City Commission - workshop

Told them they had to come. They'd have two.

Budget's always a hot topic.

I just- Who?

Okay, it is 3 o'clock. We're so used to having the mortgage company pay it. We never actually had to pay a tax bill because the mortgage- Commissioner Davis, it's 3 o'clock. I'm sorry.

That's all right, sorry. It is 3 o'clock. Today we have a continued 2027 budget study session. I will turn it over to city manager, and I think he's probably going to turn it over to Ms. Pack.

I am. I don't have any comments today. Debbie, take it away.

Give me something here. Good afternoon, Mayor and Commissioners, Debbie Pack, Director of Finance. Yes, today's session is a continuation of the 2027 budget discussions. A lot of the information, well, one of the big topics we'll talk about today is property tax evaluations that we've received. We'll ask for some direction from you all on some of the items that we've looked at recently. Just as a measure so that we can start wrapping up what our numbers are going to look like in preparation for final numbers. either in August or September, depending on the direction that we go. So we'll just slip on and get right into today's main topic, which is property tax. As you know, over the years, state legislature has tried many avenues to try to curb property tax levies for the cities or any municipality. And over those years, we've been through many, many different iterations. We've been through tax lids. We've been through notification periods. The most current item that we're following is from 2022, which is the revenue neutral rate, which basically says that we cannot exceed our property tax revenue from the prior year without publishing that or going to the city or going to the taxpayers and notifying them. as well as holding a public hearing and adopting a resolution that we're going to go over that rate. I will say 2026 legislature was very active in the property tax arena. There were many, many ideas floating around. They all kind of wrapped around setting a maximum amount of property tax increases that municipalities could levy. That kind of honed down into a cpi or three percent rate whichever was less um there were and it did require some of the some of the options did require a protest period for taxpayers that if they got 10 of the registered voters that they could do a protest and if they got that then the city would be required to go back to their revenue neutral rate All of the actual legislative items that passed both the House and the Senate went to the governor, and the governor did veto both of them. So as we know, there will be a new administration this year. The governor won't be reelected, so we're going to be dealing with this again next year, and we don't know at this point what that administration is going to look like. So it's kind of one of those years that this is the last year we really know what's going to happen because we really don't know what's going to happen next year. And so it might be our year to take advantage of what we have in front of us and do what we need to do to kind of get back on track with where our taxes need to be.

Yeah, and I just want to reiterate what Debbie's saying here. I do think that there will be some changes in how we do property taxes or how they're levied, and whether that's a change in the way the assessed evaluations work or the way it works, the way that we set the levy. We don't know what that's going to look like, but I feel pretty confident that in the next couple of years we will see some sort of changes. Those things are all fine. We will work within whatever bounds that we have. I think the hardest part has been the rules seem to keep changing year in and year out. And as you know, property tax is our most stable form of revenue. So we can bank that if If we set a levy or we set the rate, the dollar amount that we need for property taxes, we're going to receive that. That's the only revenue source that's like that. The rest of the revenue sources are kind of variable depending on all kinds of different things.

It's pretty, you know, we can calculate that. What percentage of our total revenue is that, though?

Our current total revenue from property tax is 23% of the general fund. Only outdone by sales tax.

It's 23% in the general fund, but it's almost 100% of our debt service fund. So it funds debt service for us, and it funds our general operations.

Correct. That's correct. And just as a comparison, if we were allowed a 3% property tax increase of the current, which is about $16 million, that 3% increase would be about $480,000. And a 1% increase colon merit just for the staffing that we have in just the general fund is about $480,000. So that 3% increase is only going to cover a very small increase for our staff and nothing as far as inflation, the cost of goods or anything like that that are going up for us in other arenas. So that's just something to keep in mind as well. I'm two slides ahead of you, Scott. As far as the timeline for property tax, we did get our valuations by June 15th from the county clerk. The next deadline for us is July the 20th. By July 20th, we have to notify the county whether or not we are going to exceed our revenue neutral rate. That gives us one more regular city commission meeting prior to that deadline to come up with a decision from you. And at the time, we also must, I wanted to mention this, we must provide a rate at which we believe we'll be going to with, but we don't have to necessarily levy that rate. We can always come down, we can't go up. So that's, with any of the budget things that we look at, whatever we like, publish or anything like that, we can always come down in those numbers, but we can't ever go up in those numbers. Really, so that she can notify the taxpayer that, hey, this is what the City of Salina thinks they're going to do. This is the number, and so that they can make a concerted effort if they wanted to come in and make public comment on any of those items. If we have two options at this point once we decide on property tax, we have two options. We can either stay with the revenue neutral rate that the county clerks provided us, which means that we're going to have our revenues. We're going to be very similar to what we've had in the previous year. That sets a whole calendar of events that has to happen. And the bottom line is by August 25th, we have to adopt our budget and send it to the county clerk. If we opt not to go with the revenue neutral rate, if we choose to go over the revenue neutral rate, then before August 20th, we still have to notify the clerk by July 20th. Before August 20th, the county clerk would send out notices to all taxpayers. In that notice, you've probably received them in the past, it lists all of the taxing entities that are going to exceed revenue neutral rate for this year. So it wouldn't be a notice for the city and a notice for the county if they're going to do so or airport authority or any of those other entities. It's one notice that goes out to all taxpayers with any changes over revenue neutral rate that are going to happen. Once that notice goes out, then we have a month that we basically have to hold our public hearing and adopt our resolution to say that we're going to exceed the revenue neutral rate. And then our deadline to the county then becomes October 1st instead of August 25th. So they put an extra month in there basically just so the notifications can go out to the public with those rates or those intentions of rates. The next slide, I just wanted to provide this information for you. It's changed a little bit because we have gone back and done some review of some items. But basically, the general fund that we have right now in the proposed 2027 budget currently has a shortfall of about $738,000. In this model, the assumptions are that we will levy our taxes at our current mill levy rate, that we wouldn't go back to revenue neutral. It also assumes that we would give a 1.5% colon, 1.5% marriage personnel. It assumes that we could have a health insurance premium, so they're going to go up 5%. And it also assumes that the outside agencies are being funded at the amounts that they requested. Now these are all decisions that you're going to give us today, so these numbers could change depending on our conversation today. This also includes, as I mentioned before, several, and I'll mention again here later when we talk about sales tax capital fund, there's also several one-time transfer allocations from the sales tax capital fund that are in this general fund budget for 2027. Next slide, Scott. So the numbers that we got from the county appraiser currently show that our current total valuation is $582,774,418, which is about 4% increase over the 2026 valuation. If you subtract out TIF deductions, which are for downtown and all of our RHIDs, and pending exemptions, that number comes down to roughly 570,897,187, which is about a 4.23% increase over last year. And the reason there's two different numbers, there's the pending exemptions are less this year than they were last year. But we are allowed to deduct that when we budget, so we don't have to use a valuation that may not be there. So we're allowed to deduct those when we calculate our tax revenues. I did ask the county appraiser because there were some significant changes in the numbers. You can see in new improvements, there was over a 300% increase. He said that majority of that came from housing units not in the RHIDs, including Wheatland Valley, Magnolia Hills, also some commercial development along Waterwell, including Amazon and Brecker Truck Sales. In the personal property decrease, he said that's basically due to the new exemption for boats, trailers, ATVs, UTVs, and golf carts. And the state assessed property or valuation that went up about 18%, we don't get any detail for that. Really, it's railroads, pipelines, utilities, it's those types of entities that Provide services in the state and rather than having each county assessed valuations on those properties The state does it as a whole for the whole state So that's what that a state assessed valuation and that we don't get the detail on that But that did go up 18% for us Any questions on the evaluations before we go on to the taxes I So basically the historical levies for our taxes kind of shows here. I did want to highlight on this next slide where I show the rates and what the rate was that we actually, our final mill levy rate was. Since 2022, you can see that we have budgeted at the revenue neutral rate. So out of three out of five years for the past five years, we have gone revenue neutral. And if you look at the graph below that, you can see that The city is the only taxing entity within. Well, I'll take that back. The miscellaneous section of that graph includes the airport authority, the library extension district. So within that category, there could be some that have gone down. But overall, that category has gone up as well, as well as all of the other categories, the county and the USD 305 over the past five years. And our total is about a 6% increase since 2022. The next slide just kind of gives you options of what these numbers will mean to our property taxes depending on where we go. The first box shows using the revenue neutral rate. The revenue neutral rate assigned by the county for us this year is 27.526. It would provide a little over $16 million in tax revenue. If we used our prior mill levy rate, which was 28.568, which is 1.042 mill difference, that would provide the city with an additional $605,000 in property tax revenue. And what we've done in these calculations is we've adjusted the mill levy rate between the debt service fund and the general fund. To keep the debt service fund flat, because that's the model that we've used all along in our debt service fund capacity models. And tried to add as much as we could to the general fund to absorb some of these costs that are going up so high. The next option in the next box is if we went one mill rate over our current rate at 29,568, that would provide the city with an additional almost $2 million in tax revenue. And if we did a mill levy rate to cover the shortfall, the $737,000 that I mentioned earlier, That rate would be 29.836, and that would provide the city with additional $1.3 million in tax funding. Like I mentioned, the current budget numbers are at the prior year mill rate, which is the 28,568. So if we choose to go to the revenue neutral rate, we'd have to subtract those dollars from the general fund and from the debt service fund as we move forward. The next slide shows what effect these mill levy rates have on the average homeowner. I calculated this on a $200,000 home. Assessed valuation on $200,000 home is calculated 11.5%, which gives us a $23,000 assessed valuation. At the revenue neutral rate, they would be saving about $24 a year. At the current mill levy rate, they wouldn't have any savings or any cost. At the current mill rate plus one, it would cost them about $23 more a year. And if we did the mill levy to balance the general fund, it would cost them about $29.17 a year, which is about $2.43 a month. Even at the 29,836 since 2022, that would still be a reduction in our mill levy of about 2.1%. And just for comparison for those homeowners that have a higher rate, for about every $100,000 in appraised value, the revenue neutral rate affects at about $11.99. So whether we go down or up, that's the effect it has on it. One mil currently property tax revenue on our assessed valuation provides about almost $571,000 in property tax revenue. That doesn't exclude anything that we have to pay out on NRA rebates, which is about $70,000 a year, so it's not a huge number for us. So at this point, I'd like to have the discussion, see if we can get any consent from the city commission on whether we think we'll stay at the revenue neutral rate, any consensus on where we might want to go. We don't have to have a specific rate today, but the next city commission meeting, we will have to make that decision where we want that rate to fall. Like I mentioned earlier, we can do a higher and then actually levy that lower once we get some additional numbers in, maybe if we needed additional numbers or additional conversation to have. But just want to open it up for conversation and see where your mind's going.

Commissioner Davis. Let me preface my remarks by saying I probably don't like writing a tax check any more than anybody else. In fact, I just wrote one before I came down here to this meeting. On the other hand, if the value of the house goes up, that's good if I ever want to sell it, but I've always assumed that the value of the house goes up, or your property, it's anticipated you're going to pay more taxes on it, but You're going to recoup that if and when you sell it. I don't know if we're going to keep our expenses, the increase in our expenses to only 3% a year. It would be hard put to do that. And if we want more services, I think benefiting from the natural growth and our values is not unreasonable. Hardships, have we ever had senior, different tax rates for seniors, certainly, or just carve-outs for... We have not.

The state does have a program for low-income seniors. It's called the Homestead Act that they can apply for. I think there's a cap on it. I don't know the specifics of it. I'm looking at Patrick because he's nodding his head. But there is a rebate program for lower-income seniors at this point. They've talked about it. That's been on the table as well. But that's really all that's in the... in legislation right now.

Right. I mean, it does turn into real dollars. And on a fixed income, any increase is something that has to be budgeted. But then on the other hand, when you look at the services that are provided with that money, they're valuable services and you've got to pay for them somehow.

Right.

I'd rather increase the tax and cut the service back at this point. I'm talking vital services. And I'll stop there.

I can't remember for sure, but I believe public safety, it's our number one cost. And for some reason, I want to say it's about 60% of our expenses. Don't quote me on that, but it's a pretty good chunk of what our expenses are. That and engineering streets, public works are a majority of our expenses.

Which I would rather pay up front than have a huge bill because maintenance was not carried out when it should have been. We have a disaster. Usually it's under the ground.

This is my third budget year. We've been revenue neutral every time, so this is a little different for me, but going revenue neutral, it's actually kind of, according to these charts, it's gone down every year, the percentage. Yep, stuff still gets more expensive. And we're given cost of living increases, but we're not making up for that difference. So I would probably lean towards the current mill, and then I could be probably persuaded to go plus one if we needed to.

Commissioner Linkowitz?

Well, as Commissioner Ivey mentioned, we've had the... luxury of going revenue neutral the last couple of years and so here we don't have that now and my inclination is to go using the prior year mill levy but Again, I think further discussion, I could probably be convinced to go a little further up. And I think that's mostly due to the fact that we are probably going to have some changes to the structure on the state level that may hinder our ability to use property tax to make up for budget shortfalls in the future. So I'm still letting it kind of simmer, percolate, so to speak. Mr. Rimp? Okey dokey.

Well, I would be comfortable with the current rate, but I will not be in favor of anything above that. I think we as a city, we as a commission, need to take a look at what we need to do versus what we want to do. If we have to eliminate a roundabout, it'd be very easy to do and save millions for the community. So I could support what we're currently paying in property tax, the current mill levy, current rate, but I will not support anything above.

Okay, quick question. We have certain dates. So if we say we want to do the prior mill levy or we want to do one mill over the current mill levy, we can always come off of that, correct?

Yes, you can come down.

But if we come in and we say we want to do revenue neutral, and then as we get into this more of the budgeting process, we cannot go above that after a certain date. And what date is that? July 20th. July 20th. So we have one more meeting. Yes. So whatever we say now, we can always come off of that, but we can't go above that as of July 20th. Correct. Okay.

And we can certainly bring you whatever additional information you want or need to make that decision at the next meeting if there's additional information or you just need to ponder it a little bit further.

You know, I've made this comment before, and the state has done us no favors when it comes to property taxes and You know, back in, was it 2012, when they took away, started taking away... Property tax. What's that?

Property tax.

Property tax on machinery? Mm-hmm. That's a big number. And now I see they're taking property tax away on boats and trailers and stuff. So they continue, and it sounds like a good idea, but everything they do seems to put more emphasis on property taxes.

Generally speaking, most of those changes have shifted it from commercial to residential. Residential, yes. The boats and that sort of thing doesn't, but the machinery and equipment certainly had the effect of shifting it to residences rather than commercial.

And again, the city, we've done a good job of staying revenue neutral. Again, can't do that forever. You know, I pulled out the 2025. You know, city tax rates, and you look at first-class cities, and really the only cities that have a lower mill levy than we do are cities around Kansas City. You know, the Overland Parks, the Olathas, the Shawnees, those type of things. I had looked at – at first thought I was kind of for doing the, you know – keeping the mill levy where it is, which we capture the incremental increase then in property values, which was my first thought. And then our shortfall, we have general reserve balances that we can use. But you can't do that forever. What bothers me is the state. And, again, we can't do anything about this, but if it goes to 3% of your property tax, what it levied now, we're going to fall behind continually. I don't think people in Topeka quite understand city finances. So that's why I know the league continues to fight that battle.

Yeah, and I do think that the league is going to present or at least try to work with the folks at the state to try and present some legislation that would be maybe a little bit more efficient or effective for local governments. I mean, the problem with CPI is CPI takes a basket of goods, which is like milk and bread, and says, hey, this is how much that went up. And so you can go up that amount or whatever the cap is. And cities don't buy milk and bread. We buy fire trucks and trash trucks and things that seem to have much higher inflation rates than you know, than some of the CPI items. Now, we have been fortunate here. Sales tax has done pretty well, and I think that it will continue to do well. And as we move forward in the future, I think we're going to have to be prepared in the sales tax capital fund to siphon some of those funds off to put towards the general fund operations. In the past, we had added some projects, and I think we'll have to take a look at how we do that in the future. It's kind of... We're just in a position where we've held revenue neutral for long enough that we're in a position where if we don't at least take a little bit, and it seems like there's consensus at least around keeping the mill levy the same, it will be difficult for us to reduce out $700,000 out of the budget. If that's the choice that you make, we'll figure it out. We'll figure out how to do that. if if you do increase it by one mil that that leaves us a couple hundred thousand dollars and i think i think we can we can probably find that but there's not a whole lot of fad in the budget that we've presented you we tried to take all of those measures and kind of look through it and and try to present you with something that um you know was pretty close to where we thought we could do this without limiting services without cutting any services or really affecting the day-to-day operations of the city if that makes sense

Do we have any major items coming out of the general reserve balance projected for next year?

No, we don't have any big transfers or spend downs. We've done that for the last couple of years. We've spent down a little bit.

We don't have anything planned. So the current balance, the general reserve balance, already takes into account the fire station, the dollars that are coming out of that, and some other items. So the general reserve balance currently is $26,000, $28,000.

It was at 26 million at the end of 2025. We anticipate it'll be about 21 million because we have the fire station coming out in 2026.

So we have 21 million and our target balance, did we move that to 13 or 15 million? 15. 15. So based on that, we can take some out, but we can't do that. We only have a certain amount of time.

We certainly could do it one time. I would be very reluctant to tell you that we could do it for multiple years, that the gap continues to grow and grow. And as we look at property taxes, if we had – remained at the same level of mill value for the last three years rather than decreasing it, we would have collected that million dollars over a three-year time period, and we wouldn't be looking at an increase today. I think we would be set at the mill rate.

But we'd love that. We'd have had another three million. Yeah.

So it does compound over time.

Especially since 70% of our expense is personnel. Right. And that's hard to, you get behind very quickly if you don't.

And part of what increased our expenses is, was it three years ago? I'm looking at Natalie. We did the pay plan. And so what the public needs to understand is we did adjust our pay plan to bring in additional workers and to keep what we have because we found it hard to compete with the private market and other companies. other municipalities. Was that a million-dollar hit, the annual budget? Yeah. I see Natalie back there shaking her head.

Two things happened with that. So we bumped everybody's pay at least 2%, and some at the lower end got a pretty significant bump. And it has been effective at retaining staff. And then we are more fully staffed today than we have been in years and years. And that's in police. That's in fire. Really, the only place where we're really struggling right now is in utilities. Utility workers have been difficult to fill and keep. Landfill has been difficult to keep and fill. The streets department was – we were 10 or 12 short in the streets department when we started this, and now we're fully staffed for the most part almost all the time in the streets department. So it really has been effective, but that – That affects our annual spending. When you're paying more and you're more fully staffed, that ends up costing us more – I mean, it just costs more money on the backside.

I don't – yeah, I don't know the consensus of the commission. I guess we need to give – Ms. Pack and staff some direction.

So it seems like there's consensus around at least keeping the mill value at the same. And I think we're OK if you want to take some time to think about it at our next meeting. We can have a discussion about whether we want to keep it where it's at or whether we want to increase it. Either way, if we stay at the current mill value, I don't know why that's so hard for me to say, then we are following a different process in terms of timeline. So we've never done that before. In the past, the timeline has always been the August 25th timeline. This will change the timeline, which is actually beneficial for us in terms of giving us a little bit more time to know what sales tax is going to do, what expenditures are going to do, and it will give us a little bit more time. Maybe a little bit more flexibility to know at least where we're at. So that's beneficial, but I think we do have to have a decision by probably next meeting. We need to know what your thoughts are, and then we can plan for that and have it prepared for the meeting after that to submit to the county.

Okay. Does that give you enough to go on, I guess, for now?

Yep.

Okay. Okay. So as Commissioner Link would say, I guess we'll percolate on it for a couple weeks.

That's right.

Okay. That's right.

So the next kind of section and items that we need to get direction from you on is personnel. Like I mentioned, in the current budget, we have proposed 1.5% COLA and 1.5% maximum merit. Okay. the cost of that i mean there's i gave you many options here there's not a there's not a huge change in the dollar amount depending on what you are do obviously a cola costs a little bit more because that's that's given to every employee on the on a specific date now you could choose not to do it on january 1st and that would save a little bit of money um it would be out of the ordinary but typically our assumption is that a cola would be to everyone on january 1st of 2027. the merit like i said doesn't cost as much because it's done on the on the um anniversary date, but for the most part, the cost of 1% is about $316,000 to the general fund, a little over $162,000 for the cost of one merit. And as I mentioned, we did include 1.5% colon 1.5% merit in the proposed budget.

Okay, any comments on this? Start to my left this time.

I think I mentioned at the last meeting two weeks ago, I forget what the answer was, but the question I had was regarding if we have an employee that their performance needs improvement, do they automatically get a cost of living adjustment? And to me, I think if we have somebody's performance, if they're not meeting the minimum standard, I don't think they should be moved at all. My thoughts on that.

The cost of living or for the merit?

That would be the COLA, the merit would be, they kind of go hand in hand. But the COLA is automatic, the merit based upon merit, so.

I think if we wanted to send a message to the employee that the merit increases the opportunity to do that. Of course, the smaller target of a merit increase there is, the less motivated a person is to. meet those standards to get an increase, but I think the COLA just allows us to keep the employee rather than losing them someplace else.

And if somebody is on a, I mean, so the way that our process works, if somebody gets an evaluation that says that they need improvement, then they are put on a plan and then they are given a new evaluation date and they are evaluated. So we don't just put you on an improvement, we don't just say you need improvement and then we wait until the next year. We start a plan and a process and if they aren't able to meet the requirements and needs, then they're working through a process that we would be trying to get them out of our organization. So the hard part with not applying a COLA is that you may have somebody that has a, I mean, the evaluation timeframes are all kind of all over the place. And if you don't apply it, to everybody, well, there's a couple of things that could happen. If you don't apply it to everybody all at the same time, then there could be some people that are outside of the new pay range because they didn't move. And the pay range will move. And then you could have people that get hired in at a higher pay rate after somebody who's there's just lots of concerns about splitting up a COLA payment and not paying that. I mean, it's really intended to not be connected to performance at all. It's about the system rather than the individual.

I would think there would be legal implications if you incorporated that methodology with the COLA.

Well, I mean, there's legal implications and employment law implications to anything with salary. A huge pet peeve of mine is just any time, kind of along Commissioner Rupp's point, any time a person is not performing but gets a merit increase, it drives me nuts because then it makes it harder for us to have maneuverability. But I think a different way of what the city manager is saying is the COLA just kind of is the baseline, and the baseline has to kind of move because you're not just replacing the person, you're replacing the position, and if you don't keep that positions thing at the market, it doesn't work. And at the end of the day, you just have to have good managers who actually do the evaluations and follow up with their people. And I think we do have those. But it doesn't really, whatever plan you make will fail if people aren't evaluating their people.

Honestly and correctly. Right.

Correct.

Well, the ideal situation would be if you really didn't do well this year, then your salary goes down. But that's never seemed to work in business. It's just really hard to keep employees. Any other comments?

I'd be fine with the one and a half for both.

Commissioner Linkwitz?

I concur.

One and a half, one and a half? OK. Okay, health rates.

Health rates. This one's almost as difficult as sales tax because there's a lot that goes into establishing our rates, establishing our premiums, knowing what our costs are. A few years ago, we did establish a budget, a target fund balance policy. And you can see from this next slide that we did not fall within that. target range at the end of 2025. Our fund balance was about 2.5 million and our minimum fund balance target was 2.9 million. So we were about $439,000 short. We were a little short the year before, but it wasn't as concerning. It was only like $60,000 or something like that. So we really didn't make huge adjustments based on that information. And talking with our consultant, He is recommending that we'll have at least a 5% increase in claims for 2027. We will have some opportunity. We have Blue Cross supposed to be giving us some renewal rates in July. We typically don't renew our policy until the 1st of January. That's when our plan changes. Blue Cross and Blue Shield is trying to work on some early numbers for us. So we've put into this presentation a couple of options. The first option and what we have budgeted currently, because as you know, when we raise premiums, which is the cost of the insurance, we're not only increasing it to the employee, we're increasing it to the city. So we share that premium increase. The total policy or the total premium is split between the city and the employee by 80% to the city and about 20% to the employee. So what we've provided in the information that we've got given you here is a 5% increase in premiums and then a 10% increase in premiums. And as you can see with the data that follows on the right, the cost to a family for a 5% increase, that net cost to the employee would be about $19 a month. The 10% increase would be about $38 a month, and then individual is 7 and 14, and then employee plus one is 16 and 32. And based on the direction you just gave, that 1.5% COLA for our lowest employee, which is a 1739 hourly rate, is about $41.60 a month. So that we just wanted to give you that information so that you knew kind of what the raise was compared to what this additional cost was going to be. The next slide kind of shows you where we believe that the fund balance would be if we did a 5% increase. At 5%, we believe that the fund would be in the negative about $175,000. Currently, our claims are trending flat from last year, but it doesn't take many claims that are big to change that. We did increase our stop loss. um maximum or minimum maximum i can't remember what the word would be um so that that they start covering a loss of a greater amount than it used to be um and then the next slide shows if we did a 10 increase in those in those premiums what that would be to the general to the fund and we believe it would sh it would have a the opposite effect would be a 225 000 net income which would kind of eat into that shortfall that we have in that target fund balance at least a little bit for this year. That additional 5%, if we went with 10%, would cost the general fund another $196,000. So if we went 10% on the premiums, we'd need to go another $196,000 in the hole on the general fund.

So in the budget we just looked at with the shortfall, were you using 5% or 10%? 5%. You were using the 5%. Yeah.

And a quick question, Debbie. Mm-hm. Little confused, first time going through this. To me it makes it sound like we're self insured.

We are.

Okay, well that. That answers the second part of that question. Having, in all my previous life, the insurer came to you with whatever was going to happen with your rate for the following year. Yeah.

All right, thank you. So our premiums pay for administration, and then we have stop loss. So any of the really large claims are covered by reinsurance. So those are the things that we're really paying for with premiums. We also pay for prescription drugs, and we pay for dental, and we pay for a program called TRIO, which is intended to help people get better deals for their prescription drugs and do some health, kind of some wellness, employee assistance programs. So that's why we have such a big fund balance is if we have a year of experience where we have several people that hit the stop loss, then that really impacts us and can impact us pretty quickly. So we have a whole calculation on how we figure out what we think should be the right amount in that fund. I think with 5%, you know, it does show that we'd be going down a little bit, but it's not so much that it's really overly concerning. And we are doing, I don't know if I want to say this out loud, but we are doing really well this year. I mean, we are not seeing, we've had in the past couple of years some very large instances, and we just, this year we're doing really well. Year to date, we haven't had any. What is our stop loss now?

I think it's $250,000 right now. I think we raised it to $250,000 the last time we did it. So we pay up to the $250,000 for a claim and then anything over that is covered by the stop loss policy.

So the 5% costs the lowest hourly wage point, $41.60, would the 10% then double that?

No, that's what the employee would be making additionally. That's their raise, basically, from the COLA only.

I got you.

So we were just trying to show that. even our lowest paid employee with that COLA would still be making, depending on what policy or what plan they had, it would not take their entire raise. Close in some cases.

Yeah, so at 5%, it's an additional $19 a month.

For a family plan.

So we're just trying to say that they still get a, we're trying not to eat into their entire pay increase with just health insurance costs, because obviously other things are going up as well.

So then the 10% would double that to $40. Yeah.

Is everybody okay with the 5%? Yes. Okay.

Those were the most time-consuming ones, I promise.

Good, because you only have 10 minutes.

No, I never know how much time we give. Sales tax capital fund, I'll go through this pretty quickly. I did mention that we have some additional funds. Transfers that we're going to do, we're just going to reallocate. We have budgeting a 4.5% increase over the last two years for revenue. Right now we're at 5.3% up from last year. That's as of the end of May, but we still have seven months to go. The normal things that we've always budgeted for in here is our debt service for the streetscape, river renewal, um streets vehicles and equipment things like that the changes that we were proposing is that 300 000 an additional 300 000 in tax stabilization um as a one-time transfer the 650 000 that would go to debt service to go the general fund 300 000 from the building and facility fund um to the general fund and i've shown that that That maintenance fund has $1.3 million in it. And $100,000 from Kenwood Cove to the general fund, that fund balance is about $200,000. We're also recommending that we increase the ongoing transfer for sales tax stabilization from $1 million to $1.2 million as long as the sales tax can support it. That's what we're seeing basically. So on these items, we were just recommending We would request your consensus on the one-time transfers and on the ongoing increase to the general fund for tax stabilization.

Any comments?

Any comments or concerns for any of that?

Okay.

Okay, I see now it's the one-time transfer for tax stabilization, but also a budgeted increase as well. Yes, yes.

Okay. as Jacob mentioned, to kind of start utilizing the growth in that sales tax as we go along. Okay, the next one is your direction for funding of outside agencies. The table shows what was approved in 2026, what was requested in 2027. I will say that the budget that we've presented with the $700,000 shortfall includes what the outside parties requested. What we asked our own internal staff to do was hold But this is kind of where the changes, the ones highlighted in red are the only ones that have asked for increases. And that's about $63,000 of that is in the general fund. So just from your consensus for each of these, we could go through each of these and just say yes, budget last year or give them what they've requested in addition.

And in terms of these numbers, the ones that are really impactful for us are the general fund transfers. The other ones that are coming out of other funds, they don't really have a huge impact on those funds at all. I did want to just mention the Chamber of Commerce. If you look, that does look like a pretty good increase. And it looks like a decrease in cultural marketing, but they have a fund balance set aside for cultural marketing. So that doesn't decrease the dollar amount that they're going to spend on cultural marketing. It just decreases this one year's allocation. And then the way that that agreement works with the chamber is over time they are intended to spend down a fund balance. So it In the instance over the three-year period that they aren't able to spend down the fund balance and they have extra money, that will either not be transferred to them or it will come back to us based on the agreement that we have lined out.

I can't remember. Is that an annual amount they have to spend down?

Well, it's intended to be an annual amount, but the first year was a little – Yeah, the first year was a little hard because we were working under two separate agreements, so we didn't collect anything or ask for any back. But we'll be monitoring that as we get into the second year.

But now we have a benchmark, so we can know that percentage. And plus, I always call the transient guest tax that amount. That's kind of a pay-as-you-go. So if they can request the $950,000, but if they only spend $8,000, the $150,000 we keep...

Under the new agreement, they're paid 25% of what they budget every quarter.

Okay. They are. Yes. But there will be a true-up.

And then there's a true-up at the end of the year to say this is what we spent, this is what we did.

So we pay it, but we have a settlement at the end of the year to say, okay, you spent this.

Right.

This comes back to us. You didn't meet this threshold. You did this. Whatever. I just want to make sure that doesn't build up again. Okay. Perfect. Okay. Thank you. Any questions or concerns about any of those, anyone?

I'd like to just make mention on the chamber. And while I've never participated in one, they do some pretty elaborate trips on an annual basis. And I'm sure at least one or two chamber people go on these trips around the world. And in a way, we're kind of helping subsidize that.

Yeah, actually, and that's why we did reworking of the agreement last year to take a look at the overhead and how much we are spending on those. So our funds are supposed to go for Visit Salina, which is only the tourism part. And then they do pay for a little bit of the overhead. for some of the folks that maybe do accounting or finance for the entire organization. So that's all split out in the agreement, and it's intended that our funds are not used for anything like a chamber trip or any of those functions that don't have something to do with the Visit Salina part of the chamber. So we certainly are paying attention to that.

And I see from people walking in that there will be conversation regarding water today. And I'm sure we'll go into that in detail, but a lot of these are kind of nice to do's where we're giving away taxpayer money. We're giving it away for a reason. But anyway, we're going to discuss or There will be those in the audience that will be discussing water later on.

And none of these come out of the water fund. They're all- But they come out of the fund. They come out of the general fund, but we don't transfer money from the general fund to do water specific projects. So any water project is going to be coming out of that water enterprise fund. Well, we might need to.

We can have that discussion.

We will have that discussion when we talk about water rates, which we typically do during the budget season. But we may not do that. We have to adopt them by the end of the year, so we probably will not do it during this budget season. But we will be back to you to discuss rates and projects and those types of things just for the utility fund. Most of those bid projects are debt financed or some of them are cash. So is this a consensus to allow the current request or did you want to go through these individually or?

Allow the current request would be my suggestion. I agree.

I agree.

so um i'm just going to cover the next one because it's a sales tax economic and it's tied to the request that we just did actually the next two and then i'll pull the rest of these and bring them back next time because they're just really passed through budgets the next one's the economic development fund and with the increase to sdi's funding that puts the fund it's able to support that funding with what we're projecting as the sales tax increase This funding comes from the special sales tax, the .75 portion of the city. This fund gets 3.9% of that for the purpose of economic development. So we feel like that increase for SDI can be covered with the current revenue. And then the next one on the next page is the tourism fund, and that is the transient guest tax. Not only does it provide services or funding for the chamber, it also provides funding for TPAC and funding for turf replacement that we've done at some of the ball fields. With that increase in the Salina Chamber, we believe that this fund will also support with the revenues that we projected that will support those increases in that fund. And then I'm going to bring back the rest of these funds. Most of these are pass-through funds. I'll bring them back at the next study session, and we can go through those really quickly because there's nothing there really. It's just mainly estimates and things like that.

Okay. We will... Close the study session. We'll be back. Oh, okay.

I just wanted to clarify the question on stop loss. In 2026, we moved from 175,000 to 200,000. So it's not 250. It's currently 200.

That was close. Thank you. Okay. We will be back in here at 4 o'clock for the regular meeting. Okay, it is four o'clock. I will call the June 22nd 2026 Linus City Commission meeting to order I would ask staff for confirmation of the Kansas Open Meeting Act required notice has been properly provided Yes, thank you. May we have a roll call here? Commissioner Davis here Commissioner Ivy here Commissioner Lincoln here Commissioner right here well those who able please stand for a Pledge of Allegiance and a moment of silence

Thank you.

Okay, we have no public hearing scheduled for today. That will bring us to consent agenda.

Item 4.1, consider approval of the June 8th, 2026 regular meeting minutes. Item 4.2, consider approval of resolution number 26-8359, appointing a member to the planning commission. Item 4.3, consider authorizing Evergy to relocate power poles at the landfill in an amount not to exceed $55,380 prior to the scale house and entrance improvements project. And item 4.4, consider awarding the bid for parks concrete improvements to pot and construction of Salina in an amount not to exceed $292,241. Thank you.

Is there an item a commissioner would like to have removed from consent agenda?

Point of clarification. Mr. Mayor, item 6.1, the consider approval of the ordinance, is that something we need to talk about during the meeting?

Yeah, that's part on the agenda.

Yeah, and typically speaking, we don't put ordinances on the consent agenda because they have to have a roll call vote.

So normally, we do that speaking of those. I haven't faced that before.

Okay, so is there an item, someone like, if not, is there an item on the consent agenda the public would like to comment on? Okay, if not, I will bring it back to the commission for approval.

I move approval of the consent agenda.

Second.

We have a motion and a second to approve consent agenda items 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? That item passes 5-0. That will bring us to administration.

Item 5.1, consider renewing the city's comprehensive property casualty insurance with Travelers and Chubb in the combined amount of $1,091,474. Okay. Ms. Schuessler.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Commissioners.

Nancy Schuessler, the City of Salinas Risk Manager. We're here to talk about property and casualty insurance. Hopefully this will be a pretty quick ticket item because we did come in under... budget. So that's pretty exciting. So every year we purchase property and casualty insurance for the city to cover things like our buildings, our equipment, our liability insurance, like cyber liability, public entity management liability, those kinds of things. A list of all the line items are attached to the report that I did. They list out everything in detail. But I do also have a premium summary on the bottom of that first page for you to kind of look at as far as Renal goes. But normally after the first of the year, we get together with Iron Insurance Partners and Charles Worth Consulting, and we talk about the insurance market, available carrier options, those kinds of things. And since property and casualty insurance carriers exclusively utilize an agency broker system to market and sell their policies, we can't go out and purchase those. So that's why we use Iron Insurance Partners in addition to the many other services they provide. They do provide that service of purchasing insurance for us on our behalf. And then Charlesworth Consulting is more of a contractual extension of staff. They also provide a wide range of resources, but this time of year they act as an advisor to the city and throughout the renewal process. So Iron Insurance Partners is compensated through a broker fee agreement and Charlesworth Consulting is compensated through a consulting services agreement. So the city's insurance policies, property and casualty policies, do expire on June 30th. So we do need, hopefully, to get that reset back up. But Iron Insurance Partners and Charlesworth Consulting did come back in April, if you recall, and presented the state of the marketplace at the time and what they were presenting. predicting and estimating, and they were pretty darn close. Like I said, we did come in under. But at the time, commissioners went ahead and directed the city to go ahead and renew with Travelers and Chubb. So that is what we did. And that premium summary at the bottom of your first page of your report shows it's actually a comparison of this expiring year's premium by line of coverage. how it compares to the Travelers and the Chubb proposals. We are seeing an overall increase in premium of a little over 12% and I think Iron Insurance Partners had estimated along with Charlesworth at around 15 so we did come in under that estimation but The property premium came in less than expected through Chubb. I think being told that they were committed to a flat rate since this was their first renewal with the city. So they were anxious and eager to do that for us. They did increase all the values by 2%, which is pretty standard practice. But that's why you see a slight increase in property. And then Inland Marine increased due to adding a large piece of property. equipment in January. So the auto experienced most of the significant increase driven largely by rate increases but also by claims that the city had. So the insurance amount budgeted for 2026 for property and casualty is $1.6 million. After this renewal, that line item will have a remaining balance of just a little over $500,000. Staff has identified four options for the commission's consideration. The first option would be to approve a motion authorizing the city manager to execute an agreement with travelers for $567,499 for the city's liability policies and commercial auto policy. And in agreement with Chubb for $523,975 for the city's property and inland marine policies in the total amount of $1,091,474. Second option could be approve a motion authorizing the city manager to execute an agreement with Travelers and Chubb with amendments as the city commission deems appropriate. Option three is to postpone consideration of the proposed motion to a specified date and time and provide staff direction regarding additional information or amendments the City Commission would like to request. Or option four, you can take no action, which in effect is disapproving the proposed motion authorizing the city manager to execute the agreement with Travelers and Chubb, resulting in no property and casualty insurance protection for potential losses. So overall, pricing remains consistent with the current market conditions, and staff and iron insurance partners and Charlesworth Consulting Recommend moving that the City Commission authorize the City Manager to execute an agreement with Travelers for $567,499 for the City's liability policies and commercial auto policy and an agreement with Chubb for $523,975 for the City's property and inland marine policies in the total amount of $1,091,480. and $74. So I do have Mark Skidmore with Iron Insurance Partners with me today. And we also have James Charlesworth on the phone via Zoom. So they are both available to help answer any questions you might have.

Any questions? I do not. You might just briefly touch upon the fact that as a municipality, and I don't know whether you or Mr. Skidmore wants to do this, how there's limited number of carriers that we actually have options. It's not like the average citizen that can go out and has multiple agencies.

Very true. It's very dependent upon city size. We're too large for many and maybe even too small for others. But I'll let Mark actually go through that, just mostly because he never gets to talk. So Perry, I'll let him come up here.

I don't know what more I can add to what she said, right? The marketplace for municipalities in Kansas probably is a total of half a dozen carriers. I would say that there are two or three that we're not big enough for. We don't have enough built-in deductible to get into a program like that. Two to three of them were way too big. They liked the 5,000, 10,000 population base. The largest percentage rider in the state has a cap at like 15,000 people. So we just don't qualify for that program.

I just think it's important people know we have a very small window of who we can do business with. Yep. Okay. Thank you. Are there any comments from the public on this?

Ben Wendell Salina, for the money that we're spending here as far as this, what is our deductible per event and per building? And how does that get spread out over the course of all the buildings that the city owns? Please.

Ben, were you talking about for property only? Is that what you're asking?

I'm asking for if we have a tornado or we had a vent where basically we have a deductible. Is it one large deductible for all of our buildings or is it per building? Okay.

So you're talking structures only, not auto. I just want to make sure I answer your question. I'm talking about all of them.

Okay. Anything that's under this $1 million.

Okay. So for property, our deductible with Chubb is 1% per location. and a minimum of $100,000. So except for TPAC, TPAC has a 2% per building and a $250,000 minimum. So and then that's just in each building would actually we kind of iron insurance has made it very easy when they've listed out all of our properties. They've already calculated what the deductible, you know, the 1% deductible would be for each structure. So we know when we have a structure, we can just kind of look and see what that deductible is that we need to meet. So I know recently we've had some damage just from the recent windstorm and most everything so far that's been turned into me. If there's something that hasn't been turned into me yet and I might not know everything at this point, but at this point everything is well under the deductible for every location that we've had some damage at. So now the autos work differently. The autos unfortunately with travelers, they forced, they mandated a $5,000 deductible for any auto that's $100,000 purchased new and lower is a $5,000 deductible and it goes up from there all the way up to $25,000. So that deductible works a lot different when there's a big storm that comes through, a big hail storm.

Mark just walked away, so I think he agrees with you. Okay. Okay. Anyone else? If not, I will bring it back to the commission for action.

I move to authorize the city manager to execute an agreement with Travelers for $567,499 for the city's liability policies and commercial auto policy. And an agreement with Chubb for $523,975 for the city's property and inland marine policies in the total amount of $1,091,474.

second that we have a motion in a second authorizing the city manager to execute an agreement with travelers for 567 490 for the city's liability policies and commercial auto policy an agreement with chubb for 523 975 for the city's property and inland marine policies in the mount in the total amount of $1,091,474. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? That item passes 5-0. Thank you. That will lead us to item 5.2.

Item 5.2, consider approval of ordinance number 26-11287, authorizing issuance of industrial revenue bonds and a principal amount of $12,500,000 for a sales tax exemption on construction materials for the Lee Lost Phase 2 project.

Yeah, commissioners, I can be brief on this. Our bond counsel, Sarah Steele, is also here if there are questions that I'm not able to answer. Back in 2023, the City Commission passed Resolution 23-8120, which was an authorization for the City to issue industrial revenue bonds for the purpose of an amount not to exceed $12,500,000 to allow for a sales tax exemption on construction material for the Lee Lofts Phase 2 project. So that would be a sales tax-only exemption that they received. Now that the project has been completed, today's action by ordinance is to close out that project, issue those bonds, and then basically complete what you guys approved back in 2023.

Okay, questions? That simple. Questions?

I have one. Okay. Did they get the elevator working?

So the elevator's not required by city code as I understand it. Or the elevator's required, the generator's not what's required. So I guess that you can have that discussion somewhere else in the meeting, but in terms of the industrial revenue bonds, that really wouldn't impact them.

Any other? Okay, any questions or comments from the public? Okay, if not, I will bring it back to the commission for action.

Mayor, I move we approve ordinance number 26-11287.

Second. We have a motion and a second to approve ordinance number 26-11287. May we have a roll call, please?

Commissioner Davis?

Aye.

Commissioner Ivey?

Aye.

Commissioner Lankowitz?

Aye.

Commissioner Remp?

Aye.

Mayor Hoppock?

Aye. That item passes 5-0. That will bring us to item 5.3.

Item 5.3, consider a temporary increase into the city manager's purchasing authority for the approval of tree trimming and removal services.

Mayor and commissioners, as you know, there was a pretty significant storm that happened here a couple of weeks within the city. There was extensive damage at several locations across the city in terms of trees that went down. The cemetery was one place that had extensive damage. We also saw damage at several park locations. We have about 26 park locations where we're cleaning up trees at this point in time. During the process of trying to get everything cleaned up, we did take a couple of quotes for what it would cost for tree removal at the cemetery. Those range from $90,000 to over $200,000. At the time, I reviewed that, didn't feel like that I had the appropriate authority under our purchasing policy. I do have my purchasing authority is $50,000, and then I do have an emergency authority. But that's really directly related to life and safety issues. And so once we had closed down the cemetery, I didn't feel like it was appropriate for me to approve a contract. So this item would give me authority to run a process. The other issue that I see with the process we ran is we didn't really provide that competition to a broad range of contractors. We got three quotes and just looked at it that way. So what we would like to do is take a look at some of the worst trees that we have across our system that are outsized, too big for us to handle, too big for our equipment, and then do a process where we would allow some sealed bids, probably a very short turnaround. And this item would allow me to approve that without having to bring it back and wait several weeks. So it would speed up the process of that tree removal. And I'd be happy to stand for any questions.

What's the plan if the entire bids come in over $200,000? Will we just do what we can at the two, and you'll come back to us later?

Yeah, we would have to do that. I don't think, so at this point, we've had enough volunteers, I think, in our system, you know, that have come in and really taken care of it. I'm obviously very appreciative of the groups that have came in and did a lot of work. There's been work done by volunteers at both Thomas Park and there's a lot of work at the cemetery. So the You know, the issues aren't as bad as they were, I think, when we first got these quotes. So I would be kind of surprised if we went over that $200,000. So the plan would be to kind of just get the worst of the worst things that we can get. If it happens to be more than $200,000, we'll have to come back and try again.

Any questions?

Is this for 90 days? I thought I... Or what's the duration?

We did say through the end of the year. I don't think- I'm sorry, I thought I said that- Yeah, and it is specific to tree removal, so I couldn't use this authority for anything else. But we did just put it between now and the end of the year. Makes sense.

Any other questions? Just the point of clarification. I assume like the cemetery would just be one bid or one contractor, or are you looking at the entire city?

No, I think we'll look at the entirety of what's in our park system, because there are some trees in Thomas Park in particular that are large that we need to handle. I'm not sure. I think Thomas Park and the cemetery are probably the worst hit in terms of the large trees. But if there are other trees within our system that we don't think we can handle ourselves, we would look at those as well.

While we're talking about that, I do want to make a mention of the Ark Church. had 80 plus volunteers and mentioned the Convoy of Hope and there were trees yay wide that they were chainsawing through and that was pretty impressive, the amount of ground covered that day. I see Martin back there in the back and you get that many people working on a project at one time and they really did make a difference. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely they did.

I did have one other question. Is there an aggregate total? I mean, I don't think you would approve 10 projects at $200,000 or $199,999 without coming back to us.

No, I am anticipating that we just do one project. An aggregate of 200, yeah, for all the parks.

Because it's at $200,000 per agreement, right? And so that means one contract could be $199,999.

We need to change that verbiage because that was not the conversation the city manager and I had. It was an aggregate of $200,000.

Just one time $200,000 is fine with me. Okay. So if you just want to say just take out per agreement and say $200,000, I think that's sufficient.

Okay.

Perfect. Okay. Yeah, there was some discussion about whether we should approve smaller contracts or several smaller contracts. And I just want to mention that that is a direct violation of the purchasing policy for me to split things up like that. It's prohibited for departments. It's prohibited for me to take a project that kind of circumvents the entire purpose of the purchasing policy. So that isn't something that we ever do, just to mention that.

Okay. Any comments or questions from the public? No. If you have any questions, we'll need to come to the podium. Go ahead.

Gord Head?

Yeah.

Did you call me Gord Head?

Yeah. Shame on you. I hadn't thought of that. I may change that.

Go ahead. You felt it, Mike. Anyway, logging, you got the equipment to handle this. The tree you showed me, Mr. Dump, that's a little tree. I've been in the logging business since back in the 70s. All it takes is a chainsaw. But you've got loaders. You've got track hose. You can do this. Why are you afraid to tackle it?

Well, we could do it for sure, but it might take us until Thanksgiving to get it done. So, I mean, we just have a lot of other priorities in the system. There's lots of parks that we have, so.

You give me a chainsaw with a 58-inch bar and three workers, and you can have this place cleaned up in a month. That's all you need, because we've done it. I've done timber claims, watersheds. You've got the equipment to do it. But logging is the most dangerous occupation in the United States. 98 deaths per thousand for every full-time worker. So that's the most dangerous job. And see how we're on this. This was said at your study session. Your paying scale is wrong. You're paying people that are in the less dangerous jobs.

Norm, we need to stick to this.

We're talking about trees.

Yeah. You're starting to talk about personnel and salaries. I'm not sure. Can we stick to the blue sheet and you discuss that under other business?

This is Disneyland.

Thank you.

We don't have a blue sheet.

Tony Johnson, Celina. I'm kind of piggyback on what Norm said. We have a parks and rec department. We have a forestry department, but we don't have the equipment to staff them with to handle this. I don't know. And we want to be a river town next. We can't even handle trees. Are you kidding me? You know, I mean, and I just, I can't get behind this just based on the The comments I've heard from fellow citizens and taxpayers about their confidence coming out of the city manager's office, I've not heard anything positive about that in this last year or so. So giving him unbridled authority to spend another quarter million dollars or $200,000, I would rather see you guys take a leadership position schedule an emergency meeting, come together, and let's work this out. I mean, that's what I would rather see. It only takes three of you, I think, right, to get a quorum? I mean, the next day we should have had a meeting of our city elected leaders to come together and get this worked out, in my opinion. But thank you.

Thank you for your opinion.

I'm okay with spending the money. I support getting Gypsum Hill Cemetery and the other storm damaged areas cleaned up. What I don't support is giving the city manager the authority to approve the contracts up to $200,000 without bringing those contracts before the elected body that is supposed to represent the people of Salina. We have heard repeatedly about the importance of transparency. Transparency doesn't mean informing the public after decisions have been made. It means allowing the public to see the process before those decisions are finalized. The staff report itself that this situation does not meet the definition of an emergency purchase. If it's not an emergency, purchased, then why bypass the normal public review process? The RFPs are already out from my understanding. The bids are coming in. There's nothing preventing this commission from scheduling a special meeting the day after the proposals are due and reviewing those bids in public. That would allow the citizens of Salina to see who submitted proposals what those proposals cost, how they were evaluated, and why a particular contractor was selected. That's transparency. This commission has a responsibility to oversee the expenditure of taxpayer dollars, especially when we're talking about contracts that could reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. I would urge you to reject this temporary expansion of purchasing authority, and instead schedule a special meeting to review the proposals publicly. The citizens of Salina have the right to know how their money is being spent and who is receiving those contracts.

Are RFPs been sent out yet?

Yes.

They have, okay. And when do they do back? Friday. Friday, okay, thank you. Anyone else?

Christy Dixon, Salina, Kansas. I'm kind of with Sue on that, but I'm also with the guys. I believe that we do need to get the parks cleaned up. My mom is buried at Gypsum. When I did go up there to check on her grave, I did see a handful of people out there, as well as Mr. Rimp out there cleaning up. That was pretty much all of the six of you that I've seen out there. Maybe I missed you. Maybe you didn't go. I guess my next comment is, what was it? Something else I wanted to share, and I can't remember what it was, but I want to appreciate, I very much appreciate you going out there and helping those graves and to get that facility cleaned up so that a few funerals could be held that same week of the families of the deceased. I guess also my thing is, you know, we got two paid city employees on leave. They could have got their butts out there and picked up branches just like Mr. Rimp did. They wouldn't have been able to kill anything out there. They're already dead. Yeah, we really could have used two more hands out there instead of setting them paying their full benefits and salary for the year. But again, thank you. Thank you to those that I've seen out there. Thank you very much.

It blows my mind with Gibson Hill Cemetery how many people in this community have loved ones buried out there. And emotions run wild with these people that are out there. And they're deep. And yet, there was no comparison with that being cleaned up compared to Oakdale Park the day after the storm. I already know for a fact that there were multiple, multiple city departments out there. And don't lie to me because I already heard it from one of the employees. That there were multiple people out there in Oakdale Park on Tuesday cleaning up that park. And yet nobody, nobody went to Gypsum Hill. And the director out there was begging for help. And the volunteers had to do it. Priorities. Priorities, people's loved ones are more important than a damn river festival. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Hello, Jess White, Celina, and I'm going to kind of come at this from a different angle. The cemetery is obviously important, but I think that people need to understand that the city is also a business, and from a business standpoint, the River Festival brings in a lot of money. I personally didn't even go to the River Festival because I couldn't afford to with five children and life right now. So anyways, the cemetery is important, but with the deficit of almost a million dollars right now, Not putting on the river festival would have increased that because the city makes money off of the river festival. So I think that instead of sitting here and attacking each other and pointing fingers and everybody playing blame shift, we need to start looking at things of what community resources do we already have? What kind of people do we already have? Because there are highly competent, highly capable people here that are capable of doing a lot of different things. For the trees, why couldn't we get a community service program going where people who are on corrections or probation could sign a waiver and then they could go and start working on some of the tree cleanups. There's various things that we could do as a community involvement that'll save money in the long run. And I think we need to start looking at those kinds of things because pointing fingers and who yells the loudest in the room gets nowhere. And we have a lot of different challenges. The world's going through a lot of different things and there's a lot of different things just, there's so many different moving parts that people pick one part, they fixate on that instead of looking at the whole picture. So I think we need better understanding, more transparency, and to know what great opportunities have been pursued, what reimbursement opportunities are available. Do we have something where we're documenting every single person who has done any volunteer work, all of the construction equipment that's going into the tree removals and things like that. Are we documenting all of that? Because then we can use that as procurement for the 25% if we're getting FEMA assistance. And I know I'd send out an email to all of you guys about this, well, a lot of you guys about this. So I'm just curious kind of how can we look at other avenues and stop blaming, we can't have a division of citizens and government. We're at a point in this world that we all need to come together. You guys, we can't do all this pointing fingers thing because it gets nobody anywhere. We have got to come together. There are so many people here that are so valuable, and I just want to see more of that. I think we're on the right path, but I think we still have a long ways to go, and a lot of it is going to be stop looking at everything from a survival, because so many people are trying to survive in life and navigate through all of this stuff we've been going through. I know I kind of strayed off of the trees, but I hate seeing the anger and people saying, you did this and you did that, that does nothing. So let's work together to come up with solutions that benefit everybody. Thank you.

Thank you, Jessica. I think I have all my deal. We'll discuss FEMA under other business, if that's okay. So we'll talk about that a little bit. Did you have something? I'm sorry, ma'am. You got cut off. Did you want to say, okay, give you the opportunity to come forward? Is there anyone else? Okay, I will bring it back to the commission for further discussion or a motion.

Well, I would, before any motion is made, I would I think worst case scenario, we're already waiting, or we would be waiting, but we're gonna have another meeting in two weeks. All the emergency areas have been taken care of. I think a lot of good valuable points were made and I think we can cover it at the next meeting. I've heard a rumor that we might have a meeting perhaps in a week. So I'm fine with just handling it. as the RFPs come in.

Well, look, the city manager, I know this was one way we thought we could get two things a little quicker. But that's up to the commission.

I mean, I think the fastest way for this to happen is to provide this approval. If you want to have a special meeting or meet and talk about it once they come in, we can certainly do that.

Do we feel as though? The areas that need to be emergently cleared are being cleared at a fast enough rate to wait three weeks before we

well at this point we still have two parks i know of off the top of my head that are closed to the public at least in some areas that i think this this would address that would be lakewood park uh the south side of lakewood park is still closed to the public and then thomas park is close to the public so um you know the longer we wait the longer those longer it takes to get those places back open. The cemetery is open to the public. I mean, you can get back in there, but there's still quite a few large trees that need to be taken care of there as well.

The hidden danger are those weakened tree limbs that will come down in the next storm. And my biggest fear over the storm that I think forgot to show up in its full fury this weekend was all the limbs that couldn't quite make it down to the ground a week ago got a second chance to come down. I'm picking roots through town to intentionally drive on streets that don't have as many trees. Because when you see what these things do to the ground when they hit, I don't particularly want to be in a vehicle separating that limb from the concrete. There's a lot of hidden work and I'm just watching the crews that are clearing the trees from the power lines. It takes them forever to go down a block, just to move that tree two feet if that boom won't reach. It takes time. You've got to pull everything down, pull up the stabilizers, move it. I mean, there's a lot of work to be done. I doubt that we have the city crews to do all this in the next four or five months. And the biggest call we get is, how come it's taken so long? Because there's a lot of work to do.

I'd like to add one thing, too. Kind of to that thought, Commissioner, again, I was at the cemetery last week and I saw the amount of effort that goes into clearing one big tree. It just, to me, seemed like a humongous amount of effort going in to just take care of one. And Norm, I think kind of maybe even accidentally made a point for contracting some of this work. I saw those guys with the chainsaws and I've seen people that have gotten injured by chainsaws. And fortunately, the gentleman with Convoy of Hope that were operating chainsaws, one of them, Ashley Jarvis, a local citizen, but they had on kind of the, I'm going to call it cowboy attire or full leather down their legs and over their torso to help protect themselves. And I know a lot of times you were kind of talking about hidden dangers, limbs up there. A lot of times it might be a nail or something that was put in a tree a long time ago too that can really cause things to go sideways in a hurry.

One thing I've noticed that actually surprised me with a lot of these trees that came down, before the storm I thought these were majestic, very strong, I mean, big boy trees. Half these things are hollow on the inside. And I imagine there are several trees that are still standing that look good, but need to come down. I mean, if they're like their neighbors that fell, they're just a sitting duck. I would hope whatever contract we get would include the expertise of someone, or maybe our own, I know that's a fancy term that I can't think of, but the tree arborist. Arborist, thank you. Put little tags around the trees that are just... bad things waiting to happen. We can have special meetings. If there are areas that the public wants to use that we can't clear, I have no problem trusting the city manager's judgment to come up with contracts. I mean, he's already not suggested that certain contracts be let because of the cost. And at some point we start getting into cosmetic work, still takes a lot of manpower. But if we still have work that needs to be done urgently, we can't do it. We really only have two choices, which is allow the city manager some leeway or plan to meet at a moment's notice. because we don't want this lagging on for months and months if we can help it.

Do we have a motion somebody would like to make?

I'm going to go ahead and move that we authorize a temporary increase to the city manager's purchasing authority to $200,000 for tree services related to June 8th, 2026 storm through December 31st through the end of the year. I'll second that. Just want to keep our employees safe.

We have a motion, a second. Approving the motion authorizing a temporary increase in the city manager's purchasing authority to 200,000 for tree services related to the June 8th, 2026 storm through December 31st, 2026. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? That item passes 5-0.

Those results of that RFP are posted online, are they not?

Yeah, we can.

You'll share them with us? Yeah, we will. Okay, thank you. Okay, that brings us to item 5.4.

Item 5.4, consider approval of resolution number 26-8358, authorizing the advisability and establishment of a special assessment improvement district for the extension of Virginia Drive.

Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor and Commissioners, Rex Ritter, Deputy of Public Works and City Engineer. This evening, I'll be presenting on establishing a special improvement district for the extension of Virginia Drive. On March 24th, 2025, the city commission authorized staff to prepare the engineering feasibility report and resolution of advisability for two benefit districts. One to finance internal public utility lines, water and sewer lines, and one for the extension of Virginia Drive. Staff presented the engineering feasibility report for the utilities package to the city commission on July 28th, 2025. The report today is for the extension of Virginia Drive. This public improvement will, the public improvements in the benefit district include approximately 900 lineal feet of pavement, storm sewer inlets, curb and gutter, and 484 feet of storm sewer. A more precise breakdown of the improvements can be found in the attached petition and engineering report. This prescribed by the Kansas statutes that the city commission consider a petition for street, drainage, sewer, and water improvements in established efficiency on the basis that any one of the following three conditions have been met. In this case, condition three, which is the petition is signed by the owners of record, whether resident or not, of more than half of the area liable to be assessed under the proposal has been met. And therefore meets the statutory requirement for sufficiency. The engineering feasibility report for these public improvements is attached for your review. The report describes the scope of the project, the improvement district, the method of assessment, cost assessment breakdowns for each improvement, and identifies and describes the properties in the benefit district. 50% of the cost of the improvements are proposed to be assessed to the benefit district and 50% to the city at large. It should be noted that the portion, the 50% that the city's, the total cost, the city will recover the 50% of the total cost of improvements when the parcel owners of the land south of Menards petition to be connected to the Virginia extension. At this point, they will pay the benefit fee. And this is discussed in the resolution under section one, letter B, where it describes the property described in exhibit A, Benefits from the improvements but is not included within the improvement district Such property shall be subject to the imposition of benefit fees in the manner set forth in the petition and pursuant to KSA 12-6 a 19 such benefit fee is subject to filing of a petition by the owners of property described in exhibit a Requesting construction of a new street or streets which will be connected to a previously petitioned arterial Street in the city Fiscal note, 50% of the 1,313,569.80 estimated total cost of the street improvements shall be assessed to the improvement district. Lots two and three in the improvement district shall be assessed on an equally per square foot basis. The assessments will range from 116,632.15 for lot three. The smaller lot and 540,152.75 cents for lot two, the larger lot. Property owners will have the opportunity to pay the assessment in full prior to the bond issue. If not, cost will be spread over 20 years in equal annual installments. Your action items are number one, approve resolution number 26-8358. Approve resolution with amendments. Postpone consideration of resolution to a specified date and provide staff direction regarding additional information or amendments, or to vote to deny resolution 26-8358. Staff's recommendation is to move that the city commission approve resolution number 26-8358. I'm here with staff to stand for questions.

Any questions? I have one. Where will the extension end?

The extension goes up all the way to the south to Dry Creek. It can be seen in the exhibit at the end. It runs all the way down past Lot 3.

And stops there?

Yeah.

The turns are?

There's a cul-de-sac there temporarily.

Commissioners, it is important to remember that the goal is to eventually connect that, but that would be dependent upon further development. But we did go through extensive, very extensive negotiations with them for both this north-south extension of Virginia and then when it will eventually connect into aeroplanes via the east-west connection. And there is a separate calculation for that, but that east-west extension into aeroplanes is not part of this consideration. This is just the extension of Virginia Drive to the south.

That would have been the- Extension of my thinking. Thanks for answering that.

And it is important, as he pointed out, that while the city is taking responsibility for 50% of this, whenever the parcel to the south of Menards develops and attempts to connect to Virginia, they will be responsible for that. But this will allow the extension to go forward for now. So the city will not be paying for it will in the short term, but it will recoup the cost for that.

Any other questions or comments? I have a question for counsel, and this is, I'm going to put on my title hat now. When I look at this resolution, it doesn't assess, it doesn't, refer to Exhibit A with a legal description, so it would not be posted in the Register of Deeds correctly. So if that property was to be sold, the new buyers would not have notice of this. So somehow we need to address the resolution so that Parcel A is addressed and will be posted to that parcel. It just says see exhibit A, but that won't get posted to that piece of property.

Yeah, even if we filed that ordinance, the registered deeds wouldn't index it to that proper thing, so it wouldn't do any good. So we'll have to follow that up, yes.

So do we need to, if we're going to approve this, approve it with that?

With that in your motion. In our motion. Subject to exhibit A, including the legal description.

Including the legal description. Okay.

And we would be able to do that, commissioners, because there is also a restriction against the sale of the property for, I believe, 10 years under the original DA. So we would want to clarify that any for the future. But there is a restriction on selling the property for 10 years for STD. As far as the transferring of ownership subject to a sale. Say that again, I didn't follow that.

I think that the master development agreement doesn't allow them, it says that they can't sell it. So the issue shouldn't happen because they shouldn't be able to sell it until this is paid off. But I think the prudent thing to do is to just, in your motion, include that language about Exhibit A.

Okay, thank you. Because I plan on retiring someday and somebody might not remember this. Any other comments or questions?

Where would that be placed?

I think you do it under your action would be number two, approve the resolution with the amendment to add legal description as to exhibit A. Does that sound good for everybody? Yeah, I would agree with that.

That would be a clear motion in my opinion.

Okay. Is there any comments from the public?

Tony Johnson, Celina. You'll have to forgive me. I'm trying to learn. Mr. Driscoll was gracious enough to talk me through some of these terms that we use on these developments. But if I'm understanding this right, the city's going to kick in half now. And then once it's fully developed, The developer will pay the other half, but the developer is going to turn around and build that into his rent. So then the citizens will pay it. So then the developer gets everything he wants and isn't on the hook for a dime in the end.

It's kind of like corporate taxes. So it's the developer across the street. So it's not this developer. It would be a new developer down the road. Right. Well, whoever it is, though.

He's going to build that into the price structure of whatever he... That's how every special assessment works.

Right. It's just the mechanism.

So in reality, the citizens are paying for it. The developer just... On paper, it looks like he is right up until he sells it.

Whoever the property owner is.

Yeah, but he's going to recoup that cost. That's what I said. We need housing so bad here we've got to offer incentives out to Wahoo. That means we really don't need housing probably. That's just my take. Because I'm telling you, he's going to build that into his cost structure. And residents and citizens will ultimately pay for it.

Mr. Johnson, I think it would be that way whether he did spatial assessments or not. If I'm paying for that street, I'm probably passing that on anyway.

Okay. Special assessments is just a financing tool that they use. I mean, I don't know how else you would pay for the streets unless you said... Let him pay for it. Okay, but he's the business owner, right? So whether he's... Special assessments just allows you to spread it over time and make it a... I mean, it's just a financing tool. So he could get a loan from a bank and spread it over time. It'd be the same thing. It'd be a higher rate. I'm wrong. They're going to always pass it on to whoever. I mean, that's how development happens.

Like I said, I'm ignorant to this stuff. I'm trying to learn. Okay, I see what you're saying.

Yeah, it's a financing tool. It's not a gift of any type.

Right, because he can seek private financing, and the same thing is going to happen.

It is a cheaper rate, generally speaking, so when it does get passed on, it's at a lower rate than what they could get if they went out in the market, which is why developers do it. Okay, okay.

I learned something. Thank you. Okay, thank you.

I'm Lucille Sanderson Salina. What's just west of where you're wanting to put Virginia Street in? It's Dry Creek. But Mother Nature sometimes has ideas in her head. I can't quote the year that we, Salina, was the same as marooned. You could not get in or get out of the city. What makes you think that Dry Creek is not going to flow back in that land? Are you going to build the dirt up so you can build the houses? I don't think, let's put it this way. I'm an old lady, yes, but I will not buy a house on Virginia Street. Because that's low in there, Dry Creek will flow, overflow. It's done it once, let's say it won't do it again. But if you want to build houses, build your houses. You've built houses where it's a flood zone. Why? Because you don't put basements under it. That should be enough to tell the people. And no, it's not Virginia that I'm talking about. I'm talking about the east-southeast side of Salina, southeast of Waterwell Road and east of Ohio. That's flood zone. No basements. Okay, I said my piece. But remember, Mother Nature rules. She's done a lot of it this year.

Thank you. Okay, anyone else? Okay, if not, I will bring it back to the Commission for Action.

Mayor, I move we approve resolution number 26-8358 with amendments to add legal description to... I can't remember. Exhibit A. Thank you. That's it?

That would be for legal description of parcel A, if I understood it correctly.

What did it say? Exhibit A, parcel A is what it said on the deal.

Exhibit A, parcel A.

Second. We have a motion and a second to approve resolution number 26-8358 with the amendment to add the legal description to exhibit A, parcel A, as stated. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? That item passes 5-0. Okay, that will bring us to item development business, item 6.1.

Item 6.1, consider approval of ordinance number 26-11286, designating the H.D. Lee Flower Mill sign as a historic sign.

Thank you, Mayor and Commissioners. Dustin Michelson, Planning Manager with the Community and Development Services. Before you today is a request to adopt ordinance number 26-11286, which would declare the HD Lee Flower Mills Company signs at 343 North Santa Fe Avenue to be historically significant under Salinas historic sign designation process. You can flip to the next slide. So application HD 26001 was filed by Travis Young requesting historic signs as designation for the HD Lee Flower Mills Company signs at 343 North Santa Fe. This property is owned I2 Light Industrial. Mr. Young is the applicant and the project coordinator, but he's not the property owner. The property owner is Bob Brown of B Square LLC, gave consent for the application and is party to the project's agreement with Salina 2020 that is also involved with that project. Next slide. So some background here. Henry D. Lee founded the H.G. Lee Milling Company in 1889 and the mill complex at 343 North Santa Fe Avenue was built in 1899 with major additions in 1906 and 1914. Lee has been identified in various case background or background materials and historical documents as being a major force in Salinas commercial growth. He founded the HD Lee Flower Mill, HD Lee Mercantile, Lee Hardware, and the Kansas Ice and Cold Storage Company. The sign, we're talking about today is a large industrial rooftop sign with an exposed metal framework supporting oversized individual metal letters. It was documented at this location since at least 1899 through 2021 and has long been recognized as a prominent feature of North downtown Salina skyline before it was removed. The sign was removed in August of 2021 for refurbishment and to add a modern illumination. So there was a Celina Post article at the time that documented this in an article and some photographs while it was being removed. So that sign is currently undergoing restoration and that is essentially complete at this time. And so they're looking to reinstall that sign up on the flour mill. Next slide. There's just two photos here that can show for some of the historical context, including the grain elevator complex. And this is also the location of the mural at the mill, which was completed in 2020. I don't have the year of that, but mural at the mill. which was the first major canvas project mural in Salina. The photo on the left is an 1899 photo, and I don't know the date of the one on the right, but those both show the previous location of that sign up on the upper head house of the mill. Next slide. So this is more modern photos here. These show the sign as it was before it was removed. On the left you have it in place. On the right was from that Salina Post article showing it being removed in 2021. And shows that there's three rows of lettering on that sign that were intact at that time. So getting to the proposed reinstallation, this differs from the sign's original configuration in a few ways. First, the restored signs would carry only two rows of text showing the HD Lee and then Flower Mills Company below that with individual red letters and marquee-style bulb illumination. The third row that previously said 2,500 barrels daily is not being incorporated into the renovated sign. These letters were heavily degraded at the time that it was removed, and they're currently in storage with the property owner. Second difference here is that rather than reinstalling the single sign structure as in the original configuration, which was on the upper head house, the proposal calls for two separate sign structures, one on the north lower head house and one on the south lower head house. This makes the sign readable from the north and the south along Santa Fe Avenue. And getting to the third one, this explains a little more. The sign faces are being reoriented, turned 90 degrees. The original sign faced east and west because it was meant to be visible from the railroad. So structure was running north-south with them visible from the east and west. They're trying to turn it 90 degrees and have it visible from the north and south. So that involves also, that leads to the splitting of the sign into two structures because previously you had the highest point on the structure. It could be on one or on the mill. The sign structure could be one structure and it was readable from both sides. When you turn it 90 degrees and you bring it down to the lower head houses, to have it visible from a distance on both sides, you need to split it and put it on one on each side. So that this proposal reorients both sign faces to face north and south towards Santa Fe Avenue for improved visibility from that corridor. And that was confirmed at our Heritage Commission hearing that we had on this item. So next slide. So this is a little bit more detail of the proposed sign location. On the left gives just a general diagram of that red line would be where the support structure would be and there's some yellow text kind of pointing to the north and to the south showing what side would have the lettering on it and would be visible. And those would be the lower head houses are the ones that are closest to Santa Fe right there. On the right is a drone photo showing the surface of the head houses. So in the foreground is the north head house and in the background is the south head house. So this is looking south. Next photo, or next slide. The Heritage Commission held a special meeting and public hearing on May 27th, 2026. The application was evaluated against the three criteria required for historic sign designation under Salina code section 42525C. These criteria are that the sign has been in continuous existence at the present location for not less than 25 years. That the sign possesses exemplary design, craftsmanship, materials, or illumination that significantly enhances the cultural, historical, or aesthetic quality of the community. And three, that the sign has not been significantly altered from its historic period, or if altered, is restorable to its historic function and appearance. So after receiving testimony from the applicant and public comment, the Heritage Commission found that all three criteria were satisfied and voted 4-0 to recommend that the City Commission declare the signs historically significant. That recommendation was made subject to two conditions. First, that the applicant submit a sign permit application with a stamped structural plans certified by a licensed engineer. prior to installation with a final inspection required as the signs are installed. And second, that the signs be installed and maintained consistent with the historic composition and lettering as described in the application materials on file as part of this application. Next slide. So the effect of the designation here, adoption of the ordinance would have several effects. Sign ordinance provisions would be waived, for one, except that those pertaining to safety, structural integrity, or maintenance, and the signs would be deemed to conform to the sign ordinance. The waiver is the primary purpose of the historic sign designation here, because the signs as proposed are large and they would likely exceed the applicable I2 district regulations that are based on the building frontage. of the structure, as well as the height limitations. So the designation does not affect the underlying I-2 zoning or any permitted uses or any other zoning related things for that property. The ordinance would also establish the significant exterior features of the signs to be protected. The two sign support structures and the individual metal letters comprising the HD Lee Flower Mills Company on each structure and the marquee style bulb illumination. Any proposed alteration or removal of these features would require a certificate of appropriateness to be approved by the Heritage Commission before work could commence. And once designated, removal of the signs would be subject to Heritage Commission review under the demolition and removal provisions of Article 9 of Chapter 42. Next slide. So today the Commission has three alternatives available. Alternative one is to concur with the Heritage Commission's recommendation and adopt Ordinance Number 26-11286, subject to the two conditions. Alternative two is to return the application to the Heritage Commission for reconsideration with a statement of the basis for doing so. Alternative three is to overturn the Heritage Commission's recommendation and deny the application. This would require four affirmative votes and the Commission would need to adopt alternative findings in support of denial. The Heritage Commission staff report, which is provided as an attachment to the blue sheet, includes a suggested finding and supported denial for the commission's reference, just so you know that that's there if you did want to look at alternative three. Next slide. Staff recommends alternative one, that the commission concur with the Heritage Commission's recommendation and adopt ordinance number 26-11286. And the recommended motion is provided here on the screen for you. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Okay, any questions or comments? Do you know an approximate time when they plan on installing this, out of curiosity?

I don't, but... I think that was asked in the Heritage Commission meeting, and I don't know even that Travis had an exact date on that.

In my conversations, they were trying to get it done sometime this summer, but I don't have an exact date.

Okay, any comments or questions from the public?

I'm all in favor of this. We need to keep all this stuff, put it under restoration, keep for memories for our young kids. But this start bringing up now, we're going to go start looking at other items, areas in the city, specifically the Cozy Inn. You guys are caught between a rock and a hard place. You prove this or if you don't prove it, people are going to be mad at you. So what comes next? You're going to have to do them all. You're sitting on the hot seat, and someone's going to light the fire.

OK. Any other comments? If not, I will bring it back to the commission fraction.

Mr. Mayor, I move the city commission concur with the recommendations of the Heritage Commission and adopt ordinance number 26-11286. declaring the H.D. Lee Flower Mills Company signs to be of historic significance based on the findings that all three criteria of Solana Code Section 42-525C have been satisfied and the subject to the two conditions stated in the findings and recommendations of the Heritage Commission.

Second. Second. We have a motion and a second to concur with the recommendation of the Heritage Commission and adopt ordinance number 26-11286, declaring the H.D. Lee Flower Mills Company sign to be of historic significance based upon findings that all three criteria of the Salina Code section 42-525C have been satisfied and subject to the two conditions stated in the findings and recommendations of the Heritage Commission. May we have a roll call, please?

Commissioner Davis?

Aye.

Commissioner Ivey?

Aye.

Commissioner Lankowitz?

Aye.

Commissioner Rem?

Aye.

Mayor Hoppeck?

Aye. That item passes 5-0. Thank you. Okay, that will bring us to other business. Is there an item a commissioner would like to bring before the group?

I have one concern from a citizen. I hadn't thought of it on my own, but it's a good concern. Do we anticipate the branches on the sidewalks to be cleared in time to make fireworks safe on July 4th?

Um, I do, I don't think that we will be able to get through all of those. Um, I think what we'll do is have, um, you know, the fire department always puts out a safety message before the 4th of July and maybe mentioned something about the amount of tender that's out on the, on the street. But there's, I don't think there's any chance we'll have it all cleaned up by then.

Or would there be, uh, recommendations restrictions or you know if there's a big pile of wood eight feet high on your sidewalk no fireworks within 50 feet i'm just making something up but fireworks are inherently dangerous and everyone needs to be very careful with them at all times and other than that the city doesn't have a recommendation on it okay yeah i i have a couple of things that i might take me up

Maybe a few minutes here, but one, probably most of us read about the accident on Centennial last week with the e-bike at like 4.30 a.m. or something like that. And I'm sure I'm not the only one that has noticed that there are times that we have seemingly the equivalent of a skateboard, but a motorized skateboard going down some of our main roads at perhaps 30 miles an hour or more. It just seems to me that we need to be working on some sort of ordinance to kind of keep that in check, whether it be age restrictions, helmets, where and where not, where and where they can't operate E-vehicles. I mean, I'm a fan with the grandkids, but that's in a very controlled environment at the home, not going down Crawford or Markley or Magnolia, et cetera. Jumping the gun here a little bit, because I know a lot of people in the community are going to talk about water. And I just, I think as a city, we need to take a look at And I'm going to throw out again a roundabout that we're spending millions on that the people right there are not in favor of it. And we have people that are getting water out of their taps that they're even having to pay for. And if I were a merchant, which I have been for quite a period of my life, and I was serving a product like that, I'd be giving them their money back. I know there's going to be a lot more discussion on that, so I'm going to move on. Last thing I wanted to mention, over, or let me say recently, Army Major Nicholas Dockery, age 41, a 2003 graduate of St. John's Military School here in Salina, is in line for the Congressional Medal of Honor for saving a fellow in 2012 in Afghanistan, a fellow soldier. He was wounded and received the Purple Heart. And when the medal becomes official by presidential decree, Doc Ray will become the first Medal of Honor recipient to graduate from St. John's Military School and the only living officer to be awarded the military's highest honor. And that's pretty cool that to be the only living person and they graduated from St. John's in 03. And that's all I have.

Thank you. Anybody else? I have several things I want to share. Two weeks ago, we had a catastrophic event shortly after we left the commission meeting. And there's been some things that have come up that I'd kind of like to share with the public. I know right off the bat, there were some concerns that the landfill wasn't opened up immediately for residential dumping. And so I did a little checking on that. We did have a plan out there, and it took them, what, 24 hours, I think, to get that implemented. And they did a really good job. They had to lay down some rock and stuff. We didn't want a lot of residential people getting out there and getting stuck and bottling up the thing. I thought they did a good job when I was out there dumping limbs that they actually had a separate entrance for residential residents. people to go around the weight building, the weight station, so they weren't holding up everybody else's. It was free to dump the limbs. They also had a separate spot out there for residential versus commercial. So I want to thank the landfill. I think what they did really worked out well and was used in a great way. asset to the community also there were some some comments made dealing with tree trimming and there were some some concern that the city did not have a plan and in place and that we didn't have tree trimmers and Talked to our city manager about that. And back in 2024, we did budget and added staff and funded the purchase of equipment under the CIP to purchase limb trimming equipment. Man, that's hard to say. We currently have five employees in the Parks Department, four Texans, a supervisor who focused on trees and trimming. They currently spend about 65% of their time trimming street trees and 35% in the park. So we are addressing that and want the public to know that we don't go back into the easements behind your houses and clean trees. That's not what we do. We do it in the right of ways and that's primarily where we do our tree trimming. Anything to add to that?

No, I think that's correct. There was a plan that was presented in 2023, and we applied for a grant in order to try and fund that. We did not receive the grant, so we just funded it as part of our normal budgetary process. So it was approved in 2023. I guess the plan was presented in 2022, and during the 2023 budget process, we planned that for 2024. So for about a year and a half now, we have had folks that are out trimming street trees. The intent of the street tree trimming program is really – to keep the trees off of the roadway so that it's mostly for our fire trucks and trash trucks, school buses, those types of vehicles that are tall so they don't get damaged as they go down streets. So they are out. There's a route and a schedule that they're going through. At the time, at one time, we did bid that project out to see if we could find a contractor to do it. It was in excess of $600,000, and that's when we felt like it was a good idea for us to bring that in-house and just have somebody that's constantly doing that work. So... They are out trimming trees all the time. There's no shortage of trees to be trimmed for sure, but it is something that we are doing on a regular basis.

And then there were some concerns about the city of Salina not having some overnight shelters and cooling stations. And again, had conversations with Mr. Wood about this. And we did immediately open up the field house for a cooling station during the day. A lot of you are aware that we do have a Sleen County Emergency Management Department, and so we were in direct contact with them. We did offer TPEC and the field house for overnight stays. They declined that. They have their own process of who they use, and they're the ones that have the resources to do that. So as a city, That's not what we actually do. That's where your taxpayer dollars that go to the county go, and they work towards the Sleen County Emergency Management. And so they had their plan, and we did stay in touch with them. I think we had the field house open, as far as I know, every day.

Yeah, we did, and we met with emergency management. I mean, the way that these things go down is, generally speaking, whenever there's a disaster, the first thing we do is sit down with emergency management. That's a pretty broad swath of staff from both the city and the county, and we kind of just sit in a room and go, okay, who's doing what? How are we going to do this? Sheltering has... always been a function of the county this isn't the first time they've done it it's always been something that they've done part of the concern early on was trying to find shelter where there was power so you know the first night they had a shelter open to Kansas Wesleyan second night they had and I couldn't tell you how many people utilized that second night They moved across the street to University Methodist Church there. And then they did have several other backup spaces that were available should that first space fill up. First space didn't fill up. It was available for families and their pets as well. All that information was shared on Facebook and through Emergency Management, Saline County's Facebook page. So I tried to get the word out that there were places available for people to go should they need to.

Yeah. One of the things that we may talk about is, you know, communicating that because, as you know, radio stations were off the air. There was, you know, a lot of people without electricity. So communicating where to go and stuff may be one of the things that we'll look at and talk about with the county. The other thing I wanted to talk a little bit about is Evergy. They reached out to me as the mayor of Salina on Tuesday evening to kind of give us an update of what they were doing. At that point, they had 625 workers in town. They anticipated they were going to need to replace up to 300 poles in the Salina region area. And so he tried to explain to me a little bit about why some people had electricity sooner than others. He says sometimes it may take step one and two to get somebody's electricity off, up and going. And then others, it may take that step one, two, and then there's eight other steps that go to get up. So he goes, a lot of times we just have small outages in the community. Well, I can tell you, I drove down to my office that night and got downtown at 11. And I kind of know what World War II must have been like when they blackened out everything because of bombings. The first light I saw from South High to downtown was the hospital. I mean, that's how bad it was. And you got the whole city. The gentleman called me and said, if you ever have any questions or concerns, reach out. So Thursday morning, we had started getting some concerns from citizens of why Oakdale Park was up and running and why some citizens didn't have electricity. So I reached out to the gentleman that's the regional representative and said, OK, explain to me how this happened, because I have a public that's asking. So he went on to explain to me that you have transmission lines that come into the community, then you have primary lines, and then you have laterals that go off of that. He made the comment that one of their primary lines went right by Oakdale Park. And so he said once they got that up, hooking up to Oakdale Park was easy. And so he said they knew that the River Festival was coming, that it was a significant event in the city of Salina. So they made the conscious decision. They left one crew there. They left one truck with two people. And I made the comment about, well, that doesn't sound bad out of 625 workers. And he made the comment, oh, we're way over 625 now. So they felt like it was in their judgment that it was something they wanted to do. I can vouch for the fact that I did not call Evergy and ask for that. I've talked to the city manager. He did not call and ask for that. So that was a decision that Evergy made. And I just want the public to know that and kind of how that came about. I do want to thank the volunteers I see on different social medias where we had groups at the cemetery. There are others in here that brought in and were able to do laundry for people. It's amazing what can happen when something like this happens to a community. So it's unfortunate we don't have anything like this again. I'm just grateful that we didn't have any serious injuries or any deaths from what happened. Real quick, I said we talk about it. You want to just touch base on how we apply to FEMA, how that all works, and then we'll go to citizens.

Sure. So, I mean, the way that it works with FEMA is that there's a disaster that's declared by the county. The county declares they do a verbal disaster declaration generally that as soon as they know that there's an issue, And then they'll come back and do kind of a more formal disaster declaration. That also has to go to the state. The state will do a disaster declaration. And then from that point, we are kind of just calculating how much money we're spending on this disaster. So that includes the city, the county, the volunteers. And this is something that we do all the time, so we track the number. They don't pay you for your regular time hours, but anything that's overtime, any equipment that we have rented, any of that sort of stuff would qualify. And we did rent quite a bit of equipment. We haven't talked about it much, but our water system, our wastewater treatment plant is kind of connected to the system in a couple of different ways, and it was not down for very long. But the water plant was down for about 12 hours. And then all the lift stations that we have across the community and our pumps to get us fresh water were also down. So that means we have to have crews going out. One of the main things, if you don't move the sewage from the lift station, from one lift station to another, then it will back up into people's basements. So we had crews out working 16-hour shifts from about the minute this storm started, running generators all over town to pump sewage. from one place to another, and we didn't have any backups or any issues with that. The water system, same thing. You have to make sure that we have fresh water coming into the system and that we're treating it, treating it in an appropriate amount. As soon as we knew that there was a storm coming, we saw the forecast, we filled all of the water towers and all of our basins and everything just in case there was some sort of a prolonged outage. It's a good thing we did that because we were without production for a little bit of time. It wasn't to a point where it was scary or we're going to have any real issues, but it could have been had we had the right fire or the right main break at just the right time. So those water crews were out doing a lot of good work. I want to talk about our program. streets and parks workers. Our first job is to get the streets cleared as quickly as possible. So we had street crews out at about 10 o'clock the night of the storm. So, you know, the storm was a pretty long and prolonged storm. It didn't just go for 10 minutes, but they were out in it trying to get trees moved off the street. And I think we had a pretty much any tree in the street that didn't have a power line in it was removed within 24 hours so we got we got the trees out of the streets fairly quickly and then started moving trucks in to kind of haul haul some of that stuff parks same difference they were out in the parks certainly you know trying to get trees up as quickly as possible and i'm thankful for the crews i think they did a great job we put in over 3 000 hours of overtime in the last couple of weeks and It's a lot of time, energy, and effort. So I'm appreciative of the work that they did. And we'll continue to move forward. I know this question was about FEMA. We'll continue to track everything for FEMA.

Those overtime hours.

All those overtime hours will go towards that calculation. And the $200 that we're going to pay. Yes, it will. The $200,000 would go towards that. So we'll keep tracking all of those things. FEMA is one of those things, you don't know whether you're going to get reimbursed or not, and you don't know when you're going to get reimbursed. So we will continue to work through that process. Generally speaking, sometimes it takes... Six, eight, nine, 12 months before you get any real answers or responses on reimbursement. But we've done this. This isn't anything new to the city. We have been tracking this sort of stuff and information for any time we've had a disaster or storm. From my perspective, you know, the biggest thing is getting the streets open so that our public safety guys, our police and fire can get to your house because, you know, heart attacks and medical issues don't stop when there's a storm. And, you know, as far as I know, there weren't any real injuries or anything caused because we weren't able to get there to get to somebody. And then obviously there's all kinds of when there's power lines and things down, we have a lot more fires than what we would typically have. So A lot of guys had to come in, work extra hours to make sure that we had full coverage for that. And, you know, I'm certainly appreciative of the work that those guys did. It's been a pretty stressful couple of weeks for them in particular. But, you know, I think we, all in all, we've come out of it on the backside in a pretty good position.

And real quick, I keep saying we'll get to Citizens Forum. Do you know where we are as far as... Evergy as far as then do we still have any residents or businesses still without power?

You know, I don't I don't know that I haven't looked at the the website recently I there are still Evergy trucks out and about I've seen them In the community so there could be some But it's it's a much smaller number for certain. I just was curious if you'd heard I hadn't so

Okay. With that, we will go get the Citizens Forum. This is an opportunity for citizens to come forward, and we ask that you please give us your name, and we ask that you keep your comments to three minutes.

Rosemary Mize, Salina, Kansas. Jacob, you were talking about the street crew going out and trimming up trees that are hanging over the roads. Mm-hmm. Do you charge, if the tree is on a citizen's property, do you charge them for trimming up those trees?

We do not.

So you don't?

Not if it's in the right-of-way, correct? But if it's in their yard and still... Yeah, if it's hanging over the street, we just take care of it. But you're saying if it's in their yard?

If it's in their yard but it's gotten big enough that it goes over into the streets, do you charge them?

We don't. No.

You don't.

Now, we're not going to go in and trim the whole thing up. We're going to take care of what's in the street. So we trim to 14 feet high. If there's something that's dead that's hanging over the street, we might take care of that. But we're not going to trim the backside of it. We're not taking care of anything that's not hanging over the right way.

I think about that because I keep my trees trimmed just so they don't go over into my neighbor's yard and ruin their garage, roof, or whatever.

Yeah, absolutely. We could charge. We could do it as a nuisance abatement.

I think if it's in their yard and it's... obstructing the street and that, might think about charging them a little bit of a fee to trim up their trees. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Talking about averages, I just checked their web map. There are two outages yet affecting five people. And I don't know where, but it's right close to Salina. So whether it's in Salina or real close, but there are two outages affecting five.

Okay. Thank you for the update.

She has pictures. They say pictures are worth a thousand words. And I have real samples here.

Could we get your name? Sherry Spratlett, Dover Drive. Thank you.

I want a solution to the ongoing problem that we've had on our block since 2025 or before that. We've been in contact with the Water Department since July 23, 2025. I have documented papers to prove it. I brought photographs, water samples, and copies of my water bills. This is really a serious issue on our block. These are not just from my house, these are from other people's. Would you drink this water? Would you bathe in it? Do you know if you cook and you make mashed potatoes, it takes three bottles of bottled water to cook those mashed potatoes unless you want to drink this. Takes two for a pot of coffee. Because we cannot rely on the water coming into our home, I've been buying, and so has other people, bottled water, which is costly when I'm already paying for water that I can't drink. Also, it's heavy to carry from the store to your car, from the car to your house. I pay my water bill. I pay my taxes. Every year, my taxes have increased. If I wanted to sell my home, I would have to disclose this water problem, which would not be a good selling point. What I'm asking the city to do is a permanent solution to this water problem, a refund or credit on my water bills until the water is fixed, assistance for the cost of the bottled water that I'm buying, And consider the damage that it has done to my appliances, clothing, because you can't wear white and you can't wash them, and any other household items. I've had to buy an automatic ice maker to sit on my counter to put bottled water in. You know, we've been patient. We've reported this problem over and over. The water man, Richard, has been to our house so many times, he probably knows us by name. Now we're just asking for action because we do deserve clean water and a timely resolution before the 2028 that Martha says we might get it if it's in budget. So if you'd like me, I have more samples in my bag and I have little shot glasses if you'd all like to sip some because this is what we have to drink and I'm going to tell you. If the animal shelter came to my house and saw this color water that I'm giving my animal, I'd be cited. What can you do for me?

Well, first of all, I apologize that you're going through this. We'll talk to the city manager. We need to get updated on where we are on this situation. I don't know if we have any other parts of the community that are doing the same thing. Martha wasn't able to be here today. We knew this was going to come before. She's out of town. We will get with her and if we can have contact information for you, we'll get some answers.

Well, they came out and put a water flushing system on.

And I know they've tried that at places. Does that help at all? No. It doesn't.

They flush the water with that every night from midnight till 1. So every morning, you had to run your water for about 30 minutes to get clean water.

Okay.

Or drinkable water. Okay. But, you know, I'm not going to pay for bottled water. And pay for city water.

Understood. So we will try to get you some answers and- I would like them to reimburse my water bill that I have since this has started.

Since I haven't used water except for to water my grass and it hasn't killed that yet. Understood.

Okay.

So can you give me an amount of time before they'll get back with me? I mean, Martha knows about this. She's known about it.

I need to find out where she's at in the process. I mean, in the nine years I've been on commission, I've dealt with other areas that I've been made aware of that they've you know, they have penciled in when they were going to get to it. Sometimes it's, you know, it takes some engineering and it takes, you know, bids, bid letting, and then finding somebody that will do the job. So I will have to see where we're at in that process.

Yeah. As soon as Martha gets back, we'll, we'll sit down and talk with her about, um, I mean, so generally speaking, uh, we have a water main replacement program that, that, uh, goes throughout the city. We spend between two and $4 million a year replacing water lines.

Yes, she told me that. She said we're not in the budget until at least 2028. I'm not going to stand for that.

Yeah, and we'll talk about that and see what we can do to try.

In the meantime, I'll set up a lemonade stand in front of my house. You all come by and donate for me to get water.

Do you have approximately how many homes are affected by this off the top of your head?

Everyone on our whole block, and most of them are here.

Okay. So we're talking, and it doesn't really matter, one home's too many, but I didn't know if we were talking 5, 10, 15, 20. 20. 20 homes, okay.

That we know of in that area. Just in that area. There are other areas all across the line who also need help.

Yeah, you're right. I mean, the water lines are old in a lot of places, and that's why we've spent time to try and replace them. And generally speaking, we try to take care of the worst one as quickly as we can, and we only have so much money to go around, and it takes time.

Would it be too much to ask, could one of us that are on this block sit in on your meeting with Martha?

Well, I think what we'll do is I'll meet with Martha, and then we'll try and schedule something maybe with you, and we can sit down and talk through all of it. So, yeah, I think it's certainly appropriate for us to get a meeting and talk about how we can get through this.

And it needs to be made a priority, obviously.

Yes, I mean, the Water Department should be bringing cases of water to each one of us' houses.

We'll talk. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, Commissioners. I'm the ground maintenance foreman at Gypsum Hill Cemetery. I would like to express our thanks and heartfelt gratitude for myself and my co-worker, Joe Szyminski, for the assistance we received in the cemetery for post-storm cleanup. After the storm hit, I knew the cemetery would be severely damaged. That was an understatement. Joe had to pick me up because I had lost power and I was unable to get my car out of the garage. He told me to be prepared. Nothing could prepare me for what I witnessed. It was like going through a maze and trying to get to the office. It was just us two that Tuesday morning. We started clearing the roads that needed to be cleared for the services that were scheduled for that week. That's one thing that never stops, no matter what weather event happens. After my initial evaluation of the devastation, I knew the cemetery did not have the proper equipment to tackle the job for the needed cleanup and removal. The extent of the damage would end in a very long process with the staff I have at the cemetery. This is on top of the services, the mowing, and assisting the people. With the city in shambles, help was going to be minimal. Even though pictures were posted online, you had to have eyes on site to see the totality of the destruction. I sat at home and said, God, what are we going to do? Well, he must have heard me, because as the citizens saw the damage, they got the word out, and here came help, more than I expected. It was an army. There's just enough thanks. There's not enough thanks and gratitude that myself and Joe can express to the Ark Church, Convoy of Hope, and the citizens that came to help, and the city of Salinas Street Department. Thanks to Commissioner Remp. for your coming out and pitching in. We truly appreciate it. We are just one of many stories, the community coming together and helping each other out. That's what the American spirit is all about. Thank you.

Thank you for sharing.

Thank you.

Hi, Vicki Rainbolt, Salina. I live on Millwood Drive. And I've got water problems. I've had water problems for four years. And it looked just like hers. And I had City Plumbing come in and put in a whole house water filter. And I use the water filters. It's supposed to last for nine months. It'll last for two months. And two weeks ago, the city came out and and drained the fire hydrant, and it was still running pretty dirty even when he shut it off. And I've talked to Martha, too, and I've talked to Mr. Sims. Nobody seems to do anything about it. I've been buying water, too. I didn't know it was that bad for two years. I knew it was bad when you took a shower. The last two years, I've been buying water, too.

Again, could you share your address?

And it's just not my house. There's a couple across the street. They've gone on ahead and done the same thing and put in filters and everything, and I don't think they're drinking their water yet either.

Could you give me your address so I could— 811 Millwood Drive. 811 Millwood. Okay, and do you know, you said you had one other neighbor. Do you know of others? Oh, yeah.

I've talked to all of them up and down the block. They're all using bottled water. And two weeks ago when they come out and drain the water, both curbs, both curbs where the water run down, you could just see where the water run down. It's just less residue on both sides.

Okay.

Okay. We will speak to Martha about this also. Thank you. Okay. Thank you for your time.

Tony Johnson, Celina. In a former life, I was a diesel mechanic. We used to call that breakdown maintenance, not preventative maintenance. I think we need to change our priorities, guys. That water, that's ridiculous. Holy cow, I've seen creeks cleaner than that. Honestly, I talked to a water department employee, and I won't name them. about a year ago and they thought I was calling about one subject when actually I was talking about another and they just went off and I just listened. And they said generally that they only receive funding for about half of the water line and main replacement projects they want annually. So I think we need to get our priorities. Jacob knows my big thing is basic government functions. We chase the shiny object in the distance. and we'll waste resources and throw everything we got to achieve that. But we'll step over the most basic functions that a government should provide its citizens. Ironically, trees is what got me interested in local politics here. It took me three years to get the city to trim trees on my street. And I mean, that was back during the COVID and we had a truck ordered, but it was two years out because of supply chain issues and everything. I mean, I just can't believe... It comes to that before we take action. This problem should have been remediated years ago. Obviously, it's failed completely. Having said that, Public Works, I'll give them a thumbs up. They were out on my block. They came through, grabbed... My neighbor's soft maple tree decided to de-limit itself in my roof and yard, so I graciously stacked it on his curb. They came and got it, but I think they did a great job. I've got to ask back to priorities. Why don't we have a chipper for the limbs? Why don't we have a tub grinder to take this stuff to, grind it up? Like I said, we sure seem to find money for pet projects and whatnot, but, I mean, that's just basics. Now we're getting ready to have this river downtown. You've got to think about what it takes to maintain that, or in cases of emergency. I mean, it's Pandora's box. I mean, we can't even get trees trimmed, you know. Anyway, all right. Thank you, gentlemen.

What is the source of this contamination of our groundwater? These companies that you are allowing to come here and put in these seed companies, they are putting chemicals on the seed, which goes into the groundwater, which you end up drinking. You're going to end up with an Erin Brockovich lawsuit. That's what you're going to end up with, and you're letting it happen. Like he said, priority issues. This has been around for years. Start with the air base. What are you doing? Nothing. You're going to have to get a hold of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. They don't care about this pollution. It's political. Get a hold of the EPA, federal. That's where you're going to have to go. You've got a seed company out here. They put these chemicals on this seed. You plant it in the ground, and it dissolves, and it goes into your groundwater. You've got to look at your underground aquifers. This all starts water from the Rocky Mountains coming this way. You let these seed companies come here and kill our kids. You're responsible for it. You, you. We ain't got you yet. You. You? Say something, ladies and gentlemen, at the election. Oh, don't worry about me. Oh, I'm going to get out of the road on that.

Ben Wendell Salina was going to wait until the last minute. I'm going to come up here now, and I'm going to ask for a little bit more time from the mayor because I want to address this water issue. You get three minutes like everyone else. Sorry, Ben. I'm a plumber of 45 years. All right, I started in 1976. In 1979, people were complaining, customers were complaining about the water. This is not something that's just come up, guys. This has happened forever. All right, moving on. At the last couple of meetings, Mr. Mayor, you had to recuse yourself for the contract being awarded to a company that had partial ownership and that is a business associate. So let's go back a few years to the tennis complex project. You never recused yourself during the multi-meeting process for the city partnership project. This project was wanted by Salinas Tennis Alliance with the city's help. Head of STA at the time was involved with Bennington State Bank. here in Salina. The city has dealings with this bank as well as others. With Bennington State Bank being in home loans, the final closing costs and title insurance has to be done with one of two title companies here in town. My personal experience with this process happened in December of 2023. My banker with Sunflower Bank scheduled our closing with land title without my knowledge. After everything was finished, I went back to my banker to express my frustration with using the mayor's business. And I was standing at his desk, I noticed a large monthly desktop planner on his desk with land title as the advertisement. at the top of it. So in my opinion, that is a business partnership with the bank lender and probably many other banks in town, possibly including Bennington State Bank. Getting back to the STA head, It is a known fact that the STA's head wife is a prominent realtor in this town. And I know that you have business association with a lot, if not all, of the realtors in this community. I have personally seen you at lunch at Blue Sky downtown with the realtor team at Piercy Homes. So with all the possible business associates starting with Kaw Valley Engineering roundabout doing the city platting, developers with their hands out for city dollars, certain builders in the community, realtors that sell the properties, and land title tying the bow on the whole process, how is it that you can be a commissioner with all of the conflict of interest in the city dollars being approved for development projects. There, I got it in my three minutes.

I don't, I'm not going to, we can talk, but there's a whole difference of what you're getting at and being a conflict of interest. So anyway, yeah, there it is.

No, there isn't.

Circle jerk.

We're talking about wasting money. Michelle Timpson, Solomon now. I'm going to talk about wasting money. The two employees that are on administrative leave, Andrea Murphy and Monique Hawley, we're paying them, we're paying their attorney's fees, and Jacob Wood called them good people. On June 1st, they were... They went in for their first court appearance. Andrea Murphy decided to, her and her great husband, decided to wait for us outside of the courthouse at the city building on June 1st after she was told she was going to go to jury trial. She stood waiting for us outside of the building on June 1st and there was another woman standing with them. She waited for us on the east side of the building and when we left the city building, me, her her her her all these women three of us are witnesses for the jury trial she waited for us her and her husband and another woman premeditated waited for us to leave and when we left she and her husband and this other woman decided to write down our tag numbers, take pictures of our cars, take pictures of our tags, stood behind our cars, some of these other people, and when Ben Winholz questioned them and said, hey, I'm going to drive real slow so you can get a good picture of my tag, Andrea Murphy, someone you named that said is a good people, great employee, said to him, we're not worried about you. What does that tell you about your employee, who you're now paying for her administrative leave and her attorney's fees, who she's going to trial? They took pictures of witnesses' tags, wrote down my tag number, took pictures of Sue's tags and Kim Hill's tags. Do you know what that is? Witness intimidation. Her and her husband. He's on Mounted Patrol, which is the sheriff's. I called the police department. I also called Saline County Attorney. That's your good people, that's your good employee. She opened her mouth once again. She has a problem. And this is what got her where she is in the first place. And you guys are paying her wasted money. Just think about that.

$100,000 to these two employees right off the top. Good job.

They're her attorneys. Darren Jones, 803 Manor Road. I live north of Vicki and Surrey. They had a water problem. I'm going to go get some water.

That's hard to follow. Good afternoon, Mayor, Commissioners. I'm Lori Hall from Salina. I'm here today to ask for greater transparency and accountability regarding wildlife handling by the Salina Animal Services. On June 18, 2026, I addressed the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks at their monthly meeting in Lindsborg, Kansas. In attendance at this meeting were Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks commissioners, Secretary Christopher Kennedy, agency legal counsel, administrative staff, game wardens, biologists, members of the Sierra Club, sportsmen and women, and citizen Norm. During my time at the microphone, I explained that the Salina Animal Services remained under public scrutiny due to criminal charges filed against two supervisors. What I did not share with the group was that our city government officials and commissioners were supporting the two supervisors by giving them paid administrative leave and paying for their legal fees. The information I shared with KDWP included documented intake records of 79 mammals, which included the 45 bats that were euthanized for rabies, 13 of which were never recorded into their computer tracking system, as well as numerous cases involving protected migratory birds and the rehabilitation of wildlife without permits. While KDWP officials were professional and supportive, they advised that many of the issues that I raised could not be discussed publicly because the matter remains under investigation. These cases raise questions about wildlife handling procedures, rehabilitation practices, record keeping accuracy, and whether wildlife was transported to rehabilitation facilities as required by law. As SAS has reportedly discontinued wildlife activities, accountability remains necessary. Both the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks as well as the citizens of Salina deserve a full understanding of what occurred and whether state and federal wildlife regulations were followed. Only through a thorough review of the facts can public confidence be restored and future violations be prevented. Thank you.

Sue Nichols, Salina. Tonight I want to talk to you about a dog named Bella and records that simply don't add up. I provided copies of these records for each of you to review so you can see it for yourself. Excuse me. Bella belonged to Andrea Murphy, the former superintendent of Salina Animal Services. On December 3rd, 2025, Andrea adopted a dog named Rue from the McPherson Animal Shelter. Subsequent DNA testing reportedly showed Rue to be more than 80% pit bull. On December 28th, Bella was severely injured in a fight with Rue. Both dogs belonged to Andrea. When a dog sitter attempted to pick up the injured Bella and take her inside, Bella bit him. To me, that speaks about the amount of pain and trauma this dog was experiencing. Two animal control officers responded and transported Bella to Town & Country Veterinary Clinic. A person had been bitten. A dog had suffered serious injuries. Veterinary treatment was provided. The next day, Bella was surrendered to the Salina Animal Services and euthanized. Yet when I requested the records, I was told that there are no body camera recordings, no officer narratives, no investigative reports, no witness statements, no field notes, no emails, no text messages, and no additional communication regarding Bella. How is that possible? According to the surrender intake form, Bella was eustonized on December 29, 2025. The form states that five cc's of Fatal Plus from bottle F009 was used and lists Monique Holley and Bridget Price as the individuals who performed the euthanasia. Bella's head was later submitted to Kansas State University for rabies testing and found to be negative. That raises another question. Who paid for the animal control response, veterinary treatment, euthanasia, and rabies testing? If this incident involved the superintendent's personal dogs, the taxpayers of Salina deserve to know whether public resources were used and whether those costs were reimbursed. But then something strange happens. Bella is absent from every record that should document her euthanasia. The euthanasia history report, the controlled substance report, the bottle log used to track fatal plus, and even the shelter's own outcome summary report. The only place that Bella's euthanasia appears is on a surrender intake form. That's it. how does a dog get euthanized with a controlled substance in a city-owned shelter and leave no trace in the records designed to track the euthanasia and if bella's 5 cc's of fatal plus isn't accounted for where is it as i reviewed these records i found another troubling entry on january 29th dr juby used 25 cc's of fatal plus to euthanize an 86 pound dog at the very end of that bottle What makes that noteworthy is that Dr. Juby's own euthanasia protocol calls for approximately 1 cc of Fatal Plus for every 10 pounds of body weight. An 86-pound dog would typically require far less than 25 ccs. So I have to ask, is this how discrepancies in controlled substance records get accounted for? And the last thing I'd like to say is when Bella's documented, five cc's of fatal plus cannot be found in the bottle log, the euthanasia controlled substance report, the euthanasia history report, or even the shelter's own outcome summary report. Then we see 25 cc's administered to an 86 pound dog.

Sue, time please.

Yeah, you've heard enough, haven't you?

I treat everybody equally, thank you.

Well, you know, you hear this about this water issue and it makes it sound like the comment that you made, Mr. Wood, that you weren't aware of it was so bad. Is that right? That the water issue wasn't that bad when somebody called your office?

Well, anyway- I can address that. Okay, wait, no, this is my- Stop her time, okay, can you stop her time, please? Because I saw that so I went into the city manager's office and the phone was answered by the administrative secretary and she may have made that comment that she wasn't aware of it. It was not the city manager that they talked to. He couldn't respond to me? Well, I'm responding because I looked into it. I heard about this. And so I looked into it, and it was not the city managers that responded to that. It was the administrative assistant who would not, for any reason, need to have that information or have it, okay? Thank you. Okay, I just wanted to get that straight. Okay, okay, that's fine. The city manager did not say that. Okay, well, all right.

Thank you. What I'm going to say then is that I've been coming to these meetings since 2023 to tell you guys that something needed to be done at the animal shelter, and you all know that for the most part. And here we are again. And you say you listen to us. Why are we where we're at now if you listen to us? I don't understand that. This is 2026. And I've been coming since 2023. All the volunteers left in 2024. That should have been something. We met with Jacob Wood and Jeff Hammond right over there in the fall of 2025 and told you guys that there was so many red flags, but you didn't listen. You thought it was just a joke. Now look where we're at. Look at what you're costing the taxpayers. I'd say you're a failure big time. And so are you, Hammond. You're a big failure too. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. We wouldn't be here if you had listened to us to begin with. We tried. We tried to tell you. And there's been numerous people that said that they'd come in and help clean the animal shelter too. And you know what? You denied that. You denied that. Why? There's just something here is not being... You know, this t-shirt that says Sheltergate, and I know you guys are all pretty much old enough to remember Watergate, right? Nixon, Watergate, the lies and the cover-ups. That's where Sheltergate comes from. There's too damn many lies and too damn many cover-ups in this town. And the one of them's at the animal shelter, and Jacob Wood, you know it. You know it for a fact. I don't know what you guys are hiding with them gals, but there's something going on. There's something going on and it has been, and you know it. Think about that. Do you remember when we was there at the meeting? You act like everything's cool. Well, yeah, they're good employees. Yeah, look at your good employees now. And I'm not saying that all the city employees, I mean, they work their butts off out there. Some of them do. But some of them need to be held accountable for what they're doing. And then there's some of them, obviously, from the tapes that we've seen recently, don't do nothing at the animal shelter, and you've got another ad hiring more people. What the hell's going on with you guys? And all they do is sit around. Sit around. Watch them tapes. Watch them tapes. See what our tax dollars are going for. You know? I mean, I would like to have respect for you guys, but, man, it's hard to. It's hard to when you see behind the scenes what's going down, and you guys just act like you don't care. I don't get it. I just don't get it. That shelter was an outstanding facility, and it could be again if you just give it a try, and not with this group that you got in there.

Thank you.

Think about it.

Annette Cox lived here in Salina. I'll follow her up because I'm the one that bought the tapes. And looking at them, I tried to go through some of them. Didn't have enough time, but on the 4th, I had that a person came, one of the dog walkers came in and she worked From what I watched, it was from 7.13 when she came in, and then I stopped watching at 8.08. And through that amount of time that she worked, which was 74 minutes that I watched, she was in the office sitting in a chair, playing with her phone, and talking with the other employees for 37 minutes of that. Instead of outside socializing with the dogs or doing anything else, she was in the office playing around. And for 17 minutes of that, of her being there, Jeff was right there sitting in the bench, right there, letting three, sometimes four employees just gab away right there. The only person I see working there is the cat room cleaner. She is there on time, 6 o'clock. One morning, she was there a little bit early, and I see her on time. Two officers come in, I think they're supposed to be there at 8 o'clock. They'll eat breakfast, they'll sit there. And here, what was it, $65,000 you guys are paying for overtime? And I asked for records of overtime, and I got told that they have no records of when they're being called out, when they're going responding to a call, and when they're ending a call. Because I was asking for records on that. I asked for records about the bite with Bella. I was asking for records on her too, and records were never given to me on that one either. But just look at some videos. I mean, I can't believe that he was right there. She stayed in the office even after he left. And I mean it's not, I'm looking at the kennel cleaner now, I'm watching hers. And she's showing up, eating breakfast, and I'm sure office time.

Thank you.

Christy Dixon, Salina, Kansas. Earlier, you guys, in the meeting prior to this, you talked about employees. And somebody brought up the fact that, well, long story short, giving a merit increase Based off of your yearly evaluation, it's kind of stupid. You need to address the issues at the time they're happening or shortly after. And then at the end of the year when you do your evaluation, you evaluate those and see how things were cleared up. My phone cut off because I was coming in here at that time. But I agree. You need to evaluate the issues and not judge them at the end of the year because if I did something wrong at the beginning of the year and corrected my behavior, it necessarily shouldn't fall into my yearly evaluation. But anyways, another thing, your employees are dumb as dog shit if they don't think they're not being recorded. Tell them. Talk to them. Talk to them. Hey, y'all are being recorded and the public is watching. Just like Andrea and her husband following us out took me the next morning to get the video of them following us out to our car. And by the way, since I know you're in charge of the police department or such as, when am I going to get interviewed for that? Just wondering. Still like to give my opinion and what happened that day to somebody before somebody appears on my property and they end up with a slug in them. Because if that's what's happening, if she comes to my house. Tonight... I want to talk about what it means to be a representative of the people. A city commissioner isn't elected to represent their own interests. They're elected to listen to the citizens who put them in office and to make decisions that reflect the will of the city. Over the last several months, one commissioner has consistently demonstrated the principle through his actions. That would be Mr. Doug Ramp. When citizens voiced concerns about the future of the animal shelter, Doug listened. When a poll showed that 86% of respondents favored the prioritization of the shelter, making it a private entity, Doug didn't dismiss those concerns. He went to Prairie Paws in Manhattan and checked it out for himself. He advocated for the animals and in the best interest of the citizens he represents. Thank you. When citizens raised concerns about flaw cameras, Doug listened. Whether he personally agreed or not, doesn't matter at this point, he listened to the voices, he asked questions, he got answers to those questions that weren't being answered through the questions of the people presenting it. When Gypsum Hill Cemetery suffered major storm damage, like I spoke on earlier, and sat closed for a week, Doug didn't talk about the problem. He showed up. He worked along volunteers who were trying to help restore one of Salinas most important historic places. Doug also publicly supported a calling of a special commissioners meeting to address the cemetery and discuss solutions. Unfortunately, the sense of urgency did not appear to be shared by our city manager. Despite the cemetery remaining closed and the public repeatedly expressing concern. About ten more seconds, please. You didn't start my clock, that's great. Concern, time and again, Doug Rimp has demonstrated something that seems to be missing from our local government, a willingness to listen. Let me slow down, because I still have three minutes.

Did we start the clock? I don't know, I just saw it. No, we didn't.

Citizens don't expect commissioners to agree.

Did you start it for three minutes?

No. I haven't been talking three minutes quite yet.

Well, I'm sorry. Nope, I haven't.

You didn't shut me down. I just did now. Commissioners do agree with them on every issue, but they do expect commissioners to hear them.

Can we please have this lady removed?

There's my clock starting. It hadn't started.

It had been three. Sorry, Chrissy. Thank you.

I will definitely leave with you.

Thank you.

Well, I am 630. I didn't. Love y'all.

Terry White. Terry White. I just have one question. If there's two employees at the animal shelter that are on leave of absence and paid vacation and were paying for their attorney's fees, why is one of them working for Kenwood Cove, being the manager there? And then my granddaughter's gone there, and she said, yeah, there's stuff broken like some... some of the sprinklers or whatever, fountains or whatever. But the other thing is, too, is that I've heard multiple people say they don't want to go because it's not family-oriented anymore. People just drop their kids off there, and there's younger kids managing, and people are vulgar. So I'm just kind of questioning why we're paying for the attorney fees if they're getting paid vacation or paid leave and one of them's working.

She's not at Kenwood Cove.

She's the manager of Kenwood Cove.

But she's not there currently. She's on administrative leave. Yeah, she's on administrative leave, so she's not working there. She's not at Kenwood Cove.

I think my granddaughter has.

Nobody's running Kenwood Cove.

Yeah, it's just a mess.

Please.

Yeah. Okay. But it's just like nobody wants to go, the younger kids that are younger with their parents, their parents don't want to take them because the languages are so vulgar. You know, they say it's not a family-oriented place to go. And I've heard that a lot of people have asked for money back because they don't want to go in. And we spent tons of money on that. I don't understand why Santa can't keep the good things going, but we can keep the bad things going. I'm not quite sure.

Thank you. Okay, is there anyone else?

Hi, Jessie White, Salina. I'm going to come back here and play devil's advocate again. When, as a business owner, when my staff would attack me, I would shut down. And I think for these guys, man, when everybody's coming at them and just, just check that all the time, you don't want to hear it. And, and there's things about this that we don't know. Like if they didn't pay them and I'm, and I don't know, cause I'm not a lawyer. If they didn't pay them, then what are the chances that these two women are going to come back and file a civil suit and now all of a sudden the city is getting sued and it's costing millions instead of $100,000. There's things that people don't know about that are going on.

Please let her talk.

And if there is something that can be done with the shelter and there is a group of people who are obviously very, very, very passionate about it as they should be, why are we not getting them together to formulate a plan on how to constructively move forward instead of a bitch fest? I'm sorry, excuse my language, I don't mean to be out of line. We have so many problems in Salina and it's been this way for so many years. We have so many people who are willing to step up to the plate. We need community togetherness instead of all of this division. Kenwood Cove won't be a safe place to go as long as we have troubled teens running all around because there's not crap to do in this town for these teenagers. There are so many things that we could address as a community and Doug, thank you for everything you do. All of you, thank you for everything you do because you each make a contribution at some level, in some capacity. Everybody has strengths and everybody has weaknesses. And my point is, as a community, we are at the heart of this nation and we all know that the United States is going through a shit show right now. I'm so sorry, my language. I have no filter. But we are the heart of this nation and we have the potential to make Salina, Kansas The example for the whole entire United States on what it's like to come together. We proved in the emergencies that we can come together. Why do we need to have an emergency for people to come together and pull together? Why don't we do that 24-7? You want to talk about preventative maintenance? There you go. Bring together people who want to make changes and bring their strengths together and make a whole community instead of little parts, housing is a problem, workforce is a problem, this is a problem. But what people are stopping to realize is that every single one of those things is interconnected. And when you improve the education system, you improve the job force. When you improve veterans and youth relationships, then you have teens and kids without parents that have a positive role model. You have veterans who are able to still feel like they're making a contribution to society. Why are we not focusing more on that instead of focusing on all of the problems? Because the problems are going to be here, and the only way we fix them is to move forward, not sit here stuck in them all the time.

Thank you.

Thank you. Sorry. And thank you guys for sticking up for those animals because they deserve that. Thank you.

Anyone else? Thank you for acknowledging that.

You're welcome. All of you.

I'm Linda Close. I'm going to try to talk. I live in Dover Drive. And I have contacted the city for several years about the water. Terrible, terrible. And I'm not going to go into it because you have paperwork to look at. You have the information. But my situation is... I have talked and talked to Richard. He has tried his best. He's doing what he can. But I had no idea we needed to go higher up. I thought he would go higher up in the chain and notify about this situation. It's terrible. There are several of us that have dealt with cancer, which one of the sheets that were printed off has proved that's an option. Anyway, I appreciate all you do, but we need help before 28. And I'm sorry, I can't talk. What street do you live on? On Dover Drive. And we have contacted and contacted them.

And she also has a reverse osmosis.

I have a reverse osmosis. And I don't even buy water. I use it, I thought. I was told by Richard it doesn't do any good, but I'm not going to buy that heavy water and expense. I can't do it.

Sorry, thank you. Is there anyone else? Okay, looks like we have, go ahead, yeah.

I'm not sure who we haven't thrown under the bus today, but as far as Kenwood Cove, been out there recently, took my grandkids there and You have teenage kids, you have younger kids, and they're active. If any were out of control, it's probably because their parents weren't there or they weren't given home training. We're not going to be able to control every unruly young person that you ever come across in life. If you want to make a difference, seek out their parents in your neighborhood and work at the source. This is like asking teachers to correct every home problem that gets manifest in a classroom. It's good to be concerned, but you've got to punch your energy and your anger in the right place. I found the staff to be helpful. We can use some water on the hot concrete when the sun's up, but other than that, I was not the least bit concerned about... about my grandkids being out there. In fact, some older kids, they were actually helping them in their play areas. And you're going to hear rumors of bad things. Everyone likes to repeat the sensational stuff, the Megs headlines, that gets other people listening. But 98% of the kids out there just out there having fun, probably 99%. And where in your life have you been where there wasn't an unruly kid? Well, I've lived here all my life. All I'm saying is try to look at the big picture. We cannot fix all of society's ills.

I lived here all my life. When I was younger and went to the pool, it was the old pool. And not once did my parents ever have a concern about any of us going. But then the people that were management was just management. They were older kids.

I've been going to pools for over 65 years. There are always bad kids at a pool. It's not busy like it used to be.

It's not busy like it used to be.

Please, can we let? Commissioner, there's an old saying. The older I get, the better I was. And I think we forget a lot about our youth and what all of us used to do. We just didn't have social media and everything else to socialize it then. And our parents' friends were given parental privilege to handle things when it happened. We've kind of lost that over the years. You know, this city is not going to hell in a handbasket. We've got a lot of stuff here that's working right. And when we start focusing on building up the thing, reinforcing the things that are working right, you crowd out the time for things to go wrong or for people to make wrong decisions. You all have a lot of energy. I mean, go out in the neighborhoods, help people learn about taking care of their animals so we won't have as many stray cats and dogs on the street. You know, there's things we can do officially through the animal shelter, and there's a lot of stuff that can be done one-on-one, neighbor to neighbor. But it's grassroots effort that will eventually yield some good results. And, you know, we're listening to you. The danger... is when we start paying more attention to the messenger than to your message. Now, we take notes, and a lot of you brought very good messages up here, and they're not going past us. You know, there's a court case. You're not going to get any of us to say anything out loud about something that's already in the courthouse. We're just not going to do it. You know, in this country, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. They're entitled to their day in court. We're not going to do anything officially up here that's going to interfere with that or influence. But we're not going to do it. So, you know, you mention these things, but if you're trying to get a response from it, it's not coming.

Because, you know, just a second, Rose, we're talking about teenagers being disrespectful. You want to know why? It's because there's individuals like you that are an example. And that's a poor example. We have tried to treat. Stop.

We're trying to treat.

We are trying to run a professional meeting. We have respected you, and you continue to sit over here and talk over Commissioner Davis. Do not throw stones when you live in a glass house. I don't live in a glass house. I don't need to worry about stones. Okay, thank you. Commissioner Davis, sorry, continue.

I need rebuttal. Well, the purpose of- Citizens Forum is not for us to get into a two-way conversation. It's for you to have a chance to bring your thoughts up. I get a lot of good ideas from people who come to the podium. We're available after the meeting if you want to talk with us. Mayor, I'm done. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. Okay, we have a request for executive session. How long will we need?

15 minutes. Okay.

Do we need a break before that? Yes. Okay. So let's get a five-minute break with a 15-minute meeting. Okay.

I move the city commission recess into executive session for 15 minutes to discuss the potential acquisition of specific real estate, the identification of which would be contrary to the public interest. Based upon the need for the preliminary discussion of the acquisition of real property pursuant to KSA 75-4319B6. This will start after a five minute break, so the open meeting will resume in this room at 6.45 PM.

We have a second? I have a motion and a second to go into executive session pertaining to the acquisition of real estate for 15 minutes to discuss the potential acquisition of specific real estate identified of which would be contrary to public interest based upon the need for preliminary discussion of the acquisition of real estate pertaining to KSA 754319B6. The open meeting will resume in this room at 645.

In attendance at the executive session will be Ron Marsh, Public Works Director, Sean Hennessey, Deputy City Manager, City Attorney Patrick Hoffman, and Tilden Crabill, Landfill Superintendent. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye.

Bye. you Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you Bye. Thank you.

Okay, we're back in session and there's no action to be taken. I would accept a motion to adjourn. Salute. Move to adjourn. Second. All those in favor?

Aye. Aye.

Opposed? We are adjourned.