Finance & Debt Oversight Committee - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon. The, regular meeting of the, Finance and Debt and Budget Oversight committee will come to order, and the clerk will call the

roll. Sorantu?

Here.

Driscoll?

Here.

Gaddis? Here. Hartman? Hobbs? Martinez? Three present?

Okay. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Director. We'll start off the meeting with the financial report.

Great. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chairman Sarantu, Vice Chairman Driscoll, members of the committee. I'm happy to be here today presenting our August finance reports. I'm joined at the table by our Commissioner of Taxation, John Zavisha our Accounts Commissioner, Tom Buckley and Wage and Hour Compliance Commissioner, Dan Mori, who at the end will give an update on what's going on in Wage and Hour Compliance. We also have our interim purchasing commissioner Natalie Bronagh in the audience today. If it's okay with the chair we'll go ahead and turn it over to commissioner Zavisha for income tax update.

Good afternoon. I'll be starting on Page two of the report for City of Toledo income tax collections. For the month of August, our withholding category was up $1,900,000 or 13.6% and you can sort of tell that that obviously is a huge jump for where it's been over the last few months. In looking into this more, we realized that three companies in our top 15 made their September payment at the August. So you sort of think about it Labor Day was Monday September 1.

So I think a couple of these companies just made the payment before the holiday weekend on that front. Those three companies alone represent $1,000,000 of that $1,900,000 So about 54% are just those three. So we noticed that trending through the rest of the top 75 heading to other companies we've seen this familiar with other ones. So although this isn't one of those months where it's a five Friday versus four Friday where we sometimes will be comparing two months together, I'll feel more comfortable once we get the September numbers and looking at August and September together to see if the bump up in growth that was happening in July continues to flow through in August and September. Withholding, so currently withholding at the August is up $1,870,000 or 1.7.

In the business category, an interesting thing to point out is normally so August is a quiet month in the sense that there are no estimate payments due. You might have some fiscal returns that are due, but you can even see looking back to last year or whatever where it's a quieter month of money coming in. We collected $1,649,000 but when big companies make their payments that can really skew the numbers a little bit there. So for instance this month we have it that 40 just shy of 42% of the number is actually one company making a payment. And last year they had made that payment in June.

But it just sort of shows that that number can go up or down just based on when they make their payments. Overall though still very good month up $450,000 For the year we're up 6,100,000.0 but again a reminder that we do again have a major player where last year the payments were being made thirteenth period recording. This year they're being recorded earlier in the year. So we're showing growth in the business category but once we get to the thirteenth period it's not going to repeat that number from last year. Business category up $6,100,000 or 39.5%.

Individual category continues to show good strong growth in that. It was up $50,000 for the month or 8%. We're starting to get into the Ohio Attorney General information that I'll go over a little bit once I get to the next page. So we're resending some bills out and stuff with some additional wording on it, which does seem like it has generated a little more income coming in, in this individual category. So overall individual for the year up just shy of $500,000 Overall through August we are up $8,500,000 or 6.2%, but again just being cautious on especially that business category.

I'm going on to Page three. So we have the projected number currently at 233,600,000.0 That's just shy of 1% up of what from the budget number would have been. So it's about $2,000,000 to the good on that one. So again, income tax revenue is looking really good at this point. From a refund point of view, we've issued $3,100,000 that is up slightly from last year.

Last year we were at 2,800,000.0 We had set aside $6,000,000 for refunds. So this is well within that range based at last year we were at about $5.7 $5,800,000 So that's looking good on that. I also would like to talk about the IRS unit on that sheet there. They're also being affected by this Ohio Attorney General stuff. So they're sort of changing of what they're doing because obviously this would be a new task for them.

So you can sort of see for the last couple of months assessments have been down a little bit. We were down a little in collections. We're still up 120,000 for the year coming off the record setting year of 2024. But they're just sort of changing their mechanism within the unit to go into the Ohio Attorney General. So just a reminder for the Ohio Attorney General overall, this is a program the city is going to start working with the state of Ohio on.

It should come online in about the fourth quarter. So what ends up happening is we have to change some wording in some of our letters. We actually made the changes on April 1, but obviously if we had sent people bills prior to that, we actually have to reissue the bill with the additional information to let them know that if they did go to the Ohio Attorney General, they could be part of the federal or state offset program. So what ends up happening is for a case to go to the Ohio attorney general, they would have had to have gotten their four notices after their final notice. We have to wait at least sixty days from that date before we could end up submitting it to them.

Once we submit it to them, they have their in house staff, they do skip tracing, they'll make phone calls, they'll send letters, a person's federal or state refund could come into play on this, lottery winnings will also trigger this within the state. Obviously, the attorney general's office still has the rights to do liens or garnishments as well. In the end, what ends up happening is there's no cost to the city for this. So for instance, if a case went for $500 the state of Ohio does add a 10 percent fee on that so they would collect from the taxpayer $550 they get their $50 the city would still be made whole at the $500 And this just sort of frees up resources that would have otherwise had been devoted to collections. So this is a win win for us on this one.

Councilor Briscoe, Vice Chair. Go ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Do we not know the 2024 actual refund number? Is that a matter of the waiting for the audit?

For through August or for the year?

For the year. The 2024 actuals for refund.

For full calendar year? Yes. I do not

You have a projected number here.

I would say last year was like around 5,700,000.0 or $5,800,000 for the year.

So it was a little higher than that projected number. And I guess I missed this before, but for the thirteenth period, our projected revenue, why is it so much lower than the actuals from 2023 and 2024? Because of the Exactly.

What we were talking about with the business stuff. So we have especially one of our major players last year that money would have been recorded during that thirteenth period of time. This year it's being recorded as the year is going on. That's why we again look when you're doing the month to month comparison and stuff here, it looks like we're so much higher than we were, but we know it in the thirteenth period, we're not going to be able to match that number from last year because those company payments are being recorded as we're

going this year. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, mister chair.

Thank you, mister vice chair. Commissioner, as far as the attorney general's program that you're saying this probably will go into effect in the fourth quarter. Does this affect all Ohio cities and villages that have an income tax?

Every city, village and stuff like that has the option to sign up with this program with state. We were in contact with some other cities and stuff that had done this before, and this was the year that we got everything set for the city to get that memorandum of understanding together, and now we're at that point where we're exchanging certain pieces of information of how we would get into their system and we would get the money and So stuff like

fundamentally, what is the advantage to the City of Toledo by participating in the Attorney General's program?

Probably the biggest, like I mentioned before, it just frees up our resource we become less of a collection agency and more of a tax office. This should allow us to do more audits, do more investigating into our non filings and stuff like that and less having to deal with the court and the garnishments and outside attorneys. We'll still be using those because there are certain things we cannot send to the state, like we have some stuff through our IRS program that we're not allowed to exchange, so we have to do those the way we've always done those, but it is allowing us to take some stuff, be able to have them be the collection aspect of it and switch our office to, again, more audits and more nonviolence.

And the overall effect on our stacks unit by participating in the AG's program?

On the stacks unit, I would probably say I don't know if I would say there would be a lot of difference. Key that we're running into at this point in time was the specific wording that wasn't in stuff. So like I said, we've been doing that with a ton of stuff in our office where it's like we've almost got to step backwards a little bit before going forward. Because for someone to be sent to the attorney general for instance, they have had to receive that notice at least sixty days prior since that wasn't in our letters before, that time clock hadn't even started to run. So we've been using these last couple of months to really almost rehash some of our older bills to have the proper wording to even get them to qualify for the program.

Okay. All right. So basically what we're saying is we've got another tool in the box in terms of going after taxpayers that are delinquent or have not filed that should have filed and so forth.

Yes, absolutely. Mean on stuff like currently we cannot through the like we weren't part of the Off program so we wouldn't have been able to get a refund check or lottery winnings or any of this stuff. So yes, they have tools that we do not have. Then again with the idea that for the city itself cost wise there is no cost barring getting the information to them and stuff like that. So again, takes part of that collection aspect off of our plate and gets us back Do to more of the tax side of

we have any vacancies in the tax department?

In the tax department today, we have two. However, we've done interviews for those positions and we'll hopefully be filling them probably sometime during

the And then in the stacks unit, is that up to

speed? Yes, stacks unit is actually fully staffed at

this Okay, Great. Okay. Anything else on income tax? No. That would be it. Okay. Alright. Thank you. Director, you're next.

Thank you. Moving into the next couple pages, you'll see general fund revenues and expenditures. Page four shows that through August, revenue collections are at 61.2% of the budget. Last year at the same point, collections were at 57.3%, so running a little bit ahead of where we were last time compared to budget. Like we've seen in previous months we've had positive variances in our property taxes, we've seen strong collections in local government funds as well as the EMS fees and the BLS transport.

Some of the areas where we're trending a little under budget are things that we would expect to pick up in the last quarter or second half of the year, so that would be like investment earnings for example. Casino revenue will two more quarter payments. I'll be happy to take any questions if you have them on that.

Again, going back to the property tax, we're at a 110 percent of that. Again, would you explain it's a timing issue?

No. I think in this case, with the revaluation on the property taxes, the collections that came in in the Okay. In the two settlements were just higher than the initial budget estimate.

Okay. And then a good portion of that property tax goes to police and fire?

Yes. We get 16,000,000, well, 18 overall in collections for the general fund.

Right. Okay. Great. Alright. Next.

Our general fund expenditures, by category and by cost center are on pages, five and six. Like we've seen in previous months, we continue, to monitor our labor expenses, health care costs. We have seen increases in. We do have reflected here the retro activity for the payments for completed bargaining agreements this year. We are taking a look at police overtime.

We've trending under budget in those categories for most of the year. We see police on a year to date basis is running ahead of budget driven partially by I think some summer work and special projects. And then on the service side of the budget, you will see a variance there. And that like we said last month is driven by our fourth quarter payment for the Regional Council of Governments that's already been made for the year. Page six is the breakdown by cost center.

Again, think I've highlighted a couple of the areas with regards to safety administration. That's where that cog payment is and the reason that they're at 90%. The other piece in our save our community area at 93%, we do have ARPA reimbursements that will still be processed prior to the end of the year. That would be the last year of ARPA funding for save our community or MOTSI. And then our all funds revenue and expenditures are reflected on pages seven and eight. I'd be happy to answer any questions, or I can briefly go to our CIP and ARPA report.

Proceed. I'm sorry.

I can go to our CIP and ARPA report if you'd like.

Yeah. I don't see any questions on the all funds review. So if you wanna go into ARPA?

Our ARPA report, we're reporting through August. You'll see overall 26,300,000.0 remaining to spend the performance period. All those expenditures have to be completed by the end of next year. We will, we're actually working on a referral that will be coming to counsel with an update on some of the projects that was asked at our last, council meeting. And we do have, as we close out September, we'll have an quarterly report due to treasury at the October, so we'll be working on that next month.

Okay. And, again, obviously, counsel last year allocated what the ARPA funds would go for the remaining balance.

Correct. The full funds are all obligated towards all the projects that you have on the list.

Okay. Great. Thank you. Anything else?

No changes from last month on our CIP report. And I can, at this point, turn it over to commissioner Mori if you'd like.

Yeah, like to have Commissioner Mori is here today at my request because I wanted the committee to be aware of, as commissioner, of wage and compliance issues on wages to find out what has been going on. And I think we will get those that information because I think it's been very good information. So Commissioner, go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon Chair Sorantu, members of council. In front of you, you should all have a printout of a PowerPoint. So starting with just a little bit of review, the wage and hour compliance division, we are tasked with enforcing three different portions of Toledo Municipal Code five forty five twenty dot 22 wage theft ordinance seven ninety six employees right to file a wage theft complaint and seven ninety eight contractor and subcontractor registration. Moving on to the next slide, five forty five twenty two covers wage theft of employees working in the city limits.

It has nine points in the ordinance, including our most common one we see the misclassification of an employee as an independent contractor. Moving on to Slide four. We have a primary focus in some high industries, primarily right now construction as it's a prime season. Through partnerships that we have with some other labor agencies though, we are tracking a trend of misclassification of nurses as independent contractors using a basically, if you're familiar with Uber and Lyft, there's an app that nurses are getting on now and they're being classified as independent contractors. That's happening primarily on the East And West Coast.

And so thanks to some of our partnerships, we've got a heads up on that that we're tracking to see if it happens here in Toledo. So we try to stay ahead of those industry trends. We have a education first policy. Many employers are unaware that they're possibly doing something wrong in especially in the construction industry. It's been a practice to pay cash or ten ninety nine people.

So we want to bring those employers into compliance with some education, try and get them on the right track. However, if there's a particularly egregious case or repeat violators, are some pretty stiff fines and penalties allowed for under the ordinance. Slide five, seven ninety six. This is the employee's right to file a complaint if they have experienced wage theft. To date, we have had six cases, half of which have result in wages returned to the individual employee working in the city.

We had a particularly bad case that we are in the preliminary process of taking, to criminal charges in Toledo Municipal Court. Seven ninety six requires employers to post a notice of this protection. So far, most of our complaints have found the way to our department through a Google search. So we're working to get notification of these employees' rights out to have employers posting them with the wage and hour required labor posting starting January 1. Moving on to Slide six.

Seven ninety eight is our contractor and subcontractor registration requirement. Any entity doing construction in the city must be registered with Department of Tax. That does give us good touch point because they'll have to have that certificate of compliance to pull a building permit. So it gives us a little bit of a touch point with the contractor to review their business practices, see if they have a withholding account. Conversations and then make them aware that they are then responsible to make sure any subcontractors that they bring to a project also have a certificate of income tax compliance.

We have the authority to issue a stop work order if a contractor is not in compliance, and this has been a very effective tool. Moving on to slide seven.

May I ask you, commissioner? Has that happened very often where you've had to issue a stop work order?

Of our 600 contacts we've had with employers, we've maybe issued a dozen. So it it really we look at it as a timing issue. If a contractor is there and they're going we look at a couple of different factors. If it's a very short term, they're going to be gone and moved on and we won't know where they're at. We may issue a stop work until they come into compliance. If they're going to be on the project for weeks or months, we have plenty of time to work with them. We don't want to issue stop work orders. We're only going to use them when we fit when it's like, hey, we might not be getting compliant or this person is just being entirely non cooperative. They don't wanna give us any information. They don't wanna cooperate with the investigation.

Okay. Thank you. Yep.

On to seven. So our enforcement is primarily field driven. A lot of these violations that we're finding with the wage theft ordinance, they're not on paper. They haven't pulled a permit, maybe because they don't have the license to do so. They don't have the certificate of compliance. The subcontractors are being brought to site and are working without being registered. So we do quite a few field visits employment sites to check for these violations. And recently, we've established a procedure with building inspection. A lot of times we'll have some crossover there where the contractors will be working without a permit as well. So if we're on-site, we already have city personnel on-site.

We have some procedures now where, we'll get ahold of the chief building official, show them what we got going on, send them some pictures and then we can issue a stop work order for building inspection as well. The old way of doing it is they would have to send an inspector out the next day to do a stop work for building inspection. So we're trying to save some city resources here by doing it two for one kind of special there. Moving on to Slide eight, we'll look at some of the statistics. We were established 04/01/2024 with two employees.

Mark Wilson is our wage enforcement coordinator and then myself. Large portion of our contacts again are in the field. To date, we've had contact with over 600, employers in in the aspect of, performing our our site visits. This includes weekend and evening visits. A lot of times if illegal work is going to happen, they know the city's hours.

So I'll go out on weekends or evenings if we get a phone call. I've got some suspicious work going on. We'll check that out. So far, we've recovered over, 700,000 in taxes from employers, that either owed tax or hadn't been paying. One of the common points we run across is contractors from out of state that aren't aware of municipal income tax.

Michigan, Texas, some of the other states, they don't have that municipal income tax. So it's something that's not even on a contractor's radar when they come to town. They might not be intentionally trying to violate any municipal code. It's just a lack of lack of knowing. And so getting out there and being able to talk to them is helped. And that's averaged about 9,000 per week and that's staying that statistic stays pretty steady month over month.

Okay. Vice Chair Driscoll, I'll let the record show Councilman Hobbs is here. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Averaging $9,000 a week, but is that leveling off? Mean, we getting more people into compliance? What's the trend in terms of week by week or is there one is there anything observable at this point?

I started tracking that number one year in Okay. Because we were we were just shy of 500,000 in one year and I was like, oh, that's almost, you know, it's just like 9,500 and I did some quick math and so I added that to my spreadsheet and that number stayed pretty consistent since April. Okay. There is not a shortage of there's more of a shortage of us than there is opportunity. There are quite a few industries that we haven't even we know there's problems, but we don't have the resources to dive into them.

Got it. Okay.

So, yeah, we do not have a shortage of work. Got it. Opportunities. Thanks. That is.

Thank you. I also have a follow-up question, commissioner. When contractors go to the permit office, are they advised in writing about compliance with the tax department?

Yes. They are.

Okay. So it's we don't have that issue. They they certainly find out at that point.

Correct. In fact, the software that building inspection uses won't let a permit be issued unless there is a valid certificate of tax compliance date entered into the system. We do we are tied into building inspection. We can log in and look at it. We we will watch owner pull permits, because that is one tactic that, contractors who can't obtain a contractor license in the city will use is they'll have a homeowner.

They'll tell the homeowner, oh, just go down and pull the permit and, for your project. So we kinda, we look at that a lot. We'll look at all the owner pool permits both commercial and residential. And especially when we see things like replace roof and siding, there's not a lot of homeowners that are doing that themselves legitimately. So we will make site visits on those to to kind of target in on that.

That is a very cash rich environment is that home improvement, roofing, siding, windows. And all that requires a license through building inspection because you're talking about the building envelope. So you want to it's really advantageous for the homeowner to get a licensed contractor. You don't want water damage. It will wreck a home very quickly.

Okay, great. Thank you. Go ahead. Let's

see. One thing I wanted to touch on, on the six employee complaints under $7.96. I mentioned we recovered wages for them that averaged about $573 recovered to each one of those individuals. Nationally, the statistic of wage theft is usually under about $2,000 and that is a small amount of money, generally speaking, as far as what it would cost to take an employer to court. So it makes it unlikely that the employee would pursue steps to recover the wages that that was taken from them.

One of the cases that we had, was an individual working for a franchise. They had switched over payroll and they there was a mistake in the routing number and they get paid every two weeks. Well, their policy and when I spoke to HR, they said it's our policy that he has to wait till the next pay period to get paid. So he'd have gone over a month without receiving any pay. Our initial contacts with HR, they reiterated that policy to us.

We explained the ordinance and the protection that employees have in Toledo. And within three hours, they were able to issue them a pay card. So it wasn't that they couldn't do it, they just didn't want to. So and it's I think it's personally, I think it's unreasonable to have somebody wait a month without pay. One of the that's that $7.96 is very important and I think that's one of the reasons that we're going to promote that mandatory posting come the first of the year to try to help our help the people that work here in Toledo and make sure they get paid.

Okay.

And then last slide, some of our goals, expand the knowledge of that employee's right under seven ninety six. We will always try to achieve compliance without taking cases to court. We want to achieve that voluntarily. And then we're going to continue education efforts to employers, employer groups, especially when it comes to the mandatory posting and what the rights are of residents in the city.

Thank you, commissioner. Going back to the issue of outside contractors from out of state, you mentioned Michigan, Texas as examples. So they come into the city, but they do not apply for a permit. Is that usually how it starts?

It's more that whoever applied for the permit is not requiring their subcontractors to have a certificate of compliance turned into them. It's yeah. Just a pay you know, whatever reason it is, it doesn't it doesn't make it from the office where we have our point of contact to the field superintendent or the project manager to ensure that any sub stepping on-site is registered and has that valid certificate of compliance. Generally, once we've made a visit to site and had issue with a subcontractor and that superintendent understands the ramifications and the possible delays due to stop work orders, they become very vigilant in making sure that, their subs have those certificate of compliances, especially when there's, you know, the sub that bid the job six months ago might not be the sub that actually performs the work then when it comes down to it, scheduling changes, things along those lines. So it is constant effort on our part to make sure that those prime contractors are then, you know, they're bringing somebody to the dance, make sure they're dressed for it, make sure they got Okay.

The certificate of

Great. Thank you for clarifying that. Vice Chair Driscoll?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for your presentation, Commissioner Mori. I wasn't able to be at the sort of preliminary budget discussion for the finance department, Director Campbell, but we're a year into this. And according to Commissioner Mori, there's more work to be done. Are we adding any FTEs in next year's proposed budget in the Wage and Hour Compliance Division?

I think still more conversations to be had on that. We wanted to make sure we were achieving our goal of submitting a flat budget, but we have taken a look at collections in all our areas in tax and the IRS unit and Commissioner Mori's area and are taking a look at what might make sense in the future for us especially if we move forward with expanding the knowledge of employees' rights, we'll have to see what that caseload looks like and potentially be coming back to counsel with a request for additional positions. But as of right now, we haven't officially submitted anything.

Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Anything else, Commissioner?

No. Thank you very Okay.

Great. Okay. The annual audit we're expecting from the State of Ohio, we still don't have it. Correct?

It has not been released yet. We double checked last year. It was on October 1.

Okay.

So if it follows a similar pattern, we'd probably see it next Okay.

Great. All right. Okay. Anything else from the finance department? With that, we'll move on to the city auditor, Mr. Rebalski.

Good

afternoon. I'm pleased to report that the performance metric audit has been completed. I'm proud of the work that went into this effort, and I want to thank both the departments and city leadership for their active participation. I'd like to provide a high level summary. The report is quite detailed.

But at a high level, the majority of departments are using performance measures to guide their key activities. And although many performance measures being used follow best practices, there are areas where city departments can better align with those best practices. And I listed those out in recommendations in the report. The full recommendations and details are included in the written report provided to city council and the mayor. And in other news, the grass cutting audit is underway, and that's progressing. And that's all I have for today. Let me know if you have any questions. Thank you.

Okay. Councilperson Gaddis.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the study. I guess my question is is that they are setting KPIs. How are they keeping data on their achievement rates, what they're doing differently. Could you go into that a little bit?

Sure. So, it does vary across departments. You know, each department kind of has their own method of keeping track of their performance measures and, you know, how they use those and report those to, you know, complete the activities that they complete. Yes, I guess, like, the best way to answer is it varies across departments.

If I may, Chair? Okay. Do they align with best practices in other cities, or are is there room and improvement for that as well?

So what I looked at was the GFOA, Government Finance Officers Association, adopted guidance from it sounds like alphabet soup, but an ACSLB, so the National Advisory Council on State and Local Budgeting. And they put out best practices for budgeting as a whole, and they have inside that various performance measure guidance. So I used that in my audit to see if the city's various departments are meeting those measures. So that's where my focus was. But at the same time, cities do present performance measures online or in their budget documents.

So that is a resource as city departments continue to build out their performance measures. They can look to other cities to see if any would be good candidates for Toledo too.

Thank you. Thank you, chair. And as always, I I appreciate your hard work.

Thank you, council person. Councilman Driscoll.

Thank you, chair. Thank you, Auditor Ivalski for this report. Looking forward to diving into it. You mentioned there are some departments that, I don't to say that, I don't to speak for you, but there was some concern about the measures they were using or if they were indeed using certain measures. Anything of concern to share today that raised a red flag? Or I suppose for our other department chairs, gives them something to look into in the future. Will you be talking to those other department chairs? I mean, just sort of looking for a sort of high level analysis on the comment that you made.

Sure. So yes, at a high level, departments kind of vary across the board, but some of the larger departments like police and fire that make up a lot of the expenditures in the city, they tend to have more robust performance measure practices that also better align with those best practices. And then some of the smaller departments that have smaller budgets kind of as a trend, they might be slightly lagging behind them. So there are definitely areas for improvement. I think this is a good starting point to bring those to light. And then it would make sense to regroup and decide the best path forward.

Okay. Thank you. Councilman Hobbs.

Thank you, chair. Director Campbell, I'm sorry, I thought of something I wanted to ask you. Please forgive me for making you walk all the way back down front again. The question I had is with all of the issues we've had with Republic, and that contract was done before I came on council. When they don't pick up, when they don't do the things that they're supposed to do, is there anything that they owe back to the city? Do they, you know, for services that they have promised to take care for us and our citizens, is there anything that comes back to us when they don't do these things?

Councilman Hobbs, I am not aware. I would have to double check, take a look at the contract and talk to director Robeson. I know there's a process ongoing right now evaluating the next contract, but I'm not sure exactly on your question. So I can take a note and we can check on that.

Thank you. I'll just, again, wasn't sure and wanted to see how you know, things. So thank you for that explanation. I appreciate you. Thank

you, Chair.

Thank you, Councilman. And of course, we've had a few meetings now with the citizens around the city, the next one is in East Toledo next Monday night. But we've had a lot of complaints about the service is not what it used to be like and a lot of things are not being picked up in a timely manner. So very important question that you're asking, especially since we're next year we'll be looking at a new contract. So with that, we'll go to council person Gaddis.

If I could just leave my 2¢ to counsel Minh Hobbs. I have their contract in my office if you'd like to read it. We don't have anything in it for accountability. I don't I think when they addressed it, we were new and we didn't really have a foundation to go off of. I think this new one will be much better, but as of now, there is nothing in the contract that I have. So thank you.

The all wise, all knowing. Thank you.

And you know what, I think that whoever is selected for this next cycle of collections, I think we need to make sure the law department has in their clauses that, you know, that there's a thirty day, sixty day, ninety day notice that we may end the contract. And I think that will get the attention that we're asking for because again, there has to be enforcement. We just can't say, you know, well, you know, it's gonna be late. It's gonna be a few more weeks before the garbage or the recycles get picked up. We need really need to have teeth in that contract.

So I think that we all agree to that, and I'm sure that we'll impress upon the administration that that needs to be in writing, that we have that opportunity with the contract. So I think these are good comments, and I appreciate all of you giving us that type of information. So is there anything else before the committee? Does anyone in the audience care to address the finance committee? And if not, is there any other business from members? If not, we stand adjourned. Thank you.