Common Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We will call the November 4th common council meeting to order and I will ask our clerk to call the role. Um, alderwoman Novak is excused this evening. Other person Wel here, Gisham here, Grobe here, Hos here, Halverson here, Keen here, Novak is excused, Nolan here, Roach here, Turner here, nine present, one excused.

We have a quorum. If you are able, please rise and join us in the pledge which will be led this evening by Alderman Welled United States of America to the stands. One nation under God, indivisible, liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. Moving on to section D, we have one item which um is under our public hearings. It's just a small item. It's the uh 2026 city of West Dallas budget. I will uh turn it over to staff. Uh thank you. Uh, common council, I would like to present the 2026 recommended budget by Mayor Dan Divine. Um, very first off, uh, mayor, do you want to say anything about the budget uh, to start us off? No, I'll I'll let you lead it. Thank [laughter] you.

Sounds great. Okay. So, um, like we do every year, we, uh, use our vision and our mission to, uh, put this budget together. So, just to go over that real fast, our vision is to become the preferred destination for visitor visitors, residents, and businesses. Um, many of our missions are to be cost-effective in our municipal services. Uh, the health and safety and welfare of the community is something we consider as well as the quality of living. uh and making sure we have a progressive approach to our budget budgetary process and how we operate the city. Um another thing that we take into consideration is our strategic plan focus areas which is community destin destination finance infrastructure and organizational e excellence. Um, our 20 our strategic plan goes until the end of 2026. And so the recommended budget priorities are the same as last year. Pedestrian safety and reckless driving, road and abatement, outdoor amenities, community engagement, and employee investment. Um, so what's going to happen now is our finance director is going to go through the budget recap of 2025.

So just as a reminder, um, every year uh the city and many other Sorry, Jason, can you turn the microphone back on? I think it or maybe closer to you. Thank you. Can you Is it good now?

Thank you. Um just as a reminder, the city faces a structural budget uh deficit every single year. And this is just a recap here of what happened in for 2025. Uh typically we're looking at between one and a half to two and a half million dollar gap. Um, just as a reminder, part of the way we uh bridged that gap last year was just increased shared revenues um and as well as the savings from the merged health department with the city of Greenfield. Sorry. Um, and here is a reminder of some of the limits that the uh cities face here in Wisconsin. uh we face a uh statemandated uh levy limit as well as an expenditure restraint limit. Uh both of those are somewhat tied to net new construction and so the city is always striving to uh reconstruct some of the different areas of the city so that we can have some levy capacity. Uh there are years where the levy capacity could be zero. In fact, if you look at 2024, uh the increase, the allowable increase was only $22,000 for for the city, uh with a general fund budget of almost $70 million. Um, moving on, here's a a graph that just kind of shows how those levy limits have really um suppressed what we've been allowed to do. On this graph, you're looking at the different levies from year to year. And then there's two straight lines with averages on there. The top line is the consumer price index average. And then the orange line, the lower one, is the average uh increase in levy for the city. So significantly less than the actual increase in costs. So for 2026, if we have levy levy limits in place, um how do we balance the

budget? And these are the big picture items that helped us do that this year for next year. Um the biggest thing is new Medicaid money for ambulance transports, $450,000. Um in addition, we um activated our convention and visitors bureau and that freed up $420,000 for the 2026 budget. And then there's some additional shared revenue um and some uh taxes from the water utility that help bridge that gap. Overall, we're looking at a 3% increase uh in the budget itself. Um the majority of that revenue uh like normal comes from taxes as well as state aids. Here's a breakdown of the expenditures. Uh the majority of the expenditures for the city uh fall under the public safety which is police and fire as well as public works which would be taking care of the roads and doing all the plowing and then due to the revenue uh increases we were able to um create three new positions. So we have um it's not three just three positions but it's spread out throughout um our different departments. So we have an additional 1.25 in housing uh but that one is grant funded. Uh we have an additional one in human resources and additional one in public works for building maintenance. Um we had a reduction of one in engineering. Um and then an addition of 0.5 in the attorney's office. 25 in finance and then reallocation of um full-time positions between city admin and city clerk. The oncoming of myself. So um we also uh for employee investments, we were able to give our general employees

a 2% increase um as well as a one two split for the fire department. We are still in negotiations with police. However, we're coming closer to a final settlement settlement. And here's just uh a summary of some background information. Um I will point out that on the top right there is assessed values. There wasn't another reassessment for 2025. So you can see those values um have stayed the same. Um and then the projected local tax rate on the bottom in the middle is currently $8.56. Uh up from $8.34 last year. The overall tax rate is uh currently estimated to be $22.28. That is definitely an estimate. We have not received all of the tax levies from the other jurisdictions yet. So, what does this mean for the um median home value in the city of West Alice? Uh looking at the numbers, uh a house assessed at $200,000 is right in the middle. Um so for that um median home the tax increase for the city portion remember there's more than one tax entity on the tax bill. The city portion increase would be $44 uh with an overall tax of $1,712. So what we went through so far is the general operating fund um and the tax levy for the city. Uh in addition included in this budget uh are the utilities as well. Um the water utility uh rate increase is currently at 0% because that is not something that is directly uh controlled by the city itself but we would have to go through the public service commission at the state. We did have a rate increase

earlier in the year. Um the sanitary utility. Um I'll pause here and just if you could just look to the right and look on at that arrow. The projected increase for the average homeowner with all of these increases on the their utility bill is $7.71. I wanted to point that out because as we look on the left and we look at the sanitary utility for example, it says that it will increase 11.6%. So I wanted to give you a dollar value uh so you could kind of understand what that looks like. The reason for some of these larger increases on here is because there have been a few years before we increase rates. We didn't increase rates every single year. We're going to going forward, we're going to try and smooth that out a little bit more. Um, if you look at the sanitary utility and the storm utility, if you average it out over the past eight or nine years, you're only looking at a 26 and a 2.3% increase per year. Also included in this budget are uh is a capital plan uh totaling $ 31.7 million. Um some of the items uh included in there include uh you know reconstruction of roads, uh improvements to the farmers market, uh upgrades to the police dispatch center and and others and next steps. Um and so right now we've um so far introduced this budget to the council on October 21st. We are now having well and then we had a public

information session public information session on I don't have that written down. Well, we had a public information session last Thursday. Thank you. Um, so much has happened since I The public hearing is of course right now and then we will be submitting this to council on the 11th for final adoption. That's all we have. Thank you for the presentation and and just I know I said it in October, but thank you again to both of you and your teams for the work on the budget this year and everything that you did. It's much appreciated. That being said, are there any questions from any of the members of the common council?

Mayor Divine. Yep. Alderwoman Keane.

I don't have um a question, more so just a statement. Again, thank you. Um I will say with it being a public hearing, I'm a little disappointed to see that there's really not a lot of folks here. Um I know that there's a bunch of concerned West Dallas taxpayers. Um, and this is the chance to kind of show up and ask your questions and get the answers that you're looking for. So, it's kind of a little disappointing not to see a lot of residents here. I hope that there's a lot of people um joining via YouTube, but again, this is like the chance, the mayor's budget is a public budget. This is your time to ask the questions. This is your time to question what we're doing and why the taxes are going up. and we have empty chairs. So, um I just wanted to say again, thank you. And again, it was just more of a statement. Thanks. Thank you. Are there any other questions, comments from the council?

That being said, are there any questions or comments from the members of the audience? There are only five of you, so you can each tell me individually. [laughter] All right. Um, then we will close the uh public hearing on the 2026 recommended budget. And we will now move on to part E of our agendas, which is public participation. This is where the council may receive information from members of the public on um areas of interest to them. This is a 30-minute period of our agenda. We ask that each speaker announce their name and their address at the podium and please limit your comments to one statement of no longer than five minutes. Is there anybody that wishes to address the council under public participation this evening? All right. Then we will move on to item F. Our standing committees will be meeting during recess. Those room numbers are on the top of page two on your agendas. U if you are here for a specific item that would be acted on by one of our committees and you cannot find out which room number applies to you, please ask us when we break for recess and we will make sure to get you into the right uh room for the meeting. Item G is the mayor's report. I just have two quick things. One is um on November 11th at 11:00, the city will once again hold its Veterans Day ceremony with Tanner Paul Post. That will be at the substation on 69th and National. And I also want to welcome a new business to our community. Last week, um, Alderman Halverson and I attended the opening for Carnitas de Rafa, which moved into the former

Chilango Express location on 70th and 71st in National uh, Lincoln, sorry. Um, they had their grand opening. They have another location on 27th Street, but this is their second location. So, I just want to welcome them to West Dallas, and we can say comfortably their food was pretty amazing. Um, that concludes the mayor's report. We will go on to part H. Are there any reports from the elder persons this evening? Mayor Divine, Alderman Wagel.

Um, I'd just like to uh touch base on a couple things that I've done and um, so Alder person Keane mentioned the budget. I did attend the second of the West Dallas Taxpayer Associations meeting where we discussed the budget. A couple of the other alders were there also. Um um they have been meeting at Nikico's monthly. I imagine they're going to continue. Um I'm going to keep going. It was a great chance to talk to citizens about what's going on. So the West Dallas Taxpayers Association, I think the easiest way to find them is on social media. I know they're on Facebook. um the topics of the meetings. The first first meeting last month, I guess, well actually was in September was about um the proposed fire department merger with Maossa. The second meeting was about that and also we had about half the evening we talked about TIFF financing and its impact on budgets in the city. I don't know what the next meeting's about, but they're free and open to the public. Again, if you're interested, they're engaged citizens who want to know what's going on. So, I encourage people to participate in that. Over the weekend, I did attend a a buckthornne weed out at McCarti Park that was hosted by the friends of Mccardi Park. Buckthornne is an invasive plant species. It grows as like a a small bush, a shrub, and eventually a tree, and it crowds out uh native plants. um friends groups do this kind of work all around Milwaukee County. Um so that was that was a fun day. It was about a dozen of us there. Um and there's a new friends group forming. I believe this is for the friends of Greenfield Park. A proposed new friends group. I believe their meeting is going on right now at Greenfield Park. Otherwise, if we I

wasn't here, I'd be there. Um again, so uh and these friends groups aren't limited to just the neighbors of the park. It's anybody who enjoys the park. Greenfield Park for its size has I'm was actually kind of surprised that they didn't have a friends group already because Greenfield is a very big and active park. So, um not sure exactly what kinds of things they're going to be doing, but I imagine it'll be friends groups can be like a park watch kind of thing. They'll do maybe a picnic um clean, you know, garbage cleanups, that kind of stuff. All the kind of stuff. As I think as we all know, a lot of governmental units are struggling. Milwaukee County parks, Milwaukee County is struggling. Um, and so anywhere citizens want to step up is greatly appreciated. So if you're there's a friends of McCarti Park group already, I know they're on social media and I expect the friends of Greenfield Park to be stepping up a social media presence soon as as they become official as a friends group. So that's it. Thanks.

Thank you. Any other reports from the other persons? Mayor Divine, Alderman Halverson, [clears throat]

I just wanted to shout out to was a good chunk of you city employees that went out on the rodent walks last week. Uh, I thought it was a really good way to just kind of get feet on the ground talking about ways we can deter but and I think a big and I tried to point this out too at the time big thing that we you know we can we can get poisons, we can get birth [clears throat] control, we can we can do everything in the world but it only takes one person in the neighborhood to just create a harborage, right? And it's not necessarily about going to that neighbor's house, knocking on their door, telling them that the wor they're the worst person in the world and you better clean this up. You don't know their situation. They may need some help. And all it could take is just like, you know, a knock on the door and like, "Hey, can I clean up that brush for you?" Or, "Hey, you know, let's let's figure some stuff out." Um, because I don't think anybody wants rats. Uh, so I think that's as much as we can do in our power to, you know, battle this scourge of our streets. Um, a big chunk of that is going to take all of us being on board. So, I just wanted to say that. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other alder person's reports? All right. Seeing none, we'll move on to part or section I. Alderman Hos. All right.

Second. We have a motion. We have a second. If there are no corrections or changes, all in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Eyes have it. The minutes are approved. Item J, standing committee reports. We have none. So, we will move right to item K. Mayor Divine. Alderman Hos, you're back. I am. And do any older persons wish for separate action on any of the items in our consent agenda? Then seeing none, I move for approval of item K, our consent agenda. Second. Have a motion and a second. If there is no discussion, I will ask the clerk to call the role. Alder personel. I. Gisham. I. Gro. I. Hos. I. Halverson. I.

Keane. Hi. Noling. I wrote I Turner I nine in favor zero opposed. Motion carries. Mayor Divine. Alderman Hos. I move that the council stand in recess until the conclusion of our committee meetings. Second. We have a motion. We have a second. All in favor? I. Any opposed? We are in recess.

Good evening. We'll call the council back to order and I will ask our clerk to take a role. Alder person Wel here. Gisham here. Grove here. Hos here. Halverson here. Keane here. Noling here. Roach here. Turner here. Nine present. We have a quorum. Thank you. We will begin with the administration committee and I'll ask the clerk to tell me that we don't have anything for admin and then we'll go right to the public works committee. That's right. That was discussion. Yes. The public works committee recommends adoption of items 19 and also 20. Mayor Divine, I move in accordance of the committee report.

Thank you, Alderman. Any discussion on those items on that report? If not, I will ask the clerk to call the role. All the person wiggle I. Gisham I. Gro I. Hos I. Halverson. I. Keen. I. Noling. I. Roach. I. Turner. I. Nine in favor. Zero opposed. Motion carries. Next we'll go to the economic development committee. I will read out item 21 separately. Um the economic development committee recommends granting as amended um by committee of item 21. Um Mayor Divine.

Yes. I would like to uh make a motion to amend the hours uh to also reflect New Year's Eve um being allowed to be open at 8:00 p.m. into New Year's Day until 1:00 a.m. along with the same other hours of conditions that we talked about within the committee. Second. Second. There is a motion and a second. Is there any other discussion? If not, I'll ask the cler to call the role. Other person. Wiggle. Hi. Gisham. Hi. Grow. Hi. H. Hi. Hson. Hi. Keane. Hi. Noling. Hi. Roach. Hi. Turner. I. Nine in favor. Zero opposed. Motion carries.

The economic development committee recommends adopting adoption of item 22. Mayor Divine. I move in accordance with the committee report. Okay. We have a motion. Is uh there any discussion on that item? If not, I'll ask the clerk to call the role. All the person Wel I. Gisham. I Grove. Hi. Hi. Hson. Hi. Keane. Hi. Nolan. Hi. Roach. Hi. Turner. I. Nine in favor. Zero opposed.

Motion carries. It's our first uh approval of an agreement to sell donated hyo hydrocarbon interests ever. Record-breaking evening. Now we'll move on to the public safety committee. The public safety recommends adoption of item 23. Mayor Divine, I move for approval of the public safety committee report. Thank you. Is any discussion? If not, I will ask the clerk to call the role. Other person Wel. Gisham. Hi. Gro. I. Hus. I. Halverson. I. Keane. Hi. Noling. Hi. Roach. Hi. Turner. Hi. Nine in favor. Zero opposed. Motion carries. Mayor Divine.

Alderman Hos. I move that the council stand adjourned until our next scheduled meeting which is one week from today and that's Tuesday, November 11th, 2025. Second. We have a motion. We have a second.