Monique face wildlife violations, or should we just give them a pass because killing wildlife isn't really that important on the city's list of important topics? The one person that can answer these questions, however, chooses to be uninvolved and detached from the situation. And if Mr. Wood could call in the game warden, a lot of these answers could be found. We would know why they took in the wildlife. We would know why they killed him. But until he's involved, which he is involved because she brought him in to this scenario, I think that we should, if you could. So, thank you. Thank you.

Norman Mantle, Salina, Kansas. The 18th of this month, there is a Fish and Game meeting right down here at Lindsberg, right in your back door. Attend it. Starts at 12 o'clock. Ask the U.S. Fish and Game, what is an exotic animal? Ask the federal Fish and Game, what is an exotic animal? When does it become exotic? When is it non-exotic? You need to ask the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, what is an invasive species? You better be listening to the federal government, because we're coming. And they're going to penalize this county, this state. I will be at that meeting, the 18th in Lynchburg. Now, about security in this city. Your drones, your fixed wings, they are danger. This is a balloon that flew over my property. He did not have permission to land. His balloon also harassed wildlife and other animals. He flew over this one person's property, and he's a World War vet, and he went in there and he says, you fly over my property again, you're not going to come out of there. And the bank says, who is he? He didn't bank there. He's a World War II vet. He took care of them. So you better be looking at security of these drones because you got this meeting coming up, this festivities this weekend. They're here. They're already in Saline County. I have seen them. They carry a payload of anywhere from 140 to 190 pounds. So you've got a security problem right here in this city. Before we move forward, we need to correct the mistakes of the past in North America.

Ben Winhold Salina. Back in 2010, the voters were asked to approve a .25 standalone for the River Renewal Project vote. That was voted down by 4,288 votes. 65% of the population of Salina said no. In 2016, we were again asked to vote on a sales tax increase, and that won by 866 votes. Thank you very much, Mayor, for bringing that to my attention that it wasn't 444. Now, my question is, what changed? This right here. It's called the Citizen. It was mailed out to everybody in spring of 2016. On it, it says that on April 20th, the Saline County Clerk's Office will mail to Salina voters a sales tax election ballot. It will ask voters to replace the city of Salina's current .40 sales tax, Kenwood Cove, with a .75 capital improvement sales tax for the term of 20 years. Never saying that the .40 was going to sunset here in two years, no matter what. On that ballot are the exact words that are put in here. It says the priorities for the proposed sales tax are improving neighborhood streets and drainage, preserving a stable property tax rate, ensuring a quality park system. Remember that one. And again, other things, funding equipment for things, repayment of future bonds, attracting quality jobs. So let's go back to where it says ensuring a quality park system. On the next page, preserving our park system, one of Salinas' biggest assets. The tax will be used both to retain a quality of our parks and enhance them in response to community needs. A major park improvement includes a reasonable and slimmed-down approach renewing the Smoky Hill River. The river channel is a major natural source that serves as a primary stormwater drainage basin for a large part of our community, so filling in is not an option. A limited project focus will be on the basic stream area only. This focus includes getting the sediment out, reshaping the banks where needed, constructing a single and accessible bike and hike trail, providing community gathering space along the downtown stretch, period. The city will commit to redirecting no more than 1.3 million to this project every year. Then they took 5 million out of the general fund. So if we didn't vote on this, this is why they told us on the next page. If the proposed sales tax is not passed, we will continue to focus current resources on basic infrastructure items until the current tax expires in about two years, .40. Certain community needs will likely not be met or will likely be deferred well into the future. Add another 30 seconds or so, please. So when you say that, that's a scare tactic. You're going to tell the people that No, we can't. And then they said on the average, the consumer, if this passes, the consumer will spend about 4% more on the new tax. The increase equals only 35 cents for every $500 spent. when it was a 0.75 that we were voting on. So when I say smoke and mirrors, this is why the people of Salina are upset with what is being proposed for the river renewals, because this is not what we voted on. This is what we voted on.

Thank you. Anyone else? OK, with that, I'll bring it back to the commission for motion to recess. To adjourn, I should say. Move to adjourn. Yeah, I meant to adjourn. We have a motion to second adjourn. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? See you in a couple of weeks.