City Council - Regular Meeting

Good morning, Wichita, and good morning to all of you. Thank you for joining us for this week's City Council meeting. I'll call this meeting to order. With us this morning is Worship Pastor John Waters of Believer Southern Baptist Church to provide our invocation. Following the invocation, we will have the Pledge of Allegiance, and we ask you please stand for both.

Psalm 33, 12 says, Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people he has chosen for his own inheritance. Would you pray with me? Lord, you tell us to pray for those in authority over us. You do not tell us to always agree with those we pray for, but we are tasked to pray for them and for this great nation. We come today to pray specifically for Lily and Joseph and Becky and Mike, Dalton, JV, and Maggie. We are thankful for their service to Wichita. We are thankful for their leadership. We pray for their safety and the safety of their families and a blessing over all of them. I pray that the business that takes place does so with a positive environment for all that speak today. I pray that all is done and it would honor the city of Wichita, but more importantly, honor you today. We come before you asking that you reveal your will and your way and that we have the courage and capacity to follow it. We thank you for your son, Jesus Christ, and it's in his name that we pray. Amen.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, Thank you. Worship pastor. I just wanted to take a moment of privilege and recognize Wichita park and recreation and various staff members, including the Wichita police department for hosting the various soccer watch parties at NASCAR park. We really appreciate that you brought our community together to watch the USA and Mexico games. Madam Mayor, can you please call the first item?

Approve the minutes of the regular meeting June 23rd, 2026.

Council members, any edits to those minutes? I see none. With that, I will move to approve the minutes for regular meeting June 23rd, 2026. Second. Motion second. Discussion? See none. Madam Clerk, please open the roll.

Aye. Aye.

All those in favor say aye. Motion passes 7-0. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Awards and proclamations. Today's proclamations are Jackson Mortuary Day, CASA Voices for Children Month, and Elder Queen Janet Marie Clay Diggs Day.

May I please ask Councilmember Joseph Shepard to come forward? May I please ask Jackson Mortuary and its supporters to come forward at this time?

As they're coming forward, thank you, Mayor, for the opportunity to read this proclamation. It reads, Proclamation of the City of Wichita, founded in 1870. Whereas in 1926, Jackson Mortuary was established in Wichita, Kansas, and for 100 years has provided compassionate, dignified, and professional funeral services to families throughout Wichita and the surrounding region. And whereas Jackson's Mortuary has served as a trusted institution within Wichita's historic African-American community, helping generations of families celebrate lives, honor legacies, and navigate moments of grief, with care respect and excellence and whereas beyond its role as a funeral service provider jackson mortuary has contributed to the social civic and economic vitality of district one and the city of wichita through community engagement support of local organizations and a steadfast commitment to service and now therefore be it resolved that the wichita city council does hereby proclaim July 10th, 2026, the 100th anniversary of Jackson Mortuary as Jackson Mortuary Day, signed by the Mayor of Wichita, Kansas, Mayor Lily Wu.

I'd just like to say thank you to the city, those who voted for our proclamation to be produced and presented to us on today. We started just down here in the 600 block on Main. And that was an ambulance and a funeral home combined. And we found out that we needed to expand. So we went one block over to 701 Water Street. And that building was there until 1965. Thank you for the five generations that have participated. I brought the fifth one with me, my son. And he is licensed and ready to go.

Yeah, thank you so much.

There are a lot of people that are really appreciating that in our family, thank you, and in the community. Yes ma'am, yes ma'am.

May I please ask CASA of Cedric County and its supporters to come forward at this time? The proclamation reads, the city of Wichita, Kansas, founded in 1870, whereas CASA of Sedgwick County has dedicated 45 years to advocating for children in Sedgwick County who have experienced abuse and neglect, ensuring their voices are heard in court and in the community. Whereas trained court-appointed special advocates, or CASA volunteers, are appointed by judges to advocate for the best interests of children in foster care, providing consistent support and helping them move forward safe with permanent housing. Whereas children who have experienced abuse and neglect benefit from the presence of a caring, committed adult who speaks up for their needs, well-being, and future. Whereas increasing community awareness and support is essential to ensuring that every child who has experienced abuse or neglect has a dedicated advocate by their side. Now therefore be it resolved that the Wichita City Council does hereby proclaim July 2026 as CASA Voices for Children Month.

Good morning. I would like to say on behalf of CASA of Sedgwick County, thank you to the mayor and city council members for proclaiming July as CASA Voices for Children Month as we celebrate our 45th anniversary. Since beginning our partnership with the court on July 1st, 1981, CASA of Sedgwick County has provided trained and caring court-appointed special advocates to more than 3,000 children and youth, experiencing foster care in the child welfare systems. This anniversary is not only a celebration of our history, but also a reminder of the work that remains. Every child deserves the opportunity to grow up in a safe and stable permanent home, and every child deserves to have a caring and consistent adult in their life who ensures that their voice is heard and their best interests are represented. We are deeply grateful for the support of our community, including our dedicated volunteers, donors, partners, and local leaders, such as the city council, who help make this mission possible. Together, we are building stronger community by investing in the children who will shape its future. Thank you for this meaningful recognition and for standing with CASA as a voice for children.

May I please ask Councilmember Joseph Shepard and the African American Council of Elders of South Central Kansas to come forward at this time.

Thank you, Mayor. The proclamation reads, Proclamation of the City of Wichita, Kansas, founded in 1870. Whereas the African American Council of Elders, South Central Kansas, a leading community advocacy organization for the last 25 years, gather with profound gratitude and reverence to honor the extraordinary life and legacy of elder Queen Mother Janet Marie Clay Diggs. And whereas she dedicated her professional career to her role as director of Head Start, migrant education, and childcare education throughout Kansas, with a later professional focus on social work and senior care resources. And whereas she was a respected member of the African American Council of Elders, serving with unwavering commitment, wisdom, and dignity, whose work and support for the arrival of students and families from the African Dysphoria has resulted in doctors and diplomats from various countries, such as The Gambia and Nigeria. And whereas the African American Council of Elders celebrates this life with the calling of her name as an ancestor at all council events for this mother, sister, friend, and pillar of strength in our community, who is deeply loved for her selflessness, her integrity, and advocacy, And now, therefore, be it resolved that the Wichita City Council does hereby proclaim July 6, 2026, a day honoring the life and work of Elder Queen Mother Clay Diggs as Elder Queen Mother Janet Marie Clay Diggs Day. Signed by Mayor Lily Wu.

Good morning, everyone. On behalf of my brother, my family, and my mother, Queen Mother Janet Clay Diggs, we are deeply honored to accept this proclamation and grateful to the city of Wichita and the African American Council of Elders, whom my mother deeply loved, and everyone who has helped celebrate her life and legacy. If my mother was standing here today, she would probably say, put love and light around everyone and all things. And we are deeply honored that these words are part of her legacy and continue to bless Wichita. And thank you so much.

Madam Clerk, can you please call the award?

2026 west galleon cornerstone award winner bob cook i'm been in business for 52 years i started in the concrete business doing concrete flat work when i was 21 i was fortunate enough to work for some good people growing up and by the time i was 21 i already had enough Work going on after work, I could make a career out of it. I built my first home for sale in 1978, out in the old Springdale Lakes. And over time, I'd take an occasional job here and there building a custom home for somebody. As I got into my 50s, John Smith, Deferred Properties, was instrumental in talking to me. He saw me working out on the job every day. I always saw John out there at daylight. And I'd be out there too. From there, it kind of just taken off. And I feel blessed that I'm still out here working 52 years later. And God's been good to me. I can tell you, Wes Galyon was a huge help to me. Early on, I got into a situation Wes intermediated in that. It helped get me through it. One of the funnest things I got to do was Extreme Makeover Home. I really enjoyed that experience. It was a lot of work. I got to meet some really exciting people. And I remember I was really nervous about the whole project going into it, but I just kept concentrating on the fact that a deserving family was going to get a home.

I can't even think.

She cries a lot. So glad we could do this for you. And of course, we're going to have a lot of help, including one person who is leading the charge this week. And I'm talking about our builder, Bob Cook with Bob Cook Homes. Bob, come on in.

You spent your life serving other people, stepping up to the plate time and again to help people build their dreams. Bob Cook Homes is going to step forward and help you build a new dream. We're going to build you a new home. God bless you. I appreciate it, Bob. Thank you. And I was going to get my input into it to make sure that it was going to be done correctly. It was kind of fun educating California people about Kansas. Coming back to me means trying to be an example for any young people I'm working around. have to give because people have given to me over the years. I don't know what I've done without some of the mentors I've had over the years. And so it was like the Wichita Builders Association. I don't know how you could not be a member of this organization if you're going to be in the building business in Wichita. I like to push. I like to see at the end of the day the fruits of my labors. I really enjoy working with some of the subcontractors and making them understand that it's not just a job they're working at, they're actually creating something that somebody is making the biggest purchase of their life and they have a certain set of expectations, we have to meet those expectations. And if they're gonna work for me, that's what I'm gonna have. But that's what a custom home builder does. He has to be able to create the dreams that are brought to him.

Thank you City Manager for helping recognize the various winners in our community. For the last few weeks we've honored the Chamber Awards recipients and today we are honoring the winner of this year's West Galleon Cornerstone Award. There were two other finalists, Brandon Salisbury and Eric Gilbert. And Bob Cook won that award this year. And so for a point of privilege, I know that Tyler York is here representing WABA, and he would like to say a few words.

Good morning. Thank you, City of Wichita. Thank you, Mayor Wu, City Council, City Manager, and staff for allowing this opportunity to shine a spotlight on the Wichita Area Builders Association, otherwise known as WABA. My name is Tyler York and I have the honor of working for the association. WABA has proudly represented the residential construction industry across South Central Kansas since 1951. Our organization's membership includes home builders, remodelers, developers, subcontractors, suppliers, lenders, insurers, real estate professionals, and many others who share a common goal of building strong communities through quality housing. Our mission is to advance the American dream of home ownership by advocating for attainable housing, supporting a skilled workforce, promoting professionalism within our industry, and serving as a trusted resource for both our members and the public. We believe that when housing is attainable, communities become stronger, local economies grow, and families have a greater opportunity to succeed. This year in particular, 2026, is especially meaningful for us. It's our organization's 75th anniversary. We have a few more years to go before we hit 100 Jackson Mortuary, but we're catching up. For three quarters of a century, WABA members have helped shape the neighborhoods that make Wichita such a great place to live, work, and raise a family. And for 40 of those years, WABA was led by my predecessor, the highly esteemed Wesley Gallion. We kicked off the beginning of this year by celebrating Wes's well-earned retirement, which included naming our office building after him, the Wesley E. Gallion Building, located just up the street at 730 North Main. Tragically, just a month and a half after his retirement, Wes passed away following a brief and sudden illness. The Wawa community continues to mourn the loss of such a nationally renowned titan in the home building industry. Every year since 1978, WABA members nominate and eventually select one member typically but not limited to a local home builder to become the annual Cornerstone Award honoree and earn their name and face on the wall of our Grand Hall. This Lifetime Achievement Award, recently renamed the West Galleon Cornerstone Award, is our association's highest honor, and it recognizes individuals whose leadership and integrity as well as celebrate their contributions within WABA, as well as their contributions within the greater Wichita community. At the end of April, more than 400 of our members, colleagues, and spouses, and some of you on the council, gathered to celebrate WABA's 75th anniversary at a banquet where our Cornerstone Committee Chairman, Larry Chadwick of Core North, who's here with me today, helped unveil this year's winner, Bob Cook, who you just learned a little bit about through that video. Bob has enjoyed a nearly 53-year career in the construction business, first as a concrete and flat worker before building his first home in the 1970s. Bob regrets that he was unable to attend today as he had prior commitments. When I called him recently and asked if he could be here today, Bob responded with his classic sense of dry humor as he shouted into the phone, tell him I'm out on the job site getting some work done. The Wichita Area Builders Association appreciates the partnership that we've enjoyed with the city of Wichita over the years and look forward to continuing our work together to address housing affordability, expand housing opportunities, and ensure Wichita remains a community where families of all income levels can achieve the American dream of home ownership. Thank you once again for your time this morning, and thanks to each of you, mayor and city council members, for your service to our community.

Thank you, Tyler. And again, thank you, City Manager. I encourage anyone who has well-produced videos that were at awards banquets to send them to the City Council for recognition during the awards section of our agenda. With that, Madam Clerk, can you please call the next item?

From the city's recently adopted civility pledge, the city council is committed to promoting civility. They stand united, they lead with respect and dignity, and they honor every resident in all communities. They are working to create an environment that values shared goals with increased empathy and genuine dialogue. We now come to public agenda. The public agenda allows for up to five speakers to have five minutes each to address the council. Please bear in mind that this is not a period of dialogue with council or a question and answer period. This is your opportunity to address the city council with your concerns. I ask that you address your remarks to the city council as a body and not to any individual council member. No action will be taken relative to items on the public agenda other than referral to the city manager as necessary. Speakers will please speak into the microphone. Please state their name and address for the record. A time clock will display the speaker's remaining time to speak. Order and rules of decorum will be observed. The first speaker today is Lauren Hirsch, Stewardship of Wichita Libraries.

Good morning. Thank you for having me here and for giving us the opportunity to speak with you. My name is Lauren Hirsch. I'm at 8101 East Linwood Street and I'm here again as I was last year as a representative of the Wichita Public Library Board of Directors. I want to share with you about our library system and of course I have a request that the city budget reflect the importance of this public service. The city of Wichita has adopted literacy as a pillar of the future. It's an investment that's not only to nourish our individuals within the city, but also to instill a future that allows people to develop the skills and the inspiration so that they can be great Wichitans into the future. I'd like to believe that the libraries in Wichita had a meaningful impact on me as a young Wichitan that chose to stay here as a young professional. And I know many of you have the same experience. Literacy development early in life is a better investment than repairing a person later. The libraries not only provide family support and learning experiences for children before their school years and throughout, but into adulthood as people learn new skills, seek information, receive hands-on guidance from librarians and others that can truly help them face to face, and for families to enrich their children. Let's protect the investment that the city and the citizens have already made. Last year, we reached a strategic milestone, a refresh and redesign of several branches, but an undelivered promise remains. When this strategic plan was adopted over 10 years ago, it was understood that with an investment in venues, in programming, in a lot of the things that people know and love about our libraries, that it be matched with a, not dollar for dollar, but that there would also be a parallel investment in staffing. A fact that I'd like you to know is that I am older than 40 years old and the library staff rate has not increased in my lifetime. Wichita Public Libraries have been serving more people, innovating, reaching out, looking at better communication, really, really changing the way that libraries serve our community, yet the people that really make that happen, not the structure, not the processes, all of those things need to be excellent and reinvented frequently, but it's our librarians and our staff that do that. And now I'm asking that the City Council empower the city manager to make a $1.4 million increased investment in our library so that we can properly staff the beautiful buildings that we have and that we don't see any decline or further decline, I might say, in morale and in our ability to keep our staff members safe. I mentioned to you a year ago that if there were the cuts that we were thinking we were going to need to make at that time, it would have a dramatic effect on the library system. I have watched them innovate in my years on the board. I have watched them actually take bureaucracy and turn it on its head and do some really, really creative and effective work. I actually, on behalf of the board, we asked the library director to bring you a proposal that would actually cost $4 million because that's what we know it would take for the libraries to be able to be the foundation of literacy and help parallel with the school system and serve children and families before they even get to school. The libraries are the way that this city makes a difference in early childhood literacy. And right now our staffing is underdeveloped and has been for decades. I know that with a $4 million investment, they could create amazing things that you would love to brag about. I have all the confidence in that after what I've seen, that every dollar would be well spent. Obviously, we appreciate how big the budget process is. And thank you for not rolling your eyes at me when I suggested $4 million. But that is the number that we need. I'm asking that you can allot $1.4 million this year because that's what it will take to keep our current library hours at all of the branches as we have them now. Otherwise, we're operating at a 25% staffing deficit and the hours will have to be reduced in order to keep staff safe. We're at that point now. Thank you.

Thank you, Lauren. Madam Clerk, please call the next individual.

Martin Mork, property at 716 North Elder.

Martin Mork. Madam Clerk, please call the next individual.

Timothy Mork, property at 716 North Elder.

Timothy Mork. Madam Clerk, please call the next individual.

Marsha Brown, fireworks.

Give my little notes here and my reading glasses. Good morning. My name is Marcia Brown. I'm a resident of the moorings on Crystal Lake, which is in District 6. My address is 2819 West Mill Road Circle. I want to thank Mayor Lily Wu, the city council members, and the city manager and the staff for allowing me to speak today. I am here today to let my voice be heard and to request that you consider making some changes in the current Wichita City Council's fireworks ordinance, specifically related to the late night times currently allowed, June 27th through June 5th, 10 a.m. to midnight. I have done a little research and reading and overall I do believe, as I agree, that local community polls and sentiments support reasonable 10 p.m. to midnight curfews for nighttime fireworks on July 4th. We all love. the fireworks displays and celebrating our country for sure. But the prolonged erratic bursts of late night fireworks over the span of a full week is a nuisance and invasion of peace, especially right at bedtime. Let us not forget the elderly, veterans, children, and their working parents whose sleep schedules are disrupted and other issues caused by these loud really explosives. And many animals, of course, are literally tormented by the loud noises. So I'm here today to ask you to discuss and seriously consider the possibility of minor changes to what is currently allowed. And the following changes, in my opinion, could be easily made and would be much more acceptable to the majority and would not infringe upon anyone's rights. It wouldn't affect the commercial aspect of those selling fireworks either. I realize how huge the sale of fireworks is. It's a big deal for a lot of people and organizations. So this is my proposal for your consideration. I believe most people would prefer the dates to be July 1st through the 5th. But if it must remain a week-long event, consider changing the time to 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., not midnight. Every night for a week is a lot. And continue with the Wichita City Fire Department's recommendation allowing aerial fireworks July 3rd through 5th, 10 a.m. to midnight. I do find it hard to understand the many different fireworks stands that are allowed to sell the aerial fireworks and other fireworks that are not authorized as sane and safe upon opening their stands on June 7th when that type of fireworks are only to be set off July 3rd through 5th, not beginning June 27th. And that is definitely happening, and I realize people get some of those really strong, powerful fireworks out of the city, out of the state, perhaps. But basically, these are the points of concern, and those same sentiments I know I share with a lot of my fellow neighbors, and proven to be the majority of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens. I agree with that. So I do thank you for listening to and allowing me to offer possibilities for a more agreeable celebration of the greatest country, the USA, and the city I love, Wichita, Kansas. Thank you very much. Thank you, Marcia.

Madam Clerk, are there any other individuals?

No, ma'am.

This means that there are three spots for anyone in this audience who would like to address the council. I see none. I'm going to bring it back to the bench. Council Member Hohheisel.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Marcia, for showing up today. We will discuss this at the next Fireworks Committee meeting and see if that's something we would like to pursue. So I do appreciate you coming and expressing yourself today in a very kind and gracious manner. Thank you, Mayor.

Madam Clerk, please call the next item. Consent Agenda Items 1 through 24.

Council members, are there any items to be pulled? I see none. I move to approve consent agenda items in full.

Second.

Motion second. Discussion? See none. Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Who's missing? Motion passes 7-0. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Board of Bids and Contracts, dated July 6, 2026.

Good morning, Mayor, City Council, Josh Lauber, Department of Finance. The Board of Bids and Contracts convened yesterday, July 6, 2026, for the following items. For engineering, we have the Southeast Booster Pump Station Variable Frequency Drive Upgrade for Donlinger & Sons Construction Company Incorporated for $827,700. We have the Chester I. Lewis Reflection Square Park Utility Modifications for Phillips Southern Electric Company Incorporated for $78,900. We have the water distribution system to serve Trinity Point second edition phase two for NOAC Construction Company Incorporated for $236,761.10. We have the storm water drain number 552 and sanitary sewer improvements for Cedar View Village second edition rebid for NOAC Construction Company Incorporated for an aggregate bid total of $162,233.80. We have the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement Year Two of Three for SHI International Corporation for $1,323,643.01. We have the Smartsheet Work and Project Management System Software for Smartsheet Incorporated for $58,860.00. We have the Laserfish Annual Software Renewal for GovernmentFrameworks.com Incorporated for $130,608.25. We have the Cisco Smart Net Hardware Maintenance and Support Renewal for Logicalis Incorporated for $159,360.94. And we have the consulting services for city safety program contract change order for IMA Incorporated requesting your authorization to extend the contract one year ending August 31st, 2027. This is how to become a vendor with the city of Wichita. And this is our purchasing calendar of small business resource events that the city is hosting or participating in. And these are open public opportunities opening on the 10th, the 17th, and August, and I'd be happy to answer any questions or recommend your approval.

Thank you, Josh. Questions for staff, beginning with Council Member Ballard. Thank you, Mayor.

Josh, could you go back to slide 13?

Certainly.

Could you just talk about change order? I feel like we see this a lot, and it was just an opportunity to share a little bit more detail.

Yes, fantastic. So change orders most commonly are for unaccounted or unforeseen circumstances in the course of a project delivery. So city staff will complete a procurement process or original authorization with the appropriate parties. So being a 50,000 and above city council instances where Like this specific instance, the contract would term at the end of August 31st. We would need to come back to you to authorize any extensions or continuing payments. In this specific instance, we're wanting to evaluate broadening or changing the scope of services. that primarily or generally can explain what a change order is and then also the mechanisms and city policy we have is administrative regulation 6.8 overseen by the city manager outlines direction for city staff how we facilitate change orders.

But it's not an opportunity for someone to give a low bid and then after they're awarded the job accidentally realize that they left out some part of the project to come back later for a change order. I hope that makes sense. It does in my mind when I'm saying it, but.

Yeah, fantastic question. So I think without trying to speak for you, I think you're referring to like change order fraud or you can refer to misrepresentation. That's a fantastic point in this industry and procurement in general. We have policies and procedures in the purchasing office that prevent firms from low bidding. Okay. to subvert that good faith process. When there are instances where you see vendors that are low bidding and then doing what's called a change order fraud, there can be actions of suspension and debarment where we say you are going to be prohibited from city opportunities for a defined period because that's not tolerated. We don't want that. The city wants overarching scope of services. You need to meet those scope of services. Please give us your lowest price.

And has the city had any issues with that that you're aware of?

I'm not aware of any change order fraud or any instances where vendors are though bidding and then changing after the fact. The most common from my personal opinion and my viewpoint that I see is that city departments are engaging services and then unforeseen circumstances occur. You'll see that a lot with engineering staff where you have utilities in the ground that you will not know that there's going to be issues or concerns that a contractor working in the middle of the field is going to come to the department and say, hey, there's a change in this process. We need to account for that. That never accounted for the bid. That's just my experiences.

OK. That's super helpful. Last question is, it seems like there's quite a few that only have one bid. So if you could just speak to how that process works and we're not just taking the only bid.

Certainly. Thank you for the great question. Thank you.

I'm done, I promise.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. Any time we talk about purchasing is great. So any time you have instances where there's a single vendor and no other bids received, you have to look really carefully at that to evaluate what's the market telling you, what's your processes telling you, is your policies appropriate in alignment with what contractors are wanting to do. Specifically, I will tell you for labor services, very technical services, you are seeing contractors that are struggling for labor. We see that nationally. We see that locally in the labor data for Bureau of Labor Statistics. We see that there are wage and inflation pressures occurring within labor. And then lastly, the other thing I would say is that we are sending nationally through our procurement portal hundreds or thousands of vendors per opportunity. So ways that you can combat those single instances is if you know a vendor, if there's a vendor reaching out to the manager's office or yourself, sending them our way. We have a small business program that we routinely are engaging vendors. We're meeting every single week. to notify through coffee, through outreach events, through partnership events, small resource partner events. We also have a list that we are aggregating from the state small business programs that we are routinely sending newsletters, we're routinely sending opportunities for how to do business with the city. So all those things combined without being wordy is ways that we can combat those single bids.

Thank you, Josh. I see no further questions from the Council. I will move to approve the Board of Bids and Contracts, dated July 6, 2026. Second. Motion, second. Discussion? Seeing none, Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Motion passes 7-0. Madam Clerk, please call the next item. Petitions for Public Improvements.

Good morning, Mayor, City Councilmembers, Paul Gunzelman, Public Works and Utilities. For the record, I have one revised petition for your consideration this morning. Signature on the petition represent 100% of the improvement districts and the petition is valid per Kansas statute. Oak tree addition located in District 4 on May 6, 2025, City Council approved paving improvements required for a new residential development. The developer has submitted a revised petition with the revised improvement district. The budget remains as previously approved. It is recommended that the City Council approve the revised petition, adopt the amending resolution, and authorize the necessary signatures. And I will stand for questions.

Thank you, Paul. Questions for staff? Seeing none, motion to approve petitions for public improvements.

Second.

Motion second. Discussion? Seeing none, Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Motion passes 7-0. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Referral of purchase of police robotic dog.

Good morning, Mayor and Council. Captain Aaron Moses from the Wichita Police Department, for the record. Here to provide an update on the police robotic dog, as we were instructed to do when the purchase for the first dog was approved in May. uh... april so on april seventh which the city council approved the initiation of project funding for the purchase of one spot robotic dog from radio and we were instructed to return today data and policy updates to determine if a second robotic dog was needed The first robotic dog was delivered to WPD in late May, and our staff received about a one-hour familiarization training. However, Radico has been activated and heavily involved in safety services for FIFA 2026 across the country with the use of spot robotic dogs to do that, which has delayed our ability to have full in-person training for the robotic dog. which means we haven't been able to get that data that you have requested. So we believe it is in everybody's best interest to delay this item until January so we can provide additional data for you when we come back. No financial considerations at this point. The Law Department has reviewed and approved this proposed action, and our recommendation is that due to the expected timing of collection for the performance data, that we defer this item until January of 2027 and include it in the 2027 CIP. Happy to stand for any questions that you have.

Thank you, Captain Moses. Questions for staff? See none. We will open it up for public comment. See none. Bring it back to the bench. With that, I will move to defer this item to the January 19, 2027 City Council meeting.

Second.

Motion second. Discussion? See none. Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Motion passes 7-0. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Public hearing and requests for letter of intent to issue industrial revenue bonds for the Child Advocacy Center of Sedgwick County, Kansas, Incorporated.

Good morning, Mayor and City Council. Leah Sisco with Development Services. The item before you this morning is a public hearing and request for a letter of intent to issue industrial revenue bonds for the Child Advocacy Center of Sedgwick County. The CAC is a nationally accredited nonprofit that serves children and families throughout Sedgwick County who have experienced abuse, neglect, violence, or trauma. The CAC's model is to, rather than require families to navigate multiple agencies during an incredibly difficult time, the center brings those partners together. That includes law enforcement, child protective services, medical providers, prosecutors, victim advocates, and mental health professionals. They are all working collaboratively to provide trauma-informed services. The proposed project includes construction of a 23,000 square foot addition, and that also includes renovation of approximately 6,000 square feet of the existing facility, which is located at 1211 South Emporia. And this is not the first time we've heard of this project. In March of 2024, City Council actually approved a one-time $2 million contribution from the city's ARPA allocation to help fund this expansion. Improvements include expanded therapy space, more workspace for partner agencies, enhanced family support areas, security and accessibility improvements, utility upgrades, and other site improvements. Ultimately, the project will increase access to services, reduce wait times, better meet growing demand, and improve coordination and efficiency among those partner agencies. The organization is requesting a letter of intent for industrial revenue bonds in an amount not to exceed $14 million. And as a nonprofit, the CAC is generally exempt from property taxes. So this request is for a sales tax exemption only. And that would be on eligible construction materials associated with the renovation and expansion. The estimated value of the sales tax exemption is approximately $385,000, with the city's share estimated at approximately $28,875. As a reminder, IRBs are a mechanism for achieving a sales tax exemption and or property tax abatement. The city is not lending any money and bears no risk. The organization is responsible for securing its own financing, and no taxpayer dollars are at risk. From a financial standpoint, the applicant will pay all costs associated with issuing the bonds. That includes the city's annual origination fee for the duration of the bond term. The bonds themselves will be privately purchased by the CAC or related entity. Bond documents will be prepared by the city's bond council with review and approval by the city's law department prior to issuance. And so it is staff's recommendation to close the public hearing, adopt the resolution, and authorize the necessary signatures. I am happy to stand for questions. I'll let you know that we also have the CEO of the CAC, Diane Shun, available to take any questions you may have as well.

Thank you, Leah. Questions for staff? I see none. I will allow the CEO, Diana Shun, just to share the importance of the work that is being done at the CAC.

Good morning. Great to see you all again. Thank you so much for your time to be able to look at this important endeavor for us. Obviously, as we move forward in our capital campaign, we're excited that we're about $9 million into our $14 million comprehensive capital campaign goal. You have obviously significantly already contributed to this. This allows us the opportunity to be able to really expand our services, specifically in our therapy department, but all of our departments will have the opportunity to expand and grow. And this is a great opportunity for us to be able to really incorporate additional services that are needed for the children that we serve. More than 2,000 children each year come through the child advocacy center in and need of services and so this opportunity gives us the ability to be able to really take a look at what additional services might be needed and opportunities for growth in the future. So your support is greatly appreciated and obviously any dollars that we can save from a tax standpoint, they can allow us to be able to incorporate that into the building project itself.

Thank you, Diane. Thank you. I see no further questions. Council Member Johnston.

Thank you, Mayor. Diane, thank you very much. Great work you do. Fully support it. Can you talk about, I believe you received a Maybe Foundation grant? We did, yes. Can you talk about the timeline of terms of that grant and importance of matching those funds?

Yeah, the Maybe Foundation grant is an opportunity that is a match grant for us. So we have an opportunity for a one-year time frame, so until March of next year, to be able to raise the additional funds that we need to be able to receive that $1.88 million from the Maybe Foundation. So our original goal was $3.2 million to be able to raise that. So you finish the remainder of your campaign, basically, in order to be able to receive that matching grant. contribution. So we're well into those efforts, but we certainly are continuing to reach out to the community and any individuals that might be interested in supporting children who have, when they have experienced abuse, to be able to help us meet this challenging, this challenge grant. So yes, and it's extremely important opportunity for us, but a lot of hard work that yet is yet to remain.

Thank you very much and I'd like to encourage anyone in the community that has the ability to give to you to please do so very soon.

Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate your support.

Thank you, Diane. And thank you again for hosting the Exploited and Missing Child Unit Executive Board Meetings at the CAC in which I'm a member of. Thank you.

Absolutely. And we appreciate your participation.

Thank you for your time. With that, we will open it up for public comment. We'll bring it back to the bench. This resides in Councilmember Hoheisel's district.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you to the Child Advocacy Center for all that you do. I fully encourage anybody to go take a tour there and see the great work they do. It's very unfortunate that you have to exist, but I am so grateful that you do exist, and it really sobers us up. A lot of times we put up with some foolishness up here, some things that quite frankly are not as consequential as other decisions that we make. And I'm always struck by the room that you have with the backpacks and the kids that you send home with some of the kids and just how important your work really is to our community. So thank you for all that you do and please consider us an ally every single time that you guys need anything. Also, it's at my former elementary school, so anytime I take a tour, I get a cold chill. Every time I walk by the principal's office, I'm a regular attendee there. But in all seriousness, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for all that you do. And with that, I would recommend that we close the public hearing, adopt the resolution, and authorize the necessary signatures.

Second.

Motion second. Discussion? See none. Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Motion passes 7-0. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Public hearings considering the establishment of a community improvement district and development agreement for 3109 and 3111 East Douglas.

Good morning. Corey Knisely with Development Services. You know, so this item was heard on June 9 to call for today's public comment. You know, this item is for a CID that is at the property of 3109 and 311 East Douglas. So getting into the presentation, you know, Maple Ridge Boys is proposing for the construction or for the rehabilitation of the former, you know, for the former, you know, for the former, you know, College of Barbershop and the, and the cantina there that is located at 3109 and 311 Douglas. This project will consist of some facade changes and some changes to the interior and some of the exterior. The investment will be about $1.5 million. So getting into some of our CID, You know a CID is probably one of the many tools that we have in our toolbox. You know the CID just allows for a self-imposed you know, sales tax up to a 3% for the district. And the monies that are collected from those sales will be given back to a cost cap here for this project. It would be $233,250, you know, back to Maple on a pay-as-you-go basis. And the CID, we'll have a 1% sales tax. That is only, you know, just like, part of that district. And so then for places, for businesses that are outside of the district, they would not see that 1% sales tax. The term of the CID would be for 22 years or until that cost cap is reached. There is no risk to the city and there is no risk to like the taxpayers for this project. So I want to take the moment to kind of talk about some of our procedures that we do for CIDs. Once the project is complete, staff will send, you know, all of the documents to KDOR to to establish the CID sales tax for that district. For the DA, the sales tax will begin in Q4 of 2027 or I believe 90 days after the developer asks. Say if the project gets done you know, sooner. Then the businesses will, you know, will have that sales tax and then send it off to K-Door, and then the city will pay back the developer to that cost gap, you know, and we will check with bond council and finance staff to make sure, you know, that all those payments that the developer did, you know, are statutory, you know, permitted. For compliance, we will work with our partners at K-Door for any potential collection problems. And then the businesses are supposed to post signs for the CID district showing that this project was made viable because of the CID. And staff also has all of the CIDs you know, on our city page. And so with that, you know, I ask that city council close the public hearing, you know, approve the DA and place the document on second, you know, on second, you know, on second, you know, on second, reading and authorize the necessary signatures. I will ask if it's allowable, the developers do have a presentation, so before questions, may we have the developers come up and give that presentation, if that's all right with you guys?

Yes.

Good morning, Council. This is a brief presentation that just outlines the project. So I'm sure many people are familiar with the building here, the former Margarita's Cantina. We are investing in really bringing it up to a building that can host new businesses that serve the community in a growing, you know, the East Douglas corridor where, you know, there's a lot of growth and we want to see more businesses thrive. The investment is $1.5 million, at least, and we will fund the whole project. The 1% sales tax will obviously be, as Corey said, just for the businesses within that district. There's a budget there of the approximate numbers that we'll be looking at for the building acquisition, the facade, mechanical, tenant improvements, interior, and design and soft costs. And these are some conceptual renderings of what we think the building could look like. We really want to, you know, in that area, I live in this district. It's a great place. There are a lot of beautiful old buildings that we want to really enhance and bring out some of that character. And, you know, you can see kind of in this Art Deco style rendering Obviously, it will be dependent on the tenants on what it eventually looks like, but you can see there's kind of three storefronts there. The project timeline, obviously here looking to get the agreement in place. We'll begin construction as soon as we're able, complete the renovation, and then welcome new tenants to the district. Thank you.

Thank you for the presentation, Corey and the developer. We will now have Councilmember questions, beginning with Councilmember Hohaisel.

Thank you, Mayor. To the applicant, signs is one of the main things that we have faced, signage not being posted about this. Where do you plan on putting signs to let everybody know that it is a CID?

Of course. There will be signs on the exterior entrances of all the businesses. So if there's three businesses on the front, there would obviously be signs at each entrance. And then there's a side entrance for those that have been to Margaritas. That side entrance, there would definitely be signage there. And if additional signage is requested, we could certainly accommodate that.

And the 10%, there's a 10% set aside for public good. Has that been identified yet?

We have met with our district rep, Joseph Shepard, about some ideas. As you know, this is not an enormous project. So 10% of approximately $233,000 Over, you know, obviously it's a 22-year project, but most likely the payback will be in 7 to 10 years. So over the next handful of years, as those funds start to roll in, we would love to work with our district rep to find a good project for that. That $23,000, that being said, it is fully up to the city to do what they want with those funds as far as putting that in a related project in the area. I know Corey can speak more to that, but we're obviously happy to see that. And living in the district, I know that there's a lot of good opportunities there.

Okay, and the facade you said was $345,000 that you plan on investing in the facade? That's correct. Okay, and this is a program that we did adapt the CIDs to cover the facade improvements, and that way the city would stop taking on debt for facade improvements. That is something that I think we will be covering more in as we redesign some of our economic development tools in the near future. city manager, do we have any timeline for getting the EcoDevo position or having that workshop on looking at some of these incentives?

We have a council workshop scheduled in September, so not sure how heavy that will be, but we should have a new economic development director on by the end of September.

Okay, I appreciate that. That's all I have for now. But Corey, could you please talk a little more about the 10% set aside and how that works? We just take that money and put it towards, I know with one of the CIDs we have in South Wichita, it's bus stops, covered bus stops near the area.

Yeah, so that 10% is really just to show that public-private partnership. We will, you know, once funds come in, you know, we will take that 10%, you know, and then we will hold it off in a, you know, in a side account, you know, just for that, like, when a project does come online, kind of near the district, then those funds could be used to help support that project. And some other CIDs have used that for streets, sidewalks, parks. So it's pretty broad range, but it has to be close to the district. Okay, I appreciate that.

Thank you. That's all for now.

Council Member Ballard.

Thank you, Mayor. Corey, a couple questions. Is it unusual to have only two properties in the district? I know some of the other ones that we have are significantly bigger. Is this just one that's unique?

Not really, no. We have some other CIDs that just have one parcel. For instance, one that was approved this year was the Mammoth was the Mammoth Clubhouse. Then there was some other ones that were approved back in the 20 teens that were for a hotel, that were for some other, you know, you know, retail spaces as well. So if the current guidelines, if they meet some of the guidelines, then then, yeah, we will take a look to see if they are eligible for CID.

Awesome. Excuse me. Last question is, can you talk a little bit about I'm just curious why the property owner would not flex their pricing and is choosing to do a CID in place of that. So if you could just explain maybe why they're going this route instead of just increasing their prices 1%.

So I may have to defer to the developer on that.

Does my question make sense? Okay, thanks.

Thank you for your question. There's a lot of reasons, but I think, namely, trying to get that space to a place, if you've been in it recently, it needs a lot of work. It's a 1931 building, so coming up on 100 years old. to be able to keep that building, to restore it and to make it a nice place for hopefully, you know, more of a local business or something that fits the character of the area and not just have a national come in. We love our national tenants, that's great, but there's really something special going on in that area with many local businesses and deferring that amount to the patrons who choose to go there rather than adding that to the rent that a local business has to pay to try and, you know, they're making all their costs that are associated with opening maybe a restaurant or a store. This helps us try and keep that rent just a little bit lower for them. So that's the primary reason.

Thank you. Council Member Shepard.

Thank you, Mayor. Corey, can you confirm that if, to the previous council member's point, that if there was a 1% increase in prices and negating the CID, what would happen with that 10% public benefit? Would it still be an option, not using the CID?

Could you say that question again? I'm sorry.

So there's a public benefit that goes back to the, can you? If we can be respectful, I think that'd be great. The 10% public benefit that goes back after the CID has completed, if they were to avoid doing the CID and just increasing their prices, as the previous council member stated, they would no longer be eligible for that public benefit, is that correct? Yes, correct. Thank you so much. And in regards to the question related to the public benefit and how it has been used, I know that I had the opportunity to meet with the agents and there have been robust conversations with the neighborhood association and the email chain. I see a member of that neighborhood here today. I appreciate the engagement as it relates to questions and concerns. And I know that the agent is interested in working with the council member as well as the neighborhood to ensure that those dollars are going to a benefit that the neighborhood sees fit. And I know they mentioned maybe some upgrades in a park or some of those things. Again, I know that it's not an astronomical amount of money, but we definitely want to make sure that we are meeting the moment for the neighborhood and what they see fit. Corey, can you also confirm one of the major concerns that I had was drive-throughs and ensuring that a drive-through would not come into this space. Have we updated that in the developer agreement?

Yes, and I forgot to say that within my presentation, but yes, the DA is a little bit different from the DA that was presented on Thursday. In section 3.02 of the DA, it does have the prohibited use of the drive-ins.

Thank you. That was really important to the neighborhood, and so I appreciate the agents coming in and being agreeable to that as well to make sure that we are working hand-in-hand with the community I always say that businesses go into neighborhoods and residential property owners and renters are neighbors with businesses, but businesses are neighbors with those residential areas. And I think it's really important to have those robust conversations and I appreciate the fact that you all have done that. I have a question for Mark Manning. Corey, I'll take you off the hot seat. Thanks. Thanks so much for your great work. Mark, I'm specifically interested in a post that was made by Wichita Century 2. And I want to make sure that we have clarity regarding this because CID, it's a complicated thing and not everyone understands it. And I appreciate the folks in the community who do their due diligence to try to educate the public. So this post, I'm going to read it verbatim. Equity Ball Stadium Community Improvement District. This $13 million CID bond debt, debt repayment shown below, and there's a graph there, was part of the $85 million expense to build the new ball stadium. The extra 2% CID sales tax collected from merchandise and revenue sales in this area is roughly $250,000 per year. This is not nearly enough to meet annual bond payments of almost a million dollars. Who do you think will make up the difference? And remember, we had no vote on the ball stadium. We were promised by the former mayor and city council members, and it says in parentheses, Becky Tuttle is one of the remaining original members who voted on this. that hotel apartment and retail development would magically appear to pay for this i become extremely concerned in 2026 about misinformation and not having the opportunity to clarify and acknowledge when something is accurate and when something maybe needs a little bit more context and i i've now gotten to the point where i think the city needs to combat this head-on i think it's important as we're educating our community that we're clear So my question to you is, what is the risk in this arrangement to the taxpayers?

Well, council member, any time that we issue debt in a said project and by the way, this is the only said project in which we have debt, as Corey pointed out, The one that you're considering today would not incur any city debt and there would be no risk to the city. We would only remit to the developer any funds that we collected from the Department of Revenue. The stadium financing model was different. That, by the way, was set in place in 2018 whenever we signed the original development agreement with the ball club. It's actually approved a little bit later than that, but the mechanism was put in place in 2018. The city does have risk with the CID bonds. They are backed by the general obligation of the city. However, they are intended to be paid off by CID revenues generated in that district. I would tell you that we have a bond reserve set up for this district because the CID has been open longer than the debt was issued. And in fact, today we have a half a million dollars sitting in that bond reserve. I did not see the entire post. I saw a debt service schedule. That debt service schedule is accurate. In fact, that was probably obtained from the information that we put on the internet. It is true that that said district is currently generating somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000 a year. As you know, incremental revenue is based on incremental improvements in the district. We have a $100 million improvement occurring right now that should generate a substantial amount of additional CID revenue. Certainly, improvement in that district is important for a variety of reasons. But again, the model is based on incremental increases in CID sales tax revenue in the Stadium District. It's not uncommon for the SID incremental revenue to not grow as quickly as the debt service in the early years. That's very common in these type of arrangements. But it's also common that in the later years, the SID revenue far exceeds the debt service. The last thing I'd point out, Councilmember, is that the SID district has a three-year window at the end of the debt service in which there will be no debt service, but the SID will still be in place, and it's not uncommon for those three years also to be important for us to fully reimburse our costs. Yes. I don't know if that answers your question.

It does. Thank you so much. And, you know, we bring the stadium up quite a bit. And I'm one to believe that we have lots of learning moments as a city. We are no different than any other institution. We don't get everything right. But I've seen my colleagues acknowledge where we have not gotten it right and commit to doing better. So we talk about the stadium a lot and the delay. What caused that delay?

we we had some unfortunate events occur with the stadium and that was the pandemic that was obviously completely outside of our control but that certainly did not help our financial models when we had to delay the opening of the stadium by one year so that was a significant challenge that we had and you know we've had some challenges developing the area around the stadium which are well documented but the bottom line is we now have a developer that's building a hundred million dollar improvement there that will generate additional revenue and we Hope to see continued development and that increment will continue to grow probably and will be instrumental in us retiring the SID debt.

Thank you, and so you mentioned when the debt service terminates, so trying to do my math right, so if this CID is approved, it's authorized through April of 2042, is that right? Yes. Would that mean that the debt service would terminate in 2039? Yes, sir. I don't wanna think that far yet. Okay, so there will be over two years of CID collections at the end of that period. Yes, sir, that's correct. Perfect, thank you, Mark.

Mark, question for you and also a quick comment to city manager. Can we make sure that any developer agreements that are updated should be also updated on the website so the public has an opportunity to see that prior to the council meeting? That's one. Mark, the question is for you. Can you please just one more time reiterate the difference between This CID that's currently being asked versus the one back in 2018, what are the main differences between these two?

As I noted, the only SID which has debt is the Stadium SID. The other SIDs, including the one that is proposed today, are what we call pay-as-you-go SIDs. What that means is the city does not distribute one dime until that money is received from the Kansas Department of Revenue. When they send us their revenues in that district, we remit those revenues to the developer, subject to a few things like the 10% and a small administrative charge that we include. But in other words, we do not distribute any funds at all until we have those funds in the city treasury. So materially different.

Thank you. And then, can you reiterate, this is an additional 1% sales tax only in this district, and they will have to have signage that says there is an additional 1%. So across the street from them, they do not have a 1%. Yes, ma'am. So it is really up to the consumer to choose whether or not they want the additional 1%.

I would agree with that. The 1% will only be assessed within the district, which in this case is the two properties that Corey mentioned. They are required by our policy to have appropriate signage, which the developer mentioned earlier. And I would agree with you, it's a consumer's choice whether they choose to patronize these areas and whether they choose to do that subject to the additional 1% SID tax.

I sent three follow-up questions to Corey, so I'll ask those questions to Corey now. Thank you, Mark. Corey, will the additional 1% be required to be shown on a receipt?

So, you know, and thank you for those questions. So after speaking with our bond counsel and, you know, and our law department, there is no statutory, you know, I guess, requirement that will, that is in the CID Act for, to show the tax breakdown of, you know, on the, on the receipts.

So that is a state law that basically does not say that you have to point out that there's a 1% additional sales tax?

Yes, correct.

But there should be signage around the business that says there is an additional 1% if you patronize this business. Is that accurate?

Yes, correct.

The second question I have was, how much does this cost in legal fees, finance, and economic development staff time?

So that is just a little bit more complicated to kind of calculate. So with different CIDs, there are different costs that comes with it. If a business, you know, or if a, a developer wants to have more of different incentives and they are pursuing those, some of the costs may be just a little bit different. But I can say that we have a deposit of $5,000 that will go to staff time, the legal fees for our bond council, and the time spent drafting all of the documents. when the funds are sent to us from K-Door, we will assess a 5% fee for a staff time, and then we will take that 10% as well for that public benefit, and then the rest of the funds will go back to the developer once we take that five and 10%.

So again, the applicant slash developer will have to pay that fee?

Yes.

Thank you. And then the last question was, who will ensure compliance of this 1% additional sales tax?

So we will coordinate with K-Door to help solve any collection problems that may come up for the CIDs and we will work with business owners to make sure that they have compliance. The other thing as well is that if some citizens also see some compliance problems, they can call us and tell, hey, the CID may not be doing this or the CID may not be doing that. And so then we will work with our partners to figure out how can we get them back into compliance.

And I think I asked this question prior to the follow-up question. So just for the community to understand, So if these developers cannot secure a restaurant that would generate sales taxes, if there are no sales taxes, they can't get any of these dollars that would be collected. Is that accurate?

Yes, correct. You know, the risk is on them to make those businesses performed and for them to get their cost cap.

Thank you very much, Corey. This is now a note to the city manager. Moving forward, any of these CIDs that will be proposed between now and the September workshop when we have further discussion, I would like to make sure that there are timelines in there. So, for instance, a developer could just sit on something for two years, three years, or forever and not do anything about said property. I would like to see timelines so that it will spur that development sooner because, again, this is the reason why this one is in front of us is because we no longer do the facade improvement program. and this would be a facade improvement in that district. So obviously it's not looking its best in the community. So I would like to see timelines so that community can see actual improvements that are for the public good as well. Council Member Shepherd.

Thank you, Mayor. Cory, this is not the first CID that's come before us for a request this year, right?

No.

Okay.

I ask because I think many of the questions that are I just want us to remember that this is a financing tool that is available. And if we have concerns regarding our financing tools, we should be instructing our city manager to have a conversation about what parameters we wanna put around those financing tools. And I feel like a lot of this comes from the perception, unfortunately, that people have about the way the city does business. And I appreciate you standing here and answering these questions. I appreciate Mark being here and answering these questions. I've sent an email out to my colleagues and I've shared my doors always open and even offered to connect them directly with the agent because I think that that's critical as well. If they have questions to speak directly to the agent, take their word for it. The mayor asked about compliance and one of my colleagues asked about the awareness that someone is walking into a CID that may have a sales tax. we provide the signage to them, don't we? For them to place the decal outside of their business.

Yes, we do. And there are some businesses that just provide their own decal too.

Okay, so we go the extra step and say, you don't even have to worry about producing it. We will provide you with the resource to place outside of it, correct? Okay, that was the only questions I had. Thanks, Corey.

I see no further questions from the council. Thank you, Corey and the applicants, and also Mark. We will now open it up for public comment.

Thank you. Celeste Reset, Wichita native, grew up in the College Hill area. I'm a 25-year banker with work experience as an accounting manager, chief internal auditor, FDIC bank examiner, and fraud investigator. Mayor Wu, you had great questions. I really appreciate your thoroughness. Like, this contract doesn't have 3.2 in it. How am I supposed to understand the development agreement if what I get off the website is incomplete? So I don't know what the problem was with contracts on the website for today's meeting, but it's absolutely difficult for the public to know what's going on. Thank you for your question. I guess I've got a no 3.2. Okay, on to what I wanted to say. I'm appearing before you today for a no vote, and I appreciate Councilman Johnston your no vote on June 9th. This is not worthy of a CID vote. Community improvement districts, called SIDS, were created to help areas within the city to develop, to improve. For improvement, a community, a district, not one building, not one business, but a community, a district, a community improvement district. I have the community improvement district policy right here, and I can't understand why we are voting on this for 3109 East Douglas. It doesn't make sense. I read the CID policy. the proposed ordinance, I guess the outdated development agreement, but I didn't know that, with Brian Solentrop and the Maple Ridge Boys. You know what I didn't find in these documents? What public purpose is being served by the use of this CID financing? Not what you're talking about today or what you've had conversations about. The CID policy specifically states the public purpose is to be in the development agreement, and I didn't see that. So we're not following our own policy. I see a business owner who wants help with renovation costs and facade improvements by forcing his tenants to upcharge on the sales. He will be asking his tenants to add this 1% CID sales tax. The tax is not on the notices. Just want you to know that. That was misinformation given by staff. If you go to Homegrown, you'll see a typical notice that's on their trash can. All it says is it's a community improvement district. No tax is mentioned. Who determined that he needed $230,000 to renovate the building? How does this building renovation justify a special tax? And there is an expense, as you heard Corey try to figure out, was the $5,000 sufficient enough? You're going to be talking about red tape involving the collection of the tax every day, going to Topeka, Topeka doing a quarterly report, submitting that amount back to Wichita, finance department, finance staff. Then looking at receipts for the renovation, doing some sort of exchange with the check. This is red tape. There's going to be office supplies, legal staff, finance staff. I can't even imagine all of the back office support that's going to go into this red tape. Why are you getting involved in renovation? It doesn't make sense. Let's see. This building is not located in an opportunity zone. It's not in a central business district. It's not in a redevelopment area. Community improvement districts lack transparency. I have spoken numerous times in 2003, 4, and 5. I still have my speeches where I told you these districts were not being transparent. And I know some of you are new and don't know this, so I'm going to hold up specific examples to show you. MOCAs, you've heard me talk about the Delano CID MOCAs. Here's the receipt. They're not charging the tax. So I finally took it upon myself after four years of non-tax collection to call K-Door. Just recently, they are now charging the tax, but there's no notice on the building. There's no compliance. So no, city council members, there's no compliance in the CID program, and I've talked about this for at least three years. Okay. MOCAs, that's number one. There's others that do detailed tax lines, which I appreciate. But as you learned today, the statute doesn't require that. So no one will really know there's a tax being charged if there's no notice and no line item on the receipt. So this program is currently broken and needs to be fixed before you expand it. Let's see. The last thing I'll say is thank you for verifying my accuracy because I tried to be very accurate on my posts. I did do the CID debt for the ball stadium. The current receipts are insufficient for those bond payments. Let's hope the development gets up. It's running behind. I think they were supposed to start vertical construction July 1st. I haven't seen it yet, but let's hope they continue on track. End of July. Okay. So let's hope that gets up because we've given them incentives to try to boost it. Again, you've got to fix what's broken before you expand it. This does not make sense, and they are businesses currently noncompliant.

Any questions? Thank you, Celeste. Council Member Shepard.

Thank you. I actually do have a question to the speaker. Are you willing to update your post to reflect that this is actually a material difference than the stadium CID, the one being requested today?

I was talking about the stadium CID you quoted me. I said it was the bond debt for the ball stadium.

Is that a no?

Yeah, because I was accurate.

Thank you.

I didn't know you had a problem with accuracy. It's the debt for the ball standing.

Mayor, I'm reclaiming my time. I have a question for the speaker. Thank you. Are you willing to retract the information that I have shared with you over the course of three months?

There's nothing I can retract. Everything I state is accurate. That was an accurate bond statement. That was an accurate revenue that comes in. I've got the reports right here. Do you want a copy of what I get from the state to show you the revenue coming in in the ball stadium? Yes, and I would like an apology from you as well for your rudeness to me in public.

You won't get one.

Then I won't get any retractions with you, and I'm through with this discussion. Thank you.

I'm done with the speaker. Mayor, so now that I have the floor, just to be clear, it is important to be accurate, and we have conversations about this all the time. This is why I talk about the importance of making sure that we are clarifying and respecting the dignity and integrity of work with our staff. And when we choose to allow nonprofit organizations or individuals to put information out that is not accurate, it harms the work of our staff. We have not always gotten it right. We do get it wrong sometimes, and we need to be held accountable for that. But in August of 2025, the Sports Academy was cleared of the overcharging of sales tax claims. That's a great example of sometimes how we allow folks to come forward and say things that are not accurate. And then it leads to this big assumption that creates more work for our staff. So moving forward, Mayor, I would like to ask a couple of questions to Corey. And you may not know this question, Corey, and that's okay. The previous speaker mentioned that this CID is not in an opportunity zone. Have we approved CIDs that are not in opportunity zones in the past?

Yes.

Thank you. I have no more questions, Mayor.

Council Member Tuttle.

Thank you. I did not have questions, but now I just have a few clarifying questions. But before that, Corey, thank you. You've done a great job in this. I really appreciate it. You are a great management fellow. I know you're just doing a fantastic job of stepping into this role, so thank you for all you do. I think most of my questions are for Mark, Director of Finance, but Corey, stay on deck just in case we need you, okay? And this may be a query question, but Mark, I know that you're working collaborative with economic development, so you can probably answer this too. Did the applicant meet all of the requirements to get to this point to be able to ask for a CID?

Yes.

So they met all the requirements. So if there's anything new or different, as my colleague mentioned, and I've said this from the bench ad nauseum, then we need to change the rules. We can't change the rules in the middle of the game. So just to clarify, has the applicant met all the requirements? Yes. Thank you. Regarding the public purpose. I'm not done with you yet. Not quite. Don't go too far. Regarding the public purpose, I know that there was the CID that we passed for Mammoth that was mentioned that's on Webb Road. And we are still collaborating with them regarding the public purpose because there's going to be an expansion of Webb Road between 13th and Central. And so we didn't want them to commit to maybe doing public landscape or something such as that because we don't know exactly how that engineering project is going to be developed. So has there been precedent when there's a unique circumstance that the public purpose is not specifically stated but more generalized? Yes. Can you say that again?

Yes.

You got it. Okay. Are there CEIDs in our community that have been successful?

Yes.

Yes. Is there one in District 2 that was paid off in seven years instead of 22?

Yes, ma'am, there is.

Okay, so we have precedents for CIDs that have been successful. Thank you. And last, is there any risk to the city?

Absolutely no risk at all.

There is absolutely no risk to the city if this were to be passed today? Yes. Thank you very much for your time.

We will continue with public comment.

So thank you for this extensive discussion about our neighborhood. I'm here on behalf of the neighborhood. My name is Jane Burns, and I live in East Front, which is 600 households and businesses with our northern border of Douglas. Margaritas and its small building on the east side are in our neighborhood and our neighborhood association, as is the very large and lumpy parking lot around it. We're happy in general. We don't want to get into the weeds. for some things, but we're generally happy that our neighborhood will be enhanced. Our board doesn't oppose or endorse the CID. We think it's unusual that it's a single site instead of a district. We're glad that the potential tax is limited to that one building. that we don't have to pay for it, unless we're customers, of course. We're dismayed that CIDs and some other tax reprieves are sometimes not transparent or accountable because we think Wichita needs all the tax money that it can get to support quality of life. Isn't that right? Thank you Dennis. We like fun within our neighborhood. But we also ask for safety. We do wanna make a couple of requests on the development itself. As Council Member Shepherd said, no drive-throughs, zero, no drive-throughs. Trees, we plead for trees. throughout that, maybe on the building, but certainly in the parking lot. There are for sure environmentally friendlier parking surfaces than blistering concrete or the lumpy blacktop that increases summer heat. but trees also shade and produce and counter pollution the carbon dioxide and they trade it out for oxygen. Surely you all know that it's easily 10 degrees cooler under We don't need more blistering cement. Traffic, the traffic from that full large parking lot and on the street south of Douglas Oakland, that small street, Oakland has some children, some seniors, and some cats, and some dogs. and uh... uh... in fact there's a children's play area playground right on oakland winter drivers drink of margaritas drove when they drank at Margarita's and currently drink at Harry's, which is the adjacent bar, they aren't much looking out for the folks outside their cars. People outside cars, as I'll bet you all know, are considerably vulnerable to vehicles, especially those great big over large trucks and SUVs that more and more populate drinking establishments and, of course, this parking lot. So for safety and livability, I'd like to recommend beyond the buildings to update the crosswalks in that whole very busy stretch of the East Douglas corridor and to slow vehicle traffic on that very busy stretch of Douglas. There are so many bus riders, bicyclists, scooters, pedestrians, baby strollers, wheelchairs. My heart still aches for the musician and retired attorney who was hit at the intersection of Douglas and Hillside and dragged down Douglas. a lot from his home in the very fancy Hillcrest. We appreciate this time to be proud of the East Front neighborhood, which we appreciate no drive-through, trees in and around the vast parking lot, and maybe even some landscaping, better traffic control, crosswalks and slower speeds on Douglas and Oakland. Are there any questions?

Thank you, Jane.

I'm waiting, I'm ready for quality of life. Thank you so much.

We'll continue with public comment.

Hello, Mayor and Council. Jan Manlove. If this is not germane, stop me, but it's the 1% sales tax, it's the taxes in general in this community. The alphabet of programs that we have that hand either tax abatements to businesses or charge people that go to these businesses. And then you wonder why we do not want to approve a one-cent sales tax. Because business by business, you either give away taxes or you add taxes that we're paying in general. So just in general, every time you add one of these districts, it's just more taxes for me in general. Thank you.

Council Member Shepherd.

Thank you, Mayor. And I want to thank the previous speaker for coming to identify a challenge and what I heard was a solution. So City Manager, if we can begin a discussion. I think that I've heard the Mayor say this as well, and I know we've talked about it, but I'm done talking about it. I would like to see some action. I know I was really trying to wait until the budget was approved for the Director of Economic Development. but it sounds like there's a major appetite from the community right now to begin discussions on putting some parameters around our financing tools. And to the previous speaker, thank you for sharing both the challenge and a solution and not just naming the challenges and the issues. So city manager, if we can have that discussion at a later workshop in partnership with the Economic Development Office, the individuals who do that work every day, I would be really appreciative.

We'll continue with public comment.

My name is Barry Roush. I live at 3013 East Oakland, which is almost across the street. It's directly behind the liquor store, which is just west of Margarita's. One thing that I'm concerned about is I keep hearing this facade remodel. Is that to put a bandaid on it so it's not considered a complete remodel? Is it going to be a remodel of the building and everything will be brought up to code? Including the parking lot?

Mr. Rausch, you can continue talking and then we will ask. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

I thought maybe they would be better qualified to answer that, I'm sorry.

Are you through with your five minutes?

No, no, so I don't get an answer to that question. You will.

We just don't want to waste your five minutes by going back and forth.

I'm sorry. I did not come prepared to talk this morning at all. The other thing that concerns me is now it's turned from one business to possibly three. There's already not enough parking for the two businesses that are there. I walked over there the other night on a Wednesday night at six o'clock with the only business that was open was Harry's and that parking lot was half full. I'm sure you're all aware of the parking problem in that area because of everything that you went through with the Crown Uptown Theater. That was his biggest problem is there's no parking in that area. The other problem is the two driveways on the south side of his parking lot empty out onto Oakland Street, which is a very narrow brick street that has no parking on one side of the street because if there's people that park on both sides of the street, it becomes a one-lane street. Period. You cannot get down the street both ways if they park on both sides. I've lived there for 41 years. I lived there through Margarita's heyday when they were busy, and that was a constant problem. Every Friday, Saturday night, people parking on the wrong side of the street. At that time, we were talking to the owner of Harry's, and we convinced him to close one of the two driveways, the west one, which helped because that directed everybody either to go back to Hillside or to go over to the church parking lot across the street. So that helped that he built a fence across that driveway. But now, since then, that driveway or that fence has been torn down. But since there's not a real overflow problem now, it hasn't been a problem. But I think if Margarita succeeds and Harry continues to succeed, I think that'll be a problem. And you'll be getting phone calls every Friday and Saturday night of people parked in a no parking zone blocking the street. I thank you for your time. Like I said, I really didn't come prepared to talk. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Rausch. Council now has a question for the developers. Can you please address the question regarding the facade? And I actually have an additional question to that. The city used to have the facade improvement program. Can you share why you did not choose to do the facade improvement program?

Sure, thank you. Actually, when we first considered doing something, we did approach Troy before he retired or left, but about the Facade Improvement Program. And we started down that road, but then that's when we were made aware that that program was not being used anymore. And so that's when, between Troy and Corey, they led us towards the CID. As far as if I understand his question, I think he's just asking, are we putting a bandaid on this or are we doing a remodel? And I think that, again, that's part of the reason that, again, that we're doing this CID program. I think the difference is without the CID program, then we probably would just be putting new lipstick on. But I think what the CID allows us to do is to take our renovations to another level. At the end of the day, again, no risk to the city. The risk is on us. So that extra $233,000 that we're going to go borrow, go finance, and spend the money on, if we don't perform, then we don't get that money. But that allows us to, yes, upgrade electrical, upgrade plumbing. If we have a restaurant, we're going to have to have a grease trap. Obviously, that building doesn't. It's been around for 96 years, 95 years. And so, yes, all of those things are part of our improvements that we're going to make.

I'll just ask one follow-up question to the facade itself. Yes. I know that you mentioned this is not just putting lipstick on this nearly 100-year-old building. What expectations should the community have when it comes to the outside improvement, the facade improvement?

Sure. So the front of the building right now, if you're familiar with it, had an awning on it. We've removed that already. There was a patio out front, but as you know, along Douglas, that doesn't hardly get used. But we're going to basically tear that whole front off, replace it all new with new glass and new storefronts, along with the small building. The small building, as you know right now, there's pieces falling off of it. If you drive by, you'll see that. We're going to kind of... design that building to match the art deco look of the larger building so just to enhance that and then the same with the entrance on the side just to bring it back to that art deco look to make it unique and just really fit in with the with douglas east douglas so thank you thank you council member ho heisel

Thank you, Mayor. Just a little bit of background. I believe most of my colleagues were not here when we redid the facade program. We had a select amount of money that we had been loaning out essentially for some businesses to improve the facades, mostly in developing neighborhoods. We reached the end of that and the options were to continue the program and the city take on debt or to shift it to the CID, which we have here. where the city would not take on debt to protect the taxpayers. And we went with this option to go and focus it more on the CID or to use the CID as the tool to achieve the facade improvement. It is something again I think that we are, we should look at. I think it was a better option than taking on debt. That was the other option at the time. But again, we have the workshop coming up in September. I'm eager to have these conversations not only around CIDs but around IRBs as well. I think all of us up here are in agreement that we do need to tighten some of the allowances that we have around these programs. But I did just want to offer that context because again, I believe most of you were not on here when we had that debate earlier. And again, it was to protect the taxpayers so the city does not take on additional debt that we might not get back on the back end. So, thank you.

Thank you for that context, Council Member Hohaisel. Again, that decision was so that the city would not take on debt or for the city to put that, again, back to the applicant developer at their risk. And I appreciate understanding more of that history for this council and for the community. Thank you. With that, we will continue with public comment if there's anyone else from the public who would like to address this specific item. I see none. With that, I want to thank the four speakers that spoke during public comment. I'm going to bring it back to the bench. We will begin with Councilmember Johnston.

Thank you, Mayor. I probably have a lot to say on this. Number one, thank you to the developer, Brian, your son. You do a great job. A lot of your developments are in District 5, and I know I've helped you with MAPD on some of your projects, and I'm glad to do that. You do a great job. Nothing against you. You know, I think we all do agree that we do need to re-look at the financing tools. I will remind you that no matter what parameters we put on those financing tools, It will come back to a body that is elected, which is us, to determine if that fits or not. So that's why they elected us, to make those decisions. If we put such tight parameters around that if everything qualifies, then we're not needed. We automatically do it. So this is not the case here. I think we have to make a decision here. Next, a Facade Improvement Program, Councilmember Hoheisel, that program was financed through increase in on property taxes. That's where the fee went on a person's, the developments, like a land company went on their property tax over the next, I think, 20 years. That's right. So they were paying that facade improvement. It basically is a financing tool for them to do the facade improvement program over 20 years, which the developer pays for. In this case, the developer does not pay for it. The public pays for it. Now they choose to go there, it's a 1% tax that they go there. So I think there's a big distinction between the Facade Improvement Program and the CID. Maybe this should be called a CIB instead of CID because it is a community investment district, not district, but building. So community investment building, maybe instead of district. So I think that is a distinction also. I think the CID was meant for districts. meant for areas of town that needed help to redevelop, such as South Broadway, North Broadway, other areas of town, East 21st Street, another good example. I think that was the intent for it, and it's been expanded to other areas, just individual buildings, to try to get some money. So a developer is going to spend a little less than $900,000 for all the remodeling and everything. $233,000 of that's going to be reimbursed to him personally. So fundamentally, I think that's not right. That's probably part of the libertarian in me. It says government should not be in that business of reimbursing developers. I would also say that regarding to staff time, I think $5,000 is light. There's going to be a lot of staff time involved in this. It's going to be published four times a year in our CIDs. All the CIDs that are listed in our publications every quarter, it's going to be published every single quarter. for up to 22 years. If it's done in seven, it'll only be seven years. But that publishing, it costs money to do that. So I question whether that will be the case or not. So again, I am for these tools that can help community in the right places. I don't think this is one of them. I think this part of Douglas is redeveloping and will continue to redevelop on its own. I don't think government is in a place of setting up mechanisms to go back to the developer. Government is in place for redesigning the street. As one speaker said, to slow down traffic, to make it more attractive, which will help that business. But I will vote against this again because I just don't think this is the right place and the right use for this development tool.

Council Member Hohaisel.

Thank you, Mayor. To Councilmember Johnston's point, the city fronted the money and then it would be paid back through specials over time. Sometimes those don't operate exactly how you want to as far as getting the property tax back. So it does add additional protections to it. One thing I see here is that they are spending more on the facade improvement than they are actually getting reimbursed. which was one of the games, the aims of the facade improvement program. Again, it's something I think September can't get here quick enough, so that way we can narrow this, and the council member Tuttle's point, you know, changing courses midstream, is something I try to avoid, looking at some of the other projects that we have passed up here. I think we just try to be fair and equitable across the board. So September comes, I will be advocating for changes to this and maybe the facade improvement project, maybe it's time to shut it down. Maybe it's time to focus it only in narrow areas where it would do the most good. But to that point, I will be supportive of this today specifically because again, I try to remain consistent. And the cost of the facade is more than they would actually be getting reimbursed.

Council Member Johnston.

Not to belabor the point, but good points. But if they met all the prerequisites for this, which they did, then there is no reason. And everybody does that. And I would encourage every business on Douglas that wants to remodel to come do the same thing. Everyone should do it. You should get a kickback of 25% of your project paid by tax. So there's no there's no reason for us to exist if we if we don't make a decision whether we want to do if this is the right place for this tool or not. So that's all I'll say.

Councilmember Tuttle.

Thank you. I would just be hesitant to use the word kickback. I don't think that that's the word you probably meant to use, but I certainly would not vote for anything that was considered a kickback. This is a tool that we have in our tool belt for economic development. Communities our size, larger, smaller, consistently use CIDs, TIFs, IRBs to attract businesses to come to their great cities and also hopefully so that they will grow and expand. So, you know, again, September can't come quick enough. We'll have the opportunity, but I will be supportive of this today because I feel that the applicant legitimately met all of the requirements that we placed in front of them. If we want to change that moving forward, I'm looking forward to that hearty discussion. But at this point, we must look at what is presented in front of us. And I also think that this will be a great benefit to this area. Lots of growth and expansion. I like the ideas too that were brought forward for public improvement that will also benefit from this. Thank you.

I will add a couple of comments on this. First and foremost, thank you to the public comment because you have raised a lot of the concerns that this body has had as well regarding the program. But as you can see, the program has developed since 2018 to 2026, from back in the day providing dollars to now really putting it on the applicant and the developer, and it's at their risk whether or not it performs. This is also different than the baseball CID. This is not the same. This is, again, a 1% sales tax that people can choose not to come and patronize that business. So people have a choice in this. And so it is really about reasonableness. So I agree with one of our public comments saying that the program is broken. I agree with you. Therefore, we are going to be talking about this in workshop in September of this year and something can also be true and that is that this applicant tried utilizing one of the tools that the city had however they were told that that tool would be better used with a CID because again it would be a one percent sales tax only for the patrons that want to utilize or visit that business. So I believe that both things can be true. And so it is out of reasonableness that I will be voting in favor of this because I want to see people invest in our community. I want people who grew up in our community wanting to take greater pride and put greater investment into your own neighborhood. As you mentioned, you live in College Hill. And one of the things that I asked of you, the applicant, about a month ago was please go and talk to the neighborhood association. And for one of the neighborhood association representatives to come forward and talk about her support for this, and that this, again, is gonna be up to the consumer, the customer, whether or not they want to add this, go to this business that has an additional 1%, I believe has swayed me, again, to be in favor of this CID. And so with that, this is in Councilmember Joseph Shepard's district.

Thank you, Mayor, and I appreciate your comments. I think you hit the nail right on the head, and I agree with you in what you said. It's about reasonableness and also taking the opportunity to correct what we would maybe define as brokenness. I would like to call them learning moments that we have moving forward. Much as I try to do with all the agents that come forward is I always stress the importance of reaching out to the neighbors and engaging them. I've also had the opportunity to engage with 13 residents personally and also the Wichita Independent Neighborhood Association president. Of the 13 people I have engaged with, Only two expressed concerns, and those concerns were more so about patronizing a business that had a sales tax, but not about potentially incorporating the CID itself or using it as a financing tool to benefit the facade improvement. I appreciate the context that has been made in reference to 2018. I think that adds a lot of color to this conversation. And I appreciate the agents for doing the due diligence to reach out to the city, attempt to use a program that no longer exists, and then taking the route that leads us here today. So with that, Mayor, I move that we close the public hearings for establishment of a CID, approve the development agreement, Place the ordinance on second reading and authorize the necessary signatures. Second.

Motion second. Further discussion? I see none. Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Motion passes 6-1. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Contract for Wichita Intervention Program Instructor.

Members of the Council, Mayor, Nathan Emery from Municipal Court for the record. I have the pleasure of presenting to you our WIP instructor. It's one component of three for our WIP program. The City of Wichita requires defendants convicted of first-time DUI to spend 48 hours in custody. This program was created to allow people who fall into that category to satisfy that 48 hours in an educational environment. What it does is it allows them to spend that time in custody at the Holiday Inn while receiving training from an instructor about how driving under the influence and other substance abuse impacts their families themselves and others. And it's a very successful program with a recidivism rate of, last year it was 2.42%. It also is a program that saves the city money. As of the new year, it'll be $77 a night roughly for someone to spend a night in jail. And that's funded by the city. We charge that back. We don't always collect all of that money. So it reduces costs on the front end, but it also reduces on the back end through recidivism and fewer arrests for driving under the influence. Currently, as I said, the city contracts with a local hotel for lodging, a local agency for security to create that custodial environment, and then this is that final contract for the educational environment. portion. We also, while this serves primarily municipal court, there are also many referrals from jurisdictions around us. When this program started, there was a state requirement that everyone convicted of a first time DUI spend 48 hours in jail. That has been repealed. We still have our ordinance that makes that requirement. And it's really a testament to the value of the program that in spite of the repeal of the law, we still have other agencies sending us people because they want these individuals to experience the program and believe in those benefits. So as I said, it's a 48-hour program. This individual is responsible for coordinating classes Friday through Sunday for up to 40 participants. This individual had to have at least one year of experience teaching a 48-hour DUI intervention program with individuals with substance abuse or alcohol issues and have the appropriate licensing in Kansas. We had two companies respond. The review committee met and we ended up selecting the individual who was the incumbent And this contract and their proposal really represents a continuation of their work in this program, which they're very passionate about. In a world where we consistently see price increases, this represents, as I said, a continuation of that previous contract and not a substantial price increase at all. It should allow us to maintain our current price with the program. This program is user-funded, so we have a $325 participant fee, and we continue to monitor this program to make sure that we're covering the costs of the program with those user fees. Just a couple of years ago, the program cost, I believe it was $250, and then we have raised it, I believe, twice to make sure that this is user-funded. And so we will continue to monitor that I don't believe that this contract has any impact Will have an impact that will cause us to risk to increase that user fee Which I'm pleased with because we we try to keep it affordable because we believe in the value of it and we want people to access this as a resource and when you look at what it actually offers with two nights in a hotel, food, and instruction. It's really a pretty good deal even at the $325 price point. So while we pay through the general fund, we remit those user fees back into the general fund to cover those costs. The contract's been approved as to form by the legal department, and it's recommended that the city council approve the contract with the Caring Center and approve any necessary budget adjustments and authorize the necessary signatures. And as always, I'll stand for any questions.

Thank you, Nathan. Questions for staff? I just have one. Have you seen a decline in the number of participants or an increase in the number of participants?

Yeah, so since the law was repealed, we've seen a decrease in referrals. We still see some referrals, which, once again, to me is a testament to people valuing what we do, that it's not required and they still want to send some people. They don't send all people. So they identify who they think would best benefit from the program, and they say, hey, we want you to go to that program. But we still have referrals out of those other agencies.

Thank you, Nathan. I see no further questions for you. We will now open it up for public comment. I see none in the public who would like to address the council on this item, so I'll bring it back to the bench. With that, I will move to approve the contract.

Second.

Motion second discussion. See none. Madam clerk, please open the role. Motion passes seven, zero. Madam clerk, please call the next item.

Cooperation agreement to establish a sister city between the city of Chihuahua, Mexico and the city of Wichita.

Good morning, mayor counsel, Jennifer McGonigal, city attorney. Um, the item before you is a cooperation agreement that was received from the city of Chihuahua, Mexico, um, for the city of Wichita to consider. Currently, we have four sister cities, Kaifeng, China, Orleans, France, and two in Mexico, Cancun and Tabas. I'm sorry. Apologies. The proposed agreement is received again from the city of Chihuahua for your consideration. It's a five-year term. It can be renewed unless other party chooses to terminate early. It includes areas, specifically I think the most substantive areas in Article 4, which would create a binational aerospace cooperation committee. And in that provision or that section, it provides specifically for facilitating talent mobility, promoting cultural and educational exchange, and annually evaluating the progress of the agreement through specific goals. Also in the agreement, each party would appoint a representative to coordinate activities and I think technically manage the contract. So a little bit more about Chihuahua. It's the capital of the northwestern Mexican state of Chihuahua, 12th largest city in Mexico. And as of 2020, it had a population of 925,762. It also has a strong aviation sector. The recommendation is for you to consider entering into this cooperation agreement to establish a sister city relationship with the city of Chihuahua and the city of Wichita. I'm happy to answer any questions that I can't answer. Otherwise, I'm happy to turn it over to Mayor Wu. Thank you.

Thank you, Jennifer. Beginning with Council Member Hohaisel.

Thank you, Mayor. I just have one question. The Binational Aerospace Cooperation Committee, is that the sister cities that appoints members to that board? And can I have a little more information as to the makeup of that? Do they have like a select amount of seats or anything like that?

As far as the sister cities organization, or just really the contract, all it says is parties will appoint a representative. So I would read this literally as the party being the city appoints that representative. When it says the parties will establish and appoint a representative.

Okay, so does that...

Okay, thank you, Mayor.

Thank you. Sure. The Binational Aerospace Cooperation Committee would be a subgroup within Greater Wichita Partnership, as they own the brand air capital of the world, and they host the annual reception at the International Air Show. This has been a relationship that has been building over the years. Chihuahua is a partner to the City of Wichita, thanks to our aviation sector. Several businesses here in Wichita have a satellite office in Chihuahua. And so this relationship has been building over the years. In addition, Wichita State University's president, Dr. Muma, is going to be entering into an MOU, Memorandum of Understanding, with the university in Chihuahua. that will allow for a two plus two program between WSU and what they call UACH school. Mexican students start their studies there, then transfer to WSU to finish their degree at WSU. They then transfer back WSU credits to UACH to finish corresponding degrees there. This cooperation is still in the works. Their focus is to start this in January of 2027. So this committee would be housed within Greater Wichita Partnership with constant communication with our sister city. Our sister city Wichita nonprofit is a cultural organization. And so I had the opportunity to meet the Mexico committee yesterday. And we talked about if a delegation from Chihuahua came, they would be a welcoming committee. But again, the Binational Cooperation Committee is more business and education focused. So it would be housed within the Air Capital of the World brand.

Okay, so this would be a new committee that would be focused on Chihuahua. Okay, thank you for the clarification.

Council Member Glasscock.

Thank you, Mayor. I mentioned this during the agenda review of just changing some of the language from shall to may to offer a consideration. So that would just be part of any motion. That way we're not completely bound by some of these aspects. So that would be one recommendation I have. Jennifer, could that just be a blanket one, or do I need to say every shall to may, or can that just be blanket?

It can be blanket. I'll make those changes.

Great, and then the only other question I had on the agreement itself would be article 10, or article 14, I'm trying to read Roman numerals. I might have got that wrong, actually. That's actually just out of order. It would be Article 17, but it's listed as 14 under final provisions. Said shall remain in effect for up to five year period. Five seems a lot as an initial agreement. So I'd maybe just be open to that. I'm not going to be a yes or no regardless of that, but five just seems like a long time. And then lastly, to answer some of my colleagues questions from agenda review, I got the bylaws for sister cities and under board composition 5.1.2 is the mayor may appoint one director from the eligible and active membership. That's me that serves as a representative. And then 5.1.3 says each council member may appoint one director from the eligible active memberships as well. And so each council member is given one appointment to Wichita Sister Cities. I have my appointment as Ben Sauceda. from the Kansas Aviation Museum, but that would leave an additional six members that could be, or five members that could be appointed from the mayor and council. In addition, the makeup includes eight will be, are nominated from the board. The president can nominate three and that makes up the full board membership. And then they have an annual election each year, which is in November of this year.

Council Member Ballard. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Vice Mayor, for looking into that. Could you send us the application to share with anyone that would be interested in the district?

Yes, I would be happy to do that.

Thank you for those. And Jennifer, when I make the motion, do I add anything that says shall be? will be edited to May.

Yes. And for clarification, did you want the term to stay at five years or do you want to?

Um, so the discussion regarding five years when we were talking with the Mexico committee, they thought that was too short. So, uh, as you know, uh, the city of Wichita has had four sister cities for several decades now, and so this would actually be our shortest, but I actually like these time limits. As we had the conversation prior to this, I really believe time limits allow us to reevaluate. Do these relationships make sense? Do these incentives make sense? So I do appreciate the five year. Council Member Tuttle.

Thank you. I was just looking, I went to Wichita.gov and then under government, and if you go to boards and committees, just anyone in the community who is interested in service, please go to Wichita.gov, government, and then boards and committees. And sister city is not on here. And so like you have someone, they didn't go through the process. I assume they'll have to go through the process.

I did. I appointed them from the bench.

But they couldn't, they didn't apply.

They had sent in their interest for it, but not through the formal application process. That would be fine.

Yeah, and I wasn't even questioning you as much as just saying, and I apologize that sounded like I wasn't. I wasn't. I'm just saying, will we all have to, can something be added onto the website and then encourage people to apply and then make appointments? Is that what I'm hearing is the process? Okay, cool. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Tuttle. I think that's a direction to city manager. If he can add that to the boards, that would be much appreciated for this council. Perfect. With that, I see no further questions from this bench. We will now open it up for public comment.

Good morning, Mayor and City Council. Yes, it's still morning. Thank you so much for this consideration. My name is Kim Negrete, and I'm currently serving as the chair of the Mexico Committee and as a board member of Wichita Area Sister Cities. And as mentioned, we're the nonprofit organization that's volunteer-led that helps support these relationships, helps host the exchanges, and really encourages the sharing of the culture here in our community and with our sister cities. As chair of the Mexico Committee, I'm here today to express our excitement and support for the addition of the city of Chihuahua, Mexico. We are committed to connecting with our new friends in Chihuahua and to engaging Wichita residents in developing meaningful relationships and activities, because that is what this is really about. Wichita does have a large population of residents with ties to Chihuahua, and so we are excited that this may increase the membership of Sister Cities and the efforts that we can do here with our residents. So we're very excited about that. As you know, Sister Cities was founded with the purpose of promoting world peace, unity, and understanding, which as we know in these days and times is much needed and appreciated. So thank you for your consideration today of adding the City of Chihuahua, and we stand ready to assist as needed.

Thank you very much, Kim, and to your volunteer board for serving the community through the Wichita Area Sister Cities.

With that, we will continue with public comment.

I see none, I'll bring it back to the bench. And again, thank you to Jennifer for looking over this legal document. I am very excited that this relationship will now be solidified as the city's hopefully fifth sister city. And with that, I will move to approve the cooperation agreement with the changes from shall to may and authorize the mayor to sign.

Second.

Motion. Second. Discussion? See none. Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Motion passes 7-0. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Contract Amendment and Funding for Water Reuse Alternative Study.

Good morning, Mayor and Council Members, Gary Jansen, Public Works and Utilities. I'm happy to be here to discuss our next steps as we continue our path towards water reuse implementation. I wanted to show this picture of Cheney Reservoir. Right now, Cheney Reservoir is actually in the flood pool stage. We've had a very wet 2026, but it wasn't that long ago that you're all aware that we had some real issues related to our surface water supply at Cheney Reservoir. Those historic drought impacts, kind of over the course of 2021 to 2025, led to the initiation of a water reuse master plan, which is focused on a sustainable future water supply for Wichita and the region. On May 13th of last year, the City Council approved a contract with CDM Smith and initial funding for development of the plan, which is focused on multiple components of a path toward creating a locally controlled, sustainable water supply, again, for Wichita and the region. And I'm going to walk you through where we've been and where we're going. In particular, the request of the City Council today is approval of a contract amendment to continue this effort specifically with an added focus on a water reuse pilot project. So I'm going to stay on this slide for just a moment and talk briefly compared to some discussions of the past of where we've been, the efforts that we've made for conservation to do everything we can to drought proof our community looking to the future. and to talk about why conservation is so critical moving forward. So I mentioned before that we've had a wet 2026, the Cheney elevation that is currently in the flood pool, and that includes some releases that were authorized by the Corps of Engineers recently. We've continued to see precipitation that has kept Cheney in a good place, but we all know, looking back all the way to 2013 when we had the most significant drought prior to what we just came out of in 2025. We all know that this can happen again. It's unpredictable. We don't know when that might happen, so we've got to keep an eye on the future. We've got to continue to talk about and look at conservation. I think we've done a great job over the last couple of years of putting ourselves in a great place. But looking to the future for reuse is really the best thing we can do. This isn't an effort just to help make sure that everybody can water their grass. This is to also aid with economic development and the growth of our community for the future. You'll recall that we had discussions about where we could look for other water sources, including El Dorado Lake, not a viable alternative. I wanted to mention that again because somebody asked me about that just recently again. Why don't we get water from El Dorado Lake? We've done some modeling over the years, and even though there's some water available during certain periods of time, if we get into a regional drought, the water is just not there to serve our purposes. I've had questions asked about why don't we dredge Cheney Reservoir. We've talked too about we've done a great job. The city council over the years has allocated funding for watershed protection measures to keep the sediment out of Cheney. We've lost very little capacity. A lot of discussions about building a second reservoir, why don't we build another Cheney, becomes cost-prohibitive very quickly, even if land were available, and then we're still reliant on precipitation and inflow into the reservoir. Theoretically, if we found an area to build another reservoir, depending on the watershed that would be providing water to it, In certain times, if we go back into a drought like we experienced during that period of time that we came out of in 2025, we could theoretically have two reservoirs that are half full of water. So that's still not sustainable for our future, certainly not compared to what we're looking for in regards to this water reuse effort. The current watering schedule that you see here that was put into place by the city council on September 15th, shows great vision by all of you. I've talked about this at numerous places I've been, talking about our water reuse efforts. In fact, multiple places around the country. And this has been very well received for a community of our size to see that we've put these type of watering restrictions in place, scheduling this water schedule permanently. We have seen a reduction in water use. It's kind of hard to tell during a wet year. when we're getting a lot of precipitation, what impact it's having. But we know that it is having an impact. So this is something that we've got to keep in place. We've got to keep to the forefront of everyone's minds where we were not very long ago. I've had multiple inquiries, as I'm assuming you may have too, of we're getting all this rain, Cheney's in the flood pool, why don't we lift these watering restrictions? I would just tell you what we went through over the course of time in really changing the culture, I think, for our community, for our own organization, what we've done for internal conservation and looking at... We spent a lot of time with... Kansas State and Sedgwick County Extension Centers looking at what it takes for proper lawn care. So if you look at it from a residential perspective, 90% of our water customers are residential, and that's who we hear a lot from about the need to want or the desire to want to water their grass more. Three days a week is more than enough to keep your lawn healthy. It's much better than watering seven days a week. This works great for the future. I'm hopeful for a time when this just becomes part of who we are and there's no longer that question of why aren't this lifted, because these are not temporary restrictions. So I'll just mention again, looking to the future, we've looked at options. We're not at a place as a last resort by looking at water reuse, but if we really want to drought-proof our community, I'll say it again, if we want to support economic development and growth in the future, we have got to look to other alternatives for future water supply, and that's exactly what we're doing with this water reuse effort. So I'll talk about multiple components of our master plan that we've been working on since last year. There's a lot of stuff on here and I'm going to come back to some of these specifically. So I'll go through this one pretty quick. Water quality sampling has been very critical for this effort when we talk about potable reuse. And it will stay as part of our effort when we talk about this pilot project, which I'm going to get to here shortly. CDM Smith has helped us with the supply and demand analysis, looking at historical data and looking at projected future long-term data to be able to provide water supply for our community where the gaps are during periods of drought. We have developed a funding strategy plan, not only for implementation of this proposed pilot project, but also looking to the future of what reuse looks like. It's an expensive endeavor. The technology, the implementation of the technology of construction of the facilities is not cheap, but that's something we're looking down to the road for. The city rates structure currently supports initiation of the pilot, which I'll talk more about here shortly. We also have submitted a feasibility study to the Bureau of Reclamation that's been approved, which allows us to move forward with grant funding. So there's some Title 16 grant funds related to recycling and reuse type projects. It requires a match, but we think we've got a good opportunity, just as we've received some similar funding for the work that we've done in the Equispeds to keep our aquifer groundwater in a good place. We'll be able to apply for those funding too, hopefully to offset some of our local funds. Communication and public outreach is one of the most significant aspects of this water reuse project and plan, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about what we're doing with that. Over the last year, I've probably made presentations to over 50 community groups. Everybody who will listen invited myself to a lot of places to be able to talk about this, and I think it's made a difference. for folks to hear where we've been, where we're going, and why this is so important. The pilot work plan, I'm gonna talk about here more now. We've looked at alternatives for non-potable reuse. You've heard us talk about what we've done with Spirit since 2015. We've provided almost a million gallons a day of treated effluent from our plant two, our main wastewater treatment plant, to Spirit. We are continuing to look at those types of options for industry. When we spend time with the Greater Wichita Partnership and talk about business opportunities for the community, our conversation has changed from where it was in the past, and we encourage businesses to try to locate closer to our wastewater treatment facilities so that recycling is a better option, so that the cost of conveyance isn't so much. You put these businesses that need water closer to one of our wastewater treatment plants, it just increases the likelihood and the ability that we can provide recycle or reuse to them. And then I mentioned the Bureau of Reclamation feasibility study, which is a critical step. We've talked about the regulatory effort before. I wanted to mention this one more time. And this was such a critical component of what we're doing. Really nothing could move forward without what happened in this legislative session. creating regulation that allows us to move forward and look at reuse. There are only about a handful of states in the nation that fully develop regulations for potable reuse. So it was a large effort that took a lot of people being engaged, including all of you. Representative Sandy Pickert was instrumental in agreeing to carry forward the bill with us. Spent a lot of time in Topeka. with different legislative committees. And on April 9th of 2026, the governor signed House Bill number 2462 into law. And what that does is that says that KDHE will now create regulations for reuse sometime in 2028. We're going to continue working close with them. I've mentioned CDM Smith and their efforts with our Water Use Master Plan. They have a long history with KDHE and a great connection already working with them, not only on our pilot project but also looking to develop regulations because they've got experience in other states doing the same. Big deal, very critical step. This is something that Wichita truly is leading the way on for not just our region but for the state of Kansas. Because this isn't going to benefit just us, it's going to benefit everyone across the state of Kansas in the future for what they might be able to do for reuse that was not available in the past. I wanted to spend just a minute and talk about a couple of things related to potable reuse. So I mentioned non-potable before. We can kind of correlate that to industry, like Spirit, like other big water users. But when we start talking about potable reuse, which is where we really think this needs to go and the reason why that legislation was so critical allowing us to move forward with looking at potable reuse, I just want to talk about the different types because I want you to understand, too, what our evaluation consists of, what other states have done, and why we ultimately start looking to, we think, direct potable reuse being the most viable. So if you start in that bottom left rectangle box, and we talk about indirect potable reuse, via Cheney Reservoir. This is an option that we haven't given up on yet. It's something we're continuing to evaluate, but this is something that the state of California has had to look at doing, not just California, any of the western parts of the country, Arizona and others, where they've got water shortages. And effectively what they're doing is augmenting their current water supplies. So California basically now, they treat their wastewater, they send it out to the ocean. Historically they had. What they're doing now is capturing that treated wastewater. They are putting it through an advanced water purification process. that we talk about potable reuse, and they're sending it back to their groundwater supply, they're sending it back to their aqueducts, they're sending it back to the places where they get their water from, they're augmenting it, they're recharging it. This is not totally unlike what we've been doing since 2012 with our Equus beds aquifer, In our ASR project, when we capture high water in the Little Ark River, we treat it, we put it back into the aquifer. So we've been ahead of the game a little bit. This becomes a different scenario, though, because we're talking about additional water purification of treated wastewater. So look at that option real quick. It's 37 miles from Plant 2 to Cheney Reservoir. That's a long haul. It's quite a bit of cost for conveyance to get a pipeline out there. It is an option. We lose efficiency. We still lose water to evaporation over time, not as effective as a closed system. One of the real issues we deal with is how we treat our water blend then because what happens during a wet year like this year, if we build a pipeline to Cheney Reservoir and the reservoir is full, we've got nowhere to put that. So we have to really would start changing our way of how we treat our raw water supplies. Now we would have to treat more surface water, which is possible. That would keep more water in our aquifer for groundwater use for the future. This becomes a really expensive proposition. There's some challenges related to it. So then if you look to the upper right, we think it really makes sense to look at what I call a closed system or direct potable reuse. There's only one direct potable reuse system in the country in place right now in Texas, but there are more systems coming online. El Paso broke ground last year for a large, what they call their pure water facility for direct potable reuse. And so this is what the notion that I've talked to you about before that we send 25 million gallons a day from Plant 2 to the river downstream. We would capture that treated wastewater. It would go through an advanced water purification system that I'm going to show you here in just a moment. And then what happens from there, then that system would likely be on the site of Plant 2. But we're also looking at the option of using our current water treatment plant. possibly as a location for this water purification process. Either way, we would likely blend it with one of our raw water supplies. It would go to Hess Pump Station. It would be distributed directly to the system, so direct potable reuse. You don't have the evaporation issues. You don't have the potential water loss issues if you tried to put it back in the aquifer. It's more efficient. It's more effective. But there is a cost that comes with that too that we are evaluating for the future. I know that was some technical stuff, but I kind of wanted to show you because we talk a lot about indirect and direct. Some communities, some states are doing more indirect. We want to focus on direct potable reuse. So steps forward for this reuse study. The proposed advanced water purification process will be validated and refined and by implementing a small-scale pilot project to mimic full-scale infrastructure. The piloting process will allow for continued public engagement and education in informing regulators and elected officials. Public engagement components that I talked about will include storyboard materials and videos presented for review at the reuse pilot site, and I'll show you a picture related to that in just a moment. And we're still working on a water reuse exhibit jointly developed by Exploration Place. We've had some great discussions with Exploration Place. They're absolutely on board with creating a exhibit about water reuse. They've talked about showing something even by video in their IMAX theater. It's been really cool talking to them. We're excited to keep that going. They expect their number of visitors to almost double in the coming years with the improvements that they made, so we're going to get exposure to over half a million people a year beyond that, looking at what we're doing. Before I get off this slide, the public engagement aspect of this project will be further developed in this next phase, assuming your approval today. We want to create a stakeholder steering committee. I talked about this during the recent workshop. I don't have all the details of knowing what that looks like, but we wanted to get to a point of having regulation approved, having the pilot moving forward. We think the stakeholder steering committee can be a vital part of this, of helping us move forward That doesn't mean we're looking for people that are all in support of the notion of water reuse, but we would like to get people involved from the health industry, from the restaurant industry, a diverse group from across the community that can help us make sure that we're doing the right things going forward. We also, Vice Mayor, you had mentioned at the workshop, and I think it makes a lot of sense, we would like to start having more conversations with the district advisory boards about this effort. Something similar to this same type of discussion as we move forward to make sure across the community that everybody understands what we're doing, especially as we move forward with this pilot project. Show you some pictures here related to the pilot project. What we would be doing is something very similar. I won't get caught up in all the technical stuff because I wouldn't do it justice anyway. This is a pilot project that CDM Smith designed and is operating in Los Angeles. Very similar to what we would do regardless of the size of the community. The technology is similar. They have the luxury of putting equipment outside because of their weather. All of ours would have to go in the type of enclosure that you see here. But there's ultrafiltration. This is a multibarrier process. That's why the advancement of water purification technology has made such a difference over the years. and why direct potable reuse is being more well received. So ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis process would also be in a similar type facility. Ultraviolet disinfection, and I don't know why that keeps advancing on its own. This is the part I wanted to show you real quick. This was from another facility we visited in the Los Angeles area. We planned to, where this pilot would be on site of Plant 2, we would have a trailer there with educational material, maybe something similar to this that talks about the process. What we heard from others in other states and communities that have done this, they have brought students out there. They brought classes out there. Anybody from the public would be able to come out here and see what this is all about. Elected officials like yourselves and regulators in particular, this becomes very valuable as we move forward to develop regulation for reuse. This is going to be a proving ground. It's going to be a trial. It's going to be a great place for regulators to see how this process is working. schedule wise and i'm about to wrap this up and i've got a recommendation for you in just a moment schedule wise for the pilot project which is the biggest component of our request today KDHE approval of the selected process is expected yet this year probably likely by fall the pilot process equipment procurement would be initiated late this year uh... we would see delivery of equipment sometime in twenty twenty seven and we hope to have everything up and running by late next year. We would begin process trial testing after B&R implementation. Good timing as we wind down the B&R project, especially to create space and for the public to go down there and be able to view this. Public engagement will be ongoing throughout all of this, not just related to the pilot, but to what our long-term plans are, and then evaluation of funding options will be ongoing also. uh... that is assuming uh... your approval today financial considerations for request today uh... the cost for the proposed contract amendment cdm smith uh... especially with the focus on the design of the pilot uh... and helping with the operations of seven is just over seven hundred forty two thousand dollars bring a total contract to just over $1.9 million. The estimated cost to construct and operate the small-scale pilot plant for several years is $7 million. That would bring our total estimated cost to just under $9 million. I mentioned back in May of 2025, the city council approved a project budget at that time of $1.2 million. We have identified an additional $8 million of available funding in the adopted CIP from ongoing project funds. That would bring the total project budget to $9.2 million. So as we've talked about in the past, the additional funding above and beyond the actual contract is $1. for our costs, staff-related costs. We are going to have staff involved with operations of the pilot, and obviously from our engineering group staying involved with the actual design, project development, public engagement, everything that we're doing along the way. I might mention, too, before I get off that slide, I talked before about the feasibility study being submitted to the Bureau of Reclamation and approved. Our next step then is working on a grant application that should be submitted here in the next month or two. We're also working with CDM Smith as part of this ongoing effort and assuming approval of this contract extension today to develop a long-term public return on investment analysis and funding options for the full scale potable reuse implementation. I mentioned this is a costly endeavor long-term. We have to look to the future. I don't know yet what it looks like timing-wise for full-scale implementation, but this is the most practical next step looking at this pilot project. And in the meantime, we'll be looking at what's practical for cost for the future, how that might impact rates. There's also grant funding available for full construction also, but we haven't gotten to that point just yet. Having said all of that, staff recommends the city council approve the recommended contract amendment, revised budget, and initiation of the pilot project, adopt the resolution notes of intent, authorize the necessary signatures, and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Jerry. And I would mention to you, Michelle Worth with CDM Smith is here also, in case you have any technical questions that I can't answer.

Thank you, Gary. Questions for staff, beginning with Vice Mayor Glasscock.

Thank you, Mayor Gary. I know that education is going to be key as implementation of this project, and I'm excited. I think this could be one of the longest legacy items that anybody from this bench could help be a part of, and so thank you for leading this. When talking about the district advisory boards, yes. Exploration Place, yes. If we go back to slide 80, I guess we don't have to go back to, or 82, maybe. and I'll get back to it. But this, I think, is going to be also key. I know that you talked about this being a stationary component at a site. I would love to see a version of this, obviously pending financial request, but a mobile version of this be taken to community events that people could actually turn on the tap and drink water that's being reused in that circumstance. I don't know what that looks like, if it's cost prohibitive, but I'm just thinking of how many community events we have of open streets, that this would be a great ability to go out there Instead of solely expecting people to come out to us, which I know would probably happen at one of these sites, how can we also take it to them and communities as well? So thank you for your work on this, but I'm really excited about the trailer and how that can maybe be used in other events around our community too.

I appreciate that comment. That has been done. If I'd have thought, I would have brought a picture to show you that. It's something that CDM Smith actually has been involved in, too. So it's possible. I don't know what the cost looks like, but that is a very possible option.

Council Member Hohaisel.

Thank you, Mayor. I do echo Councilmember Glasscock's comments there. I hope we have a big celebration here before too long about, you know, BNR and Plant 2 and have hundreds of people out there. I don't know that we'll have anybody out there necessarily after that celebration. So something a little more mobile I think would be a little better to get the word out and kind of get the public input, River Fest next year and whatnot. Do we, now you talk about the indirect and I think I've asked this before, do we have any scope as to how much more expensive the indirect would be than the direct? Like twice as much?

No, I don't think so. The estimates that we've looked at so far, I would say it's probably within 25%. It's not to that magnitude. Even if we said the cost was even, looking at the effectiveness of what we're doing and the challenges We're not done looking at potentially how we might be able to utilize indirect potable reuse. It is more expensive. It's not double. I was trying to remember the numbers while I was standing here, but I would say it was somewhere in the 25% to 50% range higher in direct potability. It's just because of that 37 miles to get to Cheney. We still have pipeline that if we build a direct potable or advanced water system, purification facility at Plant 2, or if we do it at our existing water treatment plant, ultimately we still have to get to our new water treatment plant. So there's still pipeline to get there. We've still got to get through some challenging areas to get there. It's going to get costly for cost of conveyance. We need to look at, again, the balance of our water use, of our uses of our raw water sources. and how that can be the most effective. Because we do not want to have a stranded investment. If you look at something like this going to Cheney Reservoir and years like this when Cheney's in the flood stage, I don't know if we can pull enough water out of there through the treatment process to fully utilize the indirect, if that makes sense. We'll continue to look at that.

Okay, I appreciate that.

We have to go through this process just so it's clear. Either one of these would still require advanced water purification. It still requires what we're looking at for the pilot project. Whether we end up with indirect or direct, we still have to do that. We've got some time to continue our evaluation of what makes sense permanently in the future. So we're not done with that yet.

Okay, could you tell me a little more about the pilot project? How much water will we save through this? I know we put 25 million gallons a day into the river from Plant 2. How many gallons a day do we think this pilot project will?

It's a really small scale. We're talking about 50 gallons a minute, which correlates to 70,000 gallons a day. So we're nowhere near, and we're not taking this to the system. This pilot project is gonna be a proving ground for the technology, for the processes, especially related to the effluent that comes out of our treatment plant. It's different in every community. Derby's getting ready to work on potential reuse. They'll have to go through the same effort there because it looks at the components of what's in their treated wastewater. But what we're gonna do, and I thank you for asking that. I should have mentioned that. With this pilot, the treated water that comes out of this will go back into the plant. So we're not using it to offset any use right now, but we're not really taking away either. We'll run it back through the plant and effectively recycle it again.

Okay, just a note, whenever we do talk rate increases in the future, as always, keep it as far off of just a common user as possible. And then to the rest of my colleagues, this is absolutely something that I think we won't be known for in 40 years, but it is definitely setting our city up for success in 40 years. I read an article last night where they actually talked about the desert area in the United States in the future. It's speculated to go from 6% to almost 12%, including half of Colorado. So we know that the weather is pretty wacky here lately and that floods are going to be more common and droughts are going to be more common. And one of the things businesses look for whenever they do want to move to a community is water resiliency, water security. And not to just mention just the overall growth and health of our residents in general. So something like this is akin to, in my mind, to Big Ditch Mitch. setting the stage now for success in the future, regardless of if we get credit or anybody knows that we were pushing on it, but this is definitely a legacy project to Vice Mayor Glasscock's point for the future.

With the intensity of the rains we've had anymore, I think wacky is an understatement, but thank you.

Thank you, Gary. And I see no further questions from this bench. We will now open it up for public comment. I see none, I'll bring it back to the bench. Council Member Tuttle has been pivotal in this, so I will give her the honors.

Thank you so much. I just want to thank Gary and Don and the steering committee, including Council Member Hohesl, who serves with me. Just kudos. And I have consistently said that I have charged us with being the first city, not only in the state of Kansas, but within our region, to obtain direct potable reuse. So I think we will be known for this in 40 years. I'm going to throw down a challenge. I think it's that important. I was watching KSN last week, and there was a city in Kansas that ran out of water, truly. And so not only is this initiative helping Wichita, it's helping our entire state. As we know, we say all the time, Wichita provides 17%, provides water to 17% of Kansans. So this is not just impacting us, but it's impacting our neighbor communities as well. I just, again, I want to thank Communications too. I know that they have been instrumental in this and sometimes they don't always get recognized for the work that they're doing behind the scenes. So thank you to our amazing comms team for helping us to be forward thinking and helping this vision to come forward. when people and you know we the three the three prongs of this is we have to find the money to be able to do it we had to get the legislation and regulation which we did and now the hardest part is going to be the public education and when people talk about it being toilet to tap i always say it's not toilet to tap it's toilet to treatment to treatment to treatment to treatment to tap so it's being treated more than our water supply now I loved the idea about open streets. We've talked about that. I think Gary and I have done more presentations than I can count. Happy to have been involved in the exploration part of it. But just a side note that I think that Vice Mayor will like, when we were doing the RFP selection process for this consultant, CDM brought us bottles of beer that were made from water reuse in another community. Maybe we have open streets and we have our pilot project in a local brewery, bottles beer from it. So that's an idea to put a pin in. I think that could be just something interesting and fun. And people might be more likely to give it a taste if it's, you know, that way. My last comment for me is I had the pleasure of going to Topeka with Gary and with Jim Jonas, our director of strategic communications, to do the governor's bill signing. And if you've ever done a bill signing, She asked the group, can somebody tell me just a few moments, a few words about this bill? And so Representative Pickard did and did a great job. And Governor Kelly gave us a heart attack because she said, I have a question about this. And we all thought, oh my goodness. And she said, why hasn't anyone done this sooner? So I thought that that was just a really good comment and spoke to the great work that Gary and his team has done. So thank you. Would you like me to make the motion? Thank you very much. That means a great deal to me. I would move that the City Council approve the contract amendment, revise budget, and initiation of the pilot project, adopt the amending resolution, and authorize the necessary signatures.

Second.

Motion second. Discussion? See none. Madam Clerk, please open the roll.

Motion passes 7-0.

Thank you, Gary. Madam Clerk, can you please call the next item?

Authorization to serve as grant committee, grant review committee for District 1.

Good morning again, Mayor, Council Members, Jennifer, oh, good afternoon, Jennifer Magana, City Attorney. The item before you would grant authorization to District Advisory Board 1 to serve as a grant review committee. This arises from the fact that the Wichita Community Foundation, which is a nonprofit that invests in the Wichita region through over 300 charitable funds, has established a fund for quality of life initiatives in District 1. And the fund would be made available through a grant application process to individuals, businesses, nonprofit organizations, and other entities. And the Wichita Community Foundation will administer the fund. and provide grants directly to selected recipients. As proposed, the recommendation is for the council to authorize and designate District 1's district advisory board to serve as a grant review committee for that fund. The DAP would review and recommend grant awards to the Wichita Community Foundation on a quarterly basis. And the DAP's recommendations would be advisory only. The District 1 Councilmember would then review the recommendations and determine the final slate of proposed awards to be submitted to the Wichita Community Foundation. The District 1 Improvement Fund of the Wichita Community Foundation shall be held managed and distributed by the Wichita Community Foundation. No city funds will be expended for this program. The recommendation is for Council to consider authorizing and designating the District 1 District Advisory Board as the grant review committee for the Wichita Community Foundation's District 1 Improvement Fund. All that I have, I'm happy to answer questions and recommend your consideration. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. Questions for staff?

Seeing none, we'll open it up for public comment. Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the bench. This is Councilmember Joseph Shepard's project.

thank you mayor and thank you to city legal for their help in getting this refined as well as the wichita foundation for working with me over the course of four months to bring this vision to life we have individuals who are invested in district one and particularly parts of our district that have not seen seen the same level of investment as other parts of our city but also want to thank Realtors of South Central Kansas. About a year and a half ago, they brought in a speaker from Strong Towns, which is a nationwide initiative that talks about little bets every community can take on their neighborhood to enhance the quality of life. While major things take a lot of money, there are small things that we can do to improve the quality of life in every single neighborhood. And this fund will help, one, offset costs that folks may incur regarding sidewalk repair, maintenance to their homes, as well as investing in art in parts of our district that don't have that, as well as other opportunities as well. And the goal is to bring hope and help back. to our communities so that people understand that local government can't solve everything, but we can become innovative, partnering with the private sector to bring some of these things to fruition. So with that, I'd like to authorize the District 1 Advisory Board to serve, I move to authorize the District 1 Advisory Board to serve as the Grant Review Committee for the Wichita Community Foundation's District 1 Improvement Fund. Second.

Motion second. Discussion? I just want to give you kudos, Councilmember Shepherd, for initiating this. And again, no city funds are being utilized for this and appreciate that you're trying to help residents of District 1 with these improvements. With that, I see no further discussion. Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Motion passes 6-0 with one absent. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Contract with Transit Solutions LLC for camera systems.

Good afternoon, Mayor, City Council, Penny Feist, Wichita Transit. Here today to talk to you about a contract for our city and security of the bus and van system operated by Wichita Transit. We utilize this system for many things, primarily the investigation of complaints, but also accident injuries and the occasional request from Wichita PD for crime footage that perhaps our bus was in the area of. The existing contracts reach the end of their useful life, the end of their term in 2025, and we authorize an extension, a temporary extension to get us through to this point while we went through the city's competitive procurement process. Request for proposals was issued on October 28th as part of a larger software and hardware package that we've brought forward to council before on separate actions. We received five proposals for this particular group, which was group five camera systems, and those were shortlisted to two vendors who were interviewed between January 12th and January 16th of this year. The staff screening and selection committee recommended transit solutions. based on successful past performance alignment with our operational needs and the competitive cost. This solution supports both bus and van fleet and represents 400 bus cameras and 180 van cameras. The proposed contract is for a five year period with the option to renew annually for five years. Hardware and software activities are eligible for 80% federal funds and 20% local match. The total cost of the contract is $485,753 with the city's total portion being $97,151. And it's recommended that the city council approve the contract and authorize the necessary signatures and approve any necessary budget adjustment. And with that, I'll stand for questions. Thank you, Penny.

Questions for staff? I see none. I just want to say thank you to you and your team for helping us celebrate America's 250th. You utilized one of the free bus wraps to allow the city to celebrate America 250 the rest of this year. So it is a side note, but thank you very much. Thank you. Our pleasure. Vice Mayor Glasscock.

I just want to say it was a great experience to see the wrap at the Holy Cross of Lutheran as well as part of the celebrations, and so I think that was just an added benefit. That was super exciting to, I think, tie in to make the day even more festive.

If I might add, I was there around 7.30, and at that point they'd already transported 600 riders, and we got to hear a lot of comments about, oh, this is my first time on the bus, and a good exposure for use of our system too. So I think it was a win-win.

Fantastic. With that, I see no further comments from the council. We will open it up for public comment. Seeing none, we'll bring it back to the bench. With that, I will move to approve the hardware and software contract with Transit Solutions LLC and authorize necessary signatures. Second. Motion second. Discussion? Seeing none, Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Aye. Motion passes 6-0 with one absent. Madam Clerk, please call the next item. Data Edge Contract.

Afternoon, Mayor, Council Members, Mike Meda for the IT Department. Hopefully everyone will understand. I'll be brief in terms of my discussion here because it relates to security matters. So if you have specific questions, I'm always available to answer those. After our, it says recent, it was recent for IT people, but everyone else probably not as recent. But based on that incident, we realized that our recovery was not where it needs to be. Our ability to bring back systems, as you can imagine, all of those systems have changed and continue to change quickly. They're expansive, some are in the cloud, some are on premise, but they're always connected. So our ability to bring systems back up needs to be in a more modern environment. We did that in conjunction with both federal reviews, Department of Homeland Security, CISA, some others, and also our internal audits. What we arrived at was a backup process that would allow for rapid recovery. We will work through with departments in terms of, and the city manager's office, what that recovery will look like, who will come up first. We have that in place, but we will confirm that with the city manager's office in terms of how these systems are brought back up. This, in terms of, again, the system will accelerate the recovery of our systems, bring those back up so we can be back up and running. For those of you that were here during the event, as the insurance company likes to call it, which I think is a bit weird. But about 28 days, we were back up and running. We did make payroll within the week, which was, I thought, fairly phenomenal based on our staffing. But I think what we're looking at here should be more of a day in days as opposed to months. So significant in terms of our ability to bring system back up. Usually if I'm having this discussion with you, it means this is an enterprise application. So it goes across all of our departments and functions across the whole city. The contract value, this also includes the airport. We always try to supplement where we can and be consistent across platforms. That means we have less usage in terms of human resource to support those systems. So airport will also be on this contract. We have it budgeted within the IT department. Again, it's looking at, impact. As you can imagine in today's environment, it used to be 30 days, you know, if we patch something, we're fine. If we miss a patch within five minutes now, it can be a problem. So the time is significantly different than it was today, or it was in the past. So this hopefully will get us in a place where we can recover. I remember during the event, the previous city manager, first thing he said to me was, Mike, he always told me it wasn't if, it was when. And I guess when is now. And that, I still stand by that. We are outmanned, if you wanna think of it that way. You have threat actors that are well-funded, especially if they're nation state, and this is all they do. They're really good at it. So budgeted within the IT department, it's our ability to be back up and running. So I would ask that you approve the contract with Data Edge and authorize the necessary signatures. Again, I will stand for any questions that you might have.

Thank you, Mike. Questions for staff? I just want to say thank you. I know that it was a very challenging time in May of 2024 when this occurred. And I understand what you just said about these threat actors are constantly working. And so I'm grateful that you and your staff continue to monitor the situation. And these types of efforts to secure our system is something that Council Member Shepherd brought up after going to the NLC conference this past March. And so seeing this contract come before us, I am very much in favor and I think that would be an echo from this council. So thank you very much, Mike. We will open it up for public comment. I see none. I'll bring it back to the bench. With that, I will move to approve the data edge contract and authorize necessary signatures. Second. Motion second. Discussion? See none. Madam Clerk, please open the roll. All those in favor say aye. Aye. So opposed, same sign. Motion passes 6-0 with one absent. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Approved that pursuant to Section 204-090, Council Member Dalton Glasscock's travel expenses, as estimated on the travel authorization and expense form, to attend a meeting with municipal leaders in Oklahoma City August 27th for the purpose of discussing local government initiatives, economic development strategies, community engagement, and best practices consistent with AR 3.1 be approved. Upon return from travel, actual expenses shall be reported to the controller's office.

I move to approve this travel.

Second.

Motion second. Discussion? See none. Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Motion passes 6-0 with one absent. Madam Clerk, please call the next item. Approved.

For Mayor Wu to accept travel and expenses to attend the Rodale Fellowship Seminar in Denver, Colorado, August 13, 2026 through August 16, 2026. The fellowship is hosted by the nonprofit, the Rodale Institute, for the purpose of education, collaboration, and professional development. The estimated gift amount for travel, hotel, meals, and material is $2,954.90. There will be no other expense to the city.

I move to approve such travel.

Second.

Sorry, I move to approve such gift. Motion, second, discussion, see none. Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Motion passes 6-0 with one absent. Councilmembers, any councilmember appointments? Councilmember Hohheisel.

Thank you, Mayor. I would like to appoint Gentry Thiessen to MAPC.

Council Member Shepherd.

Thank you, Mayor. I would like to appoint Dr. Gabriel Fonseca to the District 1 Advisory Board.

And council members, I just sent you an email. I apologize for the tardiness, but it's in your inbox. I moved to, I would like to appoint Brock Trafas as the city of Wichita appointee as an architect to the board of building code standards and appeals board. And I would also like to appoint Jane Alderson and Kent Gose to the golf board per the recommendation from staff. second with that i will move to approve all appointments second motion second discussion see none madam please open the role motion passes six zero council members comments council member ho heisel

Thank you, Mayor. I would like to have staff look into starting to work on a best practices ordinance for our affordable housing fund. I understand that there may be some things that we can't necessarily get in there now, but at least get that work started. So that way it can help influence our discussion moving down the line.

Yep. I was going to say the same thing, but Council Member Hohheisel beat me to the punch, so I am in favor of that. Yes.

And I would add to that, in that report, finding out revenue streams regarding how to fund something like this, options for the Council to consider as well. Thank you, Council Member Hohheisel. Council Member Ballard.

Thank you, Mayor. I would just invite and encourage anyone to join our public meeting tomorrow night at 6 p.m. regarding the North High Manissa Bridge. So we'll be doing an information session at 6 o'clock tomorrow night at Evergreen and also piggybacking on the Mayor's comments. Kudos to Council Member Shepard for helping create an improvement fund for your district. I think that's awesome and great job.

thank you and just want to reiterate it is private funding i know we heard a lot today about rumors and things that get stirred up and so i can't stress enough that this is private dollars going into that improvement plan if you all could be very helpful in helping spread the word especially to those who have a history of sharing misinformation that'd be greatly appreciated and councilmember shepherd thank you for taking that leadership role in creating something like this for your district

The best form of flattery is those that try to imitate, but I think it's just to influence. And so council member Ballard mentioned that's kudos to you. I would say this is also an opportunity for other council members to see how council member Shepherd created this for his district. With that, we cannot leave. I apologize, we have a blue sheet. So I will read this executive session motion. I move that the city council recess into executive session for 30 minutes to receive information on a construction contract pursuant to KSA 75-4319B2 for legal consultation with the city attorney, which would be deemed privileged in the attorney-client relationship, and legal advice. The executive session is required to protect attorney-client privilege and the public interest. This executive session will begin at 12.30 p.m., and end at one o'clock. The meeting will resume here in Council Chambers.

Second.

Motion second. Discussion? Seeing none, Madam Clerk, please open the roll. Are all those in favor say aye. Aye. All those opposed, same sign. Motion passes 6-0 with one absent.