Water Quality, Streets & Infrastructure Committee - Regular Meeting

Alright. It is 01:00. Time to go ahead and get started. I like to start promptly. Council members, if you can take your spots. Director, please have a seat. So I'm gonna call to order the Toledo City Council Water Quality Committee budget hearing for, 12/09/2025 at 1PM. Clerk, please call the roll, please.

Martinez? Present. Morris? Here. Gaddis? Here. Comives? Three present. Councilman Driscoll is also present.

Awesome. Great. Okay. So the way this is gonna work is, councilman or excuse me, director, if you can present your budgets. I think we have two portions to to go over. Is that correct?

Just one.

Just one. Okay. Perfect.

Sorry. No. Just one. The other one presents in the other Yep.

I know there was some division between us and beautification. Okay. No problem. We will go ahead and give you your presentation. After that I will get questions from members. Thereafter I will open it up to the public for any comments or questions. When I do open up to the public, it is specifically about the budget, nothing ancillary or outside of the scope of what we're discussing today. And then public will have three minutes to discuss. Director, let's get started, please.

Good afternoon. Doug Stevens, director for Department of Public Utilities. I have with me Robert Kasinski. He's our manager of financial operations in public utilities. Going through our presentation today, on the second page, you'll see our proposed org chart.

Outside of some of the structural changes that have been discussed here at council, there's no other changes to the org chart. Going through some highlights, before we get there, I have some overall things that aren't in our proposed highlights. Each of these highlights fall underneath one of the mayor's strategic priorities. But I just want to say our overall budget has increased 6.38%, which is within the rate model. Water has increased by 5.28%, sewer by 7.64% and storm by 6.7 overall.

We're very happy with that. We've been able to do quite a few things to continue to contain costs of chemicals and electricity continue to rise. Overall, you'll see we have three FTEs that have increased. I just want to say that we're not going to show this here because it's the operating budget, but we're going to have about a $13,000,000 water capital program, cash capital program, about a $7,500,000 cash sewer capital program, and a $3,600,000 storm. Again, I want to reiterate all the cost increases increases that you see in here are within our rate models.

And with that, I'll start through page three. So some of our things that we're doing is to work to maintain EPA compliance, both through containing our costs on chemicals and continuing to operate efficiently. We are doing a backflow program, which is required by the EPA. They have charged us to ensure that we have proper backflow on each and every commercial and industrial facility within our service area. We have added some staff this year to deal with the structures that were left from TWI.

So we have basins that we have to maintain. So this year we're adding some staff so that we can keep those basins out. And again, that continues to keep 500,000,000 plus gallons from being put into our river. And then we are going to be doing targeted continue I should say, to do targeted reviews and cleaning of large diameter sewers to reduce the risk of disruptions. Under quality investment, we are upgrading some of our equipment and our preventative maintenance programs so that we can again continue to keep our aging infrastructure operating.

We are doing a critical valve replacement program by which where we go out and are going to be able to operate valves and ensure everything's working and start to identify that better than we have in the past. We're adding some key technical positions in our water reclamation plant to help with cybersecurity and data management and improve some of the systems operations. Investing, moving to the next page, on four, investing in equipment, vector trucks and CCTV units, that again will be used to clean out the basins under the Toledo Waterways And we're seeing lot in the pipeline. Distribution division. And then under customer service, we've had a nearly 30% adoption rate in our customer portal online that helps us provide better customer service.

We have assured that we have better meterease through better operational stability with the AMI systems, the maintenance. We are improving our emergency response capability for water main breaks by putting in place a contract next year that will enable us to have an emergency repair contractor in water, very similar to what we do in sewers. So that way we don't have to have time in awarding emergency contracts and we can act quicker when our forces are unable to do the work. Primarily we try and do those with our forces, but again, we've had a few instances this year I'm sure you're aware of that we would like to respond quicker to in the future. And then we're adding a safety and training specialist this year to continue to promote safety in the department.

So that takes us to page five.

Before you be I'm gonna pause you right there. I just wanna recognize President Williams for her attendance, and Councilwoman-elect Kramer, welcome. And Councilman Soranti, thank you.

Please proceed. Thank you. So overall, we have increased four FTEs this year throughout the department. We went from 614.5 to 618.5, And we'll go through the breakdown of those as we go through the different departments or divisions in the department. Page six and seven, those start to show the full time equivalent positions that we have in the division of utilities administration, and that has remained the same.

When you get to page seven, you'll see we're down one, but there was an error in that file, discrepancy on divisional assistant two is gonna remain a one. It's not going to a zero. Page eight. What you can see are that we'll that do that. We'll that.

And do we're And then if you go to page 10, I just want to point out you see Toledo public power there. And you see Charge of $9.52. We have an expenditure of that. That's where we pay AMP for the power usage. And then we actually bring in 4 k a month of profit.

On top of what you see there for that $9.52, so it's an expense, but we actually bring in a $48,000 a year profit from that for our one customer. Moving on to the next page, you'll see the summation of the utilities administration proposed expenditures. You can see we went in 2026, we're at $17,300,000 for the overall expenditure. And again, those are back charged to the operating divisions in this account for those expenses. So all of that breaks out like you had seen in the previous charts to that number from water storm And sewer.

That total to that 17,300,000.0.

Just just so for so we can follow you if you

can let us know what page around.

You should be on Page 10.

Nice if we had a power. That we could have shown. But just saying. Next time.

So moving to page 11. We see the water next

to to we're see slide.

We're doing the an apprenticeship program for plumbers and electricians. We're in H V A C. Part of that is because they're so difficult for us to hire. You know, obviously the trades are paid a little better than what we're able to do, so it's very difficult to find and keep those guys. So but by contrast, you can see we went down in this in this table and you kind of have to flip between eleven and twelve.

That's the two pages with all the different positions. But overall, we went down. One plumber and two electricians. We've added those apprentices. We increased engineering associates, but we went down to counter that in professional engineers.

Again, it's been very hard for the city and the environment right now. I mean, there's a shortage of civil engineering a lot of times, and even mechanical electrical are difficult to get. So, oftentimes we have to go with entry level engineers and train them with our senior people. So, we just did an even swap there. We added an instrumentation technician, an engineering technician, and that will take us up to the grand total of six additional FTEs.

Moving to page 13. You can see the overall expenditures. The increase last year. We were at $79,300,000 in the division. Dollars 80,975,000.000 this year.

You can see we went down in chemicals. Originally in 2025, you see a $12,800,000 amended budget. We put some additional dollars in there with the amended budget mid year to ensure we could meet all our obligations primarily. Again on the chemical side under supplies. And then this year we think that we can do a $10,000,000 chemical budget and be sufficient if chemicals costs rise and we have to come back, we would do a mid year adjustment this year, but we didn't want to over budget unnecessarily.

And then you can see under services, There you would also end up seeing that we had Some additional costs that went up about 800,000. But included in services is our power usage. Those are some things that we do try and control, but we don't necessarily have a ton of control on some of the cost of that. And then I just kind of want to point out when it says other, you see 3,000,000 and 25 and 2,500,000.0 now. We're expecting improved collections.

So, what that represents is our uncollectibles. And so, we've actually lowered expenditure for uncollectibles. So, looking for improvements in that area this year. Going to page 14, we have the water reclamation schedule of full time equivalents. Again, that finishes on page 15.

We have again here done some manipulating of dropping the number of professional engineers and increasing the number of engineering associates. We have added a couple of heavy equipment operators, and we have also added the water reclamation maintenance workers, and that primarily is to go back to what we talked about in our previous slide, where we were able to start addressing the TWI basins many years ago, and I think I could reiterate this to the members here today. When the TWI project took place, they put money in for construction when they did the rates and they budgeted for that, but they never actually budgeted any positions to actually do the maintenance on them. So, operations costs, equipment and manpower was never included in those budgets years ago when they did that. We had an audit this year with the U.

S. EPA, and we came back and agreed that we needed to add some additional maintenance workers, and we're gonna have a couple of Vactor trucks in our budget that we're gonna be using to help keep those basins clean. Anyway, moving on, you see on '16, our budget has went up in the division just a little under 4%. Again, we were able to stay pretty flat in this area. You can see labor with the increased Number of positions that we brought on have also played a part in some of the increases, but everything's pretty nominal overall.

But labor is the primary driver for the increase in budget and water reclamation. Moving on to page 18 for water distribution. Water distribution. We have actually lost positions. So we actually had some vacancies for clerk specialist twos. We went down four there. And we also eliminated meter readers, and you'll see up towards the top of page 18, you'll see AMI inspectors. We had thought we were going to create AMI inspector positions out of the meter readers. We did not. That wasn't necessary.

So we actually took the 11 meter readers we had. Some chose to retire or or to move on. Others, we moved into the position of utility worker. So you're gonna see on page 19, we have increased six utility workers, and that is really the way we're utilizing the meter techs, our old meter readers, but we have about a $375,000 savings annually now in salary by not having the meter readers. A lot of the utility workers, We plan to allow to phase out over time.

We're able to keep them busy. We have plenty of work for them to do. But most likely as they retire, we'll reduce staff. And get additional savings from that. But the meter readers, know, the retiring and so forth.

And the elimination of the vacant clerk positions that we don't need anymore anymore. The reason that we went down the overall eight positions in the division. Moving to page 20, you can see we have went up A little about a million 4 in the budget. A lot of that is due to increases in labor because we did upgrade positions. We're paying licensing fees for our employees.

You may have seen the article on our employees who are now getting licensure through the Ohio EPA to operate the system. We do have a payment plan for those that get an annual stipend for getting their licensure and maintaining that to help develop our workforce. So some of that's in there. And we actually had upgraded a few positions so that we can manage some of our more advanced programs. So, for example, we have a position that we created, upgraded into a supervisor, supervisor to handle the Backflow prevention program that I talked about earlier, so some of those positions have been upgraded.

And then in services, we went up about 300,000. Thousand dollars and that $300,000 is what we're going to be budgeting for that emergency repair contract for next year, so that way if we run across essentially another Arco Drive, we can instantly put a contractor on that. And then 19, again, is just showing some of our expenditures by category and how it breaks out between the administrative services fund that we pay back to and the storm water fund. Moving to page 22. We start the sewer and drainage schedule of FTE's full time equivalents.

And that did not change at all. We still maintain 122 FTEs in here from 2025 budget. We were actually having an increase in the budget. If you go to page 24, You're going to see we have an increase in the sewer operating fund. Of About.

1,000,003, but the bulk of that is actually coming from the services line. You can see we increased about a million dollars, and 900,000 of that is for the Ohio Utility Protection Service. Currently, we don't do oopses on our sewer lines, so sometimes that's causing hits and we're having some issues with utilities. So we've done some investigation, and we may have to engage some services out of the sewer department. We're looking at how to do that.

The most cost effective way to do it is to hire a service to do it. There's 32,000 oops requests a year. And it's far more expensive for us to buy vehicles and equipment and try and create an oops program from scratch internally. So, the 900,000 reflects that we may need to go out this coming year and do an RFP for services to actually mark our facilities for oops calls. And then going to page 25.

I just want to point out that you saw a pretty big increase from the 2025 amended budget 2026. Of, you know, just about 900,000. There is a discrepancy in this. You'll see under the other, which again is the uncollectible write off that we Make assumption for in our budget. It says 750,000 under 2026 proposed and $2.50 last year.

That should have said 250,000. We were not intending for that to go up $500,000 So that kind of skewed that number. So really, we're going to be at $7,563,250 So it only went up about $400,000 overall in budget, And you know you can you can see the little pieces of that going through labor wise with you know increase in salaries and so forth is going to account for the bulk of. Those dollars, but in general we stayed. Fairly flat overall.

That concludes what we have for the handout presentation. Again, I am very happy that we've been able to stay within our rate models and that we have been able to contain some costs that are not easy to contain with chemicals and electricity. And one other thing I didn't mention I want to point out that we are now getting about 800 customers a month at our two kiosks downtown and at Scott Park. We're having success with that. Even the Scott Park numbers have started to go up.

And again, we've got about a we're getting around a 30% adoption of our customer portal already, and we've been underway for a year, so we're going to continue to push on the customer portal because we believe that is the way for us effectively. Be able to reach our customers and we're looking at. You know how we can build that out so that customers can do more through the portal. So with that, I'd be happy to take any questions from council at this time. Great. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you and the great work your staff has done. Especially with. What's happened over in Arlington. They've been very proactive.

Anytime any of us have issues, especially the district reps. You guys have been very, very responsive. So I just want to say thank you. You and your staff for a phenomenal year. There is some questions regarding your budget. Before I turn it over, one of the things that I just kind of caught my attention in terms of the pipe replacement that we're gonna be doing. Any

concerns about microplastics or leaching into

downstream? None that that, you know, I'm aware of. I could ask Todd Saum's, commissioner for water distribution, to see if he's got any information on that. I know he he could come up. He's got you know, he he kinda spearheaded that effort to to do the research and kinda bring us in line with some other communities in using that. Gotcha. Okay.

Yep. Lots of research went into this. My previous wife, we put in

miles and miles of plastic s d r nine service line. There's plenty of studies that suggest otherwise.

Depending on what rep you ask. Depending on the answer you're gonna get. But I'm confident there's no issue with micro plastics in the in the water. Thank

you, chair, and thank you for providing the updated information for 2026. You know, I am a chronic worrier, and I I do this because I really care about our water, and I really, really care about our sewers. And I see Calvin over there. And if anybody's a champion for sewers, it's gonna be me. Very unpopular place to be.

But, you know, I look at the continued investment in modern equipment. So the vectors, the c the the closed or I know don't what CCTV. Those you know, and it it talks below. It talks about an improved emergency response. We have extremely aging infrastructure in the city of Toledo.

These are not the first things that people ask about, when they talk about city services, but they are important city services for health, you know, just to be able to survive, having water and having a working sewer. Do we are we purchasing enough of these things? Because I'm afraid that we're gonna have more Arlingtons, and more Arcos, and, all of these little dips you see in the street that end up being big dips over time. So can you talk about the the equipment? And and I'm gonna ask about that, but I'm also gonna ask about pumps representing Point Place.

Pumps are extremely important, to my district. So I when I see all of these and I see the people, people power is so important. These these this equipment is important so that we don't have, like you said, emergency contracts that we have to scramble like at at at the Imagination Station when something happens. So, I have a follow-up question after that. So can you address the equipment? And and are we able to get enough? Is this enough in this budget? These are important questions.

So we we do have enough in there. So with DPU has a five year plan that that actually Calvin helps us maintain. He's sort of our master keeper and all the Divisions. Know, input into that what they need. We do keep enough equipment going to make sure that our crews outfitted to where they can keep working constantly.

Changing out the CCTV's like this year, we get CCTV's, that will replace old ones that have been breaking and keep us more efficient. But I want to point out that Calvin's group when it comes to sewers specifically. He's going to have budget this year to have a contract that he's been doing now for a couple of years with a like, a contracting firm that they actually can do large sewers. So, like, we have a certain limit to the size of sewer we're capable of doing. So he sends them out, and they do some of the cleaning and televising work on those.

So we keep our forces busy. You know, we have mandated amount of televising that we're required to do annually from EPA. So we take the the the internal consultant crews that we do, and then engineering services actually runs it has a consultant contractor that it uses to do other investigations. So, we coordinate all of those so that we're getting a good cross section. And as we move forward into the future, you know, with Arlington, we're looking at how we're going to start talking about our program ensuring that we're going after larger targets instead of some of the smaller ones.

We do a great job of lining out of engineering, let's say. You know, and and that's the best bang for your buck truly is to line a sewer before it gets bad. But we're going to be working pretty hard to make sure some of these larger ones that make us more vulnerable, we're going investigate those, and then as we see the need for those, we're going to find ways to finance that that the utility can afford with the current rates. As you know, there wasn't a lot of money, there was some money put in to do more piping in the current rates, the bulk of those rates was going towards our wastewater plant. So, we are going to be stepping up our game in that.

I think right now with the requests we've had for equipment and having a solid five year plan, that we do allow the commissioners in each division to have some variability within that budget to be able to say, hey, we had an issue and we need to make a small change, we can do that. So I I think we're positioned well for that, you know, especially within the budget that we have, I think we're doing really well.

Okay. Thank you. And and I should retract a little bit, so, you know, the the pumps are not just important to Point Place. We use them throughout the whole city, but they're really important to my district. And then lastly, I wanted to ask you about the the power, that we we provide. Last time I knew, we only had one customer. Is that still true?

It's still true. Our our one customer's Omnisource. Mhmm. And, again, we we buy the power through American Municipal Power Amp. And then, you know, we we're we're essentially a reseller on that. And so we provide that to that location. I think that's your district too. So that's our that's our one.

So is there any thought of growing that? Is that anything is that ever something that we want to I mean, it is a revenue source. So is that ever something that we want to grow?

We we have had some discussions with that with our energy consultant. It's a little difficult because, you know, we don't generate anything. We have talked about a few other potential opportunities, but, you know, right now we don't have a specific avenue that we think is viable for us, but, you know, we've got some people on our team who are they entertain discussions about that looking for opportunity. If we do come across the way that we think we could, you know, with some measure of, I guess, assessed risk, you know, go forward in a way that would be considered safe for us on the risk side. We would like to increase that, but there's not a large concerted effort to push that.

Well, I mean, you know, having difficult difficult times times and and and and having having limited resources. Sometimes we just gotta think outside of the box. So that's why the question was asked. Thank you very much. Thank you, chair. Thanks,

chair. Thank you for your presentation. Of the current, I know in the previous years if you had a problem staffing, making sure all our positions were full. Where are we at currently in the water department?

Sorry about that. There has been a pretty dramatic increase in

And we can follow-up with that and give you our current vacancy rate and kind of compare that. Again, as Robert said, we have made improvements in that. Our staff, you know, my commissioners and every one of the groups have pushed really hard to be able get bodies, and, you know, human resources has done a good job assisting us with that.

That's great to hear. Thank you. You had mentioned that you're going to house a cybersecurity person because of the upgrades.

They're they're not actually our cybersecurity person. We work with Anne on that. Okay. But we're actually going to be adding I'm trying to remember what we call the position. Let's say administrator of automation.

So, in the plant specifically, we have these SCADA control systems, and we have other systems that go out into the collection or distribution systems that coordinate with our plants, and we have and I think you guys have done a few things in executive session for us when it comes to plant security, but we've worked with Director Bennett and our teams, but we really are looking to have somebody in as this administrator for automation to start to make sure that we're coordinating, tracking, and making sure that we keep up on the operational capacity of some of our automated systems, because again, those are critical to us being able to operate the utility properly.

Awesome, thank you. And then you had mentioned the licensure stipend. What percentage of your staff is utilizing that? Like, what percentage have all their licensing updated? You know,

I I would have to get that by referral, but I would say so if you take water distribution as an example, let me see, we were at in water distribution, I'm gonna jump back over here to the number of FTEs we have. We have a grand total of 138 FTEs, and right now we're at 17, I believe, people who have gotten licensure. If you would go back six, six and a half months, there were four. The program where we've come up with the stipend and started to get people into training has worked. We're going to be kicking that off again over in sewers.

I know Calvin has been looking at that. Out of water treatment, it's hard to say because many of the positions require licensure, so we have quite a few licensed people, and if you're going to be an operator, a lot of the administrators and so forth have licensure, but, you know, I could I can I can get you that too by referral and let you know what percentage of our workforce is licensed? Okay. But I I do wanna say I think it's a great thing for our employees, you know, to learn about the actual industry and some of the things that go behind why the rules are there, and as they begin to understand it, it's more than this is just what we go out and do every day. You know, they understand the why and how's behind it, and I think it's only going to make our workforce better.

I couldn't agree more. I think it's great that we offer them that opportunity. And then, you had mentioned that we had 800 customers on our water collecting or bill collecting stations. Are they returning customers or are they like one time? Like, do you have the stats on that at all?

We could probably get stats on that. I know it's a mixture. I think that, you know, we do have a fair number of recurring customers that come to the kiosks. It's a mixture. But, you know, I'm I'm thankful that, you know, our customer base has has adapted to that quite well.

Yeah. That's great to hear. Thank you. Thank you for all of your work. Thank you, chair.

Thank you. Councilman Swanson, you're next. Thank you, Mr Chair. Director of let's go back to the kiosk situation. We've got about 800 customers. The overwhelming majority are now mailing in the payments to DPU. Is that what you're finding? Yes, I think that the overwhelming number do Robert, you

may know some of the statistics on how many do auto pay and so forth.

Do you have some data on that? It's still an overwhelming amount number that is still mailing and checks and that kind of stuff. But you're seeing that transition as people get acclimated to all the other options.

Yes. I'll do a referral so we can break it down by mail. And then paying at the kiosk and then online. They can pay online.

Yep. Yeah. Think we even go as far as to track whether or not it's credit card or ACH. So we've got good data and we get monthly update on that. We can give you year to date on that.

Okay. Just want to see the progression, I think the mail in thing has been working pretty well from what I can tell. I'm finding my check clears within a few days.

Yep. That going to the Fifth Third lockbox as to doing it internally has been an incredible improvement for us. You know, it's just as you know, it's a more secure way for us to handle checks and payments. Right.

So and then as as far as I wanna follow-up with councilwoman Morris talked about Arlington Avenue. You know, I attended the, you know, the meetings and discussions with people on that. And I guess I I'm looking to see to ask for reassurance. Are we we have the equipment or will have access to the equipment to prevent future Arlington Avenue situations where, you know, we just didn't know how bad the damage was until we really went in there and saw that. So, I mean, are you saying that we've got access to equipment now that can tell us?

We we do. We, you know, we have equipment to do, I think, under 24 inches sewers in house. When we start to get to 24 and above, that's when we have those two contracts, one in engineering and one in sewers, where we have the resources come in and do the cleaning and televise those. And again, know, Commissioner Harris, he's talking to me constantly about the areas that concern him, and he's going to be focusing his contract on those areas. Our goal is to identify that and see what fixes we can do before we come to $16,000,000 replacements.

So I do feel like we're doing well with that as long as we continue to fund our two outside programs, and again, I think adding the equipment, Councilwoman Morris talked about, it's going to keep our guys efficient, and it's enough equipment that it will keep the people we have dedicated in the organization for that work to be going constantly. Do you have a guess estimate when Arlington might be completed at this point? So I believe it's June is still the target date. So they're actually going to be putting in a larger casing pipe, pushing that pipe in, and it's common to do this as it was cheaper than using a micro tunneling machine, but they're actually going to be down in that tunneling this by hand. So, it's going to take until June to get everything all buttoned up.

And I think I might have mentioned last time I was in council that I do anticipate we're going to spend more on Arlington to the West. We know that there's debris in there. We're trying to make sure we assess whether that is critical to continue. Our hope is that we have enough ability right now to send that out, get it designed, get a loan for it, and then bid it traditionally. We think that's the proper approach to it. So, we're looking at that, and I'm working with Commissioner Sondkrant in engineering Make sure we keep that process going.

At the water plant, how many electricians do we have at York Street?

It's three. Right now we have three positions proposed. But then, you know, we will be looking to get guys into the you see the apprentice water treatment. Hopefully some of those will be a couple of electricians.

So those three coverage of the shifts at the plant at

the water plant or? I can ask commissioner McClure to come up and explain how the how the electricians cover.

By the way, I have to say that mister Harris has been very, very good about handling issues when we call him. He he and his team have done magnificent job, and I I just wanted to put that on the record. He's very responsive. No. Thank you. I couldn't agree more. Commissioner? Yeah. So electricians, skilled trades, maintenance crews all work straight shift Monday through Friday. The plant, they all voted. They opted for taking earlier shifts. They work a 62 shift Monday through Friday. Alright. Good. Alright.

Thank you for clarifying that. And then the I noticed that we we don't we had 11 meter readers. Now we have none. But yet we have 5,500 customers who do not have the AMI. Who's reading those meters?

Commissioner Saum's can answer that question for us.

So they're technically utility workers now, but there are three of those Former meter readers now utility workers reading meters.

Okay.

It's just a standard drive by route. There's a couple of manual reads with the old reader on the side of the building. So

I mean, we're reading. Okay. So we're reading those meters until they convert to AMI. Okay. Alright. That's that's what I wanted to clarify. And then finally, you mentioned the challenge of recruiting workers, skilled trades workers. What is it that's keeping us from hiring them? Is

money? It Is it the hours? What is it? It's dollars. I'm not 100% sure where everything falls, but you're probably seeing $40 plus an hour, let's say, for an electrician.

I don't think they're even as low as the low 40s an hour when it comes to being industrial or commercial. A lot of times, the skilled trades, you get to electricians, plumbers, mechanics and so forth, they're making significantly more dollars than any utility honestly, pays for them. So that's the issue we have, getting them internally. A lot of times we'll get guys who are later in their career and they're looking for something a little more stable as far as hours and don't have to travel from job site to job site, but It's just

tough to compete. Okay. Alright. And then one final thing, if you could. We're going to have a finance committee hearing December 17 at 04:00. If you could present to us just the latest numbers in terms of the collections on delinquent accounts, I would appreciate that. Thank you, director. Thank you, chair.

Thank you, chair. Director Steve's going to go to a question about Page 13, you said increased costs and electricity driving. Our services budget here terms of water treatment. Is the that only thing driving that increase?

Primarily, Yeah, I mean that that was about a 50% increase. I think it was in cost, so I think we went from about a $2,500,000 budget was it about 3.5, Robert, could you?

Was more like 1.3 to about $2,600,000 and the big thing is the ozone program that's gone live. It's consuming more energy. Three But there's a trade off. Chemicals we use then, is it?

Or isn't there? Not yet. We have done a little bit of change to reduce chemicals, but I don't think the trade off is ever going to be anywhere close to one to one. But we have done some work to start reducing some level of chemicals. But chemical usage, even with ozone, might be dependent on weather, time of year, things like that where we have have to use more chemical.

Missing in this list. Don't recall seeing it as any revenue projections. This is just looks like expenditures. You said we're within our Rate increase by how much? So we got to look at the net of the revenue and expenses that are projected.

And so far within the last five years, we've been within 05% to 1.5% and in our favor. So priorities of what we want to do, how we want to do it. Forward. So. Some trade offs, but the basic essentials of.

Utilities. Are intact and we've been able to kind of maintain those costs to the best of our ability. What's the utility do with the surplus then? It goes into the fund balance and then that fund balance essentially can be used for your cash debt. And what's the fund balance now? And what's the projection at the 2026? Our fund balance in water is going to be approximately. I say about $30,000,000 sewers. I think I have a projection of about $9,000,000 but what's kind of like the rest of the year shake out? There's also other pieces that factor that could use legal obligations to move funds into other funds, right?

Operating transfer. And then if anything else happens throughout the year, that's an emergency. The waterfront has been doing very well. We have. We have not since we put the rates in had the fund balance go down. And that's kind of the central core credit rating. It's a big piece of that. On the sewer side, we have dipped into that to some extent, but we've had some pretty big issues that we've had to address. But I think, we're gonna have some time to kind of build that back up again. I think it may just me. I think in the future it would be helpful to Talk about this is the only department that works this way for the city, so I think

it would be helpful to Talk about the fund. What it is. We're do you have. We talk. When we do the top line budget, we talk about our goals or what we think is a healthy fund balance for us to carry over. I don't really know that for the water side. What would you say that is? But I do truly I think in the future we should this should be a part of the budget presentation.

Yeah, absolutely. We calculate fund balances on a monthly basis, so we keep track of that. And we monitor that because there's certain things we want to make sure that we have. Annual projections to make sure that.

I'm aware you track it. I just think it's important. This is something that we directly charge our we have customers here. This is not the same thing as taxpayers who have a vested interest in signal. These are our customers. I think we need to make sure that we're we're we're going to agree to rate increases over a period of time, we need to make sure it's understandable, I think, to our customers what it is we're charging those rates for. I'm not alleging anything. Don't think you guys are doing a fine job, but I do think this is public document. This one of the few times that people get to interface with our budget, don't and I think it would be necessary. This might be

a question for Director Campbell.

We treat why is that not an adjustment to the revenue? Going back to Page 13 here, we talked about improved collections efforts. Why do we treat that as a why don't we just adjust our revenue numbers? Why we take it out

of our expenditures? So there's two pieces to that. There's an income statement side of that and then there's balance sheet side of that. So you identify as an expense, but you also kind of accrue a balance on the balance sheet that will allow you to offset any write offs and that kind of stuff. It's basically there to project out what you will not collect over the course of doing business.

And so we monitor that over time. We take into consideration the fact that we have some policies in place to kind of address the collections and then we're working hard to continue to improve that. And so to kind of reflect where we think we're going with that, we adjusted that a little bit. And we also kind of maintain, when we're looking at the balances, the balances in the balance sheet, how much do we have, how does that project out to history, and how does that that kind of Project out in future years as well. We don't want to over inflate it, of course, but we also don't want it to be underfunded.

We try to keep that balance as best we can. But we don't adjust the revenue number at all. It well from a financial perspective, when we look when we produce our financial statements, it's netted against the revenue. It's netted against the That's correct. Perfect. Thank you very much.

Just

very briefly. I know this is not the budget, but I would continue, and I wanna go on record to continue having the mayor and the administration, work with the Bayview, Gulf retirees. And, they have offered the from what I understand, the plant needs 16 acres, and the retirees have offered 17 acres. So I I think that this is a project that that can coexist, and we can have what we need at our plant, and we can have the retirees have an abbreviated golf course. So just a comment, not a question.

And it's just something I want to go on record. Please continue working with baby retirees. Thank you. Thank you.

Councilman Strachter, we do have I know. Two minutes. I'll be brief. I'll be brief. So I also want to follow-up on that. Councilwoman Morrison and I, the day before Thanksgiving, did a tour on a golf cart of the proposed 17 acres that the Bayview retirees are proposing to be utilized that would not disturb the golf course. There there would still be nine holes. So I encourage the mayor on record, the administration, and council members to go out there and view that. Obviously, with the snow, it's a little difficult, but once that snow melts, we really need to take a good look at that because they make a very compelling case that there's plenty of space there without destroying the golf course. So thank you, mister chair.

Thank you, councilman. Okay. That's gonna wrap up. Will open this sorry, I will open this up for a public comment. Would anyone like to discuss the budget from the public, specifically from what was just presented to us? Nothing outside of that. Going once. Again, I'm opening this up to the public to discuss the budget that was presented. If there's anyone that I'd like to speak for or against or any concerns. Going twice. Three times sold. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate everyone's willingness to be here. Meeting adjourned.